ABOUT CHINA GYPSY ROSE
ABOUT CHINA GYPSY ROSE
'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 1993. Six years later,, 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 237-page digital book.
My great-grandchildren
My Story
My Story
Although I am originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, namely in Santa Rosa, I began my photography, writing and traveling in Europe many years ago while my late first husband was stationed in the U.S. Army. During our 19 months there, we had purchased a 1936 BMW for US$150 that we drove over the Alps to the French Riviera via Zermatt, Switzerland and the famous Matterhorn Mt. and then onto Rome and back to Germany via Florence and Venice. Our Rhine River Cruise from our home in Mainz to Koblenz was just one of our memorable trips besides taking a "three-day pass" to Paris; visiting Brussels, Belgium during the 1958 World's Fair; and taking a train ride to Nurnberg, where the war trials of World War II had been held .
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 .
My Advantages
My Advantages
My advantage as a news reporter for several years in No. California, gave me the skills needed to interview, write and speak in front of audiences besides being a recruiter for an adult English student program in Portland, Oregon. and an exchange student local coordinator rep for Education, Travel and Culture (ETC) with FT students from Europe, South. America and Asia. during their ten months of attending high school. I also assisted with their sister program, NW Intl Study Exchange (NISE) during the annual three-week short-term summer program of students from Chengdu, China. After moving to Honolulu in 2018, I showed my newly-revised , "Journeys of My Heart" with pleasant Chinese music with an overflow audience.
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 Vision
My Vision
My experiences provide additional opportunities to intermingle with people from different foreign countries, and to get an insight on their history and culture. From 2009 onward, I escorted several friends as a private tour guide to various parts of China to see and be a part of "the real China." I also created a three-week private China tour two years in a row for a person from Portland who needed experienced guides since he although being Chinese from the U.S. , had no knowledge of the language. In 2018, I began completing the editing of my 237-page digital Online book of stories with photographs about traveling, living and teaching in China off and on since 1993. The title is "Journeys of the Heart - A Different Kind of Love Story" to be sold on Amazon. The Table of Contents is on the Contact Page of this website.
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.
Meet Three of My Tour Participants
Meet Three of My Tour Participants
Antoinette Smith
Antoinette Smith
I was her tour guide for two weeks to Beijing and Lijiang in Yunnan Province in 2012. We found two friends who were documented in the book about "Lijiang, A Small Town in China," that I had read prior to my first trip there when I originally met these two women. They had grown up and became married women by 2014 when we visited them for the second time.
Nancy Piantanida
Nancy Piantanida
This was also Nancy's first trip to China for two weeks in 2014 when we visited not only the Great Wall but also flew to Pingyao to see this ancient town with its almost complete wall in addition to taking the raft cruise on the Li River and stopping off in Qingdao, one of the towns on the coast of Shandong Province where I had lived in 2010. See more in my 237-page book.
Craig Mallory
Craig Mallory
Entrepreneur & Traveler, my third son who came to China with me three times, the first time when my second husband from Honolulu, Hawaii accompanied us ; the second time when my son and I traveled by train across China to visit the people portrayed in Lijiang as previously noted and the third time, when we moved to China in 1999-2000. He loved traveling.