Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter (11 page)

Father said, ’You are now reaching the age of marriage and we have found a very good man for you. It is really for your own benefit for the future, because now is a good chance, and if you do not get married when you are still young, you will certainly be another spinster in the family and we will not let such a thing happen. And this is final.’

Their words were like a thunderbolt to me and I felt terrified, miserable and at a loss as to what to do or think. For I had never even thought of marriage at seventeen. Instead, I admired some of my classmates who were going for further studies abroad. I could do well because my English was good. Nobody ever told me anything about sex or love. But I was to do what I was told or else I would be sent to a convent to become a nun for the rest of my life. I can still remember Niang’s cold voice in my ears: ’I’m not going to keep another old maid in my house! What do you expect? We’ll certainly send you behind closed doors in a convent if you do not act as you’re told. And we’ll be good to you if you obey!’ This made me realize that I was really surplus and unwanted. When I looked in the mirror I saw that I was truly not very good-looking with a handicapped hand. Though I was then unaware that every child has rights which include that of education and the choice of her own spouse, still I had a strong impulse to rebel against their selfish tyranny. I went to Ye Ye and Aunt Baba for help. They told me they could do nothing because first of all I was Father’s child and secondly they themselves were dependent on Father for a living.

At the age of seventeen, I was naive and puerile and trusted Father entirely, thinking that his decisions must be best for my future. Only later when he sent all my brothers to England to study did I realize that I had been a fool. I felt so wretched and depressed for having submitted to their mean plot of shifting their burden to someone else. I hated them for discriminating against me when all the time I had trusted Father completely. Looking back, I think Father had the feudal idea of male supremacy.

According to Lydia, Niang practically forced her to marry Samuel by reminding her that Father had seven children to

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support and she was the oldest. Since it would be difficult to get a job with her crippled left arm, there was no point in wasting money on a college education. ’If you marry Samuel,’ Niang told her, ’Father will give you a dowry.’ Under this pressure, Lydia gave in.

They had a big wedding in 1948 with over five hundred guests, all Chinese. Two popular radio comedians were engaged as masters of ceremony. Months before the wedding, gifts arrived at our house and were carefully sorted out. The best ones were kept by Niang.

My three brothers were ordered to have their heads cleanly shaven for the occasion. They were dressed in long, traditional Chinese gowns. Franklin wore a well cut, tailor-made western suit and his hair was fashionably styled and waved. Susan attended in a frilly lacy satin dress.

During the ceremony and for days afterwards my brothers, the three light bulbs, were mercilessly teased by their peers. Father’s friends remarked on the unequal treatment of the two sets of children by his two wives.

As promised, Lydia was given a dowry of 20,000 US dollars, an enormous sum in those days. She and Samuel moved directly to Tianjin after the wedding and lived with Samuel’s parents. I was not to see them again for thirty-one years.

After Japan lost the war, Father reclaimed his businesses and properties in Tianjin. He and Niang were frequently away visiting them. The boys increasingly asserted themselves during our parents’ absences. I remember them flirting with some girls who lived immediately behind us across the alleyway, using rubber-banded slings to catapult ’airmail letters’ wrapped around hard candies from the rear window of their bedroom. Gregory was tired of his daily breakfast of congee and preserved vegetables. One Sunday morning, when Father and Niang were away, he strode purposefully into the kitchen. As shao ye (young master) of the house, he demanded eggs for breakfast. Cook demurred, protesting that there were not

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snough eggs. Whereupon a determined Gregory searched the larder for himself. He found sixteen eggs which he deliberately and systematically broke, one by one, into a large bowl. He then made himself a giant sixteen-egg omelette for breakfast, relishing every bite until his plate was empty.

Chasing an errant ball one afternoon while my brothers were away at a school function, I crept under Gregory’s bed and found a lidless box containing school stationery, seal and ink. James later confided that Gregory had solved his cash-flow problems by printing fictitious invoices for small sums on school stationery. Gregory had befriended a clerk at the accounting office, who would ’refund’ in cash for any ’overpayments’. This gave him a steady stream of pocket money and a happy life.

