Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter Page 13

  In London, we met Gregory and Edgar and caught up with their news. At first Gregory was miserable. He was the only Chinese in his school and he hated the wretched weather and tasteless food. It seemed to be mutton every day, gristly and rank. When he noticed that his Jewish schoolmates were given baked beans or eggs whenever ham or bacon was served at breakfast, he hatched a plan and went to see the headmaster.

  ‘Sir, I wondered about this concept of religious tolerance in England. Does it apply to all religions?’

  ‘Naturally! In our country we do not discriminate.’

  ‘I think that is admirable, sir. I wish we had religious tolerance in China. Unfortunately, we only have barbaric intolerance. I hate to inconvenience the kitchen staff but it is against my religion to eat certain foods.’

  ‘Oh! My dear boy! We certainly have to rectify this situation. And what might these foods be?’

  ‘Well, the chief one is mutton: in any form or shape!’

  ‘I am so sorry to hear this. Let me notify the kitchen at once. And what does your religion permit you to eat when the boys are served mutton?’

  ‘To make it easy on the kitchen staff, bacon and eggs will be fine, sir.’

  ‘Certainly, certainly. By the way, what is the name of your religion?’

  Gregory had the answer all thought out. ‘It’s a very rare and remote sect which comes from a region between Tibet and Mongolia.’ He mumbled some Chinese words which meant ‘Anti-mutton-eaters’ Affiliation’. Like Somerset Maugham, Gregory believed that, in order to eat well in England, he had to consume three breakfasts a day.

  Gregory and Edgar found few science courses offered at their respective schools and enrolled after a year at a London tutorial college for a dose of cramming. When we arrived, they were living in bedsitters in Earl’s Court. Eventually, Gregory entered Imperial College to study mechanical engineering and Edgar was to become my contemporary at medical school.

  At college, Gregory’s main interest was bridge. He became captain of the bridge team. The day came when he decided he would much rather devote the rest of his life to bridge than to engineering. He wrote a six-page letter to our parents asking permission to give up his studies for bridge. He was convinced he would be happier as a professional bridge player than as an engineer. After all, was not the pursuit of happiness the final goal?

  Back came Father’s reply in a short but succinct telegram. ‘WHY DON’T YOU BECOME A PIMP INSTEAD?’

  Gregory stayed on to graduate.

  Father had enrolled me at a lay Catholic boarding school in Oxford called Rye St Anthony. During the month-long voyage on the SS Canton, I was befriended by the American widow of a Methodist missionary. She insisted I call on her English sister-in-law who had retired to Oxford after living in Shanghai for many years. In due course I telephoned Lady Ternan and, after chatting about her sister-in-law, was invited to tea.

  Lady Ternan was also a widow and lived alone in an imposing Edwardian manor. I was admitted by a uniformed maid and appeared to be the only guest. Tea was served.

  ‘Likee more tea and cakee?’ she asked in pidgin English.

  At first I thought it was a joke. On the phone, she had spoken in standard English. Across the table my Chinese features must have sparked off an old, buried, conditioned reflex. I had a wild desire to laugh. To humour her, I answered in my own version of pidgin English made up on the spot. As I spoke, I began to grasp that to Lady Ternan, this dialect placed me where I ‘belonged’. By speaking pidgin, she reaffirmed her own superiority, establishing with every rounded vowel and clipped consonant that we were not equals. Needless to say, we never met again.

  Although recommended to my parents as a proper girls’ school with high academic reputation, Rye St Anthony was actually a finishing school. No science courses were offered. Instead of physics, chemistry and biology, we learned music appreciation, dancing and riding. I transferred myself to the convent school of Our Lady of Sion in Notting Hill Gate, attended a tutorial school over the summer vacation and fulfilled my entrance requirements for medical school. At the age of seventeen, I was admitted to University College in Bloomsbury where my brother Edgar was also enrolled.

  Of my three older brothers, Edgar was the least favoured physically. He had a squarish face and bulging forehead, accentuated by a receding hairline. His eyes were small and closely set. His lips were thin and pressed tightly together, giving him a look of dogged determination.

  Edgar had neither Gregory’s charm nor James’s good looks and intelligence. He was sandwiched in the middle and was nobody’s favourite. When we were children he vented his frustration on me, the most insignificant member. It galled him to witness Father’s pride at my academic successes. Initially, he had been one year ahead of me in medical school. However, he failed his first attempt at the second MB examination and we ended up taking some classes together. He took this as a personal insult. Gradually, his resentment turned into pathological hatred.

  At college, he refused to admit that we were brother and sister, or even related. To our schoolmates, he claimed he did not know me. Father and Niang were well aware of our mutual antagonism, though neither made any effort to mend our differences. On the contrary Niang seemed pleased by our reciprocal animosity and would fuel our rivalries. She would be pointedly nice to me when she wanted to hurt Edgar, driving the wedge ever deeper between us.

  In the 1950s racial prejudice was much in evidence in England. Chinese students were few and far between and there was a layer of reticence between my English classmates and myself. Most of them had never been in such close proximity to a Chinese. Some felt uncomfortable around me. A few showed barely disguised contempt. Others were patronizing, making a show of their liberal acceptance. Condescending reference would be made to China, or Shanghai, or chopsticks – usually about a subject highlighting the glaring differences. The underlying assumption was the superiority of the West.

  I found that not all English words conveyed what they depicted. In a social context, words like ‘exotic’ or ‘interesting’ hid subtler shades of discrimination. ‘Exotic’ meant ‘possibly considered decorative in China, but very strange indeed and certainly not my cup of tea’. ‘Interesting’ meant ‘let me give you my valuable attention for the time being, while my eyes stray around in hopes of meeting someone worthwhile’.

  British liberalism and magnanimity were flaunted at school functions where my professors would single me out to show that they even accepted female Asian students into medical school. While they patted themselves on the back, I would be left standing like a prize sample, steadfastly maintaining a frozen smile of amiability suitably deserving of their attention.

  Female medical students consisted of less than 20 per cent of the class. By and large, we were a studious and earnest bunch. The boys resented our ‘constant swotting’ and good grades. They called us DARs (damned average raisers). Some pronounced quite openly that all female medical students were ugly. Others proclaimed that we were capriciously ‘robbing’ qualified males of entry into medical school and those on scholarships and grants were ‘wasting’ government-subsidized educational funds.

  It was sometimes hard to ignore the racial and sexual slights encountered along the way. Not infrequently, I sat and ate lunch by myself in the college cafeteria while my classmates grouped themselves cosily around neighbouring booths. Once when I picked up enough courage to join them and brought my lunch tray to their table, a boy came and grabbed the last seat. Somewhat self-consciously, I carried over an adjacent stool. Dead silence fell around me. Everyone wolfed his food down at record pace and made for the exit. I found myself alone, surrounded by dirty dishes and empty chairs.

  My dissection partner, Joan Katz, and I were in the habit of going into the anatomy lab on some weekends to work on the 81-year-old male corpse assigned to us. We nicknamed him Rupert. Apparently our extra zeal provoked discontent among our male peers. One Saturday morning we eagerly descended into the dark and forbidding workshop t
o 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’ 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-year-old 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-year-old 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 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 self-revelation. 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 self-centred. He had no friends. He lived for his work, routinely spending fourteen-hour 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. 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 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 comprehend 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, sautéd 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.

  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 mini-Chinese 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.