October 26 2008: Three Part Series: My Father
Filed under Asian-ness & Family
This is the first in an intended three-part series about my parents, how they grew up, how they met, and how they live now in Australia. Today’s entry will focus on my father, the next on my mother, and the last on them as a couple, them as parents. After all, to understand the person I am now, will require you to have some understanding of who my parents are.
My father was born the thirteenth of the fourteen children my paternal grandmother, my “nai nai”, ended up bringing to the world. Seven of the fourteen died before they reached the age of five, including my father’s younger twin sister. To this day, my father maintains that instead of having died in the measles outbreak that killed three of his siblings, his twin had been given up for adoption by his parents to a wealthy couple with no children of their own.
“Wealthier” however, is a subjective term. To many of us living in affluent countries, we think of ‘wealthy’ as having money to spend on frivolities, to having a large home, a luxury car. To my father and his family, ‘wealth’ in the slums of Hong Kong in the sixties was simply anyone who could afford to have a private bathroom in their home.
The sixteen of them (gradually fewer as the children died) lived in a small two-room apartment in overcrowded community housing in the New Territories of Hong Kong. When I say small, I do literally mean small - two rooms measuring three by four metres each. This is where the entire family slept, cooked, ate, worked. Mattresses were an unheard of luxury, let alone beds. Instead, they slept upon straw mats on the ground, three to each mat, lying like sardines in a can.
They had two meals a day - a bowl of rice gruel in the morning (with pickled vegetables in the morning if they were lucky), and a bowl of rice in the evening (with one or two meat dishes - ordinarily shared between three people, but shared between eight in the family). Candy and lollies were only able to be bought when the children of the neighborhood were entrepreneurial enough to spend a day away from the slums to enter the wealthier neighborhoods and act as a jack of all trades - helping a wealthy housewife to carry groceries for example, for which they would be awarded ten or twenty cents.
By the age of three, my grandfather died. He was only forty years old, but years of supporting his large family had ruined his health, and he died of heart failure. It was now up to the eldest sons (my eldest uncle is twenty years older than my father) to start working to support the family. My first, second, third, and fourth uncles went out to work in the fur industry as menial labourers - at the time, my fourth uncle was only fourteen years old.
For the next decade, my father, the youngest of all the children in the family, grew up, studied, and played. Photos of the time (official family portraits every two years) show him as a skinny, almost malnourished child, with little to no meat on his bones. My father was a prankster, someone with a fantastic sense of humour, a great sense of fun. He was an indifferent student, continually bringing home abominably low grades.
By the age of thirteen, upon the conclusion of elementary school, my grandmother had decided that my father had had more than enough education. He wasn’t making anything of the opportunities afforded to him through education by studying more diligently, so rather than continue studying, she pulled him out of school to start working. At the age of thirteen, he had begun working in the fur trade.
As a young furrier, he managed to rise quickly up the ranks, and grabbed at opportunities that arose for him in the company. He volunteered to be posted at any of the branches of the company, so over the course of the next decade, he spent time working not only in Hong Kong, but also in Shanghai, in Nanjing, and for a brief three months, in Japan. There’s a certain sense of wanderlust in my father which I’ve inherited.
By the time my father turned twenty-three, it was decided that he was ready to take a wife, not only for his own sake, but also in order for his wife to care for his aging mother. He was financially ready - having risen in the past decade up the ranks of the fur trade to serve as a supervisor of fifty young workers. The family’s fortunes had also improved sharply in this time - with all the children out and working, their combined income meant that the older brothers had started their own families and set up in rental housing, while the youngest three had managed to rent a two-bedroom apartment with a private bathroom. The family was now ‘wealthy’, or ‘wealthier’ than they had ever been.
This is where my mother enters the story.
14 Responses to “Three Part Series: My Father”
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Oh, wow. So, I’m beginning to see where you get your hardworking mindset from!
This was super interesting! I am really looking forward to the rest!! :D
Aisling on October 26 2008 #
I’m very interested. You know, me being azn and (IDK if you’ve been reading my blog) family history coming to play a prominent part in my life. It’s nice to read these things when it’s still, somewhat, in “context”. Usually, the Chinese history I know is incredibly outdated and not “relevant” to my life now.
It’s sort of weird to know how different our histories are, too, from what I can pick up on, yet here we are today, and we’re not THAT different? We don’t have a big difference in lifestyle. Except for the whole age and different hemisphere thing. Hehe.
Jenny on October 26 2008 #
Wow, that’s fascinating! Now I can understand where you get some of your traits from!! I think this is a great idea. I can’t wait to read the rest. <3
Caitlin on October 26 2008 #
Wow that is fascinating to read and learn from you. It’s very sad about your fathers siblings , and the lifestyle,I can’t even imagine living like that. I have experienced growing up in a poor family but nothing like this. Thank you for sharing it I look forward to the rest of the series.
Bobbi-lee on October 27 2008 #
Wow that’s an amazing story thus far, I can’t wait to hear the next part. It sounds a bit like my grandfather who was born in the Philippines. He ended up jumping on a fish boat and stowing away to America! Sadly I never met him.
Veronica on October 27 2008 #
I really like these stories because they are so different from what our usual lives are. My parents tell me similar stories, but it’s more like life/school in small village, war, living in war, living under communist rule, moving to America with nothing, and then now. haha, there is always so much though…my parents stories are a lot so when they tell me about my grandparents or the larger family, it just blows my mind how my family was everywhere.
marilyn on October 27 2008 #
Wow, your father sounds like such an inspiring man- and this idea is excellent, I can see where you get your work ethic! Can’t wait to hear about your mother :)
Carmen on October 27 2008 #
This is so interesting. My grandmother’s Chinese history is so different, yet so similar to your dad’s. Lots of children, small house, work at a young age, etc.
It’s amazing how much of our family’s history is embedded in us, even after all this time.
Regina on October 27 2008 #
This was so awesome to read - nice to see somebody writing something not whiny about their parents for once! :) I can definitely see a few things you inherited from your father!
Chantelle on October 27 2008 #
This is so fascinating- I can’t wait to hear the rest! My mother, who grew up in Fiji, has a past similar to this.
Melinda on October 27 2008 #
Oh man. I love family stories! My dad is always more than happy to oblige when I ask him about how things were for his family “back in the day.” I’ve been wanting to make a similar post for the longest time but because it takes my dad 3 hours to tell the story of his life, I’m not sure I can summarize it all. Haha
Something about your dad’s family that reminds me of my own is that my Dad is the youngest of 7 and his eldest brother is also 20 years older than him.
It’s really interesting that your dad didn’t take school very seriously but is probably doing better than a lot of other people in his school who DID study hard. I’m making this conclusion based on the fact that living in Australia, you’re probably better off than a lot of people who came from the slums in Hongkong where your Dad is from.
Considering your dad’s humble beginnings, it’s amazing that you are where you are now. I suppose you can say it’s amazing that a lot of us (my family included) came from nearly destitute families and rose to better lives. I won’t go as far as to say that my family’s story is a rags to riches story because we’re not rich but struggling to make ends meet day to day in a small, poor barrio in the Philippines to living in middle class American suburbia within one generation is a noteworthy change.
Felisa on October 27 2008 #
[...] Part two of a three part series. Read part one here. [...]
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