Meanwhile, Ye Ye started to notice that from time to time, banknotes were disappearing from the upper left drawer of his writing desk, where Aunt Baba regularly placed half her monthly salary. Ye Ye suspected that the culprit was one of us, but did not make an issue of it. Disagreeing with Father’s austerity programme and sympathetic to our plight, he kept his counsel and never reported the periodic losses. His was an awkward predicament because he approved neither of stealing nor of the circumstances which led to it.

Things came to a head one day in 1948. Inflation was rampant and Chinese money was worth less and less. As a valued employee, Aunt Baba was being paid in US currency and silver dollars (called big heads because of the imprinted profile of Yuan Shih-kai, a Qing dynasty general who had proclaimed himself Emperor of China for eighty-three days in 1916. As usual, she placed half her salary in Ye Ye’s desk.

Chinese currency depreciated so fast that the central bank in Shanghai could not print money fast enough. Soon one US dollar was being exchanged for two million Chinese yuan. Huge bundles of banknotes changed hands for the simplest purchase.

The thief, who happened to be Edgar, had taken a few Amer—

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lean dollars from Ye Ye’s drawer and changed them on the black market. He was given an enormous sackful of local currency. Now he was in the terrible dilemma of having so much money that he had no place to hide it. There were just too many banknotes to slip under the mattress. Besides, the three boys shared a room.

Edgar dug a large hole in the garden and buried all the money. He thought his secret was safe, but he had forgotten Father’s dog, Jackie.

Next day, while we were away at school, Jackie dug up the small patch of earth with his paws and sniffed out the stacks of cash. Soon banknotes were flying everywhere all over the yard. Meanwhile, the maids found a foreign exchange slip in Edgar’s trouser pocket in the laundry basket.

Niang instructed the servants to pick up all the money and tidy up the garden. Not a word was mentioned until dinner had been served and eaten. Then, instead of the usual fruit bowl, the maids brought out a large platter stacked with soiled banknotes, a veritable mound of local currency.

Father was as much taken aback as everyone else. He launched into a terrible tirade. After interminable threats and much fulmination, Niang revealed what she had known all along: that Edgar was the culprit. Father followed with another of his diatribes about dishonesty, untrustworthiness, bad blood from our dead mother and a doomed future for all of us, especially Edgar, who would bring nothing but shame to the Yen family name. He insinuated that Ye Ye and Baba had overindulged us to such an extent that we were all worthless. Finally, he took Edgar upstairs and thrashed him with Jackie’s whip.

We second-class residents gathered in Ye Ye’s room. We could hear the sounds of the lashes and Edgar’s whimpers. Ye Ye, Baba, Gregory and I winced at every stroke, but James merely shrugged his shoulders and nonchalantly suggested a game of bridge to ’pass the time’. Throughout our childhood, James was the only stepchild

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never singled out for punishment. He survived by detaching himself emotionally. We were very close and shared many confidences but never did he come to my defence. Once he gave me this piece of advice: ’Don’t trust anyone. Be a cold fish. I hurt no one. And no one can hurt me.’

Franklin and Susan were the pampered ones, the empress’s son and daughter: favoured and privileged. To us on the second floor, the antechamber seemed like paradise. But paradise turned out to be Franklin’s own private garden of Eden.

He used to bully Susan, grab her toys, pull her hair, slap her face, twist her arm. Niang chose to ignore this. Every night she came into the bedroom to kiss Franklin goodnight. She sat on the edge of his bed and cooed and teased and talked to him without even acknowledging Susan’s presence. On those evenings when Franklin was away with his French cousins or friends, Niang did not bother to visit their room at all.

Ye Ye and Father were overjoyed when the Japanese Occupation finally ended after America dropped the atom bombs in

1945. However, civil war recommenced almost immediately between the Nationalists (Kuomintang) and Communists. In the next three years, they were increasingly alarmed to see the balance of power shifting towards the left. Mao Zedong, the Communist leader, and his armies were on an inexorable march.

Newspapers those days were full of stories of atrocities committed by the Communists against landlords and merchants. There were daily reports of fresh barbarities and appalling savagery. The prevailing impression, goaded on by Chiang Kai-shek (ruler of China since the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925) and his Kuomintang press, was that if Shanghai should fall into Communist hands, there would be a bloodbath.

