In Memoriam

Shinn-Der Chang

1929 2023

A scholar from coastal Fujian, war-displaced inland and across an ocean. An engineer who built towers and heavy-water plants. A husband for sixty-seven years, whose happiest place was a cottage on the Pickerel River.

I have been blessed. I have no regrets. My life has been beautiful.

China

1929 · Fuzhou, Fujian

A tumultuous childhood 童年

“My father was doing so well. He managed the number one top restaurant in Fuzhou. Everybody knew him.” Shinn-Der's Recollection, 2015

Shinn-Der was born in 1929 in Fuzhou, on the southeastern coast of China. His father owned the largest restaurant on the city's main shopping street — Nan Xiong on Nan Jie — a place that stretched more than eight storefronts deep behind its facade. As a small child, he sat in the accountant's office and counted money.

The prosperity did not last. In 1937 the Japanese invaded; the coastal cities were evacuated, and the family's fortune, as he later put it, “rather fell down. Not long later it fell down completely.” By the time he was old enough to notice, the family's resources had “already dried out.” When his father tried to start over after the war, it was, in his own word, with “meager resources.”

One accident of timing favored him. When Shinn-Der was seven, Chiang Kai-shek launched the country's first national program of public education. Before then, schooling meant hiring a private tutor at home, something only wealthy families could afford. Shinn-Der was part of the very first group of children to enter the new public schools — at age eight, in Fuzhou. The classrooms were primitive — temples, with Buddha statues still in place — but they were free.

He was raised primarily by his grandmother, a woman who had gone blind at forty yet still kept a vegetable garden. The family drew strength from her mother's side — a large Fuzhou household that quietly supported them through lean seasons.

II.

1944 · Nanping

The War 抗战

“The government wanted to construct the New China; they wanted to educate more technology and engineers.” Shinn-Der's Recollection, 2015

Shinn-Der was eight when he started school, in 1937 — the same year Japan invaded China. For four years his schooling went on. He was lucky to have a good teacher, he later said.

In April 1941, the Japanese seized Fuzhou. School stopped. Then the war shifted — Pearl Harbor came in December, and Japan pulled its forces south to Southeast Asia. “Fortunately [for Fuzhou], the Second World War broke out,” Shinn-Der would later say, in the soft voice that belied the catastrophe. The Japanese withdrew from Fuzhou, and the schools reopened.

At thirteen, in 1942, he tested into the provincial industrial and engineering school. Chiang Kai-shek's government, intent on building a new technical class for postwar China, gave each student a stipend of thirty jin of rice a month — about fifteen kilograms, an extraordinary allotment for the time. “Whoever could get in got the support,” he later said. “That attracted quite good students.” In the end, the school's reputation came less from the rice than from the company it kept.

In 1944, the Japanese took Fuzhou a second time. The cities along the coast had been bombed out — “no place to go,” he said — and the school moved four hundred kilometres inland, to the mountain city of Nanping. Shinn-Der was fifteen. The bombs reached them there too. And the school was competitive and difficult — “four classes dropped to one,” he remembered. “Seventy-five percent were gone.” He stayed in Nanping from age fifteen to seventeen, and graduated well after the Japanese surrendered.

He went home to Fuzhou in 1946 after graduation. The family restaurant was long gone, and his father had been left with no work and few connections who weren't also looking for work. With what little remained, his father launched a textile company — there was demand for new clothes after the war. For a moment, it looked as though the family might rebuild.

It would not last.

III.

1948 · Taipei

A load of textiles, and a love 布与爱

“He asked my brother and myself to take the load of product and move to Taiwan to sell. So I was there — and I met my love.” Shinn-Der's Recollection, Christmas 2017

In 1948, due to economic challenges leading to low textile demand in nearby Fuzhou, his father asked him and his older brother Bebe (Ching Hwa / 經華) to carry textile bolts across the Taiwan Strait and sell them, and to send the money home to Fuzhou. The bolts went on a sailing junk — no motor, cargo only — judged too dangerous for a passenger. Shinn-Der took a different boat: a surplus American landing craft, flat-decked, no seats, a cloth top. A storm came up; everyone lay on the deck for twenty-four hours straight. Six decades later, retelling the story from Plymouth itself, he said: “Listen, like the Mayflower getting into Plymouth, half of them died. But in my boat, nobody died — but half of them got sick.”

