Happy 96th Amma!

Today, my children's paternal grandmother, Helen Shiao Bei Yen (nee Mao) turns 96. My children call her Amma, equivalent of Grandma. She lives in a retirement home in Singapore and we haven't seen or spoken to her often since coming to live in America 35 years ago. She's mentally alert, devoted to her Christian beliefs, and though I'm not sure if she still reads them, she used to study her bible and peruse the Reader's Digest in English, her second language, regularly. She told me when she was ninety, that she has no idea why God hasn't taken her yet and asks God about it quite often.

I continue to feel a strong bond with my children's grandmother, grateful for her kindness to me in the early years of my marriage to her son. These days any news about her is infrequent, and most often given to my son from one of his aunts. Since divorcing my children's father over 30 years ago, I'm not officially considered family. On my Chinese former in-laws' family tree, next to my children's names, there's a blank space where their mother's name should be, as if they were dropped by an anonymous stork. My ex and I both laughed when he told me about it. ,

The stories I know about Amma's life came either from my ex-husband, whose memory wasn't completely reliable, or from speaking directly with her. I learned that she was from a good family, a modern Shanghainese, educated, English-speaking with an English and Chinese name, and who had married for love. She met her husband in an English class. He told me he thought her "very cute" and a photo of her as a young woman shows a petite, slender figure, wearing traditional high-collared Chinese dress, posing very shyly for the camera. I see her features in my own daughter's petite height and slender hands and feet.

As a widow, Amma decided, against her children's wishes, to live in a retirement home. In a traditional Chinese family, it probably didn't look good if your mother chose not to live with you. But, perhaps remembering her non-traditional background as a modern Shanghainese, she was showing her true mettle, now that she no longer had her life proscribed by her husband's demands, which were considerable. So to those who may have mistaken her for an obedient, submissive woman, this decision probably came as a shock. It might even have given the appearance of rejection of family in favor of her own independence. Rejection was something she knew about, all too well.

During the late 1930's, as a young wife and mother of a toddler (her firstborn son, my children's father)Helen Shiao Bei Yen left Shanghai to join her husband, Menjen, in what was then called Malaya. He was a young civil engineer assigned to the construction of a hospital in Johore Baru, across the straits from the island city of Singapore. Although the Japanese were already thoroughly engaged in the brutal occupation of many parts of China, the couple may have felt relatively safe overseas for a while. Eventually, however, as the Japanese extended the aggressive arm of the Empire of the Rising Sun towards Malaya, following their occupation of British Hong Kong, the overseas Chinese community began to plan evacuation.

Menjen decided to stay behind in Malaya and continue the hospital building project, reasoning that the Japanese would not destroy a facility that could benefit them and would spare those involved with it. He decided to place his wife, now pregnant, and their young son in the protective custody of an older gentleman, a family friend. They joined others on a flight to what they hoped would be a relatively safe region in northern China. Nobody could have foreseen what was to follow.

As she sat drinking tea in my living room in America, years later, Amma called this her "terrible time". Before going into detail, she told me" You know, Caroline, you are the only one nowadays who ask me to talk about these things. Nobody ever ask me." Looking back on it, I suppose her children might simply have been reluctant to put their mother through any painful reliving of the past. In my usual way of being curious about people's personal histories, I had overlooked the possibility that she might have been reluctant to talk about the past, and she was smiling and certainly seemed calm as she spoke. She put down her teacup and continued.

Soon after the evacuees' plane departed from Malaya, the trusted family friend abandoned her. When she recovered from the shock of this, she somehow found a place to stay until her daughter was born and then decided the only way they could possibly survive was to rejoin the rest of the family in Shanghai. This entailed an epic and dangerous journey through war torn countryside, including travel by wheelbarrow at times, until she finally arrived at her husband's family home late at night. Starving, exhausted and lice-ridden, with her young son holding her hand and the baby strapped to her back, she was met with the harsh query "Oh, no baby ?" as if her infant daughter must have died instead of being merely hidden from view, and, no, she could not stay with them. To be turned away in this cruel and almost unheard of manner by family, was a stunning blow which has stayed with her. Although as a Christian she forgives, as a woman she remembers, though there's no bitterness in her voice. She glossed over the humiliation of showing up at her brother's house, the struggle to survive, make a meager living and keep her children alive. My ex-husband remembered coming home alone to their tiny room after school, adding boiled water from a thermos flask to the dried milk his mother had spooned into a glass for him, as he waited for her to come home from work.

After the official ending of the war and the ensuing chaos in China as Mao Tse Tung and the Communists took power, the family was re-united in Singapore. Things were far from happily ever after, however, as told by my children's father who vividly recalled the reunion. After the ship's docking and meeting his father, they went straight to a coffee shop instead of home. He remembered drinking sarsee, an herbal soda like root beer, as his parents were talking, though he doesn't remember what was said exactly. His mother wept as she listened to her husband's words. They then went home to meet and live with the woman who had been taken as a second wife during their wartime absence. They were instructed to call her Auntie. She was pregnant and she lived in one part of the house while they lived in another part.

The Chinese custom of taking of a second wife, though very painful for Amma, may have been understandable considering the prolonged separation and irregularity of wartime communication between China and Singapore. After all, for years they hadn't even known who was alive or dead. As she told me this part of the story, she sat a little straighter, smiled and clenched a ladylike fist:" I decide to fight" she says. There it was again, that unexpected flash of resolve, borne of the recent miseries of survival in China. She wanted to make it clear to her husband and the other woman, exactly who was the number one wife in the house. She was soon pregnant again. However she did it, eventually she established herself successfully as the rightful female head of household and "Auntie" and her daughter eventually moved out to live elsewhere. Not quite end of story, but a good ending to that particular chapter.

My Chinese mother-in-law graciously accepted me and my children into her home when we arrived from Tokyo, me expecting my second child and with a toddler son, even though I was a "second wife" and on top of that, horrors, a white woman. She told me to call her Mother, which I do to this day. She perhaps recognized my struggles with the tropical climate, the Asian culture and the sense of loneliness and homesickness of a young mother away from her own country, married to a charismatic, temperamental man. She surprised me by admitting that her son's temperament and behavior had sometimes been a challenge for her, too.

After we moved out of her home and lived in a remote seaside apartment, she sent us groceries because she knew I couldn't get out of the house easily to buy them or often didn't have enough money. She did her best to love and accept my strange looking mixed race Eurasian babies, though couldn't help herself from gloating a little, just once, as she carried my dark-haired newborn daughter home from the hospital, "Now this one is Chinese". My son's appearance, when younger, had favored his Caucasian forebears with fine, wavy, red hair, unlike the stiff, black brush-like manes of his Chinese cousins. It's not hard to imagine there may have been some doubt expressed by others about my son's true lineage, for while both his father and I knew the truth, we were aware of the raised eyebrows. Mother Helen was discreet and kind enough to keep any such gossip if she heard it, away from me. I regret that I did not learn the art of discretion from her sooner and there's been some family damage to this day, as a result.

I plan to call her at 7am Singapore time, since she told me this was best for her, early in the morning when it's cool still, when most people have been awake and active for a couple of hours. She will have eaten breakfast, be dressed and probably finished her morning devotions by that time. I wonder if she still asks God about why she hasn't been "taken" yet. I'm not arguing with God though. The world could use more women like her.