Looking Back
Julie Lee Wei
“Di Di is not obedient, she cries every day,” wrote my father in Calcutta to my mother in Chungking on the other side of the Himalayas. His letters were in Chinese.
I was seven and had arrived in Calcutta with my older sister Bao Bao to join Daddy. “Bao Bao” means “Precious Precious” or “Darling” in the Mandarin dialect. “Di Di”, my name, means “Tiny-drop-of-water” or “Teensy-Weensy” in my parents’ Hubei dialect.
It was spring 1943, during the Second World War. Daddy had been sent to Calcutta to be China’s military representative. Chiang Kai‐shek was head of the Chinese Nationalist government in Chungking, China’s wartime capital. Our family, Daddy, Mummy, and seven children, the oldest eight, had been living in Chungking after fleeing the British colony of Hong Kong, which had been bombed and captured by the Japanese a few weeks after Pearl Harbor. We were there in Kowloon, in an apartment in Lunar Terrace on Kimberley Road during Japan’s attack. After escaping from Hong Kong we had finally reached Chungking,in the mountains of Sichuan Province. After living a year in Chungking, Mummy had put Bao Bao and me aboard an American military cargo plane in care of the pretty Chinese stewardess, Mrs. Rosalind Fu. We’d flown over the Himalayas to join Daddy in India. Mummy had to wait for her passport before she could join us with the five younger children. Until then she and the children would continue living in the dark, windowless backroom of my Uncle Yao Ye’s two‐room apartment. The backroom was lit by an oil‐lamp. My three sisters and I had shared a bed. Uncle, Aunt, and their six little children, the oldest seven, lived in the front room. Behind the backroom was a small kitchen shared with the adjoining apartment, which was then inhabited by a group of lower‐ level Chinese army officers. There was no running water, no flush toilet, no electricity, no gas range, no telephone. We older children, from four to eight years old, would play happily on the terrace while Mummy and Yao Niang (Aunt) would take care of the toddlers and babies and do the housework. I know Mummy had a hard time finding powder milk in wartime Chungking for the little ones. Perhaps because of the scarcity of milk my two brothers who were babies then did not grow as tall as the four older children, my sisters and me. We all spoke Mandarin, though our cousins spoke with a Sichuan accent.
In Calcutta Daddy was staying in a sumptuous suite in a great English hotel. Calcutta was still in an India ruled by the British. Now Calcutta is called Kolkata. At that time, in 1943, Britain had recently lost Hong Kong and Singapore to the Japanese, and was now fighting the Japanese in Burma, just east of Calcutta. America had joined the war, and had started the Lend‐Lease program whereby it would provide military assistance to China in the form of money, weapons, and military training.
As China’s military representative in Calcutta, my father, Major General C. F. (Chi-fu) Lee, served as liaison between China and her allies, America and Britain. Part of the Allied program was to have Chinese officers train in India under the British and Americans. In the great hotel where my sister and I joined Daddy, we were served by tall handsome Indian waiters in starched white uniforms with colorful cummerbands. Suddenly we were in a world of brilliance and grandeur, a world away from drab Chungking. Here in the hotel, the Kanahni Mansions, the waiters brought English meals to our suite in covered silver dishes and tureens. I especially remember the silver dish with the butter that came with each meal. I would watch the butter melting into a golden liquid in the heat of Calcutta. Calcutta was so hot that temperatures would sometimes reach 120 degrees, I heard the grown‐ups say.
The bedroom of Daddy’s suite had two large beds. Daddy slept in one and Bao Bao in the other. Let me call her Helen , because after we arrived in Calcutta, we became over the years less and less Chinese and more and more English. My mother had picked out the name Helen for her and Julie for me out of an English-Chinese dictionary, Helen for Helen of Troy and Julie for Romeo and Juliet. Mummy knew very little English, but had heard these names. As we began to attend British convent schools in India, we gradually stopped calling each other Bao Bao and Di Di., though our parents still called us by these Chinese names.
At night I slept on the sofa in the large sitting and dining room of the suite. Helen was one year older than me, and as the elder one, got the higher honor, the bed. After sharing one bed with three sisters in Uncle Yao Ye’s cramped backroom, I now found myself alone on a sofa in a huge empty space surrounded by darkness and silence. Daddy and Helen were far away in the next room. My instincts for equality and fraternity were awakened. Every night I cried and sniffled into my pillow.
