Spring Flower: A Tale of Two Rivers

Spring Flower
– A Tale of Two Rivers –

A Three-Volume Memoir By Jean T.-H. Perkins, MD. Edited By Dr. Richard Perkins Hsung

Excerpt from the Introduction to Spring Flower

Caption: Dr. Edward C. Perkins attending a morning clinic at the Kiukiang (九江) Water of Life Hospital in China, ca. 1920s.

Where shall I begin a story that spans more than half a century? I’ve told my story to many people over the years, and quite a few have encouraged me to write it all down and publish it. Some say it’s a fairy tale and can be told to children. I’m not sure about that, but I did have a charmed childhood.

A very long time ago, when I was a junior high student in Yonkers, New York, I fell in love with English literature and fancied becoming an author. But life had other plans for me. I’ve had plenty of time to contemplate where and how to begin the only book I’ll write, and still, it’s challenging. Everyone’s life is book-worthy, but not everyone sits down to write their story. What makes mine different from others? What warrants the agony of dredging up the past? What would make my story even slightly of interest to the modern reader?

Perhaps this is a common experience among first-time authors. I sat and sat and could barely get beyond lifting a pen or holding a pad. While my heart was racing with all I wanted to tell, my mind was in disarray. And that was on a productive day. On unproductive days, I felt so overwhelmed by the enormity of it all I would lie on the floor among stacks of boxes of documents, photos, and letters and feel paralyzed. At other times, I would hyperventilate until I would practically pass out from the pungent odor of fifty-year-old carbon paper. There were days I’d stare at old photographs for hours with tears streaming down my cheeks, overcome with grief, suffocating as though someone was squeezing my throat, preventing the air from flowing in.

As the days and months went by, I began to fear I’d never write a single word. My fingers were beginning to feel the onset of arthritis, and I realized I might not be able to handwrite the first draft. Not that long before, I’d had the steadiest hands, but now they were beginning to tremble. So I splurged and bought a typewriter, only to learn that it wouldn’t type by itself like a player piano; I still had to do the work. I sat in front of my new typewriter for hours upon hours, staring at the wall in my dimly- lit studio. So I rented a studio with a window, only to find myself staring at a beautiful young Japanese maple a few feet outside the little window, and suddenly I’d be flooded with memories. I began to gain weight from a year of binge eating, so I changed my strategy. I began to jog along a river path to come up with ideas, which I planned to jot down afterward. But I’d fall asleep at the typewriter the moment I got back, exhausted from the run. During one run, though, on a nondescript, cloudy Sunday afternoon, an epiphany rose up: The book needed to be about me. It sounds obvious now, but I hadn’t actually realized that till then. Miraculously, I typed five words: “My Life, by Jean Perkins.” That became the working title. A few Sunday runs later, I woke up disoriented, lying among archival boxes. As I wiped the moisture from my cheeks, I stared at the boxes, most of which were there because my mother had saved them. And then my cousin Evelyn and her daughters held onto them until I returned to America. Randomly thumbing through one of the boxes, I saw a folder with a chronology of my father’s life. Eureka! To begin talking about myself, I had to talk about others, especially those to whom I owed my life. The book of my life is really about these most beautiful human beings who gave me life, and those I have had the good fortune to encounter.

–– Jean Tren-Hwa Perkins, MD

Dr. Jean T.-H. Perkins was born into dire poverty during the perilous Yangtze River flood of 1931. At the age of one, she was adopted by Dr. and Mrs. Edward C. Perkins, an American medical missionary couple in Kiukiang, China. Jean went on to become an acclaimed ophthalmologist in China during Mao's Cultural Revolution. In 1981, she returned to the U.S., where she had attended school during World War II while living along the banks of the Hudson River. Jean brought her teenage son, Richard, who in 2023 completed her three-volume memoir Spring Flower. The title is a translation of Jean's Chinese name, 春华.