Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter (17 page)

81-year-old male corpse assigned to us. We nicknamed him Rupert. Apparently our extra zeal provoked discontent among

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our male peers. One Saturday morning we eagerly descended into the dark and forbidding workshop to begin our dissection. Behind the heavy doors, the room was pitch black and smelt strongly of formaldehyde. Joan reached up to pull the cord controlling the light switch and gave a blood-curdling scream. The light went on. There was raucous, hysterical laughter from a group of boys who had been lurking in the dark. They had severed Rupert’s penis and secured it to the light cord. A few cameras clicked and Joan was caught with her upraised hand clutching a penis and an incredulous expression on her face. The boys circulated her picture among themselves for many days afterwards with the caption ’Awarded First-Class Honours in Human Anatomy’.

Despite these problems, it was a wonderful period of my life. The whole world of science was opening up to me. I could not wait to get to classes every morning. Physiology, biophysics, pharmacology and biochemistry were like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle depicting the mystery of life. Experiments reminded me of intricate chess games. My opponent was the great ’unknown’, about to be unmasked. Along the way, there were tantalizing clues.

Consistently, I studied hard and gave my best effort. I dreamt of returning to Hong Kong with the highest academic honours and making a name for myself in my father’s city so that he would be proud of me.

Many of my non-Chinese friends at medical school were Jews. They treated me as an equal, invited me to their homes and never made stereotypical remarks. We discussed our studies, played chess and ate at Chinese restaurants. I felt as if real life had begun at last. I never suffered the bouts of depression that sometimes affected my classmates. They called me Pollyanna but I didn’t mind. How could they understand the exaltation I felt to be at last free of Niang’s looming shadow?

I stayed at Campbell Hall, a hostel two blocks away from University College. The Chinese Students’ Union was in nearby Gordon Square. The London University Students’

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Union was across the road. Later on, Hong Kong House was founded at Lancaster Gate about three miles away. Father sent me an annual stipend of five hundred pounds, one hundred pounds less than my brothers because I was a girl. We were expected to be our own stewards of the money, which was to last the entire year. My life revolved around medical school and the students’ unions. I joined the table-tennis team and played chess for my college. James had been admitted to Cambridge University to study civil engineering. I often visited him on Sundays. We spent pleasant afternoons drinking coffee and talking in his medieval rooms at Trinity College, intoxicated by our new-found freedom. It gave me a thrill to trot along on cobblestones after my tall and handsome big brother, dressed in his flapping black college gown and Cambridge scarf, while all around us church bells rang out their chimes for evensong.

The carapace that shielded me from the wounds of prejudice and injustice also served as a secret shelter into which I could retreat. It enabled me to form and develop a friendship which would have astonished all my peers and alarmed a few of them had they known of it.

Karl Decker was one of my lecturers. To my seventeen-yearold eyes, he was the ideal man: intelligent, sensitive, tall and handsome. Passionate about his work, he spent long hours in the lab. He was a thirty-four-yearold German who spoke with a stutter and a pronounced accent. Assigned to his tutorial group, I first noticed Karl because of his earnestness. He used to write long columns of corrections in the margins of my essays and I was touched by the trouble he took over my efforts. Sometimes I saw that his annotations had been erased and then painfully rewritten in his meticulous handwriting.

He started to comment on my clothes and appearance. ’That’s a pretty blouse,’ he would remark as I entered his class. And I would suddenly become tongue-tied and self-conscious.

For months I refused to admit, even to myself, that Dr Decker admired me. I found it hard to believe that this brilliant

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scientist could be seriously interested in a teenage Chinese medical student freshly out of convent school.

He spent hours discussing his experiments with me, laboriously showing me all the important articles related to his field. On cold days he showed me how to heat coffee over a Bunsen burner in his lab, and we would drink it together afterwards out of tall glass beakers.

Most of all, he wrote to me. Those scribbled notes in the margins of my essays were replaced by lengthy pages of selfrevelation. I read about the death of his mother when he was ten, the remarriage of his strict and autocratic father, the bleak and fragmented memories of his emotionally disturbed adolescence. He wrote about a mysterious illness called schizophrenia which afflicted him as a young medical student in Prague; of shadowy voices, eerie convictions, frightful torments.