“Always a face like a horse,” my father snapped at me during the day. He must have felt like the Shah of Iran, who after he had knocked himself out to make life better for his subjects, took their expressions of discontent as a personal affront. I must have worn a long, mournful face. India was throbbing with color, “pink is the navy blue of India” as they say, and teeming with life. The hotel was magnificent and beautiful. Still, my heart was heavy. Helen was the blessed one. Besides sleeping in the bedroom close to Daddy, she was blessed in another way. She could speak some English and I couldn’t.
My father put us in Loreto House, which Mrs. Lo, the discriminating wife of Mr. Lo, a Chinese intelligence officer, had told him was the most elite school in Calcutta for girls. When we first arrived in Loreto House, I could only say “Yes” and “no” in English. Too diffident to make friends, I looked anxiously for Helen at recess time, and stayed close to her. I eagerly picked up another word from her. It was the word “alright”. How did she learn this interesting word, I wondered with admiration.
Daddy tried to help us catch up with our English. As we walked around the grounds of the magnificent Victoria and Albert Museum, where he loved to take us by horse and carriage—for those cabbies still existed alongside the new automobiles—he would introduce us to English grammar. But it was hopelessly difficult for me. In Chinese we had one word, “wo”, for three words in English “I”, “my”, “me”. We had one word “ta” for three words in English, “he”, “she”, “it”. And one pronoun “ta‐men” for English “they”, “their”, “them”. What was the difference between “they”,“their”, “them”? I would never remember these words and their differences, I thought. I tried to keep back my tears. Even worse were “who,” “whom”, “whose,” which didn’t even exist in Chinese. How could I possibly remember or understand them? Then Chinese had one word for “has”, “have”, “had”, and one word for “is” and “are”. Of course, Daddy explained them cheerfully in Chinese, but it was all a blur to me. Helen didn’t appear unhappy, however. For some reason unknown to me she was soon—the next year– writing long poems in English. But of course, she had been reading English books for children ever since she was little. She loved to sit and read and then she would write and draw illustrations to her writings. She was already a poet and artist. She was always kind and serene. Everyone loved her. Everyone remarked on her beauty.
Even at three the instinct for equality had thrown me into gloom. I saw the pictures of pretty little girls Helen drew at three and four. Looking at my own misshapen drawings, my three-year-old’s sense of probability gave me a foreboding that I would never be equal to Helen. I was right, for Helen was both beautiful and highly gifted.
In Calcutta, I also had good reason to cry when Daddy washed our hair. Back in Kowloon or Chungking our hair was always washed by Mummy or a maid. We never used shampoo or soap. It was always egg-white from raw eggs. That is also the best thing for washing ladies’ faces too, Mummy said. To wash your hair, first rub in the ege white, then rinse it off with water, which was poured over our heads with a cup. “Egg white takes away grease, and it’s also a good astringent for the face,” Mummy said.
Now in the hotel in Calcutta, Dad used a bottle of English shampoo, which we liked. He addressed the task with enormous gusto. Our hair was seized, shampoo applied, the scalp kneaded and scratched fiercely, and our heads shoved roughly under blasts from the tap. It was a noisy session, with explosions from the tap and frequent “ouches” from us. When I see Charlie Chaplin as Hinkle the Barber in “The Great Dictator” working over the poor man in the barber’s chair, I think of Daddy giving us a shampoo, “manhandling” our heads. Later, he would pull our hair so tightly into braids that it hurt. He washed and combed our hair every day, and Helen complained often. Helen usually served as spokesman for me and my younger sisters.
Then Mrs. Findlay came along, and things got better. She was Daddy’s girl‐friend. This I only realized years later, when I was fourteen. In Calcutta at that time, I didn’t realize there were such things as girl‐friends and mistresses.
“But what do you think she was, of course she was Daddy’s girlfriend,” Mummy said to me later, when the war was over, we were back in Hong Kong, Helen had died, and I had become Mummy’s confidante.
At that time in Calcutta I only knew Mrs. Findlay was a friend of Dad’s who dropped in and took an interest in Helen and me. She was a cheerful Chinese lady dressed in a high collar Chinese dress, called a qipao or cheongsam, often a floral print, with slits down the sides. She chided Daddy for tying our hair so tightly and sometimes helped him wash and comb our hair.
