My uncle Kee In (youth name , pen name  ) had written a large quantity of modern free style poems in his younger days. Once he was the editor of the daily News Paper in Fujian Province. In 1984 he put together 192 poems from his early works and published in a book named "A Collection of Insignificant Weeds" ( below). On the left below is the first page of that poetic book, which he signed for his sister-in-law, my Mum. Uncle was an extremely gifted sentimental poet who let his feelings gallop freely in his rhymes. I called him "the Chopin of poetry". One certain morning in the 1930s while he was doing outdoor early exercise, he was tipped off that secret police had come to catch him for his criticism of the regime at the time. He fled, still wearing shorts, and landed in Shanghai (His eldest  brother, my dad, was earlier put in jail some days for doing the same thing until he was bailed out by friends). Later, uncle ended up in Burma where he found success in industry, a family joint venture of cigarette factory, of which he was totally in charge (This factory was an instant success, because a only few short months after its establishment in 1950 the Burmese government suddenly disallowed importation of all foreign cigarettes. Immediately, cigarette whole sellers from cities, towns and villages traveled to Rangoon and queued by the factory door at pre-dawn hours for their orders.   So, once again Grand Pa's predictive blessing for his son is somehow manifested through my uncle's baby name , which actually meant 'Heaven's Beneficence" ). 

During the most of the 1950s, and being the useful first born son in the family, I would be called back almost yearly from my studies in UK to Hong Kong, but always stopped in Rangoon first. I remember in 1955 uncle was having big problems with his recently acquired large cigarette packing machine, which had more than 20,000 parts. Large amounts of cigarettes were being damaged. So after many hours of observation and with only one year of engineering education behind me, I made and fitted a temporary device in the machine, which helped to guide the cigarettes into a transport slot and prevented damage. Later that year uncle wrote to me that an engineer from the machine makers had visited and told him there had been originally a guiding mechanism, which was either misplaced or did not come with the machine delivery. Ever since then and for the next few years, uncle would prepare some tricky IQ questions, mostly in science or mathematics, to test me when I saw him the next time, and I would take much pleasure not to disappoint him. It became a game that had brought us much closer together..  Then in the 70s uncle immigrated to USA. Twice he had asked me to go with him. In retrospection today, I would have done well to go with him ... On the right below is the Closing Word for uncle's book. He wrote in his waning years from New York reminiscence of those past patriotic emotions and wished to leave his poems to his beloved land and his friends of the youthful days. Now in memory of my dear departed uncle, I wish I could display all his beautiful poetry in this website, but this site is not meant for poetry and I have only space to barely mention his work and his wishes!     

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