'HAVE CAMERA, WILL TRAVEL"

With the following background information,  I trust you will welcome the opportunity for me to come to your club or retirement home to share "Journeys of My Heart"  with club members or retired residents here in the South California area.

All these things happened to me through the years that brought more people into my life and introduced me to more foreigners including Chinese.  My study of Chinese history compelled me to write about them in a 60-page transcript about their lives as gold miners and immigrants and that I later used as a background for a  2-hour  fact-based fictional screenplay about their treatment as immigrants with no freedoms for over a century. After the Beijing Massacre in 1989, I wanted to go to China.

We finally saved enough to take our first trip to China, flew to Hong Kong,, then rode the train to Beijing and went to a little-known section of  the Great Wall called Mutianyu, where I later went once again taking a friend.  My ins and outs of China are all written down in order in my digital book, "Journeys of My Heart - A Different Kind of Love Story."   Be sure to get it soon.

A QUICK HISTORY

Please see more about my former life before I became interested in China on the webpage entitled, Aki's China Connection,   I also had four children by the time I first went to China in 1993.  My first husband was Gareth Charles Mallory and we were married 10 years.  

In July of 1980, I married Gabriel Keahi Aki from Honolulu, and we together with my third son, Craig, who was developmentally-disabled, flew to China for the first time.  In 1999, all three of us moved to China.  What "moved" me to want to go  to China was studying the history of the Chinese in this country and in their own.  You can read about it in my 321-page digital book.

My great-grandchildren

The Gornergrat Hotel near the Matterhorn Mt. high above the town of Zermatt, Switzerland, where my first husband and I stayed a couple nights back in September, 1959.. This was just part of our three-week adventure that included Rome and the Swiss Alps.  We parked our car  at the cog railway station and rode the train to Zermatt.  Two nights later, we rode higher into the mountains with a 10,000 fit, altitude, then walked down to a lake where you could see the reflection of the Matterhorn Mt.. in it.  Those have been very vivid memories through the years since the late  British actor, Michael Rennie was being filmed in that location for his Hollywood role  in "Third Man on the Mountain," that was shown in 1959 .

Summer students from Changdu, China at the top of a trail near the Columbia R. Parkway, overlooking Mt. Hood.  We hiked up many steps to arrive there.  I was privileged to go with these students including  the two Chinese teachers next to me  who accompanied their students from Chengdu.. 

I  was given this character, "love," from a professional Calligrapher from Beijing who came to the Cultural Center in the city of Qingdao. My  landlady friend, Beth, brought me there to observe  his methods as well as to watch the students engage in their study of  calligraphy.

My Fourth  Anniversary

October, 2019, marked the 4th anniversary of when I had to leave the country where I left my heart, namely, China, with its people whom I grew very fond off during my 4 times of living there plus five other times traveling and getting to know the people.  So, it's time to say Goodbye , and that my heart must go on living back in America and finding new adventures also among Chinese who have moved here.  Actually, I have found them in every place I have ventured or moved to so that makes me feel "at home" again and  taught me that I can be happy wherever I am among the Chinese and other peoples who contribute to this  beautiful world in which we live and can enjoy it to the full.