Journey across the Four Seas: A Chinese Woman's Search for Home

by Li, Veronica

  "So what did the doctor say?" Mother asked.

  "He says I have blood disease," I said, feeling rather self-important.

  "Did he give you any herbs?"

  "No, he says I should stay home and rest. He says I shouldn’t go to school for at least six months."

  Mother fixed a stern look at me. I didn’t dare return her gaze for fear that she would read my mind. Like any child, a long vacation suited me just fine.

  "Don’t go, then. Your health is more important. Look at you, long and thin like a bamboo. All the fish-head stews I made have been wasted on you." Mother shook her head. Her jowls quivered like jelly. She’d grown so fat that her neck had completely disappeared.

  During the long break, I reread the novel Dream of the Red Chamber. The first time I read it was at the age of seven. The message had been way too deep for me, but now at the mature age of thirteen, I could appreciate it much more. I copied down the poems and committed them to memory. I talked to the characters, cried with them, and dreamed with them in their worldly chamber.

  The heroine, Tai-Yu, became my best friend. Perhaps it was because we were both orphans, as well as poor and sickly. After her mother had died, Tai-Yu was sent to live in the palatial compound of a wealthy uncle. She and her uncle’s son fell in love, but because of her circumstances, the family objected to the union. The young man was tricked into marrying another cousin, a rich one. While the wedding was going on in the main house, the sound of the festivities reached the orphan girl in her quarters. She gathered all the poems that she’d written and burned them one by one. She died that night after spitting blood.

  I cried for my heroine, for the unfairness of the world. It wasn’t her fault that her parent died young. Was there no hope for a better life for her? The chapter on her death always depressed me. Fortunately, by the time I got to the end of the book, my spirits would be uplifted again. The Taoist philosophy of the novel sounded just like what Sam-Koo had been telling me. Life is but a dream; good times or bad times, both will pass. What does it matter how luxurious a chamber you’ve built? It will be reduced to red dust sooner or later. As the Taoist monk in the novel concluded, "To be free is to forget." The possibility of a way out of a situation, no matter how desperate, gave me hope.

  During this time, I also tried my hand at writing. I composed pages and pages in my head, but never got around to putting them down. I was going to someday, after I was all grown up. Experiences from my life would inspire novels as great as Dream of the Red Chamber, and people would remember me as the author who’d suffered many hardships in her childhood.

  *

  Gradually my headaches went away, my weight increased by a pound or two, and the color returned to my face. At the same time I was getting bored. Even the classics couldn’t keep me in bed forever. I returned to Yeung Jung, a middle school established by Sam-Koo and a group of her teacher friends. Because I’d missed six months of Form Two, the principal wanted me to repeat the class. I was incensed. As one of the top students, I’d rather drop out than stay back with the rotten oranges at the bottom of the basket. Mother, who had no idea about these things, had no advice for me. Sam-Koo could have helped, but she was part of the school’s administration, and I was angry with the whole lot of them for holding me back.

  I took the matter into my own hands. Located on the same street as Yeung Jung was another school, called Italian Convent. As I passed it one day, I noticed a poster saying that applicants were to appear on a certain day for interviews. I’d often wondered what was on the other side of the massive stone wall. This was a good time to find out.

  On the day of the interview, I pushed through the iron gates and was immediately met by a flight of steps. The climb up was steep and long. I stopped at every landing to catch my breath. This was more than a school. While Yeung Jung was a single structure, Italian Convent was a city unto its own. It had many buildings spread over several tiers along the mountainside. I eventually learned that not all of them were classrooms. One was a convent, another an orphanage, and a third was a dorm for overseas students. They were mainly Portuguese girls whose parents had returned to Portugal following a tour of duty in Hong Kong. These girls had been left behind to finish the first-rate education the convent had to offer.

