Richard H Chiu Biography

Chapter 9 Another Generation

Shortly after David was married to JingWang, Richard and Pat
became grandparents when their oldest daughter, Meg Keller gave
birth to her daughter, Tara Lynn on February 23, 1988.

In June 1988 Pat received her college diploma from the U of U and was accepted into a graduate program for an MS in medical administration. The little house that she had purchased was nearly a hundred years old and although she remodeled it extensively, a county inspector dictated that more repairs were required. Richard told Pat to abandon the house and move back to the farm. Pat offered an alternative. She would move back to Virginia if Richard were interested in continuing their marriage. He agreed and Pat abandoned the idea of getting an advanced degree and moved back to Virginia with all of her younger children; Maryjane, Lucinda, Eliza, and Sam, leaving her son Richard who was in high school, with his sister Tisha who would soon begin her freshman year at the U of U.

In November of that year, David and Jing did their part to increase the Chiu family when they produced their first son, Taylor, born on the 15th November at Utah Valley Hospital.

Jing’s mother came from Taipei to help the couple for the first month or so after the baby was born. Pat and Richard had their first sight of the baby when he was about a month old and they brought the younger children to Utah for a winter visit.

In 1889 Richard helped Meg and her husband Skip purchase a small home in Annandale. Unfortunately, Meg and Skip were having problems, much like those that beset her parents. Differences in values, including how to spend their money and problems with controlling anger put a growing strain on their marriage. Meg and Tara were involved in a scary accident that proved a turning point. When Meg discovered that there were problems with morality as well, she finally realized that it was time to leave her
husband.

Meanwhile, Richard was deeply involved in competition couples dancing. He had several unsatisfactory partners and wanted Pat to join him. There were two problems. For one thing, she was a couple of inches taller than her husband, a real handicap in terms of couples dancing. For
another thing, she was involved in being a grandmother and a mother.
Finally Richard found a woman who seemed to be a perfect partner for couples competition. Unlike Pat, she was willing to devote many hours a week to practice, leaving her two children from two different marriages to care for themselves as she practiced or competed almost nightly. She was also several inches shorter than Richard, making her a more compatible partner.
Hours spent together dancing led to a more involved relationship, and although Linnea, Richard’s new partner, was a professed Christian, the sect she belonged to was strongly anti-Mormon. Could it really be a sin to separate a man from the cult of Mormonism with any means at hand?
Pat discovered the truth about Richard’s relationship to Linnea when she tracked him down one night. Although Richard vowed to try to reconstruct their marriage, he could not withdraw so easily from his partnership with Linnea and Pat sued for divorce. Eventually Richard moved into the house that he had purchased along with Meg and Skip who no longer used it now that they were involved in a divorce of their own.

In the midst of so much separation, there was another marriage. Patricia (Tricia), Pat and Richard’s third living daughter, married Brad Voss at the turn of the year on December 29, 1990. Pat flew to Utah with a wedding dress and plans for a wedding breakfast to follow their morning ceremony in the Salt Lake Temple. Richard was not able to make the trip.

Afterward, the couple moved to Monterey, California where Brad was studying Arabic at the Navy language training center.

In June of 1992, a few days more than 30 years after Richard Hung-hsiung Chiu had married Patricia Heywood, their divorce became final. Pat flew to Greece where she visited Tricia and Brad who were stationed near Iraklion, Crete. Richard drove to Canada where he married Linnea. They settled down in the house on Vellex Lane with Linnea’s two children.

In December of 1992, tragedy brought the two families together. Tricia’s baby boy, Richard Alexander Voss, was born in Incerlik, Turkey.

At first he seemed a very healthy baby. In a few days doctors discovered that he suffered from a fatal heart defect. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Linnea and Richard attended the funeral and two of Richard’s younger daughters left the family pew to sit with their father and his wife.

Nancy had graduated from the BYU after serving a mission to Toronto, Canada and young Richard had graduated from High School and served a short time on a mission to Korea at the time Tisha’s baby died. They were able to be with the family and offer their support to the grieving couple. Tricia herself spent time in the same hospital where her baby had died, so
burdened by the events surrounding his death, the flight from Turkey to Germany and then to the US, the days without sleep, that she suffered a nervous breakdown. Brad obtained an early separation from the Air Force by reason of the family’s situation and he and Tisha moved to Utah to be closer to his family.