They arrived in May, too late for the summer textile market, and had to discount the cargo to clear it. Sending the inventory back to Fuzhou would not have helped: as the Civil War spread, no one on the Mainland had money to buy textiles either. Bebe carried what cash there was home to their father, and eventually returned to Taipei on the last ship out — 1949, with the reserve officers. The Communists took the Mainland. Shinn-Der would not see Fuzhou again for decades.

He had nothing — no job, very little money, no way home. The classmates from his Nanping engineering school carried him through. “I was very, very lucky because I graduated from a quite famous school,” he later said. “Friends gave me a job.” They got him into the government wine factory in Taipei, where the boss, Sun Wei, took to him quickly. He worked in the laboratory; the reference books were all in Japanese and English, and he could read neither — a wall that became motivation. He met Rae Lin around the same time. She was at a wine-crate company nearby, and they crossed paths through friends. They were nineteen and twenty when they first met.

In 1953, looking for a way to keep studying without bankrupting himself, he applied to the Republic of China Naval Academy in Zuoying, in the southern port city of Kaohsiung. Six months of Marine Corps entry training came first — “really, really hard work,” he said. He passed into the engineering coursework. But he found himself unable to learn much, and Rae Lin was up north while he was in the south. He quit. The Navy assumed he must have a political reason for leaving and threw him in jail as a suspected traitor. It was a few weeks before Bebe — by then a former Second Lieutenant in Chiang Kai-shek's Special Army Corps — used his connections to get him out.

He took the entrance exam for National Taiwan University and got in: thirty thousand applicants for one thousand seats. Friends pressed him to choose the four-year Tai Da degree over a cheaper two-year alternative — “You're crazy,” they told him. “You have no future.” — and he took the advice. Then came the question of how he would pay for it. The answer came, again, from Sun Wei. His former boss, by now promoted to a senior post, heard Shinn-Der was back in Taipei and sent word: “Why doesn't Shinn-Der come to see me?” He arranged work at a glass-bottle factory near campus, with hours that fit Shinn-Der's classes. “This solved my problem,” Shinn-Der said later. He paid his way through Tai Da on the job he got through Sun Wei's referral. He and Rae Lin married in 1956.

IV.

1959 · Kaohsiung

Climbing the towers 炼油厂

“It was luxurious compared to the neighboring organizations, but we lived month by month.” Shinn-Der's Recollection, 2015

He served eighteen months as an Air Force reserve officer, training in aerial photography. “I was lucky, this job was really interesting,” he later said. “That is why I know a little bit about photography.” When the service ended, he sat the civil-service exam and was placed at the Kaohsiung Petroleum Refinery as a process engineer. In 1959 the family moved from Taipei to Kaohsiung. Nathan, his first son, had been born in Taipei the year before. Nancy, his first daughter, was born in Kaohsiung soon after they arrived.

The work was prestigious, and it was hands-on. He climbed the distillation towers. He learned, tray by tray, how crude oil yields its fractions. The knowledge would matter later, in another country, in a colder sea.

The refinery paid better than the reserve service had, but not by much. The two-bedroom semi-detached house the refinery provided was “luxurious compared to the neighboring organizations,” Shinn-Der later said — and yet the family lived month by month. Rae managed the budget weekly. “She put one red envelope on the table,” he remembered. “This week, only get this much. So you cannot use this week's money next week.”

By the early 1960s, a third to half of his NTU classmates had gone abroad to study. “Why don't you come out?” they would write to him. He began to wonder how he could raise his family on a refinery salary alone. In 1963 he quit, and a scholarship took him to Ottawa.

1963 · Ottawa

The PhD Years 留学

“$145 a month. Tuition was $50, so I had $95. I rented one room for $30. Food, $30 or $35. And another $30 I sent home.” Shinn-Der's Recollection, 2015

In 1963, through a connection of Mrs. Wong's — a Dr. Lu — he was offered a PhD scholarship at the University of Ottawa. He went ahead alone. Rae stayed in Taiwan with Nathan and Nancy. The arithmetic of his stipend was exact and pitiless: $145 a month, and a list of mouths to feed on two continents.

