Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter (2 page)

Legal cases were tried before a Chinese magistrate but presided over by a foreign consular assessor whose power was absolute and whose word was final. The local populace was further humiliated by being barred from ownership of, or even free access to, many of the most desirable sections within their own city. Discrimination, segregation and abuse coloured most interracial dealings, with westerners viewing the Chinese as their vanquished inferiors. All this was bitterly resented.

Immediately south of the French Concession in Shanghai, my great-grandfather owned a tea-house in the old walled Chinese city of Nantao. These Chinese quarters, or the Old Town, were packed with low, dense buildings, small bustling markets and wandering alleyways overhung by colourful shop signs. Business was successful in spite of fierce competition from mobile stoves on bamboo poles, roadside stands and modest one-room cafes. When Grand Aunt was seven years old, her father relocated his tea-house to a more fashionable site in the International Settlement, formed by the merging of the former British and American Concessions. He then moved

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his entire family into a house a few streets away, in a quiet residential neighbourhood within the French Concession.

The French laid out gardens, apartment blocks, office buildings and tree-lined avenues which were given the names of French dignitaries. These boulevards became thick with cafe strollers and imported motor cars intermingling with wheelbarrows, rickshaws and pedicabs. Shanghai began to be known as the Paris of the Orient, though Grand Aunt always claimed that Paris should be called the Shanghai of Europe.

Grand Aunt’s older siblings received little formal education, but they did learn to read and write at a private teacher’s home. The youngest of five children, Grand Aunt was an afterthought. When she came of school age my great-grandfather had prospered. He enrolled her at the fashionable and expensive McTyeire Christian Girls’ School, run by American Methodist missionaries. She was the first child in the Yen family to be given a foreign education.

By that time, Shanghai had become the centre of China’s trade and industry. Opportunities were limitless. Grand Aunt’s eldest brother had established a successful business manufacturing spare metal parts for rickshaws, pedicabs, bicycles and some of the more modern household appliances. He was to die young, probably from syphilis, for he succumbed to the three vices common to Chinese men at that time: opium, gambling and the brothels. Leisured women also gambled and took opium, but discreetly at home. Grand Aunt’s second brother set up a thriving import-export tea business but he, too, became infected with venereal disease and was unable to sire children. Her sister had an arranged marriage and died from tuberculosis. Her third brother, my grandfather Ye Ye, was soft spoken and gentle. A devout Buddhist, he was tall and slender, with poetic leanings and gentle ways. He disliked the required Manchu male hairstyle of shaving the brow and braiding long hair into a single queue. Even as a young man, he kept his head clean shaven (the only permitted alternative), wore a round skull cap, and sprouted a neatly trimmed

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moustache. Determined riot to follow his brothers down the slippery path, he proved to be far more able than either of them.

While at McTyeire, Grand Aunt developed a lifelong passion for riding. She became fluent in English, was baptized as a Christian and made many western friends through her church. One of these, a fellow member of the Anti-foot-binding League, gave her a job as a clerk in the savings department of the Bank of Shanghai. During the twenty years that she worked there she learned every aspect of the banking business and was made manager of her division.

Grand Aunt never married. In those days, daughters could still be legally sold or bartered. A wife was often treated as an indentured servant in her husband’s household, especially to her mother-in-law. If she failed to bear a son, one or more concubines would be brought in. Remarriage for widowers was routine but considered unchaste for widows. Most men of means routinely visited brothels but a woman who was unfaithful to her husband could be punished by death.

I remember Grand Aunt as a tall, imposing figure, treated with great esteem by every member of our family. Even Ye Ye and Father deferred to her every wish, which was remarkable in a society where women were disdained. Out of respect, we children were instructed to call her &—&- ’Gong Gong’, which meant Grand Uncle. It was common practice for high achieving women within the clan to assume the male equivalent of their female titles.

At five feet seven inches she was only slightly shorter than Ye Ye. Erect, dignified, her feet unbound, she had a striking presence, in contrast to the obsequious demeanour befitting women of her time. Her black hair was cut short above her ears and combed backwards to reveal a smooth forehead above an oval face. Behind round, wire-rimmed, tinted glasses, her large eyes were penetrating. Always elegant, she favoured dark, monochrome, silk qipaos (Chinese dresses) with mandarin collars and butterfly buttons. Her complexion was fair with a tiny

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sprinkle of freckles across her nose. Habitually she wore face cream, a dab of rouge and a touch of lipstick, while her ears were adorned with exquisite stud earrings of pearls and jade. She moved with ease and athletic grace, riding and playing tennis into her sixties. I have a photograph of her smiling and confident astride a large black stallion, dressed in a white blouse, dark tie and well cut jodhpurs.

