To keep the Sun light burning
When a China Airlines Airbus crashed in Taipei in February, killing 202 people, Lily Sun Sui-fong believed she understood why the tragedy had occurred. But the granddaughter of Dr Sun Yat-sen blamed neither foul play nor mechanical failure. Instead, she attributed the disaster to karma: it was the price Taiwan had to pay for the decision by several Taiwanese universities to cancel a core course on her grandfather's 'Three Principles of the People'.
'My feeling is that the plane crash wasn't a pure accident,' Ms Sun said. 'The lives of [some] 200 people couldn't have been lost without a reason. Heaven was telling us something.' While laying herself open to ridicule for articulating her beliefs, the Shanghai-born Ms Sun can hardly be faulted for worrying that Sun, the founder of modern China, is gradually being forgotten. The youngest of Sun's six grandchildren, Ms Sun, 62, is the only surviving family member devoted to promoting his doctrines and principles. When she is gone, she fears, there will be no one to continue the work.
In early November, during the week in which Sun would have celebrated his 132nd birthday, she left her real estate business in Honolulu - where she emigrated 32 years ago - to visit universities in Hong Kong, where she lived from 1959 to 1966.
'Shortly after my grandmother [Soong Ching-ling] passed away in 1981, my grandfather appeared in my dreams and told me to go to mainland China and pass on his san min zhu yi, 'Three Principles of the People', to Deng Xiaoping,' she said.
To fulfil her mission of keeping the memory of Sun alive, six years ago she established the Hawaii-based Dr Sun Yat-sen Foundation on Peace and Education, which she chairs. In the past 17 years, she has also travelled to Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and Japan (among other places) to proselytise mainly to academics and overseas Chinese students. She has returned to the mainland about 40 times for the same purpose.
Dressed conservatively, if expensively, and speaking in deliberate but low tones, Ms Sun did not bat an eyelid when discussing the February 16 crash that killed not only passengers and crew, but also five people unlucky enough to be in the path of the plane when it missed Chiang Kai-shek International Airport and ploughed into a residence nearby.
Declaring there were certain paths for people to follow 'no matter if it's Confucianism, Taoism or Buddhism', she said, alluding to the cancelled university courses: 'If people want to do things on the wrong path, do you think Heaven is going to allow that?' However, her concerns that respect for Sun is waning - some Taiwanese universities have recently renamed their Academies of the Three Principles of the People as Academies of Social Sciences - are not shared by Dr Chow Kai-wing, head of Baptist University's History Department.