By 1948 a colder wind tempered the economic climate for businessmen like my father. In a last-ditch effort to stabilize the

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currency, the Nationalist government had just announced the issue of a new form of currency called the Gold Yuan Certificate. This measure was necessary because the people had lost all confidence in the old currency, called Fa Bi or legal tender. Rampant inflation had escalated to the point where one US dollar was being exchanged for eleven million Chinese yuan: even more than Edgar got for his stolen dollars.

Official announcements called for all Chinese to turn in their old banknotes, their personal caches of gold and silver and their foreign currency by 30 September 1948. Gold Yuan Certificates would be given in exchange, supposedly backed by gold and worth four to each American dollar. Immediately there was a gold rush as most private depositors withdrew their precious metals and foreign currency from local banks. No sane mind believed that there was any gold to back those certificates. Big capitalists like my father spirited their wealth abroad to Hong Kong, the United States and Europe. Small wage earners such as Aunt Baba were obliged to obey government instructions. The value of the Gold Yuan Certificates fell with each Communist victory until they became as worthless as the old currency which they replaced. By obeying Chiang Kai-shek’s orders, Aunt Baba lost all her savings.

Father was making all sorts of contingency plans and it was simply a matter of time before he made his move.

It must have been the Sunday immediately following my classmates’ disastrous visit when Father suddenly appeared alone at the doorway of Ye Ye’s room. He summoned Aunt Baba and ordered me to go and play on the roof terrace. He seemed preoccupied, but attempted a semblance of respect towards his father and sister. Aunt Baba reflected sadly that this was the first time the three of them had spoken alone together since the family moved back to Shanghai five years earlier. For a short while a sort of intimacy was restored. Father started talking about the civil war, and the possibility of Shanghai being occupied by the Communists. He and Niang had decided to move to Hong Kong. Would Ye Ye and Baba go with them?

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It dawned on Aunt Baba that besides leaving her friends she would have to give up her job at Grand Aunt’s bank and revert to being the spinster living on charity under Niang’s critical eye. She wondered if life under the Communists could really be any worse than a life under Niang. She decided to remain in Shanghai.

Meanwhile, beads of sweat had appeared on Ye Ye’s brow and his face had turned white with fear. Tremulously, he accepted his son’s invitation to move to Hong Kong and together risk their chances under British rule.

’Surely we don’t have to leave right away?’ he asked. ’Maybe Old Chiang (Kai-shek) can still pull it off with the help of the Americans.’

’Of course we don’t have to go immediately,’ Father replied. ’We still have a few months at the very least. Jeanne and I plan to fly to Tianjin next week and sell off as much as possible. It looks as if Beijing and Tianjin will fall before Shanghai. I will convert all my funds into Hong Kong dollars and take them with me to Hong Kong.’

Father now asked Ye Ye to show him where he kept his money, stressing that it should always be locked away. He meandered on distractedly about how wrong it was for children to be put in the way of temptation, turning to my aunt and accusing her of favouring me over my siblings. Aunt Baba dismissed the notion, adding that she would have given a silver dollar to any of his other children if they, too, had reached the top of their class. She reminded him that children needed to be rewarded if they excelled in their endeavours.

Father began a litany of my deficiencies: my small stature and thinness; my poor appetite, no doubt due to secret snacks between meals provided by Aunt Baba; my arrogance and aloofness. He demanded that Aunt Baba write down every fen she had given me over the past year and was sceptical when my aunt insisted that the silver dollar was all that I had received. He marched her into her room and demanded that she open up

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her small box of snack foods which she was in the habit of keeping, making a list of its contents:

Salted preserved plums z packets

Pork jerky: Beef jerky (sweet): Beef jerky (spicy): Roasted peanuts: Peanut candy: Dried melon seeds:

Ye Ye and my aunt watched in astonishment as he made this inventory. Father then began a harangue about my worthlessness, my want of moral fibre, my excessive consumption of snack foods and my monstrous behaviour. Aunt Baba tried to defend me, telling him that I was just a little girl who never knew her own mother, but Father waved her protests aside.