For four years the couple wrote letters across the ocean. Three hundred and sixty-six aerograms survive, preserved by Rae and translated by the family in 2023. “I am eating well now,” he wrote in May 1966, three years in. “I now eat a full meal instead of half. When I first came, I only ate until I was half full because I was afraid I would not have enough money.” He sent money home anyway — to his parents in China, to his mother-in-law, to Rae and the children.

The stipend, by his own breakdown
Item	1963 / month	2026 equivalent
Stipend	$145	≈$1,490
Tuition	$50	≈$515
Rent	$30	≈$310
Food	$30–35	≈$310–360
Sent home	$30	≈$310

1963 figures from his 2015 Mayflower recollection. 2026 equivalents calculated from Statistics Canada CPI data — $1 in 1963 ≈ $10.26 in 2026.

His supervisor, Benjamin Lu, was a Christian who had drawn him into a small home Bible study soon after his arrival. In June 1965 Shinn-Der joined a membership class at a Free Methodist Church in Ottawa, and on January 30, 1966 he was baptized. “Yesterday I was baptized,” he wrote home the next day. “This is important for Christians.” The faith he would lean on for the rest of his life began here.

In Shinn-Der's last year of his thesis, a personal tragedy and loss befell the Lu family. Dr. Lu could not teach. Shinn-Der, the senior Chinese student among Lu's seven or eight, took over the group and held it together. He finished his PhD in 1968, summa cum laude. By then his work was piling up — thermodynamic-consistency tests, vapour–liquid equilibria, partial molal volumes, the virial coefficients of normal fluids. Fortran was new, and so were the possibilities it opened.

Bringing his family to Canada took two years. A visiting visa would have been faster but limited — two years only, with no right to live in Canada. For permanent residency he had to prove he could support a family on his stipend, which meant first earning his master's. The application had to route through the Canadian consulate in Hong Kong, and Canada's diplomatic ties with Taiwan were uncertain. “If they become friendly with China,” he wrote, “it will be difficult for me to bring you over.” He pressed Rae to start her papers, gather references, resign her job. He prayed. The bureaucracy delayed and delayed. In 1967 it all finally came through. Rae, Nathan, and Nancy arrived in time for his graduation.

VI.

1971 · Port Hawkesbury, Cape Breton

Two inches, not four-and-a-quarter 重水塔

“I had so much practice on the computer, I figured out I could convert the process into a program. Finally they said they should try. When they did, they could produce 320 tons of deuterium.” Shinn-Der's Recollection, 2018

When Shinn-Der finished his PhD in 1968, he could not find a job. The North American economy was depressed by the Vietnam War, and his English was still limited. “Shinn-Der's only deficiency is English,” his department's recommendation letters said. He stayed on as a postdoctoral fellow under Benjamin Lu while he searched.

The opening came through a single paper. Stan Davies, the British-born technical manager at the General Electric heavy water plant in Nova Scotia, had read Shinn-Der's thermodynamic-consistency-test article in ‘Distillation’ — a specialty journal — and tracked him down after a worldwide search. Davies took a chance on him in spite of the English. In 1971, Shinn-Der took the job: starting salary $14,500, fifty percent above peer PhDs. As his daughter Margaret later put it, “it was an economic migration. There was very little else available for a new graduate from China — except this job, because of that one paper.” Shinn-Der himself had a different word for it. “At that time,” he said, “I considered this a blessing.”

The family followed in 1972. Their first house was a small one on the Strait of Canso — beautiful, exposed. The strait runs through a gap in the mountains, and the wind funneled through it like a tunnel. One snowstorm, Nancy walked home from school into white-out conditions and got pinned between houses, blown back two feet for every foot she made forward. She finally reached the back door in tears. “No more one year, Daddy,” she pleaded. “No more one year.” Shinn-Der had told the family the job was a one-year stop, just for the experience, before they would move back to Ottawa. They moved to a less wind-exposed house, but they stayed for five years.

