“When the Phoenix Rises” Chronicles Author’s Life from Abject Poverty to Extraordinary Business Success and from Hong Kong to Hawaii.
Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
Home is a Storage Room
I was born into a traditional Chinese family; both my grandfathers took advantage of the Ching Dynasty law of 1900 that declared a man could have two wives and they could all live together. My fraternal grandfather had been a rich man in China’s Canton Province and could afford to support two wives and fourteen children; my father was his second son by the first wife. When the Communist Party took over China in 1949, the family fled to Hong Kong where grandfather eventually ran a grocery import and export business, which could not support his large family in the same style. My father worked as a manager for this business, but he did not make a regular income.
My mother’s father owned a preserved fruit factory in Hong Kong, but he too had a large family, with two wives and seven children. My mother was the youngest daughter of the second wife. My parents met because their families were friends.
In 1950 when my parents got married, Hong Kong was recovering from World War II, when the Japanese had occupied the island after defeating the British in December 1941. The population of Hong Kong, which was 1.6 million before the war, had shrunk to about 600,000 by 1945, when Great Britain resumed control after the war was over. With the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Chinese immigrants fled persecution and streamed by the thousands into Hong Kong. Corporations in Shanghai and Guangzhou also shifted operations to the city that would for many years be the only place of contact between the Western World and Mainland China.
My twenty-four-year-old father and eighteen-year-old mother started life in a four-hundred-square-foot, windowless storage area with a bare concrete floor, behind my maternal grandfather’s fruit factory. It had no separate bathroom (we used the facilities in the factory) or kitchen, but at one end of the large room, there was a wood-burning stove and a water tap with a basin underneath. A large footbath would be filled with water for bathing. All drinking water, however, had to be boiled, but this was typical of Hong Kong at the time. At the front door of the warehouse, the only door marked this so-called residence as Number 12 Square Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. Just inside the front door were boxes and boxes of prunes and preserved fruit, the fruit factory inventory. The factory nearby had a telephone and a radio, but they were considered luxury items, and my family would wait for years to acquire them.
Our home, which was rent-free, was in the back of the warehouse, on the ground floor of a four-story wooden building that housed ten separate families on the upper floors, also living with minimal accommodations. The residents were mostly adults who worked long hours and paid low rent. With only one kitchen/bathroom per apartment, bathing was a shared activity. The men would take a shower together at the same time, followed shortly after by the women. The building was a firetrap and home at night for countless cockroaches, rats, worms and lizards.
In the Central District of Hong Kong there were many four and five- story wooden buildings; they had been built before the war and jammed together with no thought for landscaping, much less trees or flowers. These buildings were also highly susceptible to fires. My brothers and I were shaken awake one midnight when I was six; there was a fire on the third floor and the black smoke poured out into the night. We watched in fear as firemen brought out the casualties: one of them was a young friend of mine. We escaped everything but water damage from the fire hoses, but there was no insurance to cover our losses.
***
I was born a year after my parents’ marriage and for the next nine years my mother gave birth to five more children. I became the respected “Big Sister.” Fortunately for me, because Chinese parents always wanted sons, my parents were then blessed by four boys before my mother had her last child, also a girl.
Chinese custom designated the fraternal grandfather to name the children, and Ah Kung had a name ready for a male child. When he discovered his new grandchild was a girl, he was so disappointed he turned over the naming to Pa Pa, my father, who responded by naming me a common Chinese name which means “beautiful clouds.” When I was a little older, I was also given the English name Cinderella, shortened later to Cindy. When I was in my twenties, I decided Cindy was too childish and I changed my name to Wendy, which seemed more professional to me.
As a baby, I slept in a rusty old crib beside my parents’ double bed in the makeshift bedroom, but soon graduated to a folding canvas cot when the next baby was born. The cots occupied the space designated as a dining room, which had a table and chairs and a cabinet for dishes. There were crude wooden partitions to divide our home into four small rooms.
I will never forget the horror of waking up one night to find a bloody, black smelly mess at the foot of my cot. It was a large dead mouse, probably killed from the poison my parents used to hide in various parts of our home to keep the rat population in control. Unfortunately, I didn’t easily forget the incident because my mother couldn’t manage to scrub away all the blood.
