Falling Leaves Return to Their Roots Read online

  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 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 mah-jong; 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 1920s and 30s, 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 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 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 mah-jong 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.

  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.

  CHAPTER 2

  Dian Tie Cheng Jin

  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 o
f 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 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’.

  Soon after receiving this letter, Grandmother and fifteen-year-old Aunt Baba hurried to join Ye Ye in Tianjin, leaving my thirteen-year-old father in the care of Grand Aunt. Aunt Baba was told to drop out of school because advanced education was considered detrimental to the marriage prospects of young girls. Confucius had professed that ‘only ignorant women were virtuous’.

  Father remained in Shanghai and continued attending Chen Tien Catholic Boys’ School. He excelled in English and Ye Ye advised him not to leave his excellent teacher, an Irish missionary. Father lived with Grand Aunt until graduation five years later. During this time, he converted to the Catholic faith and was given the name Joseph. He also developed a close relationship with my Grand Aunt, who became his mentor.

  After completing middle school in 1924, Father chose not to go to university. He joined his family in Tianjin and was employed as an office boy under Ye Ye at Hwa Chong Hong. Although this was a menial post and the salary was minuscule, Father claimed in later life that it was the best possible education for a bright, inexperienced teenager. He learned all facets of the import–export business at first hand. Because of Father’s fluency in English, K. C. Li soon relied on him to write and translate most of his firm’s correspondence.

  Father bought a second-hand typewriter and often typed important business letters after eating dinner at home, with his whole family clustered around the dining table in awed admiration. Once Ye Ye wondered aloud how the heads of these international companies would react if they found out that valuable documents worth hundreds of thousands of taels of silver were being banged out with one finger by an eighteen-year-old boy barely out of high school.

  Hwa Chong Hong developed profitable relationships with various large pharmaceutical companies, including the German firm Bayer. Enormous quantities of the Chinese plant ma huang were purchased by Hwa Chong Hong and exported abroad. For many centuries, ma huang was used by Chinese herbal doctors to treat asthma and general malaise. Eventually, scientists working in the West identified and extracted the key component of the plant, ephedrine. This was then imported back into China in its purified form and sold to pharmacies prescribing western medicine.

  Meanwhile, outside the foreign concessions, the Japanese military presence in Tianjin deepened. Well-armed and ruthless, they were a law unto themselves and treated the Chinese with contempt. Hwa Chong Hong’s prosperity did not escape the notice of the Japanese. Company headquarters were situated outside the French Concession and unprotected by French law. K. C. Li was being increasingly harassed to ‘collaborate’. There were no formal demands, just vague threats hinting at the need for ‘protection against criminal elements’. During a routine ‘visit’ by Japanese inspectors, K. C.’s employees were randomly beaten for not showing sufficient respect to photos of the Japanese emperor in old newspapers, which were frugally being cut up and used as toilet paper. K. C. realized that at any time the situation might explode. Rather than give in to Japanese coercion, K. C. decided to move out of Tianjin altogether.

  Father did not follow Hwa Chong Hong on its departure. Instead, at the age of nineteen, in 1926, he started his own firm, Joseph Yen & Company, within the French Concession in Tianjin.

  Ye Ye had such faith in Father’s business acumen that he invested his total life savings, about 200,000 taels of silver (equivalent to over one million US dollars in today’s currency), in his son’s company. Ye Ye resigned from Hwa Chong Hong and became the new firm’s chief financial officer. No formal contracts were drawn up between father and son. It remained unclear whether the money was a gift or a loan. However, Ye Ye had authority to sign all company cheques and extracted an oral promise from Father that he would look after everyone in the family and pay all expenses, including Aunt Baba’s dowry should she marry. At this time, my aunt had left Tianjin and was living in Shanghai. Grand Aunt’s recently opened Women’s Bank was flourishing. Reliable assistants were urgently needed and Aunt Baba had been dispatched to work at the bank.