Initially, the plant did not reach capacity. Its enormous distillation tower flooded in operation, producing under half of its design output. For two years Shinn-Der modelled the tower, tray by tray, in Fortran — the same way he had climbed the refinery in Kaohsiung. The computer told him the trays were too far apart. Two inches was the correct plate height. The plant had been built with four-and-a-quarter.

Shutting the plant down to rebuild it cost roughly a million dollars a day. They did it on his analysis. When the plant came back up, production jumped from under half of capacity to more than ninety percent. Output reached three hundred and twenty tons of deuterium a year. General Electric sold the plant to Atomic Energy of Canada, and Shinn-Der was promoted to Technical Superintendent.

The Cape Breton years lasted until 1977. In 1973–74, with savings accumulating, Shinn-Der and Mr. Chen of Halifax bought a 22-unit apartment building at 23 Mandaville Court in Dartmouth — Shinn-Der eighty percent, Chen twenty — which he and Rae managed remotely from Cape Breton Island.

Tray plate height

4¼″ → 2″

Production

<50% → 90%+

Annual output

320 tD₂O

GE Heavy Water Plant, Port Hawkesbury, 1973. The chalkboard records the run that proved the 2″ tray fix: water and air both at 100% of design. Identified by Nathan.

VII.

1983 — 2023 · Toronto and the Cottage

The settled years 安居

“Life goes fast, but I have been blessed.” Shinn-Der to Margaret, April 2023

In 1977 the family moved back to Ottawa, where Shinn-Der had begun his Canadian life thirteen years before. Nancy finished high school there. In 1979 she left for university. The family stayed in Ottawa a few more years; in 1983, Shinn-Der took a job in Toronto and moved on his own. Rae remained in Ottawa with Margaret, who was still in high school. In 1987, after Margaret had finished, Rae joined him in Toronto.

The Toronto job was at Ontario Hydro. He worked there as a process engineer, drawing on the same heavy-water and distillation expertise that had brought him out of Ottawa in the first place. He stayed at the company through the rest of his working life.

A second career had begun back in Cape Breton, when he and Mr. Chen of Halifax bought their first apartment building together in Dartmouth in 1973. He kept buying. He bought more in Ontario as he could, managed the buildings himself, and held on through interest-rate spikes, recessions, and the long months when units sat empty. Each building was its own small fight. The portfolio he assembled across those decades became the nucleus of the family business his son Nathan would take over and grow.

In Toronto they bought a large house at Tillingham Keep, in North York. The family grew — three grandchildren were born: Michael, Daniel, Jonathan. He and Rae continued to look after the apartment buildings. They bought a cottage on the Pickerel River that became Shinn-Der's happiest place. The family thrived. Much of the struggle of his earlier years was unknown to the grandchildren until much later.

In April 2023 the diagnosis came: primary liver cancer, weeks rather than months. There was no pain. At home, with Rae and his children near, he spoke of what he saw when he looked back. “Life goes fast,” he told Margaret. “But I have been blessed.” He died in June 2023, in Maplehurst, surrounded by family. He was ninety-three. He had known Rae for seventy-five years and been married to her for sixty-seven of them.

Quiet Patience

By Daniel Yue, his grandson · with the framing he, JJ, and Michael shared

A quiet man — the framing the three of us shared, and the patience that held it all up.

When we think about our Grandpa’s life, we feel blessed to have known such a remarkable person. We feel this way for many reasons, which others have and will speak to today. But the characteristic that we want to speak about today is that our Grandpa was a quiet man.

(JJ) So quiet that when I was trying to make a documentary of the cottage, his voice is partially covered over by the background wind.
(Daniel) Our Grandpa was so quiet that, though I spent the past few years improving my Mandarin and starting weekly video calls with my grandparents, I don’t think I heard much more from my Grandpa! I had to ask him questions directly if I wanted to hear from him, and he would often reply with just a word or two. My Grandpa was quiet in any language.
(Michael) Perhaps the only time he wasn’t quiet was when he was snoring — a trait that he has lovingly passed on to our entire family.

