When they arrived in the village, his parents had both passed on. The elder in the village was an uncle who was a magistrate. He at first refused to come out to welcome them, as he had heard that he had taken a foreign wife, but for some reason he knew some Italian and when he heard she was Italian he changed his mind and came out to the village gate to welcome them in.The village was surrounded by a waterway and one would cross a  bridge, much like a Medieval compound with its own wall and a tower 7 stories high. This was used as a storage facility for the harvest and also for defense. In those days there were bandits that would come and pillage This tower had slit windows covered by iron shutters where the people in the interior could shoot at the intruders.

This was a complete cultural shock for our mother, as the villagers had never seen a foreign woman. The older women were very curious, came up to touch her hair, her skin and when the family would have a meal, a round table meal, mother was not used to people using their chop sticks to fetch her food, after having put the chop sticks in their own mouth, so she was quite uncomfortable with this. When she went out in the morning to go for a walk, there were children following her and calling out to her and she would give them coins with a hole in the centre that she carried around on a string and the children, of course, would be very happy to get. One day my father asked why she was giving out money to them: "well they greeted me every morning." To this he replied they were calling her a foreign devil woman. After a short period in the village, they moved to the main city of South China, Canton and there our father became a professor of Art in two universities, one established by the city, called the Canton School of Fine Arts and the other by the Province which was called Shun Kun University. He was immediately well received by society in Canton; the Mayor, high government officials, rich merchants, foreign dignitaries such as General F. Lindermann, military advisor to the Chinese government early 30s, literary figures, all sought after him to do their busts and, in many cases, full size or greater than full size bronze statues (to adorn the fronts of different schools and establishments). This was probably the best period of time that he had (1931 to 1937). In 1937, the Japanese attacked Southern China and bombed Canton and our parents decided to move to Hong Kong, on a temporary basis, to avoid the hostilities. This, however, became a permanent move as there was no ability to go back. The house was totally looted and the floor boards were ripped out, as the servant who was left to guard the house ran away in fear, as the bandits roamed through the city.

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