She would visit Daddy at the hotel and after some pleasantries she would go out with him. Sometimes we all went out together for tea or dinner at the famous Firpo’s restaurant, and watch couples, with the ladies in long evening gowns, waltz to the orchestra in a circle around the ballroom floor. We also went to movies in beautiful air-conditioned movie theatres whose interiors looked like palaces. There were a number of musicals, like “Down Argentine Way” with tap-dancing Bette Grable and the “Argentinian Bombshell” Carmen Miranda, whom Daddy found delightful. We also watched Andy Hardy movies with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, and enjoyed “The Major and the Minor”, with Ginger Rogers, and “You Were Never Lovelier”, with Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire.” In the air-conditioned movie palaces we would put on our sweaters, and after the movie we would be back in a bustling, hot Calcutta, filled with Indian women in colorful saris and Indian men in white dhotis, our eyes squinting in the bright sun.
Once we went to where Mrs. Findlay lived with her husband, the Great Eastern Hotel in Calcutta, which was made famous by wartime foreign correspondents. I never saw Dr. Findlay and hardly thought he existed. He was an Englishman. I suppose he was at work seeing patients and she had plenty of time on her hands.
One day Mrs. Findlay, who said to Dad, in her Cantonese accented Mandarin: “C.F., you always talk about Helen. There is nothing wrong with Julie. I think Julie is just as pretty as Helen!” Tears welled in my eyes. Not that I believed what she said. But she had touched a secret reservoir of sorrow. She continued to appear at our hotel, adding the feminine touch and gaiety to Daddy’s carefree “bachelor” life.
It was just after my eighth birthday when Mummy arrived with the other children. Mrs. Findlay never came around again and we had moved to a large apartment in a handsome old two-storey, red‐brick building that had the words “Auckland Mansions” molded in plaster on the façade just under the roof. Daddy proudly told Mr. Lo, who had expressed misgivings that the building might be too old to be safe, that it might collapse, “I took it because the floors are covered with marble!” Daddy always loved beauty and luxury. The rooms were large, the ceilings very high, and I now imagine the building must have seen its days of glory in the second half of the nineteenth century, at the height of the British Empire. Lord Auckland was Governor-General of British India from 1836 to 1842 and Calcutta had been capital of British India until 1911. Behind the mansion there was a large unkempt, overgrown garden with a mouldering fountain, now dry, in the center, and to the side, there was a green lawn with a tall chain-link fence covered by morning-glories. We children would run around this lawn and sometimes play badminton.
The war ended in 1945, and we left India, taking an American cargo ship, the S.S. James Buchanan, back to Kowloon‐Hong Kong. We stayed there for two years, then Dad was sent by Chiang Kai‐shek’s Nationalist government to Singapore as Trade Commissioner for China, and we followed him there. My sisters and I became pupils at Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus. Helen died in 1948 at the age of thirteen from a kidney ailment. Chiang K’ai‐shek’s government was losing the Civil War with the Chinese Communists. Dad’s Singapore office had to close and the whole family except me moved back to China. I stayed on to finish high school in Singapore. In 1949 I received the Cambridge School Certificate, Grade I (the highest grade), matriculating into University of London. I was fourteen. China had fallen to Mao Tse-tung and the Communists, and Daddy, Mummy, and the family were now refugees in Hong Kong. I joined them there.
Mummy was a “lady” in those days. We still had servants, now a Cantonese cook and a Cantonese maid, sometimes two. Mummy liked to stay home and supervise the children and the household, but like the other Chinese ladies, also spent time visiting shops and stopping for afternoon English tea at such fashionable places as the august Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon or the venerable Hong Kong Hotel in Hong Kong. Often one of my mother’s friends would drop by and they would go out together. These ladies included Mrs. Cheng, whose husband was Chinese ambassador to Persia (now Iran) before Chiang’s government collapsed, and Mrs. Hsiao, wife of the Shanghai banker who later became head of the Land Bank of Taiwan. Mrs. Findlay and her husband Dr. Findlay were now also in Hong Kong, and somehow she and Mummy became friends. Mummy said she always became friends with Daddy’s former girl‐friends. Daddy now was in Taiwan looking for a job with the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai‐shek.