Today, JJ, Michael, and I want to share three ways that our Grandpa’s quietness stands out: his quiet support, his quiet courage, and — my piece — his quiet patience.

I remember our Grandpa’s quiet patience, in forbearing the challenges of life and responding with a patient consistency that transformed them into a fulfilling life. This patience allowed him to thrive despite the political and economic uncertainties that plagued his life’s circumstances: in setting up a new life in Taiwan as a refugee; in pursuing PhD studies as an immigrant away from his family; in establishing a career that took him all across Canada.

As his grandchildren, we also contributed to his life’s hardships: we used to roughhouse around our Maryland home, and on occasion would break the plaster walls when Michael would (too) enthusiastically push one of us through them. Fortunately (for us), we noticed this would tend to happen shortly before visits by Grandpa, who would always come, patiently take out his plaster and putty, and fix the walls — if only for them to be broken again before the next visit.

This captures an essential part of my Grandpa: forbearing the broken walls of life and patiently fixing them. Though he was never in a rush to fix things or force them to go his way, his quiet patience allowed those he loved to flourish around him.

Though our Grandpa was quiet, his words spoke loudly. And these were the words that he said to me, repeatedly, in his final weeks of life:

I have been blessed.
I have no regrets.
My life has been beautiful.

Isn’t that what we all want to be able to say? While many give advice on life, the greatest lessons we’ve learned from our Grandpa come from his example. We believe that, from our Grandpa, we can all learn what it looks like to live well.

We will deeply miss our Grandpa’s soft demeanor, his understated assurance, his silent courage, his gentle patience, his quiet love. But as in life, his influence on us will quietly be there with us as we seek to follow in his footsteps. For that, we are grateful.

Daniel, July 2023

A Frugal Life, Given Away

By Nathan Chang, his son

A son’s eulogy — the cottage stroke, the heavy water plant, the lab full of papers, and a quiet, frugal life given away to others.

First, I wish to thank Margaret for the good care she took of Mom and Dad over the past two decades. When Dad first purchased the cottage in 2005–06, they had to come out in the rain on one trip, and he was soaked on the trip from the cottage. Dad developed a stroke the next day. Margaret was able to pick him up, take him to the hospital, see the specialists, have the diagnostic done, the medication prescribed and filled, and be home by 3pm the same day. As a result of that care, the impact of the stroke was minimized. In 2010–11, Dad collapsed onto the floor, and Margaret was able to take him to the emergency and identify the issue as an irregular heartbeat — which led to the installation of a pacemaker. These two actions extended Dad’s life by 17 years. We are grateful that we can postpone saying goodbye to Dad by 17 years, to today. Thank you, Margaret.

I remember Dad as always being very frugal. The best example of his frugality was during his PhD in the 1960s, when he received only $90 a month as a stipend. He sent $20 a month to Taiwan to help support Mom, Nancy, and me. He also sent $30 a month to China, to his parents and to Mom’s parents. For China, that was during the Cultural Revolution, and the funds were very critical to his parents and Mom’s mother. However, that left him only $40 a month to pay for rent and food — the equivalent of about $370 a month in today’s dollars to pay for all living expenses. He survived on that budget for a couple of years. No matter how tough things were for himself, he always thought of the needs of others before he thought of himself.

When we came to Canada, he was busy finishing his PhD program. Then when we moved to Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia, he was busy at the new job, and also starting his investment adventures in real estate. Dad always did well in whatever he did. During his PhD program, he published five or six papers when most PhDs publish one. When it came to hunting for a job, Dad always had excellent references from the professors. The glowing recommendations always came with a caveat — Dad’s English had a heavy accent. That caveat was enough to prevent prospective employers from offering Dad a position, but he was able to run the lab for Dr. Lu and publish some key papers. He was not able to find a job in the teaching field for two years after his PhD.

During Dad’s job hunt, one of those papers came to the attention of people at General Electric. GE had invested 350 million dollars in a heavy water plant to produce 400 tonnes of heavy water a year. During the start-up, they had run into foaming problems and the plant could only produce 50–100 tonnes a year instead of the 400 the design called for. They had tried to solve the problem for about a year, including with consultants from DuPont, without success. They flew to Ottawa to interview Dad and, based on the interview and recommendations, offered him the position to try to resolve the issue. That is how we came to move to Nova Scotia in 1971.

