Family History Connections

     One connecting theme I identified from within at least three of our family's histories was struggle. Because of that struggle, many individuals or families has to exert effort to sustain something important to them.
     In Alex's post, he tells the story of how his family had to struggle to overcome death and hardships in surviving in the United States:
     In Peter's post, he describes how his father had to escape China:

It was impossible for his father to escape anyway, at the end; his father asked one of his best friends brought them away as far as he can because he feared that his family would get involved into it. Thus, my uncle follower his two brothers, from China, then shipping to Macau, to Hongkong, and lastly took airplane to United States. However, after he was going to United States, the government considered him as illegal immigration and did not give him any identity at all.

This proves that in order to escape suffering, Peter's father chose to leave China and went to America, even though it meant entering illegally.
     Therefore, in the end, many family histories tell the stories of some kind of suffering and what the indivdiual or family did or had to do to construct a solution.

My grandmother died and had left behind the building where my family lived and there was dispute because the building was also under the name of my Uncle Victor and he wanted to sell it it in order to split the money among the family. At the same time, the family began to split up...My Uncle eventually sold the building and me and my family only had three days to pack up and move out...We had no where to go...All three of my sisters still attended school in San Francisco so they had to catch both BART and MUNI to get to school. The cost of transportation, food, and rent became extremely high and my father was forced to find a second job. He entered his job at three in the afternoon where he worked as front runner and server at a restaurant in San Francisco. When he finished at the restaurant he proceeded to the Trans American Building where he worked as a janitor from eleven in the night to six in the morning.

Because of the conflict caused by his grandmother's death, Alex and his family had to face the problem of instability. However, in the end, his family was able to overcome this crisis and live happily in a new home.
     In David's post, he talks about how communism led by Mao in China caused his great-grandfather to die in prison and to have all of his families' wealth stolen from them:

During [Mao's] rule, one of his terrible actions is that he ordered the imperial army to arrest all of the wealthy people, in which one of them was my great grandfather, and placed them in jail to rot. The jails had horrible living conditions and eventually, my great grandfather died of starvation because the food there was unbearable. The family wealth was never returned and the family had basically dropped from the elite class to the poor class within a few years.

This indicates that David's family had to somehow overcome their loss, in both finance and love, and restart a new life without everything they once had.