Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter

FALLING LEAVES

FALLING LEAVES

THE TRUE STORY OF

AN UNWANTED

CHINESE DAUGHTER

ADELINE YEN MAH

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

New York Chichester Weinheim Brisbane Singapore Toronto

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Š

Copyright Š 1997 by Adeline Yen Mah. All rights reserved Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published simultaneously in Canada

First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Michael Joseph, the Penguin Group

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Mah, Adeline Yen

[Falling leaves return to their roots]

Falling leaves: the true story of an unwanted Chinese daughter / Adeline Yen Mah.

p. cm.

- Originally published: Falling leaves return to their roots. London : M. Joseph, ”997.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-471-24742-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

i. Mah, Adeline Yen, 1937- . 2. Chinese AmericansCalifornia Biography. 3. Women physiciansCaliforniaBiography.

4. CaliforniaBiography. 5. ChinaSocial life and customs. I. Title.

CT275.M45H5A3 1998

3O5.48’895iO73’o92dc2i ’,

[B] ’ ’ 97-40144

Printed in the United States of America

10 98765431

Dedicated to my Aunt Baba, whose unwavering belief

in my worth sustained me throughout my tormented childhood

And to my husband, Bob, without whose love this book

could not have been written.

Contents,

CHAPTER 1 Men Dang Hu Dui: The Appropriate Door Fits the Frame of the Correct House 5

CHAPTER 4 Xiu Se Ke Can: Surpassing

Loveliness Good Enough to Feast Upon 25

CHAPTER 5 Yi Chang Chun Meng: An

Episode of a Spring Dream 34

CHAPTER 6 Jia Chou Bu Ke Wai

Yang: Family Ugliness Should Never be

Aired in Public 41

CHAPTER 7 Yuan Mu Qiu Yu: Climbing

a Tree to Seek for Fish 75

CHAPTER 8 Yi Shi Tong Ren: Extend the

Same Treatment to All 91

VII

CHAPTER 9 Ren Jie Di Ling: Inspired Scholar in an Enchanting Land 99

CHAPTER 10 Du Ri Ru Nian: Each Day Passes Like a Year 107

CHAPTER 11 Zi Chu Ji Zhu: Original Ideas in Literary Composition 112

CHAPTER 12 Tong Chuang Yi Meng: Same; Bed, Different Dreams 118

CHAPTER 13 You He Bu Ke?: Is Anything Impossible? 122

CHAPTER 14 - Yi Qin Yi He: One Lute, One Crane 135

CHAPTER 15 fu Zhong You Yu: Fish

Swimming in a Cauldron 141

CHAPTER 16 Pi Ma Dan Qiang: One Horse, Single Spear 151

CHAPTER 17 Jia Ji Shui Ji: Marry a

Chicken, Follow a Chicken 157 ť

CHAPTER 18 Zhong Gua De Gua: You

Plant Melons, You Reap Melons 167

CHAPTER 19 Xin Ru Si Hui: Hearts Reduced to Ashes 178

CHAPTER 20 Fu Zhong Lin Jia: Scales

and Shells in the Belly 193

CHAPTER 21 Tian Zuo Zhi He: Heaven made Union 206

CHAPTER 22 Si Mian Chu Ge: Besieged by Hostile Forces on All Sides 212

CHAPTER 23 Cu Cha Dan Fan: Coarse Tea and Plain Rice 218

VIII

CHAPTER 24 Yin Shui Si Yuan: While Drinking Water, Remember the Source 227

CHAPTER 25 Yi Dao Liang Duan: Sever This Kinship with One Whack of the Knife 235

CHAPTER 26 Wu Feng Qi Lang: Creating

Waves Without Wind 240

CHAPTER 27 Jin Zhu Zhe Chi, Jin Mo Zhe Hei: Near Vermilion, One

Gets Stained Red; Near Ink, One Gets Stained Black 244

CHAPTER 28 Jiu Rou Peng You: Wine and

Meat Friends 252

CHAPTER 29 Wu Tou Gong An: Headless

and Clueless Case 261

CHAPTER 30 Kai Men Yi Dao: Opened

the Door to Salute the Thief 264

CHAPTER 31 Yan Er Dao Ling: Steal

the Bell While Covering Your Ears 268

CHAPTER 32 Luo Ye Gui Gen: Falling

Leaves Return to Their Roots 271

Index 275

ix

Author’s Note

This is a true story. Much of it was painful and difficult to write but I felt compelled to do so. I continue to have deep feelings towards many members of my family and harbour no wish to hurt anyone unnecessarily. I have therefore disguised the Christian names of all my living siblings, their spouses and their children. However, my parents’ names are real, so are all the events described.

FALLING LEAVES

It would not be quite truthful to say that we were all together for the first time in nearly forty years. Each of us, severally and separately and sometimes stealthily, had gathered before but there had always been a common denominator of absence. Today it was Father.

Susan, our youngest sister, well-known socialite and wife of billionaire banker Tony Liang, was also absent. She had not been invited to Father’s funeral or to the subsequent will reading. Her name was left out in the obituary published in the South China Morning Post. ’Joseph Tsi-rung Yen,’ it read, ’dearly beloved husband of Jeanne Prosperi Yen, father of Lydia, Gregory, Edgar, James and Adeline, died on 13 May

1988 peacefully at the Hong Kong Sanatorium.’

That very morning, Father had been buried at the Catholic cemetery in North Point, on the east side of Hong Kong Island. Now, at four thirty in the afternoon, we were assembled at the impressive law offices of Johnson, Stokes & Masters on the seventeenth floor of Prince’s Building in Hong Kong, for the reading of his will.

