The growing Chinese academic community surrounding SUNY Buffalo led to the formation of an investment club, which had its first meeting at the Yin house and mostly served as an excuse for couples to prepare delicious meals and socialize on a regular basis. These dinners forged deep, lifelong friendships and led to many memorable and extended travel vacations to Greece, Nova Scotia, and Taiwan, to name just a few. The Yins served as surrogate parents for many of the younger new faculty arriving from Taiwan: Yi-ming, despite not having any daughters, became proficient at walking brides down the aisle. After retirement, they moved to Fremont, California to escape the infamous Buffalo snowstorms and be closer to a growing network of relatives in the Bay Area.

Hua-nien had a strong ‘can-do’ attitude. She was a skilled seamstress and knitter, making much of her children’s clothing when they were small, which also satisfied her frugal nature. She managed to replicate almost all of her favorite Chinese foods by pairing her childhood memories from curiously watching the cooks in China with her chemistry lab experience. She also loved throwing dinner parties for large groups, often Chinese visitors, who were hungry for some home cooking in those days when chop suey was the dominant menu item in Chinese restaurants. She could generate a feast at a moment’s notice with aplomb. In the 1990s she and YI-ming embarked on a project to write up a family history book with the aid of their relatives across the sea. This involved learning how to use the computer, send email and do word processing in Chinese at a time when such programs were in their infancy. They signed up at the local community college for a course on computing and managed through diligent effort and many trial-and-errors to produce a remarkable document of family memoirs “Our Memories” with essays in both languages from all branches of the Yin family tree. About that same time Hua-nien was also instrumental in encouraging and assisting her nephew Stephen Teng to produce a similar product for the other side of the family “The Chien Reunion Book”. After Yi-ming passed away in 2001, she eventually moved to Madison where two of her sons lived.