Meanwhile, David and Jing were living in the house on Columbia Road that Richard had not found time to improve and which he had granted to Pat in the divorce. Nancy and Maryjane were living in Chicago where Nancy had been accepted into a combined Phd.-MD program at Pritzger Medical School at the University of Chicago.

In the beginning of 1993 Meg met Bryan Stout and they were married in August in the Jordan River, Utah Temple. Richard was not able to attend their marriage reception.

In the fall, Maryjane left for Hawaii where she attended BYU Hawaii, the same school her father had once attended under the name Church College of Hawaii. As winter fell, Richard Chun-ling headed off to Army boot camp. When his training was nearly finished, he found that he could not continue and eventually he obtained a non-prejudicial release. In May, 1994 Richard and Linnea accepted Meg’s invitation to attend her graduation from George Mason University with a degree in physics.
Meg gave birth to William Arthur Stout at Georgetown hospital in Washington D.C. on December 9,1994.

It was already known that he suffered from a heart defect that was completely different from that which had taken the life of his cousin Richard Alexander Voss a couple of years earlier.  He was immediately taken to Children’s Hospital in Washington D.C. but even though the surgery performed on his heart was pronounced successful, he died a few hours later on December 17, 1994 and was buried only a few feet from his aunt Kathleen’s grave in the baby cemetery at National Memorial Park in Falls Church, Virginia.

Richard was able to go to Chicago to attend his daughter Nancy’s wedding reception after she married Robert Clark in May of 1995. Here he is with all the children and grandchildren that he had at that time.

Shortly after Nancy’s wedding, Meg gave birth to a lovely little girl they named Elizabeth. A few months later, Tisha gave birth to Rochelle. These little girls were anodyne and balm to their parents’ hearts. David and Jing had a daughter, Talitha. Although they faced the challenges
of a child with Down’s Syndrome, they recognized that they had been given a lovely personality
to raise. Soon after Talitha was born, Meg had another daughter, Patricia Anne.

Beth, Talitha, Rochelle, and Annie in 2000.

Richard was working for the Navy as a program manager at a facility located in Crystal City in Alexandria, Virginia. He continued dancing with Linnea, and traveled to Europe with her and her children. Although he had considered adopting Linnea’s son, Jason, he never carried through with the intention. Linnea helped him renovate the house in Norfolk and they used it as a vacation place for themselves and her family and friends. He embarked on a remodeling project, trying to expand the Vellex house. In the process he put the refrigerator out on the back porch and put a wood burning stove in its place in the kitchen.

As Richard approached the time that he would retire, strains began to appear in his marriage. Linnea grew impatient with his continued attention to his children. First Lucinda, and then Eliza had graduated from Falls Church High School and had been accepted as students at the BYU. When Mary joined them, after serving a mission to Barcelona, Spain, Richard decided it would be wise to invest in a house in Provo where the girls could live together instead of continuing to pay rent to strangers. He purchased a nice little brick home on the tree streets above the campus with four bedrooms which were shared with other female students.

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Linnea’s daughter, Jessica, was just beginning college and her tuition and living expenses at American University exceeded the scholarship she had earned by more than ten thousand dollars. It irritated Linnea that Richard would purchase a home for his daughters when her own finances were strained to provide an education for her own child. Her resentment was increased when Richard flew to San Francisco and helped nurse his
elderly mother back to health. Linnea moved out of their bedroom and into her son’s room. Richard called Pat and asked for advice. She told him to see a lawyer. At first he thought there might be some way to reconcile with Linnea. He had been married to her for almost 6 years, and they had seemed to get along very well together. She rejected his offer to go to counseling and she also rejected his offer of settlement that seemed
reasonable to him. At last he sought the services of a lawyer. Linnea had signed a pre-nuptial agreement, which she now repudiated, but Richard was able to get the evidence admitted and Linnea was forced to settle for one half the value of the house that they had shared. After further delaying releasing the deed, she was assessed with legal costs that reduced her award by several thousand dollars. Whatever difficulties he may have had in expressing his love for his family, in the end, he sacrificed his marriage to Linnea in order to serve his mother and provide a place for his daughters.