I had last seen Mrs. Findlay in 1943. Now in 1949, I saw Mrs. Findlay with older eyes, trained to assess a woman’s looks and style by years of watching Hollywood movies. She was fashionable as most of my mother’s friends were. High heel shoes, fitted Chinese qipao with slits on the side. Stylish short permed hair like Rita Hayworth in the 1947 movie “The Lady from Shanghai”. Makeup, probably Max Factor and Elizabeth Arden, and Cutex red or pink nail polish on long fingernails, just like Mummy. Ultra‐violet, a bluish‐red lipstick, was then in vogue. Unlike Mummy, who never wore dresses in red or pink—it wouldn’t have been seemly for a married woman with seven children—Mrs. Findlay often wore cheongsam of muted, dusky pink silk crepe, and I liked her in it. It was feminine and soft, a contrast to Mummy’s austere elegance. In those days we all liked to evaluate female faces and figures, style and taste. Beauty was almost a religion then, when a woman’s prospects were limited and beauty was what mattered, or so it seemed.
“You know, Mrs. Findlay has quite a beautiful face, if it wasn’t for that eye,” Mummy said to me. After Helen’s death, I found myself elevated to the position of privilege she had vacated, becoming the focus of Mummy’s attention and her confidante. Mummy never got over Helen’s death and would cry over it for years. I knew I would never fill the void left by my sister. Mummy continued, “She looks like Rita Hayworth, don’t you think, she has the same shape of face, same forehead, nose, chin, mouth. Rita Hayworth is a person who can open her mouth very wide when she laughs and still look beautiful.” It was a pity that Mrs. Findlay had a cloudy eye, otherwise she would be a beauty, Mummy and I agreed. Mummy and I spoke in the Mandarin dialect, whereas Mummy and Mrs. Findlay spoke in the Cantonese dialect, as did most of the native Chinese of Kowloon and Hong Kong.
One day Mrs. Findlay brought two girls to see me. We sat in our parlour on Chatham Road, overlooking Hong Kong harbor. They had just come from Guangdong province. I assessed the girls. They were quiet but diffident and ill‐at‐ease.. Mrs. Findlay was worried about putting them in an English school, since they spoke no English. Both were in their mid-teens, thickset and plain next to Mrs. Findlay. They spoke to me in Mandarin with a Cantonese accent, deferentially, which made me feel I had an unfair advantage because of my English. Mummy later told me they were the daughters of Mrs. Findlay’s Cantonese chauffeur, and Mrs. Findlay, not having children of her own, had taken them under her wing.
“Oh, what lovely shoes you have!” exclaimed Mrs. Findlay, looking at my custom‐made shoes. They were red, with a cut‐out scalloped design around the edges, and had been copied from Seventeen magazine by the Chinese cobbler Mummy took me to. All our dresses, shoes, and handbags were custom‐made, copied from pictures in Vogue, Bazaar and other American fashion magazines, which was what one did in our circle in those days. “Could I borrow it to copy for the girls?” “Of course!” Mummy replied. So they had shoes made of the same design.
We also visited Mrs. Findlay and I saw the girls a few times. Sometime later Old Mrs. Findlay, Dr. Findlay’s mother, came from England to visit, and became good friends with Mummy. She visited us one day, sitting on our sofa and complaining about the girls.
“I’ve never seen girls who are so slow,” she said. “Can you imagine, they still can’t even speak simple English!” She went on in this strain.
When Mummy and I went to visit Mrs. Findlay, I was impressed by her residence. The apartment was so much more spacious, Western, modern and beautiful than what we had at home. Even the centerpiece of gladioli on the dining-room table looked so soignée. I felt Mrs. Findlay led a charmed life. She and Dr. Findlay shared such a large apartment, whereas our family with many children were all in a smaller apartment, though large compared to most of our Chinese friends, who were after all refugees. We only had maids, but Mrs. Findlay also had a butler who served lunch in an English manner, holding the dish on your side while you spooned from it, just like at the Peninsula Hotel. Her husband the English physician was very successful no doubt, and they moved in the upper English circles of Hong Kong, Mummy told me, where my parents certainly did not belong. My father’s circle consisted of officials and intellectuals newly exiled from China. They included the great historian Chien Mu and the famous philosopher Tang Chun‐i both of whom were still in their thirties or forties. I met Dr. Findlay at the apartment. He appeared shorter than Mrs. Findlay, quite a bit older, fiftyish? I wondered. He was not handsome, but he bore himself erectly and looked alert. He did not join us, but simply passed by the parlour nodding at us without smiling.
