A beautiful sunny April 23 morning to you. I’m looking down the last week of the Ultimate Blog Challenge. I’ve been successful in showing up almost every day, having missed just once. Coming to the keyboard early in the day makes the words flow better. My mind is still relatively fresh, not corrupted by the events, thoughts and feelings accumulated through the day. Writing about things that I am familiar with and passionate about makes it that much easier.

My head and thoughts are still on The Woman in Gold, the movie about Maria Altmann, an elderly Jewish refugee living in Los Angeles. She was 82 when she embarked on recovering her family’s paintings by Gustav Klimt. They were stolen by the Nazis during WW11. Two of them were portraits of her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer. Though the odds were against her, she did win. The movie was a great interest to me because of the history and the art.

It reminds me about my family’s journey out of China. I was 6 at the time. My paternal grandfather and father were already in Canada then. When we(my grandmother, uncles, my mother and I) left China for Hong Kong, there was no thoughts of us not returning home. All our worldly possessions were left behind. These included all the gold jewellry in my mother’s dowry, gold gifts on my birth plus my grandmother’s gold were left behind in the safe keeping of our relatives. My grandmother had always wanted to return to the house my grandfather had built for us.

Life got in the way. We never went back to China. We ended up in Canada. Our relatives kept and spent what we left behind. Now they have immigrated to the U.S. They have visited us a few summers ago. My cousin’s wife talked to my mother about how beautiful her jewellry were. I think they still have some of it but did not offer to give any back to her, not even the gold hairpin she described so vividly. My mother didn’t ask for any.

It was always my dream to visit our village one day. I got as far as Hong Kong and a bus ride away. It was not to be. I was there at the wrong time of the year, when everyone was going back and I couldn’t get a bus. Then I had plans on another time. Politics got in the way. Now, I do not have any interest. Sometimes you just can’t go home again.