  Father’s company prospered from the start, picking up much of the business left behind by the departure of Hwa Chong Hong. Ma huang continued to be exported, as did walnut kernels, straw hats, candle wax, pig bristles and dried fruits; imports included bicycles and pharmaceutical products. In the state of political unrest and increasingly ominous Japanese presence, many businesses came on the market very cheaply and Father expanded rapidly by buying up their assets. He soon acquired a lumber mill, a carpet-weaving concern and a bicycle spare parts assembly plant. Father retained the loyalty of key personnel by giving them incentive stock in his newly acquired companies. Grand Aunt and her bank played a crucial role in Father’s early success and rapid growth. She had connections in Tianjin, including the manager of the local branch of the Bank of Shanghai. With her help Joseph Yen & Company was able to issue letters of credit for up to half a million US dollars guaranteed by Grand Aunt’s Women’s Bank. Their arrangement was for net profits after expenses to be split 70/30 in Father’s favour. Hundreds of thousands of taels of silver changed hands with each transaction. Every deal was profitable. In three years, they never had a loss. Father began to be known in business circles as the ‘miracle boy’ who had the power of dian tie cheng jin (converting iron into gold).

  Marriage brokers swarmed around the young business tycoon. But, with that same bit of swagger that gave him an edge in business, he declared that all Tianjin girls were dreary and provincial. He preferred the sparkle and sophistication of the young women in Shanghai.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ru Ying Sui Xing

  Inseparable as Each Other’s Shadows

  Shanghai in the late 1920s was an exhilarating city for a young girl such as Aunt Baba. While the rest of China still travelled by push carts, sedan chairs and horse-drawn carriages, in Shanghai shining imported motor cars were speeding down well paved roads alongside trams and buses. Giant, colourful billboards advertising British cigarettes, Hollywood movies and French cosmetics gazed down at crowded pavements teeming with young men in suits and ties and girls clacking around in high
-heeled shoes and stylish qipaos. The Bund, close to the Women’s Bank on Nanking Road, had been transformed into a panorama of majestic buildings sweeping along the Huangpu River. Gun-boats, steamers, sampans and tug-boats festooned the muddy waters. Multi-storeyed department stores, such as Sincere, Wing-On, Dai-Sun and Sun-Sun, were crammed full of furs, jewellery, toys, household goods, ornaments and the latest Parisian fashions. Large enough to rival Selfridges of London or Macy’s of New York, these emporiums promoted seasonal sales, gave away coupons and prizes, and even held concerts and theatrical performances on their roof gardens.

  Aunt Baba had become friendly with a girl a year younger than herself, who worked in the new accounts department. Miss Ren Yong-ping could render complicated currency conversions in her head with astonishing speed and accuracy. Even when Grand Aunt checked her calculations with the abacus they were never wrong. Glowing with high spirits and vitality she had a ready smile and warm liveliness which made her attractive.

  Miss Ren came from a middle-class Shanghai family which struggled somewhat after her father, a post office official, became addicted to opium and spent the last twenty years of his life in a drug-induced haze. An only daughter, she had three younger brothers, two of whom also worked in the post office, both rising later to become inspectors. She herself was soon promoted by Grand Aunt to head the new accounts department.

  Working downstairs in the bank and spending their leisure hours upstairs in the dormitory, the two girls soon became best friends. Aunt Baba remembered one occasion when she and Miss Ren lunched by themselves in the restaurant at Sincere’s, nicknamed ‘Shanghai’s Harrods’ because of its physical resemblance to the famous London store. The two girls hired rickshaws which pulled them along the busy Nanking Road, where traffic lights were controlled manually by red-turbaned Sikh policemen stationed in cage-like boxes perched on poles twelve feet above ground. The restaurant was elegant, with white tablecloths, fresh flowers and crystal glasses. The menus listed only western food items with which they were unfamiliar. Chinese food was unavailable.