Sometime later I was surprised when Mummy told me that all was not going well with Mrs. Findlay.
“He has a girlfriend,” Mummy said.
“Who is it?” I asked, wondering about the newcomer’s looks and age.
“It’s one of his Chinese patients.” Mummy said. I later learned that it was a girl whom I had heard about. She lived in a walled mansion near our place that I would walk past. She had caught polio and was confined to bed. The mansion was visible through the iron gate. It was always shut and I never saw anybody there. I thought it had the aura of a house in mourning. It reminded me of our own home when Helen was dying.
Now Mrs. Findlay would come to see Mummy and they talked about her trouble. They always called each other Mrs. Findlay and Mrs. Lee, never by their first names. Only Mummy’s intimates, such as a few old classmates from college in Beiping (as Beijing was then called), would be called by first names. And though the conversations with Mrs. Findlay broached the troubled situation it was always circumspect, and Mrs. Findlay never raised her voice.
The situation continued to deteriorate for Mrs. Findlay.
“You know, she’s in a very bad position,” Mummy told me after one visit. “I don’t think she was ever married, and so she doesn’t have that piece of paper.”
“Not married!” I exclaimed, for that thought would never have entered my mind, having come out of a convent where we boarders were never allowed to read “forbidden” books, or even newspapers and current magazines. “Then how did she get to live with Dr. Findlay?”
“It’s quite obvious she hasn’t had much education,” Mummy said. “She gets by with her English, but she doesn’t know much English, nor does she have much Chinese. I think she was one of those ‘dance hall girls’ that one picked up at a nightclub in India or China. I imagine she was sweet and good‐looking. I think those two girls aren’t the chauffeur’s, the way she cares about them. No, they couldn’t be the chauffeur’s. They’re probably her own children by a previous marriage or something. And how Old Mrs. Findlay dislikes them!”
After this, Mrs. Findlay became a poignant figure to me. Whenever she came she would still be the same lovely, fashionable figure, but rather more subdued, and I knew when she and Mummy went out for English tea Mummy would be trying to help her find a solution to her trouble. She was now probably thirty‐five or forty, in those days quite old. Greta Garbo retired at forty, thinking herself too old to be a star. Lana Turner, Betty Grable, and Rita Hayworth, all in their thirties and considered to be aging and being replaced by younger stars like June Haver, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. What lay ahead for Mrs. Findlay, I wondered. From the highest English circles in Hong Kong to what‐‐ ‐a maid, a shopgirl? A superannuated dance hall girl plying her trade in Wanchai, that crowded squalid district of brothels which we’d often pass through in the tramcar but never dreamed of visiting?
Things came to a head a few months later. Mrs. Findlay took my mother to a party at the Repulse Bay Hotel, a Victorian jewel by the sea that, alas, has since been torn down.
“I think this will probably be the end of the marriage,” said Mummy when she came home after the party.
“What happened?” I asked.
“We were having cocktails when Dr. Findlay walked in with the girl.”
“Was she pretty?”
“She was in a wheelchair. She looked like a student, no make-up and not dressed up.”
“What happened then?”
“When Mrs. Findlay saw them, she walked over and threw her wine into Dr. Findlay’ s face. Then there was some commotion and Dr. Findlay hurriedly slipped off with the girl.”
Not long after that Dr. Findlay and the girl were married. The nuptials were written up in Hong Kong’s English-language newspaper.
Shortly afterwards, our family left Hong Kong to join Daddy on the small island of Taiwan, where Chiang Kai‐shek had retreated with the remnants of his army. Daddy found a position with the Ministry of Defense in Chiang’s Nationalist government on Taiwan.
I never saw Mrs. Findlay or her girls again. But to me she will always be a kind and lovely figure in the dusky pink dress. And when I see pictures of Rita Hayworth, with her head thrown back, laughing, with lips stretched wide, I often think of Mrs. Findlay and my father’s gay bachelor days in a Calcutta of long ago.
Note: Mrs. Findlay is a fictitious name.
Copyright Julie Lee Wei
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