Guileless and inexperienced, flattered and moved by these extraordinary disclosures, I became enmeshed without realizing that I was treading on dangerous ground. He was full of fears, doubts and restraints but, to me, he projected an air of sensitive refinement tinged with gentle melancholy which captivated my imagination. Part of his appeal no doubt originated from my deep-rooted Chinese reverence for learning, age and wisdom.

His letters began to assume a central role in our emotional lives. He wrote about poetry, music and philosophy; his thoughts, moods and fears; his loneliness and yearning for me. Underlying it all was the solitude of his bleak day-to-day existence and the taboo of a budding interracial romance between teacher and pupil.

Karl was both self-sufficient and selfcentred. He had no friends. He lived for his work, routinely spending fourteenhour days in his lab, including Saturdays and some Sundays. He ate all his meals at the college cafeteria, hardly knowing or caring what he ate.

His was a stark, ascetic life, devoid of frills and indulgences.

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We rarely went out anywhere together. Neither of us wished to be seen in public. Couples of mixed race were still a rarity in those days. Besides, we made an incongruous pair. To the outside world we did not look as if we belonged together

He didn’t want his colleagues to know that he was seeing one of his female students, a Chinese girl at that. I also didn’t want my Chinese friends to find out, in case gossip reached my family.

Because of this our meetings were intensely private. Karl’s lab at University College became our haven. It was one of the few places where we were not stared at by prying eyes and felt completely safe.

It was strange for me, gauche and socially incompetent, to see my esteemed professor, a man twice my age, so timorous and uncertain before me. When we were alone his fumbling manner, his shy stutter and his intense longing swept away my defences.

One of my Chinese friends, Yu Chun-yee, a pianist from Singapore, was giving a recital at Wigmore Hall. Knowing that I wished to support his efforts, Karl bought eleven tickets at the box office, split into two batches of eight and three. He gave me eight tickets so that I could invite my Chinese friends. He himself went to the concert with his American post-doctoral fellow and the fellow’s wife. The three of them sat by themselves seven rows behind us. None of my Chinese friends knew that Karl had arranged this, but throughout the performance, I sensed his presence behind me.

It was an impossible situation and yet it went on and on. We were so different, but the affinity was immense. I was both attracted and repelled by the fanatic dedication with which he attacked his work to the exclusion of all else. He told me that he needed to fill his time with science in order to defeat the demons.

At times, his emotional instability baffled and frightened me. ’It’s all so sad and difficult,’ he would say, adding, as he looked at my puzzled countenance, ’of course, you shouldn’t

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be spending time with me. You! You who are so full of life and hope!’

He never took sufficient time off from his experiments to understand the Chinese cultural values which moulded my personality. He never understood what he thought of as my obsession with food, calling my incessant search for the ’perfect neighbourhood Chinese restaurant’ a hopeless quest for the Holy Grail. He failed to appreciate how central the sharing of food is to Chinese celebrations. Most of all, he could not cornprehend my persistent refusal to consummate our relationship. Besides my youth and Catholic upbringing, I was ingrained with the Confucian belief that, for a woman, loss of virginity outside marriage was a fate worse than death.

For his birthday one year, I spent a whole week preparing a special dinner, planning and shopping for the best seasonal ingredients, buying fresh flowers and fruits, cleaning his sparse and dusty flat. He ate the six-course meal without comment in forty-five minutes: fresh broccoli soup, stewed goose with leeks, sauted cauliflower with ginger, curried chicken, peas with mushrooms and steamed rice. He kept glancing at his watch, itching to return to some experiment at his lab. I washed up the dishes after he had dashed out, telling myself it was a wasted effort:

On rare evenings, after Karl’s experiments were finished, his test tubes washed and dried, his frogs fed and my homework completed, we would sit perched on lab stools and talk deep into the night. There were moments when we reached a depth of intimacy and mutual understanding which was everything that anyone could wish for between a man and a woman.

