Late one evening in 1933, in the Siberian winter with the ground thick with snow, a young Chinese was walking back from his late shift at the heavy machinery factory where he worked.
He saw a drunk, burly man harassing a pretty teenage girl. Without thinking, he confronted the man and threw him to the ground, to the delight of the girl. It was the first meeting between Chiang Ching-kuo, 22, and Faina Epatcheva Vahaleva, 17.
Two weeks ago, on December 15, Faina died of cancer in the Veterans Hospital, Taipei, at the age of 88. On that Siberian evening, she could not in a thousand dreams imagine the life that destiny was to hand her from that meeting with the young Chinese man.
Chiang was the son of Chiang Kai-shek, president of China, but a political exile in Siberia where Josef Stalin had sent him as punishment for his father's crackdown on the fledgling Communist Party in China.
He had already been in the Soviet Union for eight years, spoke fluent Russian and, like millions of other political exiles in Siberia, did not know how long he would live. They survived by savouring the simple pleasures of everyday life and not thinking of the future.
The young couple fell in love and got married in March 1935, in the workers' dormitory of the factory where they lived, to the sound of the socialist anthem the Internationale. No parents attended - his were thousands of kilometres away in Nanjing and hers, from a poor family, had died during her childhood. The guests were her sister, relatives, fellow workers and friends from the Communist Youth League, of which she was a member. Later that year, their first son was born and Chiang lost his job.
