Cao Clan in America · 2026 Age Register
Preface
前言
This year, 2026, marks exactly fifty years since Father, Cao Zhenpeng, and Stepmother, Lin Ruozhao, emigrated from Taiwan to the United States. With the help of my youngest uncle, Lin Cha, the couple bought a house and settled down. Their timing was fortunate. Three years later, in February 1979, Deng Xiaoping visited the United States: the long-closed mainland launched Reform and Opening, turned toward the world, and promptly agreed to President Carter’s proposal to let Chinese citizens emigrate to join their relatives in America. At the end of that year my youngest brother, Yingshan, became the first to leave Sichuan for America. In 1980 my second elder brother Yinghua and I — I brought one daughter — and my younger brother Yingyuan, who brought one son, arrived one after another at Father’s side; Yingyue and Yingxiang soon followed. A member of their church asked Stepmother Lin, “You’re bringing so many Communists over from the mainland — aren’t you afraid they’ll communize your property?”
We all came at first on family-visit visas. As a U.S. permanent resident, Father could immediately obtain green cards for the unmarried Yingshan and for my widowed second brother, but the rest of us had to wait until our parents became U.S. citizens before we could apply to immigrate. The wait stretched over several years, because our parents did not naturalize as soon as they had completed five years in America. Stepmother Lin became a citizen first and sponsored green cards for my younger brothers and sisters; I had to wait until Father, after putting it off for eight years, finally became a citizen before I received mine. In 1985 I immediately applied for my wife and daughter, still in the mainland, to join me, and the following year for my son Xu. And so, within the first decade, the relatives Father brought to America from both sides of the Taiwan Strait — including Uncle Cao Guoquan and Father’s nephew Zhongyin — had grown to 31 people.
The second wave
Ten more years have passed since the Genealogy of the Cao Zhenguo Clan in America was published in 2015. Yet over this decade the Cao clan in America has grown very little. The main reason is that the fourth generation all had the opportunity of a good higher education in America, so they started work later and married later; the fifth generation’s birth rate is therefore very low, and the clan’s population in America has entered a period of very slow growth. Moreover, mindful of the cultural differences between China and America and of individuals’ wishes for privacy, we will no longer compile a complete Chinese-style genealogy recording everyone’s life history. Instead we are trying out this age register, which tallies the Cao clan’s growth in America year by year and shows at a glance the long lives of the older generation and the growing up of the younger.
Ages are reckoned by the custom of our ancestral home, Hengshan: for the living, the age reached in the current year; for the departed, the full years they completed. Only those who have passed away are given fuller life histories, so that younger readers may understand how the forebears who founded the Cao family in America came here and what they achieved — and also the hard lessons of history, when some among them misjudged the changing times and suffered for it.
In addition, any man or woman in America who has divorced but whose children remain in the Cao family is still regarded as kin and counted in the clan’s population, for the bond between a parent and child can never be dissolved. If they still wish to take part in the clan’s activities, they are most warmly welcome — Ms. Peng Xiaoyue, whose son is in the Cao family, among others.