The bomb that sent me on the path to Christ: World war veteran's miraculous survival was beginning of a spiritual journey
Ever since I was a child, my father has told the story of the bomb that changed his life.
He could not recall the year, but it was during the second world war and he was at boarding school in Guilin , Guangxi . He was in his teens and running for cover during an air raid but he could not squeeze into the crowded bomb shelter.
Miraculously, the bomb failed to go off, but its propeller cut the person next to my father in two. One half of the body hit my father and he lost consciousness.
"The blood dripped down my head and I passed out," he recalled. "People told me later they found me among the dead bodies. I had a high fever and my body felt like it was burning, so they reckoned I was still alive."
He was taken to hospital where he remained in a coma for days. When he woke up, his arm brushed against something by the bedside.
"I was so scared. But it was actually a nurse kneeling by the bedside praying for me every day," my father said.
"I am very grateful to her."
He remembers only that the nurse was from Zhejiang province, and she was tall, her surname was Zhang and she was a Christian. That was the start of his interest in Christianity. Years later, when the war was over, he joined the Lutheran seminary in Wuhan before fleeing to Hong Kong with the seminary to Tao Fong Shan in Shatin in 1949.
The bomb had set him on a different path in life.
He could not return to school or to his home in Changde so he had to find refuge.
"The roads were cut by the Japanese and I could only follow the stream of refugees [to Guiyang ]," my father said.
It must have been a hard time for my father as he was born to a well-off family. My grandmother, of the Tujia ethnic minority and from Fenghuang , had made her fortune by selling timber her clan logged in Hunan province.
"I slept on the streets and I had to beg for food. I had rashes all over my skin. Luckily I found a suitcase of cigarettes outside a railway station. Someone had left it there, so I began selling cigarettes on the street."
An inn owner took him on as a bookkeeper in return for food and shelter.
In 1944, Chiang Kai-shek, head of the military affairs commission, launched a massive campaign to recruit young students to join the army.
The slogan was: "Our blood covers every inch of the land and 100,000 youth will become an army of 100,000."
My father signed up even though he was too young.
"I told people I was already 18, even though I was only 16. I was tall and people couldn't tell. There was food in the army and that was why I decided to join."
He added: "I responded to the call for youth ... We wanted to resist the invasion of the Japanese."
My father was trained as a radio and telegraph operator. He rose to be a lieutenant and head a team of telegraph operators.
"There was an American adviser in every unit. They taught us how to use the machines and equipment they provided to the Chinese army," my father said.
Though my father had been to India and Burma during the war, his memories of the expeditionary force are vague. He was in charge of telegraph communications, remaining close to the commander of his unit. That commander was Zheng Dongguo, who defected to the Communists in 1948 when he was besieged in Changchun .
But my father does remember guerilla fighting on the Wild Man Mountain, or the Savage Mountain, on the China-Burma border.
"We roamed the mountains. We were carrying the telegraph machine on a cart, it was really heavy. We heard sounds, but we did not know what happened. We did not know what would happen the next hour and we did not know when we would bump into the enemy," he said.
My father witnessed killings and death during the war, but he seldom mentions them.
Instead, among the war stories my father told me was how he was appalled to see soldiers thrashed by officers and the harm those beatings inflicted.
"It was really cruel and I was horrified. I thought it was not the place I should stay long," he said.
Perhaps this is why he quit the army after the war.
Today my father is 87 and his memory is fading. But he still has an answer to "what if" - what if the bomb had gone off, if the nurse had not prayed, if my father had not become a Christian? He would not have come to Hong Kong and his path would not have been the same.
Even his name changed. Like many Chinese Christians at the time, he adopted a biblical name - James - when he converted.
"I never planned my path," he said. "I just followed the situation like a boat floating along a river."