Dad was able to identify the leakage problem in the initial pilot plant that was the basis of the full-scale heavy water plant. That leak led to a miscalculation on the ratio of gas–water counter-flow, which caused the foaming. He suggested cutting the tray level in the towers to adjust the water flow rate and rebalance the ratio, and got the proposal approved. After the shutdown and the tray height was adjusted, when the plant restarted, the foam problem was resolved and the plant produced at 97% of design capacity. That built Dad’s reputation as a distillation specialist. It was a major feat for him to solve a problem that the site staff, the GE design team, and the GE lab had not been able to resolve for two to three years.

The plant manager, Mr. Hatton, never forgot the job Dad did for him. Though he was not able to promote Dad, he remembered him when AECL went through its downsizing and Dad was laid off — one year before he qualified for the vesting of his pension. Mr. Hatton went to the board of directors for permission to rehire Dad for that one year, so he could qualify. The request was approved. Dad went back and worked the year, qualified for his pension and benefits, and received them until age 93 — benefits Mom still receives to this date.

Dad also began investing in real estate with his first purchase of an apartment building in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Real estate investment is a long-term endeavour. During the initial 20 years or so, you have to pay the mortgage, and there is never any surplus cash flow. Often, Mom and Dad would need to subsidize the business with Dad’s income to break even in the short term. Dad never had any cash in his pockets.

Many relatives only saw Dad’s assets, but not the debt. Requests and demands came continuously from many relatives to pay off their debts or to pay for their responsibilities, often with dubious facts. Dad never spent money on himself, but always seemed to be helping relatives. These loans to relatives were usually not repaid — they did not feel that they needed to repay the help once it was received. The best example of Dad’s generosity to relatives was when he paid 85% of the cost of relocating the grave site of his parents, going back four generations, some ten years ago. Dad’s comment was that it was the last thing he could do for his parents, so whether we had the money or not, he would come up with the money to pay for it. This clearly demonstrated Dad’s commitment to help others before himself.

We always knew that Dad would guide us to the path he wished for our lives. It was always understood that school ended with university, not high school. He expected to pay for the university cost, but seeing how tight the family finances were when I was growing up, I refused to strain them further and insisted on paying my own university costs. That was the first fight I had with Dad. I won the fight — but in hindsight, what a stupid fight to win. I could have backpacked Europe instead of working at a summer job. Oh well.

Dad never told us how to live our lives. He would always live his life, and let us watch the example he set for us. The best example of this was his desire to have me go to medical school and become a doctor, and to have my sisters stay out of medical school. He got the exact opposite of what he hoped for, but he still encouraged each of us to pursue the life path that we chose for ourselves. That is what I appreciated the most about Dad: he would respect our choices for our lives and then help us to succeed in whatever career we had chosen. Thank you, Dad, for all the help you gave us over the years.

Nathan, July 2023

Still Waters Run Deep

By Nancy Yue, his daughter

Three years of video-call translations — and the still waters that ran deep beneath them.

Hi, my name is Nancy Chang Yue, and I am the second child of Shinn-Der and Rae, and the mother of the three young men who just spoke. I thought that I would honor my dad Shinn-Der today by wearing a traditional dress that my mom Rae brought with her from Taiwan when we moved to Canada in 1967, one that she has preserved all these years. It is a dress that my dad would have identified with special memories, and wearing it today reminds me of all that my mom and dad have done to help us to thrive in our Canadian home, so far away from everything that was familiar to them at the beginning.

Many of you gathered here are immigrants or first-generation, and can probably identify with me when I tell you that it was not until adulthood that I really learned any specifics about family history, and also did not know any details about my dad’s career other than that he was a chemical engineer who was well regarded for his work in heavy water. My family has travelled faithfully to my home in Baltimore to spend American Thanksgiving with us every year for the last 30 years, but it was not until 2017, in one of these gatherings, that the details came out. Since then, we have discovered a treasure trove of letters that were sent between my dad and mom during the four years, 1963–1967, that he was studying in Ottawa for his PhD while she stayed with my brother and me in Taiwan. We were able to get those letters digitized and printed into books, and I have spent many evenings the last three years on video chat with my mom, listening as she read the letters in Chinese and, with the help of my dad, roughly translating them into English. What a blessing it has been to see into the heart and soul of my parents at that transformative time of their lives.

