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‘Come and take my pulse for me,’ my grandmother invited me, holding her arm out towards me. ‘How is it?’
Happy to put my newly-acquired medical training on show, I placed two fingers over her radial artery to feel the pulsating beats beneath my fingertips. After all, I was a fully -qualified doctor (‘yi sheung’ which means ‘healer of life’) looking after a full clinical caseload back in England.
‘It is strong and regular,’ I told my grandmother, satisfied that I had not found anything untoward.
‘Is that all you can say?’ she asked me in a rather disappointed tone of voice. ‘If you had trained in Chinese medicine, you would have been able to tell me everything about my health. You would be able to tell me about my flow of chi and whether it is obstructed or imbalanced. There are at least twenty-eight different pulses, you know. But I guess they do not believe that in Western medicine.’
I wished then that I had learned more about the traditional Chinese art of healing; about the balance of yin and yang forces and the five elements my grandmother so often talked about. Throughout my childhood, she sought to give us a proper diet, supplementing it from time to time with a Chinese medicinal brew, saying there was too much heat in what we had eaten the previous day. In creating her meals, she endeavoured to restore the flow of chi and the harmony that keeps a person healthy, in body, mind and spirit. I don’t recall seeing a doctor when ill; I remember when I was very young being taken to a child health clinic where all the children were lying on a bench with their bottoms exposed in order for the nurse to get a rectal temperature. Sometimes that and a brief conversation would be it; other times it ended with a vaccination, the most painful being the BCG for tuberculosis. My only encounters with a Western doctor were the required health checks with the school doctor. He looked rather elderly, had an engaging smile and large warm hands. He reminded me of the American TV character, Marcus Welby MD, though that might be more fantasy than reality. I remember going once, and standing in front of him with my cotton top up to my armpits and my knickers down at my ankles.
I watched as my grandmother prepared an infusion of chrysanthemum flowerheads to apply to her tired eyes. In forty-eight hours, I was to be married, and we were relaxing and anticipating the exhaustion of the occasion ahead. My fiancé and I had flown back to Hong Kong, so that my grandmother could be at the wedding, and so that I could be married in the cathedral church where I had grown up.
‘How come you let Mum marry someone who is not Chinese?’ I asked, thinking about my own forthcoming union with an Englishman whom I had met on the first day of medical school. ‘It must have been very unusual in those days, wasn’t it? Especially in your generation, when you had arranged marriages and everything.’
I reminded my grandmother about the tall tailor who had lived and worked in a shop opposite our little flat ten years before. Grandmother had adopted him as a godson (a ‘kai’ son) after his parents’ death, and he often popped round to the flat to seek her advice and counsel. Taking on a ‘kai’ child is a very popular custom amongst the Chinese people. It can be a casual affair, with nothing more than a feeling of kinship between the child and ‘kai’ parent, or it can be a formal arrangement with a degree of ceremony, privilege and obligation. That particular day I remember well, as her godson was very agitated and unable to settle. His thirty years sat heavily on his lean features, and his eyes darted from one corner to another as he pleaded and implored my grandmother to arrange his marriage to a woman he had seen at a dinner party the week before.
‘Your mother’s brothers, your uncles, wrote to me from Guangzhou when they found out. Scolding me, saying your grandfather would never have had any of it, had he been alive. They were very much against it. But I didn’t listen to them. After all, I wasn’t the one getting married. It was your mother’s life,’ my grandmother recounted as she pressed the warm flower heads onto her closed eyelids.
‘But yours was an arranged marriage, wasn’t it?’ I persisted.
‘Yeah, it was. We weren’t meant to know our future husbands. But in my case, it was a bit different. You see, we used to live near your grandfather, in the next hamlet. Once we even talked to each other, on our way to Hong Kong by steamer. He already had his watch shop over here, and was travelling from Guangzhou to Hong Kong on business.’
‘Did you know him well?’
‘Not at all. But at least he wasn’t a complete stranger to me. He was a lot older than I was. I didn’t know how old he was then; he looked quite young to me. I was only fifteen when I married him. Everyone warned him not to marry me. They told him I was a stubborn, bad-tempered girl.’
It was difficult to imagine my grandmother being stubborn and bad-tempered. Sure, she had her fiery moments, and she must have had such strength and determination. Perhaps they were not the qualities one wished for in a typical, subordinate wife, but those same qualities led her to learn to read and write from the boys living across the alleyway late at night, when other women around her remained illiterate. Even in her 80s, my grandmother was keen to learn and asked me to teach her the English alphabet.
‘I desperately wanted to go to school and learn how to read and write, to learn everything I could, but in those days people didn’t educate girls that way. Not only that, but I was a foster-daughter and really treated like a servant. But my foster-brother, Ah So, was about the same age as me, and he taught me how to read. I always listened to him whenever he did his studies, his homework, so I could learn as much as I could. I managed to buy three books when I was a girl. I remember them well; Liang Shan Bai and Chuk Ying Tai (The Love Story), Mou Yue Shue (Wooden Fish book) and Xing Yue Kao (The Book of Complete Sentences.)
‘And grandfather didn’t mind?’ I asked.
‘No, he was very good to me. You can tell from his photograph. He was a decent man. He always told me not to work so hard. I helped with the shop, and looked after the children, and when the staff weren’t there, I did the cooking as well. And then, at night, when everyone else was asleep, I would sit up by the sewing machine, sewing padded silk jackets. I worked from morning to night; helped earn quite a lot of money that way. Your grandfather would always say, it’s dark now. Get some sleep. Do not work so hard, you must have your rest. It was so hard in those days. But we survived. I even saved up enough money to buy myself some gold bangles, the first pieces of jewellery I ever owned.’
‘Have I seen them?’ I asked. My grandmother shook her head. ‘What happened to them?’
‘I pawned them, to pay for your Second Uncle’s wedding. You know he was my stepson right, from your grandfather’s first marriage, but I didn’t want anyone to think that stepmothers treated their stepchildren badly, so I wanted him to have the best wedding I could afford. I pawned the bangles, and we had a really grand wedding back in the village. It was 1928. But I was never able to redeem them from the pawn shop. We went badly into debt at the end of the Chinese New Year; our creditors took back all our goods and business started to slip again. Perhaps I should have chosen to buy a new sewing machine instead, but I felt so strongly that I should give Second Son a good wedding.’
‘So, when was your first child born?’
‘Your Third Uncle? Oh, let me see.’ Grandmother thought for a moment. ‘It must have been when I was about seventeen. It went on for days. And after that, my breasts were so sore. No one said anything about breast milk, you see. Our breasts were always bound, so men couldn’t see them wobbling about. Not like nowadays. It was all very decent and proper. After the birth, mine were still bound and they started to swell and got very painful.’
‘What did you do then?’ I asked, remembering the acute mastitis I had seen in women during my medical student training, their breast tissue red, hot and extremely painful.
‘Well,’ my grandmother continued, straightening up from her treatment, wet petals in therapeutic disarray around her eyes. ‘Luckily, one of the elderly women in the village saw me crying, and said you’ll have to undo all this binding and release the swelling. And then she stuck a big needle into them and all the blood and milk came out. After that, I felt much better.’
I recoiled at the thought of such barbaric treatment, probably with no thought to antiseptics or infection. ‘And what about when you had your other children?’
My grandmother smiled, and said in a very matter-of-fact way, ‘Oh, I knew after that. It never happened again. But you know, don’t have children too early. In my day we had no choice, but you do now. I induced five abortions. Drank a potion to get rid of them. I couldn’t carry so many. Don’t get pregnant too soon. Don’t be in a hurry to have children. Live your life.’