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Mark Wang about the lives of his parents

Mara Moustafine and Mark Wang.

Mark Wang discusses the lives of his parents Mabel and David Wang

Created:

unknown

Date Added:

09 February 2009

Source:

source not available

Format:

mov (Quicktime);

File size:

5.4 MB

Length:

02min07sec

Transcript

MW:

00:08

My grandfather had a reasonably high station in life as – in the community, he was a sort of a community leader and was the – at the – in his older years he was the secretary of the Nationalist Party, the branch in Melbourne and so he – a lot of dignitaries and government officials came to Australia, when they came to Melbourne they went and visited him because he was virtually like an unofficial representative of the Chinese Government.

00:43

So, that –he came there and that’s where he actually - how my mother and father met each other because my father – who was actually from Shanghai at the time - they met just during the war time, Second World War time.

00:57

He was part of the Nationalist Army. He was in the intelligence and he – they were trying to work out a way of getting the Japanese out of China because they’d invaded China in the 1940s and the Americans and the Chinese were trying to find a way of getting the Japanese out of China so they met and they happened to meet in Melbourne. After the war finished, my mother and father got together and they went back to Shanghai to live.

01:24

My mother has said to me in, you know, before the country was in such turmoil with the – before 1949, before the Communist Party took over, just the economy was in turmoil and, you know, she used to get paid in packets of money nearly every day because of the devaluation, they’d have to go and exchange it straight away for other things. Luckily we’ve never – in Australia, we’ve never been in that environment that sort of, lots of countries have in the past, so it’s sort of very novel to us to sort of think in those terms but she – they lived under that sort of circumstance for probably six months and then they were lucky enough to be able to just migrate back to Australia.

02:07

End transcript