I think we can safely say that nobody knew my dad Shinn-Der better than my mom Rae did. So I am here to tell you about Shinn-Der Chang from her point of view.

You have heard my boys say “Grandpa is quiet.” There is an English saying that really applies to my dad. It is, “Still waters run deep.” On the surface, he is very calm and amiable, and is not much of a talker. Some of my good friends in Baltimore did not even realize that his English is excellent and had no idea that he understood perfectly everything that they said to him. My mom and I are here to tell you about some of those deep waters under the quiet — about his foresight, his faithfulness, and his generosity.

Foresight

My mom Rae has continually marvelled at Shinn-Der’s foresight as we read these old letters. When they first met in 1949 in Taiwan, the Communists had just taken over Fuzhou, and they were stranded in Taiwan, my dad with his brother James, my Bebe, and my mom with her friends. They were 19 and 20 at the time with only high school educations and no financial support other than the work that they were able to find. In my dad’s words: “I met my love at that time.”

With his love Rae by his side, Shinn-Der was accepted to National Taiwan University but could not attend until a former employer contacted him and offered a part-time, flexible position that could pay for his expenses. From my dad: “It was a miracle. I was able to marry your grandma in the second year.”

After graduation from university and his military reserve obligation, during which my brother Nathan was born, he spent four years as a process engineer at the Kaohsiung Petroleum Refinery, where I was born. Shinn-Der saw that his career was limited without further study, so he made the difficult decision of heading off to Canada in 1963 for graduate school by himself, leaving his heart back in Taiwan with his young family. The letters are full of his longing for us to join him in Canada. During his graduate school days under Dr. Benjamin Lu at the University of Ottawa, Shinn-Der had the foresight to learn Fortran for the incoming computer systems and use it for processing his experimental data. His publication of key papers in several specialty journals on distillation led him to his first post-PhD job in Nova Scotia, where he was able, with meticulous computer modeling of each of the towers, to solve a major design issue that plagued the plant — changing production of heavy water from 20% capacity to over 90% capacity, a difference worth several million dollars a week. This made him a local hero.

Not resting on his laurels, Shinn-Der built much of our family home in Nova Scotia and then, comfortable with home ownership and repairs, ventured into buying and renting apartment buildings with his spare time — first in Nova Scotia, and then in Ontario when he worked for Ontario Hydro. This was the nucleus of the family business that my brother Nathan was able to take over several decades ago, to grow successfully into what it is today.

Faithfulness

Besides his marvellous foresight and accomplishments, my dad was faithful. Faithful to his beloved wife, my mom Rae, for 75 years, 67 of them married! Wow. Faithful to his family, and his friends. Most of all, he was a man of deep personal faith in God. I do not know exactly when he came to be a Christian, but it is clear in the letters that he leaned on his faith in God to give him the foresight that I talked about, as well as to guide him through the many hard times and decisions that came his way. He loved his Lord, and his faith became a nucleus and bedrock for our family’s faith. This past Easter Sunday, when Margaret had taken my dad to the hospital but we had not yet received a diagnosis, my mom and I were reading a letter from March 1966 where my dad wrote:

“Being a Christian is not a show-off thing. It is a quiet decision in your heart… I can see the Holy Spirit in many of my friends at church and they have peace in all situations. Do you agree that this is special? …If you pray to God, then he will make your path straight and your load light… we have been through tough times and tough winds, but have persevered with God’s help.”

Later, when we were given a first diagnosis and told that he might only have weeks to live, I thought that it had been God bringing us these words just at the right time. I believe that my dad’s faith will continue to bless our family for generations to come.

Generosity

Even during those hard years when he was on a graduate student stipend, from the start, you have already heard how he helped support four households. From a letter in May 1966, three years after arrival in Canada:

“I am eating well now. I have been here nearly three years. I now eat a full meal instead of half. When I first came, I only ate until I was half full because I was afraid I would not have enough money. I also never went to a restaurant to pay for cooked food, so that I could buy more food.”