Karl insisted that he was no good for me and that I should allow myself to be courted by the Chinese boys I met at the Chinese Students’ Union. Just to compound my emotional confusion, these outings would often be preceded or followed by a long letter from Karl, full of anguish and regrets, letters which tore me apart.

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My Chinese friends were an important part of my life. Among them, I could drop my defences and be myself. I needed to speak my own language and relax with people who could laugh at the same things. Now and again we would gently poke fun at some of the mores of our host country. There were Chinese students not only from China and Hong Kong, but also from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mauritius and elsewhere, bringing an international dimension to our miniChinese world.

The grandparents or parents of many of these South-Asian Chinese students had emigrated from the Chinese coastal provinces of Fujian or Guandong because of hardships at home. Though my Singaporean friend Yu Chun-yee had never set foot in China, he had read the same Chinese novels, loved spicy Sichuan dishes and held many of the same cultural values. In many ways he was more Chinese than a Chinese.

Three of my fellow boarders from Hong Kong were also attending university in London. We all came under the influence of C. S. Tang, president of the Chinese Students’ Union.

C. S. was originally from Shanghai. His family was in the shipping business. He was very handsome and was working for a Ph.D. at Imperial College. C. S. had leftist leanings. Unlike the rest of us, he fully intended to return home to serve the people of mainland China. He was our big brother.

At weekends, C. S. organized rowing excursions on the Serpentine in Hyde Park or ice-skating at Queensway. He arranged dances and pot-luck dinners with dishes full of peppers and garlic. He rented Chinese movies portraying Communist freedom fighters outsmarting corrupt Kuomintang officials and landlords. We felt very progressive and idealistic watching them, dreaming of returning to China one day to contribute our skills to the glory of our motherland.

C. S. had nothing but contempt for Chinese students dating westerners. ’Traitor!’ he would mutter under his breath. ’Consorting with the enemy!’ Once, at a Chinese restaurant near Leicester Square, our group ordered the house speciality,

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Peking duck served with spring onions, plum sauce and waferthin pancakes. The waiter told us that the last duck was already in the oven, about to be served to a white man with his Chinese girl seated a couple of tables away. C. S. draped one arm around the waiter, a diminutive young Cantonese from Hong Kong called Little Chang, and said that for many years our great country China had been bullied by the barbarians. He repeated the story of the notice in the Shanghai park forbidding entrance to dogs and Chinese.

’Here you see a barbarian taking the last duck to share with that pretty Chinese girl. You simply cannot allow this to happen! Barbarians don’t know their Chinese food. They can’t tell a live duck from a live chicken, let alone when the bird is dead and roasted. Why don’t you give him something else tasty, put a bunch of plum sauce on it and just call it Peking duck? It won’t be difficult to fool a barbarian.’

So I ate the duck along with the rest, but inside I felt uneasy about C. S.’s attack on the ’barbarian’. Towards the end of the meal, I blurted out, ’When you talk about fooling barbarians, isn’t it a sort of reverse racism?’

C. S. cocked his head and pondered. He ran his fingers boyishly through his thick glossy hair. He called me by my Chinese name. ’Junling, you ask the most difficult questions. How do I answer without sounding like an idiot? I suppose in everyone’s life there are priorities. Mine are, in the following order: my country, my leader Chairman Mao, my family, parents, siblings, Chinese friends. My professor, schoolmates and other barbarian friends. Finally, everyone else. I can’t help it if I feel kinship towards my own people like our waiter Little Chang here. Apparently Little Chang feels the same way about all of us.’

During that period in England, roughly between 1955 and

1963, most of us were proud of the way China had risen in the eyes of the world. However, we did not share identical hopes for the future of our nation. Some wanted China to blaze in a gleaming capitalist society like that of North America. Others

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hoped to see Mao’s revolutionary policies of collectivism and socialism take an even firmer grip. Few were as evangelical as C. S. with his pamphlets and propaganda movies showing plump and rosy-cheeked children, happy workers, giant new factories and incredible and ever-increasing production figures: the whole of China on the move. I believe most of us, at some time or other, saw ourselves as a group of skilled university graduates trained in the latest disciplines of western technology, dreaming of going home to serve our motherland and right the wrongs of long ago.