Soon after, this horrible incident was reinforced by several of the neighborhood children. There was a playground fairly close-by and one day an older boy, who had caught several mice, wanted to experiment with fire. He encouraged other boys to gather around and help him burn these helpless creatures. I was appalled.
***
Since storage space was at a minimum in our tiny abode, a four-foot-wide wardrobe served to hold everyone’s clothing. Even with eight eventual family members, there wasn’t much to store. Because Mother couldn’t sew and we had very little money, each child got one new outfit a year, usually purchased right before the Chinese New Year celebration, and this frugality applied to shoes as well. Even Father, who had control of our meager finances, had only two outfits for the entire year.
British influence had introduced Western food and clothing styles, but except for an important occasion, our manner of dress was traditional. At home, females wore pants and a high-necked top with an angled lapel that fastened with buttons or loops. For a special event, my mother wore the conventional Cheung Sam, a high-collared form-fitting dress with the skirt slit down each side. The dress fastened the same way as her top, but for a special occasion, I would wear a Western-type little girl’s party dress with a fuller skirt and puffy short sleeves. My brothers dressed in short pants and simple t-shirts.
Mother kept busy raising her children and cooking the meals, but if she had spare time, she would work for her father’s factory, packing boxes with preserved prunes to earn much-needed money. As the head of the family, Father played a conservative Chinese male role; he made the income and wasn’t involved in domestic chores or in raising his children. Although I knew my parents loved us, they showed little affection, and our conversations were perfunctory for the most part.
Because my oldest brother performed well in school, my father and mother were willing to invest in my oldest brother’s education, but they did not value me in the same way. They assumed a daughter would not be ambitious, after all, my mother wasn’t. Perhaps I’d finish high school and then probably marry young. As for working, teaching school would be a suitable goal for me.
Their discrimination and lack of support only inspired me to be motivated. They will discover, I said to myself, that I am a phoenix, and I can fly.
***
My mother’s role as the timid housewife influenced me early in life. I could see she was ignorant of life outside her little world and had no desire to widen her horizons. It made me become the opposite: independent and self-confident.
“Can I help you with the shopping, Mother?” I asked when I was about seven. I had heard her complaining that she had always been treated unfairly by her family, and never got any attention since she was the daughter of a second wife.
“I am so busy doing all the work, and nobody helps me out. You are old enough to help your family,” my mother instructed me. “Here is one Hong Kong dollar for you to buy us something for dinner, Sau Chun.”
“What will I buy?” I asked her.
“You’re a smart girl, you figure it out. It must be cheap,” she answered.
I walked along the narrow bumpy roads to the nearby shopping area on West Street, where several butchers had stalls on the same street. I had to push my way among the crowds of pedestrians, bicycles and rickshaws. With the influx of Chinese immigrants, people were desperate to sell all kinds of things. I had to watch out for men carrying long poles with buckets on each end, buckets filled with vegetables, fruits and all sorts of edibles. There was even a man sitting on a sidewalk selling snakes. Chinese favored snake meat and especially the liquid that came from the snake’s gall bladder.
When I checked all the butcher stalls, I’d look for one with six or more pigs’ brains available, then I would bargain. I had often watched women haggle over the price.
“How many do you need?” the butcher would ask.
“Eight,” I would say.
“I’ll sell it to you for two Hong Kong dollars,” the butcher might reply.
“You have so many and no one is buying,” I would retort.
“How much do you have?” he would ask.
“One Hong Kong dollar.”
“I’ll sell it for one dollar and a half,” he replied, “but only for seven.”
“I will buy six if you sell it for a dollar,” I would answer, and he usually agreed.
I was proud of myself that I could get a bargain for my family. I earned the nickname “Pigs’ Brains Girl” from some of the children in my neighborhood.
At home my mother would remove the red nerves from the brains, chop them up, and then add ginger, water and a little wine to make a soup on the wood-burning stove. Hungry as we were, we would choke on the smoke from the wood fire since there was no ventilation and no windows. Mother always added lots of rice to the soup to try to fill us up. The soup was tasty, but there was never enough protein to sustain us, and all of us children were thin and weak from malnutrition.