His generosity, along with that of my mom Rae, was extended to their friends and relatives over the years. Nobody has learned that lesson from my dad more than my sister Margaret, who is the only child that he was able to raise for her whole life, since she was born in Canada. Margaret exudes generosity of time and resources to all those around her. When my boys were young, they asked me, “Why do we have to make a Santa list? Auntie Margaret gets us everything we want!” What a life, so different from that of my parents. Margaret continues to show her inherited generosity of time and resources with the unparalleled care that she provided for my dad these past months.

Closing

So thank you to my dad for the depth of his foresight, his faithfulness, and his generosity. These have provided the deep roots and then the wings to help first my generation, and now the next generation, to thrive. This week, my mom and I have finally finished reading and translating the last of the aerogramme letters — the last one written hastily in December 1967, just before we embarked on the plane to Canada to join my father. Now, 56 years later, my dad has slipped through that thin veil between heaven and earth to reach his forever heavenly home. So we know that my dad is in Heaven, and we say to him not “goodbye,” but instead “Good night, see you in the morning. Thank you for preparing the way for us, just as you always did on earth. We love you!”

Nancy, July 2023

We Consider This a Grace

By Margaret Chang, his daughter · April 2023

Written in April 2023, after the diagnosis — an update the family still re-reads.

Hi everyone. So, I know I haven’t been communicating well. So, just a note as a recap, starting from last Sunday.

Dad has primary liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma), likely related to his Hepatitis B carrier state. For the last few months, he has had swelling of the feet and loss of appetite, fatigue and weight loss. There has been progressive weakness. Last Friday, Tina and I took him for a walk and he needed to be in the wheelchair. Last Sunday, when he seemed to be dehydrated, I took him in to the emergency for workup.

The facts: this is pretty extensive. The liver is almost completely replaced. The return of blood through the liver from the rest of the body is nearly completely blocked, resulting in fluid filling the abdomen (portal vein tumour invasion and IVC compressed). There are progressive derangements in his liver enzymes. Symptoms are predominantly of pressure rather than pain, and 5.2 L was taken out the first time. On Thursday, they were able to put in a permanent tube, so we can drain at home. The oncologist thinks it is going to be on the order of weeks, not months — and that he will likely just get sleepier and sleepier until he is less rousable. Dad is pretty confused in hospital, so we are bringing him home. With the support of the palliative team, we will have visiting PSWs, nurses, and a doctor on call.

The important stuff: God is good, and there is definitely evidence that He is in control.

Grandpa could understand what was going on. I was able to tell him, and he grieved. “Life goes fast… but I have been blessed.” But his mild cognitive impairment is now moderate, and every morning he had forgotten. I told him three times, and each time his response was the same. This really brings to mind that God is giving him peace.

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” — Philippians 4:6–7

Grandpa has no pain. Given the extent of the tumour, the fact that there is NO pain is a huge blessing. Every medical person is stunned. And this was Grandma’s biggest concern — that Dad have no pain.

Grandpa could not tell Grandma himself. He wanted to, but kept forgetting. So I did, and… she is more resilient than I thought. Grandma is grieving, but that is expected after more than 65 years of marriage, where she lived to take care of Dad (and Uncle Nathan, Nancy, and myself). After a lot of tears, she just kept saying, “He has been the best husband and father… we need to do right by him.” This is a blessing, because I was afraid that she would refuse to take him home.

God has definitely been blessing me. The last week has been a complete blur, but so many people along the way just extend more courtesy than expected in a public health-care system. It humbles me. The way I see God working is that nothing has been so overwhelming that it has pushed me over the edge. There are multiple agencies and multiple people in each agency, along with the hospital planning and just getting the equipment in for Dad (and then putting it together). Each call has come serially, one at a time. I could deal with someone incredibly gracious and it seemed that the next phone call would happen immediately when the last one would end. A lot to do, but no anxiety. His hand is definitely in the timing of everything. God is faithful.

Margaret, 15 April 2023