  I stopped in front of a statue of a woman. A veil shrouded her head, and her arms opened toward me. Her face was sweet and tender and I felt her looking directly at me. She had the same aura as the goddess Kuan Yin, but she couldn’t be—she had the deep eyes and sharp nose of a gweilo. I looked at the sign at her feet. There were two words that I recognized: "Mother" and "Mary." I read them out loud. The words rolled so deliciously around my tongue that I repeated them several more times.

  Naïve and fearless, I faced the nun whom I was told to address as "Mother" Angelica. She was shrouded from head to toe in black, her face the only flesh that showed. She peered out at me like somebody peeking through a hole in the wall to catch a glimpse of the other side. The layers of clothing seemed so complex that I wondered if she could ever get out of them to take a bath.

  After studying my report card, the nun said, "Do you have an English name?"

  I understood that much English to reply, "No."

  The nun scribbled on a slip of paper and handed it to me. "Flo-ra," she said slowly. "This…is…your…name."

  Mother Angelica went on speaking in the incomprehensible language. From her friendly manner and the name she gave me, I guessed that I’d been accepted.

  I reported to class the following Monday. The week went by without anyone acknowledging my presence. The homeroom teacher, a Portuguese woman, called everyone’s name except mine. I wanted to ask her about it, but that would mean using my meager English. I fretted a long time before getting up the courage.

  "What’s your name?" she said. I rummaged in my pocket and pulled out the piece of paper on which the nun had written my name. "Flora Li!" she exclaimed. "I’ve been calling your name all week and you didn’t respond!"

  The truth was, I didn’t recognize my name.

  *

  Now, I have to explain the education system in Hong Kong. There were three kinds of schools: Chinese medium, English medium, and Chinese-English medium. The school I’d been attending was a Chinese medium school where all subjects were taught in Chinese. English was added to the curriculum only in Form One, the first year of secondary school. Thus at the time of the interview I’d had only one year of English lessons, given once a week. I called English writing "chicken intestines," because that was what the funny-looking squiggles reminded me of.

  Italian Convent, on the other hand, was an English medium school. English was the only language used in the school, which was why everyone had to have an English name. To accommodate transfer students like myself, the convent offered a remedial class to help us catch up.

  It was in this remedial class that I met my pals, Anna and Evelyn. Anna was two years older than I, taller and sturdier, while Evelyn was my age and the daintiest girl there ever was. Her mother was from Suchow, a city famous for the beauty of its women. Evelyn, with her porcelain skin and delicate features, had inherited the classic Suchow looks. I remember celebrating my first Christmas at Evelyn’s home. Her family, being Protestant, observed the holiday with all the trimmings of the season. It was just as in the storybooks—the tree decked with lights and baubles, the colorfully wrapped gifts, and a dinner table set with silver forks and knives. Compared to the kind of celebrations I was used to, this was a fairytale come true. My own family was too poor to celebrate anything. On my birthday, Mother would put a roast duck leg in my bowl. If it weren’t for the drumstick, the day would go by without my noticing.

  Anna and I often slept over at Evelyn’s. Once, we spent three days and three nights locked up in Evelyn’s room. Aside from meals and visits to the bathroom, we didn’t set foot outside her door for seventy-two consecutive hours. We nested in Evelyn’s bed with a stack of romance novels and transported ourselves to the
world of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. When we got tired of reading, we worked on our master plan for the future. The three of us vowed never to get married. We were to set up home together, dividing household chores evenly among us. Anna, the practical, no-nonsense person, would take charge of cleaning. Evelyn, who had learned to cook a few dishes from her mother, would be the chef. The two looked at me.

  "You’re the most useless," Evelyn said. "You can’t cook, you can’t clean, so what can you do?"

  They were right. I’d never done any housework in my life. Mother shooed me away every time I stepped into the kitchen. Lately, she’d been drilling into me the lesson of the girl who lived upstairs of us. Although this girl had perfectly fine and symmetrical features, matchmakers didn’t have high hopes for her because her hands were brown and scaly. Rich men wanted well-bred women with lily-white hands, Mother said. Of course I couldn’t tell this to my friends. They would laugh at me.