By age ten, the years of poor eating had affected me the most. My skin and eyes turned yellow and my weight plummeted to thirty-six pounds.
“Look at her, she may be dying,” Mother tearfully said to my father. “Let’s bring her to the hospital.”
“I don’t trust the doctors at the hospital,” Father anxiously replied. “Western medicine is no good; too many people die of jaundice there. We will look for a good Chinese herbalist.”
The next day my maternal grandfather brought a renowned herbalist to visit me. My mother explained the history of my sickness, and the doctor scrutinized my hands and my eyes and then advised, “First, every day you must get a Chinese medicine I will prescribe from the herbal shop. You boil down three bowls of water with this medicine until you have one bowl left for her to drink. But, if you do not find wampee tree roots to add to this mixture, it will not work.”
Luckily, a severe hurricane had toppled many of Hong Kong’s lovely wampee trees. My mother made a tea of the wampee tree roots and the medicine and had me drink it every day. I had been bedridden on my canvas cot for months, but the wampee tea and the Chinese herbs finally cured me.
Recovering from the brink of death, I cherished the value of life. The incident reinforced my sense of hope, and I determined I would create a different and better life for myself than my parents had.
***
As I grew older, I realized that I was a pretty girl; I had been told I looked like my maternal grandmother, who was beautiful and graceful. My oval face and smooth fair complexion was complimented by a warm smile. There were many young women who worked in my grandfather’s prune factory, and since they were great fans of the movies, they knew all the Hong Kong film stars.
If any of them spotted me when I walked by the factory, they would scream, “Look, look! Miss Lin Feng is coming now.” Lin Feng was a good-looking and popular star in those days and I was immensely flattered. It reinforced my feelings that I could accomplish what I wanted in life.
We children were excited when an American movie was filmed in Hong Kong in 1960; some of the scenes were shot quite close to our home. I watched one important scene in which Nancy Kwan, who played the main character in “The World of Suzie Wong,” walked up the hundred steps of Ladder Street, steps I would take to school and to play with my baby sister, Doris.
I told myself, “When I grow older, I’ll be as pretty and successful as Nancy Kwan.”
My intelligence was recognized by a fraternal aunt when I was young, and she came to visit with special information.
“I have good news, dear sister. My friend who works as the division chief of the Hong Kong Education Commission can help your daughter to enter the prestigious and famous Sacred Heart of Mary Catholic School.”
“What is the need for that, sister?”
“The students at this school are known for their fluency in English.”
“I am afraid she could not catch up to the English standard. The tuition fee is high too,” my mother answered.
“Think of the opportunities it will give her. She can go to a university and perhaps travel overseas to work. It will enable her to get a better job.”
“Why would she want to leave Hong Kong and her family?”
“She is a smart girl, and perhaps she wants more from life than you expect.”
“Ah, she is only a girl, my sister. She will marry like me and forget all about schooling. And if she is so smart, she can become a schoolteacher after high school. That will be enough.”
The favor was never acted upon, but I didn’t lose heart. I knew my dreams would eventually come true.
***
Another momentous event happened in 1965, when I was almost fourteen. The government of Hong Kong gave us the money to move.
The old building on Square Street had never been in good shape. Residents complained about the pieces of brick and sand that fell from the ceilings; not only was it annoying, but it was dangerous. After a great deal of negotiation, the government finally condemned it and agreed to pay several thousand dollars for the residents to move.
With this money and the help of my maternal grandmother, my father purchased a new small residential apartment (coincidentally, also four-hundred-square feet) in Kennedy Town, a factory area, for Hong Kong $25,000 (US$5,500). The building was concrete, had eight floors with ten units on each floor, and an elevator. Our new home had three small bedrooms, a sitting room, and a detached kitchen and washroom. We could even afford some new furniture: a dining table, chairs, real beds and a television!
Life was looking up for my family until 1967. Supported by the Chinese Communist Party, a political riot erupted in Hong Kong with the goal of toppling the British government. For several months we endured the turmoil of homemade bombs and nightly curfews until the British arrested the leftists and regained full power. Many residents decided to move elsewhere, but we could not afford to relocate and had to make do with Hong Kong.
Read more about When the Phoenix Rises and Wendy Wong HERE.
Copyright 2008 Wendy Wong. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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