Thinking about my friend Chan, whose passing I noticed a few posts ago, the closeness of the past came to mind.

Chan grew up in the 1930s in the household of a grandee in the Foshan distict of Guangdong Province. It was a wild and woolly time, with warlords, bandits, the Japanese, and rapacious government agents stomping around.

Noticing that Chan seemed to know a lot about handguns, I once asked him:

“Did your father have guns?” Chan: “My father had his own private army.”