We waited nervously in the conference room around a large, oval table with a polished granite top. It gleamed, like the matching granite floor, in the afternoon sunlight that flooded through huge windows from the harbour. Lydia, my oldest

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sister, moved close to me and placed her right arm protectively around my shoulder. My three older brothers, Gregory, Edgar and James, sat sombrely next to each other. Louise, James’s pretty wife, gazed solicitously at our French-Chinese stepmother whom we called Niang, a Chinese term for mother. She sat with her solicitor at the head of the table; a cloud of cigarette smoke floated from her gold cigarette holder, tightly clutched between meticulously manicured fingers. The room seemed enormous and I felt sick with grief.

He had been a very wealthy man, my father, something of a risk-taker but certainly one of Hong Kong’s more successful businessmen. Escaping from Shanghai in 1949, he had started an import and export company, then diversified into manufacturing, construction, trading and property, and had even listed a company on the highly competitive Hong Kong stock exchange. James and Niang had managed his financial affairs when he became too ill to deal with them himself.

Niang was immaculately dressed in an expensive Parisian black silk suit. On her lapel was a large diamond brooch which matched the glittering diamond on her finger. Her dyed jet black hair was carefully coined above her broad forehead. From a black alligator handbag she extracted a pair of glasses in designer frames which she put on her nose. She nodded towards her solicitor, who now handed us each a copy of Father’s will.

He cleared his throat and said, ’Your mother, my client Mrs Jeanne Yen, has requested that you don’t turn the page for the time being. I shall explain the reason later.’ He began to read the first page with each of us hanging on his every word. I felt as if I was seven years old and living back in Shanghai.

’This is the last will and testament of me, Joseph Yen, of No.

18 Magazine Gap Road, No. loa Magnolia Mansions, Victoria, in the colony of Hong Kong,’ he began. There followed the usual phrases about revoking all wills and codicils made previously. Father then appointed his wife Jeanne Yen to be the sole executrix of his will. ’And give devise and bequeath to her

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my entire estate whatsoever and wheresoever.’ Should Niang not survive him, the solicitor continued, then James would be the sole executor and trustee of Father’s will.

The solicitor had already reached the bottom of the page. He now coughed nervously and said, ’It is my duty to inform you that 1 have been instructed by your mother, Mrs Jeanne Yen, to tell you that there is no money in your father’s estate.’

We stared at him in astonishment. No money? All eyes turned to Niang, our stepmother. She gazed at us one by one. ’Since there is no money in the estate,’ she said, ’there is no need for you to go on reading the will. There is nothing there for any of you. Your father died penniless.’ She held out her hand and slowly, reluctantly but obediently, each of us handed over his or her copy of Father’s will without reading the next page, exactly as we had been instructed.

No one said anything. The prolonged silence carried an uneasiness as we looked expectantly at Niang for an explanation.

’None of you seem to understand,’ Niang said. ’Your father’s will is meaningless because he had no money in his estate.’

She stood up and handed all the copies of Father’s unread will back to the solicitor. The will reading was at an end.

No one questioned the legitimacy of Niang’s actions, or turned the first page to peruse the next. Baffled and bewildered as we all were, we accepted Niang’s command. We had no idea in what manner Father had wished to dispose of his fortune or how he had foreseen the future of our family.

Father had been a man of great wealth and substance. Why did we each hand back Father’s unread will as if we were mindless robots?

In order to explain our collective docility that afternoon, I have to go back to the very beginning. A Chinese proverb says that luo ye gui gen (falling leaves return to their roots). My roots were from a Shanghai family headed by my affluent father and his beautiful Eurasian wife, set against a

3

background of treaty ports carved into foreign concessions, and the collision of East and West played out within and without my very own home.

4

The Appropriate Door Fits the Frame of the Correct House

At the age of three my grand aunt proclaimed her independence by categorically refusing to have her feet bound, resolutely tearing off the bandages as fast as they were applied. She was born in Shanghai (city by the sea) in 1886 during the Qing dynasty when China was ruled by the child emperor Kuang Hsu, who lived far away up north in the Forbidden City. The pampered baby of the family, eight years younger than my grandfather, Ye Ye, Grand Aunt finally triumphed by rejecting all food and drink until her feet were, in her words, ’rescued and set free’.

Shanghai in the late nineteenth century was unlike any other city in China. It was one of five treaty ports opened up to Britain after the First Opium War in 1842. Gradually it burgeoned into a giant intermediary between China and the rest of the world. Strategically situated on the Huangpu River seventeen miles upstream from the mighty Yangtse, the city was linked by boat to the inner western provinces. At the other end to the east, the Pacific Ocean was only fifty miles away.

Britain, France and the United States of America staked out foreign settlements within the city. To this day, amidst the new highrise buildings, Shanghai’s architecture reflects the influence of the foreign traders. Some of the great mansions, formerly homes of diplomats and business magnates, possess the

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stately Edwardian grandeur of any fine house by the River Thames at Henley in England or the Gallic splendour of a villa in the Loire valley in France.

Extraterritoriality meant that within the foreign concessions, all subjects, be they foreign or Chinese, were governed by the laws of the foreigner and were exempt from the laws of China. Foreigners had their own municipal government, police force and troops. Each concession became an independent city within a city: little enclaves of foreign soil in treaty ports along China’s coast line. China was governed not by written laws but by the rulings of magistrates appointed by the emperor and her citizens traditionally viewed these mandarins as demi-gods. For roughly one hundred years (between 1842 and 1941) westerners were perceived throughout China as superior beings whose wishes transcended even those of their own mandarins. The white conquerors were treated with reverence, fear and awe by the average Chinese.