In 1924 Grand Aunt founded her own bank, the Shanghai Women’s Bank. It is impossible to overestimate the scale of her achievement. In a feudal society where the very idea of a woman being capable of simple everyday decisions, let alone important business negotiations, was scoffed at, Grand Aunt’s courage was extraordinary.

The reputation she had gained was such that Grand Aunt was able to raise the financing for her bank without difficulty. Shares were issued and fully subscribed to. Her bank was staffed entirely by women and designed to meet their specific needs. In they came: spinster daughters, with their inheritance and nest eggs; first wives (called big wives), with their dowries and winnings from mahjong; concubines (called little wives), with cash presents from their men; and professional and educated women, who were tired of being patronized at male dominated establishments. Shanghai Women’s Bank was profitable from the very beginning and remained so until Grand Aunt’s resignation in 1953.

With her profits she built a six-storey bank building at

480 Nanking Road which, in the 192.05 and 305, was considered the most prestigious business address in China. Her bank was situated at the nerve centre of the International Concession, adjacent to major office blocks and department stores, less than a mile from the Bund (nicknamed Wall Street of Shanghai), the famous park-like river-front promenade which, in those days, excluded Chinese ownership. Her staff lived in comfortable dormitories on the upper floors. The best building materials were used. Lifts were installed and modern plumbing put in with flush toilets, central heating, and hot and cold

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running water. Grand Aunt lived in a spacious penthouse on the sixth floor with her friend Miss Guang whom she had met through church. There were rumours about their relationship. They shared a room and slept in the same bed. In China, intimate friendship between single women was sneered at but tolerated. Miss Guang, born in 1903, had money of her own and was one of Grand Aunt’s first investors. She became the bank’s vice president. Later on, Grand Aunt adopted a daughter. (This was a common practice among childless women of means and required little formality.) They employed three maids, a chef and a chauffeur and entertained lavishly at home. Many a transaction was negotiated over a bowl of shark’s fin soup during lunch at Grand Aunt’s penthouse apartment.

At the age of twenty-six, Grand Aunt’s third elder brother, my Ye Ye, entered into an arranged marriage through a mei-po (professional female marriage broker). My fifteen-year-old grandmother came from an eminently suitable Shanghai family. Theirs was a men dang hu dui (as the appropriate door fits the frame of the correct house) marriage. Across the street from my great-grandfather’s tea-house, her father owned a small herbal store filled with desiccated leaves, roots, powdered rhinoceros horns, deer antlers, dried snakes’ gall bladders and other exotic potions. The bride and the groom saw each other for the first time on their wedding day in

1903.

On the eve of her wedding, Grandmother was summoned into her father’s presence. ’Tomorrow you will belong to the Yen family,’ she was told. ’From now on, this is no longer your home and you are not to contact us without permission from your husband. Your duty will be to please him and your in laws. Bear them many sons. Sublimate your own desires. Become the willing piss-pot and spittoon of the Yens and we will be proud of you.’

Next day, the trembling bride, bedecked in a red silk gown and her face covered with a red silk cloth, was borne into the home of her parents-in-law in a red and gold sedan chair

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painted with a phoenix and dragon, rented from a store specializing in weddings and funerals. The wedding procession was a colourful, noisy affair accompanied by red lanterns, banners, trumpet blowing and the clanging of gongs. It was a point of honour for families to impoverish themselves for such occasions. However, in the case of my grandparents, friends and relatives gave many wedding presents including large cash gifts to defray the costs.

The young bride’s fears were misplaced because Ye Ye proved to be loving and considerate. At her insistence, the young couple broke with tradition and moved out of the Yen family home into their own rented quarters in the French Concession. Grandmother taught herself mathematics and used it to great advantage in her daily mahjong games. I remember her as a quick-witted and strong-willed chain-smoker with bound feet, short hair and a razor-sharp tongue.

