Manho Chou Edwards

EDWARDS, Manho Chou 75, a Chinese emigre who lived in Washington, D.C. for the past ten years, died Feb. 18. She had long suffered from the effects of a botched thyroid surgery ultimately leading to her death from renal failure. Mrs. Edwards was born April 4, 1934 in Hangzhou, China. She was the eldest of six children. Her father was a Chinese air force officer and regional magistrate serving in the Kuomintang government under Chiang Kai-shek. During the war with Japan which started in 1937, the family moved around China with stints in Yunnan, Chungching, and Chengdu. Mrs. Edwards vividly remembered the severity of the Japanese bombing even in the countryside. She recorded in her private memoirs how she and her siblings would blow out their candles and hide under their beds when the bombs dropped. She also remembered American relief planes dropping supplies including Klim powdered milk and Gerber's baby cookies. The care packages also contained small black scissors. Mrs. Edwards kept a pair as a treasured memento of those times. Mrs. Edwards' family in China had many prominent members including her uncle, the major poet and essayist Zhu Ziqing. Even while most of the family were fleeing the Communist takeover in 1949, Mao Zedung praised her uncle in a famous anti-imperialist speech entitled "Farewell, Leighton Stuart!" referring to the last US ambassador to the nationalist Nanjing government. Another maternal uncle was Zhu Wuhua, China's first Harvard Ph.D. in physics and president of Shanghai Jiaotong University, often called "China's Caltech." The family resettled in Taiwan. It was there in 1959 that Mrs. Edwards met her future husband, Robert Randle Edwards, a young US Navy officer from Alabama who had studied Mandarin. The couple married in 1961. Mr. Edwards was threatened with an early discharge from the Navy for marrying "an aborigine." The couple moved to the US in 1961, first to Massachusetts and then the New York area, where Mr. Edwards was a professor of Chinese law at Columbia University. Mrs. Edwards was a person of many talents and active hobbies including cello, cooking, and letter writing. She received a bachelor's degree in General Studies in 1981 from Columbia University. She suffered from hypoparathyroidism and was an advocate for fellow victims of the disease. Survivors include her husband; her children, Lee Edwards of Beijing, China, Sue Edwards of Washington DC, and Jon Edwards of London, England; and eight grandchildren.