  "I can do the bookkeeping," I said.

  My friends agreed. They acknowledged that this was an important chore, and it might as well go to the person who had no other skills.

  Anna, Evelyn, and I became known as the Three Musketeers. We did our homework together but separately. We compared our answers but never copied from each other. Our diligence paid off, and soon our English was on a par with the mainstream. Now, the English-language system progressed on a declining scale. Instead of advancing from Grades One to Seven, we were promoted from Grades Seven to One. There were two major hurdles—Grade Three, when a colony-wide exam sifted out second-rate students, and Grade One, the gateway to our one and only Hong Kong University. By the time we got to the last year, the class had been whittled down from thirty to thirteen pupils. No hurdle, however, could break up the Three Musketeers. We rode together till the end.

  *

  Besides English, which Italian Convent girls learned to speak with an Italian accent, French was also compulsory in the school. In my last year, Mother Mary, the French teacher, contracted TB. A young French woman who was a Hong KongUniversity student was called in to substitute. She was only a few years older than we were, and had never taught before. To make up for her inexperience, she flew at us whenever we made a mistake. "Non, non, non!" she shouted and stamped her feet. One day she asked me a question to which I didn’t know the answer. She must have been in a bad mood that day, for the insults she hurled at me were worse than usual. She called me stupid and lazy and predicted that I would never be able to get into university with my measly French. I got so mad that I blurted, "I don’t have to study French to get into Hong KongUniversity. I can study Chinese."

  She laughed in my face: "Oh yeah? Go ahead, study Chinese!"

  The moment she said that, I realized I’d accidentally set my house on fire. In theory I could take either the Chinese or French exam to fulfill university entrance requirements, but in practice the last-minute switch would pose a daunting handicap. My Chinese education had stopped seven years ago. How was I supposed to boost myself to pre-university level in less than a year? I went crying to Sam-Koo. Immediately she cast her net out to catch me the best tutors in the land. Having taught school for decades, she had an ocean of students and parents to fish from. Through friends of friends she dug up an elderly scholar in a flowing robe. He’d been a mandarin of the Manchu Dynasty and could recite every word of the Four Books and Five Classics. He would prepare me for Part I: Chinese Literature. For Part II: Chinese history, Sam-Koo got me a colleague at her school, a man by the nickname of History Wong. He knew his subject so well he could discuss history in his sleep. For the final part, Translation, a journalist who was well versed in both Chinese and English was to be my coach. However, after three sessions he couldn’t fit me into his busy schedule. I would have to tackle Part III on my own.

  The day of my Chinese exam arrived. The first two parts, literature and history, were smooth sailing. After all, my grounding in Chinese had deep roots in the classics. Even in Italian Convent, I continued to read Chinese novels and history books in my spare time. The third part, however, was brutal. The essay to be translated was a treatise on the Battle of Waterloo. Terminology in military strategy and guns and cannons with names that I’d never heard of filled the page. I winged it as best I could, but when I walked out of the hall, I was certain university was an impossible dream.

  The results took me by surprise. My scores weren’t only passing—they were way up at the top, above those of thousands of other secondary school students. Hong KongUniversity accepted me! I’d never aimed to get this far in the education ladder. I was pulling so hard on my Chinese just to spite the French teacher, but now that the bird was in my hands, I didn’t know what to do with it. Mother was glad to see me finish secondary school, but she was afraid that going any further would make me unmarriageable. Only men with a university education would dare ask for my hand, and there was only a handful of them in the entire colony. Besides, tuition plus room and board were more than Mother could afford. Sam-Koo, however, thought I should grab the opportunity. After all, she’d gone to a lot of trouble to push me through. The final word came from Brother Kin in Bangkok. He was working as an intermediary for an American company and earning a good income. He promised to foot the bill for all my university expenses. Swayed by her favorite son, Mother gave her permission. And that was how I, a girl, became the first in my family to go to university.