In June of 2000 Nancy received her Phd. from the University of Chicago and Richard and Pat were present along with Nancy’s older siblings. Richard was able to meet his youngest grandchild, Russell Voss, who had been born on February 28 of the same year.

The family gathered again to see Richard’s youngest daughter,
Eliza marry Philip Porter on her birthday, June 30, 2000.

Shortly afterward Nancy married Hunter Bivens in July of 2000. Richard and Pat accompanied many members of their family to Philadelphia in March 2001 to attend a celebration of Nancy’s marriage.

After his retirement from employment as a civilian by the Navy, Richard was hired by a consulting firm that worked with the Navy. He had seen many of his colleagues who had lasted only a short time in such arrangements, only until the new employer had taken advantage of their
contacts and their recent knowledge. Richard was not sanguine about his future with the company, expecting a short career with them. But his ability was deeper than mere contacts or recent projects. He has always been an innovative and imaginative engineer. The elegance of the bridges he designed, still noted landmarks after more than forty years, the clever use he made of arcane knowledge, such as in his design for the Ammi Barges during the Viet Nam war, were proof that he was more than a
bureaucrat. While he was working for the government, he gave more than his money’s worth. In Guam he discovered that a ‘broken’ dry dock ship simply needed more grease in the hinges of the doors that were failing to open. In the Mediterranean he traced a leak aboard a carrier to a broken laundry hose on board the ship rather than a breach in the hull. Eventually Richard retired from his job as a consultant and began another career in real estate.

On September 17 of 2002 David's wife Jing gave birth to a son, Alden.

Not long afterwards Lucinda announced her engagement to Jared Hancock. They planned to marry in January 2003, but just a week before the wedding Richard's mother Pei-chiu died in California. Richard and a number of his children diverted their planned journey to Utah to El Cerrito, California where his mother and father had been living near his brother Mark. After the funeral they went to Utah for Lucinda's wedding.

The family continued to grow as Tricia gave birth to her second daughter, Hannah Ruh on May 5, 2003. About nine months later Lucinda had her first child, Calvin, born on February 15, 2004.

Richard's last unmarried daughter, Maryjane, who had become a mortgage banker after graduating from BYU, married a young man from Togo named Kizou Sam. Richard himself had married again after courting Zoe for some time.

Eliza and her husband Philip had moved to Florida and purchased a condo near the school where he taught band. She gave birth to their first child Geoffrey on Christmas Day, 2004. When he was four months old he was diagnosed with Leukemia, but after long and dedicated care he was able to live a fairly normal life.

After returning from a mission to France, Richard's youngest son, Sam received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and joined the US Army Reserves. He left for basic training in early January of 2005 just before his mother returned from Geoffrey's birth in Florida. After completing his training he began graduate studies in electrical engineering.

Lucinda gave birth to a daughter, Jacqueline, on July 5 of 2005.

Sam was sent to Afghanistan as a member of a civil affairs unit in April 2006.

The family planned a reunion and because of Geoffrey's situation it was decided it would be best to meet in Florida. Sam was able to come on leave from Afghanistan, but David's oldest son Taylor was in boot camp becoming a marine and Nancy and Hunter had the best excuse of all, bringing Miranda Ruby into the world in New York City on the first day of the family reunion in Florida, June 23, 2006.

This is a picture of most of the rest of the family gathered around the anchor at Philip's school.

Lucinda gave birth to her second son, Adam, on October 5, 2006. Eliza gave birth to a daughter, Margot on June 22, 2007. On June 27, 2008 Lucinda again enlarged the family with the birth of a daughter, Diana.

In a surprise move, Richard's sister Donna, now divorced, made contact with her former husband Kent Briggs. They decided to marry and Richard traveled to their home in Las Vegas. Richard's father died in California and once again he was joined by some of his children at a cemetery looking over the ocean.