At the age of three, Grandmother’s feet had been wrapped tightly with a long, narrow cloth bandage, forcing the four lateral toes under the soles so that only the big toe protruded. This bandage was tightened daily for a number of years, squeezing the toes painfully inwards and permanently arresting the foot’s growth in order to achieve the tiny feet so prized by Chinese men. Women were in effect crippled and their inability to walk with ease was a symbol both of their subservience and of their family’s wealth. Grandmother’s feet caused her pain throughout her life. Later, she braved social ridicule rather than inflict this suffering on her own daughter.

My grandparents grew to love each other and had seven children in quick succession. Of those, only the first two survived. Aunt Baba was born in 1905 and my father two years later.

On 10 October 1911, when Aunt Baba was six years old, the Manchu dynasty came to an end. Dr Sun Yat Sen, the leader of the Chinese revolutionaries, returned from exile to Shanghai in triumph on Christmas Day the same year. He was named President of the Republic of China. One of his first acts was to abolish the custom of foot-binding.

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Ye Ye supported his family by buying and leasing out a small fleet of sampans (bum-boats) which plied the waters of Shanghai’s busy Huangpu River. Goods were ferried in and out of China’s interior and loaded on to giant ocean cargo steamers moored at the Bund. Ye Ye never gambled or wasted his money in brothels and opium dens. By the time he was forty, he had accumulated considerable wealth. He was approached by young K. C. Li, the dynamic proprietor of Hwa Chong Hong, a thriving import-export company, to manage their branch office in Tianjin, a port city one thousand miles north of Shanghai.

Ye Ye had a secret. He was prone to seasickness and hated to set foot on board one of his own sampans. So, though his business was profitable, he decided to sell and move up north, leaving his family behind as Aunt Baba and Father both attended local Catholic missionary schools which were considered the best in China and he did not wish to disrupt their education.

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Converting Iron into Gold

In 1918, when Ye Ye moved to Tianjin, (Ford of Heaven), the last Qing emperor had been deposed and China had fragmented into fiefdoms governed by warlords. To the north, Japan already controlled Korea and now set her sights on China. At the Versailles Peace Conference held after the conclusion of the First World War, Japan was allowed by Britain and her allies to seize and keep Germany’s colonial possessions in Shandong Province as a reward for having remained neutral. Emboldened, Japan began moving into Manchuria. Japanese soldiers then infiltrated south into Tianjin.

Situated in the level and fertile great plains to the north-east, Tianjin was the second largest of the treaty ports. It was opened up to trade after China’s second defeat by Britain (and France) during the Second Opium War in 1858. The treaty of Tianjin added ten more ports between Manchuria and Taiwan. The city suffered from hot, dry summers and bitterly cold winters. It was prone to flooding because of its flat terrain crisscrossed by many branches of the Huai River. Between November and March, the rivers were icy and there were occasional dust storms. Whereas the architecture in Shanghai reflected mainly British and French influence, Tianjin adopted a bewildering kaleidoscope of building styles representing all the allied countries which had defeated Empress Tsu Hsi during

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the Boxer Rebellion in 1903. Besides Victorian office buildings and French churches, there were Russian dachas, a Prussian castle, Italian villas, Japanese tea-houses and German as well as Austro-Hungarian chalets, all situated in separate concessions adjoining each other along the river bank. Ye Ye again chose to live in a rented house in the French Concession, a tongue-shaped enclave sandwiched between the Japanese to the north, the British to the south and the Russians across the river. The area was neatly laid out with tree-lined avenues, tidy tramways, an imposing Catholic church, missionary schools and cheerful green parks.

Meanwhile, business had never been so good. Both Tianjin and Shanghai were booming. British, American, European and Japanese money poured back into China at the conclusion of the First World War. Concrete and steel buildings replaced the Victorian structures along the river. Factories sprang up at industrial sites manufacturing wool and cotton textiles, carpets, glass, concrete, tiles, paper, soap, matches, toothpaste, flour and other food stuffs. Under Ye Ye’s management, Hwa Chong Hong prospered. To his delight, the traditional bonus paid to him at Chinese New Year greatly exceeded his annual salary. To celebrate his prosperity, fellow employees and friends urged him to take a young concubine to ’serve him’. Even Ye Ye’s boss, the London-educated K. C. Li, jokingly volunteered to ’give’ him a couple of girls with his bonus. Ye Ye reported all this in a matter-of-fact way in a letter to his wife, adding touchingly that he was a ’one-woman man’.