Occasionally I’m asked by friends, family and acquaintances how I came to write The Gathering Place and why I chose to write it as a collection of stories. There are two reasons that motivated me and they have to do with two photos that were given to me many years ago.

During a Christmas family get-together, my mother presented me with two photographs in small frames. The first was a family portrait of five people taken circa 1920. I confessed to my mother that I did not recognize any of the people in the photograph. My mother was not surprised and explained that it was the only group photo of my father’s family that survived. As I studied the picture, I recognized my uncle as a teenager, my grandmother as a matron rather than an old lady, and my father as a small boy in a school uniform.

I realized then that my father had not spoken of his family, what happened to his extended family or how the five people in that picture had migrated across all of Asia and settled in the Orient during World War I. There was a deep tragedy associated with his family that he did not want to share.  I was determined to interview him and get as much information as possible before this small segment of family history was gone forever.

The second photograph, which unfortunately I have subsequently lost, was a candid group photo of people at a party circa 1941. This was obviously a happy time with people smiling and laughing into the camera.  But the only two people I recognized in the group were my father and mother in their youth just before they married.  I was told that the photograph was taken at the Armenian Social Club in Shanghai.  How they came to meet there after separate travels across all of Asia and the Orient was a story that I was determined to capture.

Eventually I had an opportunity to interview many people who had visited the Armenian Social Club.  It turned out that many of the stories seem to center in this place in Old Shanghai.  Interviews with people who had visited the club added details to the stories, took me in new directions of interest, corroborated some of the events and clarified others, or provided additional insight into the immigrant experience in the Orient.  I also came to appreciate some of the rich history of my people.

This then became more than a family history.  The stories became the histories recounted by resilient and resourceful people who undertook a migration across half the world during the most turbulent period in recent history.  I am pleased that I had the opportunity to record some of their adventures.