  Only six out of the thirteen in my class got in. Anna was one of them, but her father, who was a bookkeeper, couldn’t scrape together the money. She enrolled in a two-year teacher training college instead. Poor Evelyn didn’t make it. Her mother turned on her, calling her incompetent and openly favoring her brother, who got into Hong KongUniversity the next year. Evelyn eventually enrolled in a night college, but what with war and illness, she never lived to finish her schooling. She died of cancer soon after thirty. The cancer started as a watery mole on her side, then spread to her blood and became leukemia. I was living in Bangkok at the time. I tried to rush back to see her, but she died before I arrived.

  3

  My freshman year had all the ingredients of a romance novel—the warm cozy feelings that bubble into a smile on the heroine’s lips, the throbbing of the heart whenever her love is near, and the excitement of every new day. The only thing missing was the fellow. The man of my dreams was tall, fair, handsome, kind, intelligent, and mature. While some of my classmates met some of the criteria, none of them met the crucial one of maturity. In my eyes they were mere boys still reeking of curdled milk on their chins. They were eighteen or younger, while I was a grown woman at twenty. Unbeknownst to me, the remedial class at Italian Convent had added two years to my secondary school education.

  No, there was no fellow in my romance. I was in love with myself, my classes, my social life, and the breathtaking vista from the university. The Hong KongUniversity campus was nestled on a mountainside, suspended between an expanse of blue above and blue below. The women’s dorm looked out to a sweeping view of the sea. KowloonPeninsula lay on the other side, and in between was a small island named Stonecutters. I would have loved to live in the dorm, but to cut costs Mother made me commute from home.

  I was a new person. Even my appearance underwent a makeover. Italian Convent girls were required to wear their hair straight and with no adornment. They also had to dress in sack-like blue cheongsams that covered every curvature down to the ankles. Their shoes were made of cloth and were as flat as they came. Convent fashion, however, was hardly suitable for a modern institution such as Hong KongUniversity. With the pocket money from my generous older brothers, I got myself a perm, a pair of leather shoes with a bit of heels, and several cheongsams of sleek cuts and bright colors. By bright I mean a modest design of small flowers against a pastel background. Flashy patterns have never been my taste.

  Let me tell you how I selected my major. The medical school had accepted me because I’d scored "distinction" in a "science" subject. This turned out to be biblical "science,
" which for some strange reason university administrators equated with biology and chemistry. However, I knew better than to enroll. Science was my weakest subject, and I wouldn’t have the stamina to complete the arduous medical training.

  The choices in the arts were limited to three: English literature, Chinese literature, and economics. Much as I loved literature, and the ambition to write was still in the back of my mind, it was too predictable a major for a female. I wanted to do something different and outrageous. Economics had a masculine appeal about it—never mind my total ignorance of the subject. I signed up for it, becoming one of three women to join the economics department.

  The first year sailed by in balmy weather. My academic life was everything I’d hoped for. Economics was challenging, yet not so challenging that I would flounder. Socially, however, I felt like a misfit. After sitting in class with the sons and daughters of wealthy families, I had to return to my hovel of a home. How I wished I could live in the girls’ dorm. The bedtime socials that went on every night sounded absolutely fabulous.

  During my first summer vacation, I went by ship with Mother and Ngai to visit Brother Kin in Bangkok. We found him living in a big house overrun with more servants than a bachelor needed. He was doing very well as what was known as a "comprador" for an American trading company. His job was to interact with Thai suppliers and smooth the company’s way with the authorities. He was perfect for this role, given his widespread family connections and his fluency in English, Thai, and two Chinese dialects.

  The boy who left home was now a man. His shoulders had broadened, and his angular jaws gave him a handsome rakish edge. Already a success at twenty-seven, he could take his pick among the Chinese girls in Bangkok. When I asked him teasingly whether he had a girlfriend, he gave me a serious answer: "I have no plans to get married until I’ve finished raising my younger siblings." Can you imagine such a good brother! His words moved me deeply.