Li Minglun on his grandma

My portraits of father and grandfather for the Lee family records are too sketchy---bare of essential details.

They are just brief character sketches written out of the blurred memory of the child I was. After the long passage of time.

Compared to the other biographies they are woefully inadequate. For instance, I did not even include the names of all my uncles and aunts. I did not mention of the names of their wives. I cannot even remember their names!! Many relative might take offence as no recognition was made of who they are. I must apologize.

Our relatives in China are too polite, asking us to write these mini-biographies. They are the ones who are capable of doing a much better job as Pei-hua(佩华), who is grandpa’s youngest and possibly most favorite daughter, and others like Yuan-yi(元一) one more intimately knowledgeable about the last decades of grandmother’s life time in China, why not ask them to write something to supplement my own??

The sweet oval face of my grandma with her bright eyes is still vivid in my memory, while other faces fade out, my fondness for her remaining undiminished. But when it comes to putting things down on paper, there is precious little I can say except that Sunday after Sunday when we were children we spent whole days visiting her at her home , and what big gathering s we had . And food on the table. All this strikes me as particularly nostalgic, now that I’m living in Capetown far away from all my old relatives.

A daughter of a governor of Guangdong province although her ancestors came originally from Hangchow, my grandmother grew up in a big family with a set code of conduct for proper social behavior, herself being the seventh child, hence her nickname “The 7^th lady”. Legend had it that her father being bigwig, when she traveled as a school girl, she had a whole train for herself! Her elder brother was himself a public figure with strong political convictions of his own although the role he played in politics remains controversial to this day in the annals of Chinese history. To the end of his political career, he remained “clean” and never was he known to have taken a bribe or amassed a personal fortune of his own. Once her mother was seriously ill while she was still a little girl, my grandmother was said to have peeled off a slice of skin on her arms with a small knife and cooked it with Ginseng and Chicken soup----Chinese folklore insisting that such a gesture of filial piety in a desperate situation without anybody else knowing about it then would help the patient. Like a prayer silently and sincerely offered , it would surely be answered!! I used to sleep in the same bed with my grandmother and notice the faint scar on the arm years after afterwards.

My grandmother loved people. She loved helping people and there were friends constantly in her house. Indeed she was famous for her hospitality and entertainment. There was food spread out on the table every few hours. ( pity the cook ! ) There were times however, while insisting others could help themselves, she would refuse to eat herself noting that there were days for devout Buddhists to fast according to the old calendar. My grandmother had a whole retinue of servants in her household, each doing his or her job, all of them receiving gratuities from guests who came to visit and entitled to generous bonuses at year end. Her young petite maids whom she purchased in their infancy and whom she pampered like little daughters of her own, were sent to school and were gorgeously dressed up like movie stars, sometimes to the envy of my aunts! No shopkeeper at the marketplace would ever suspect they were just housemaids and when the time came for them to get married, suitable, reliable husbands would be chosen (my grandma deciding by decree of course) and handsome dowries be provided for members of our extended family that they were.

Then in 1947,my brother and I left for the United States ,and even after 1959 when I returned from the US to Hongkong, I seldom wrote to my grandmother. We exchanged photographs occasionally. My mother used to read aloud to me” letters from Shanghai”. In fact after the political upheaval in China in the late 1940’s members of the family in HK were separated from the members of the family in Shanghai. For fear of causing unnecessary troubles to one another and so as to avoid the eye of the censor. The few letters that were written tried to say as little as possible except to convey the usual greetings and to repeat assurance that despite the distance in between everyone was ‘safe’ and ‘well’.

I was living in Hongkong after 1959. For all I knew , my family included only my own mother my brothers and sister having settled in America. My father having passed away. My grandma ---I remembered having one dear to my heart. Other uncles and aunts were in China, in a different world of their own! That seemed so long ago as in a another place at another time!

Then one day, accidentally as it were in the 1990s, in the home of Li Zufa(李祖法 ), someone greeted me and asked me if I was Minglun(名伦), he claimed to be a relative of mine and said he had only recently come to Hongkong from behind the Bamboo curtain (国内 ) And in what sounded like a confidential whisper he recounted the story of grandma in her last days. He said that grandma had been badly beaten by the hooligans, that belonged to the Cultural revolution. Those hooligans allegedly came from Beijing. Ugly hordes of unruly hooligans apparently were roaming uninhibited all over the country. Since then grandmother hardly spoke and remained silent till years later when she died. On hearing the story, I was infuriate and felt momentarily like clenching my fist so as to punch someone in the nose, but I tried my utmost to retrain myself. He then assured me that at a time when people avoided taking garrulously to one another or even greeting one another in the street, many relatives continued to come to visit my grandmother for she was favorite grandma to everyone , the last towering iconic figure of her generation in the Lee family! I sincerely pray that such orgies of savagery beating up the senior citizens---seldom seen even in Africa ----will not be repeated in China today which is hopefully more civilized .

Some ten years ago, my brother Mingsing(名信) went to china, when he returned, he had an inspiration---to build a pavilion in memory of our Chinese ancestors. You might say it was an homecoming ancestral instinct. He then proceeded to raise money for it. I was myself skeptical; I opposed the idea. Having lived for years in HK without much to do with relatives, I had no use for relatives. Relatives could be a nuisance! Besides, I was suspicious of the practice among some Chinese under the pretext of something praiseworthy of a senior member of the family or promoting an exhibition of a young talent artist so as to raise money by obliging friends and relatives to dig deep into their pockets to contribute . The Chinese call it (打秋风), and I opposed it, I asked my brother not to go ahead, for as ( 打秋风 )it might be looked upon even though has own intention of raising the money required was genuine and unimpeachable.

My brother went ahead anyhow. I am pleased today that I was proven completely wrong. Relatives from HK , from Taiwan , from various parts of China and America all contributed, They believed in my brother’s integrity and rejoiced in his enthusiasm, And sure enough, the pavilion materialized. It was Ming-choo(名觉 ) and MingYi( 名仪 )who designed it. Huge banquets were held in Ningpo; many faithfuls attended. I was thinking how grandpa and grandma ---the grandees of the Lee family ---would have been thrilled to attend too, had they been alive, maybe their spirits were present on those festive occasions, smiling, nodding with approval!

As for the brief biographical sketch for my father ( 祖永 ) , come to think of it, there might be something I forgot to include and tht is, in his youth, it was my granduncle ,my grandma’s elder brother ( 王克敏 ) who helped financially to send him to school at Philips Andover and Amherst college in America. More important than mentioning those who are the beneficiaries of one’s own generosity. It is appropriate in any biography as in life to acknowledge one’s indebtedness to others who have been helpful.

Last but not the least, in the late 1940s, during the few short years she spent in HK before leaving to study in the states, my sister ( 幼君 ) who was then only a round faced teenager, found herself a Cantonese boyfriend a romantic roving newspaper reporter and they soon married. Now, they are residing in Seattle WA, with son Kevin Kwong ( 邝开文) a lawyer and a eligible bachelor in town.

Rummaging through some of my books and knickknacks I had left behind, Kevin found by chance, a crumpled old photograph of my grandma. As he instantly took a fancy to her, he decided to keep the photograph for himself. There was something extra-ordinarily, enchantingly beautiful about this woman; he was cast under a spell ! I was thinking that throughout her lifetime my grandma delighted in helping all sort of people in many ways, her one passion being matchmaking. Many celebrities in Shanghai elite social circle including movie stars and opera singers came to seek her counsel. Maybe the ancient ghost of my grandma now probably in Seattle will be instrumental in finding our lonesome 40 year old bachelor a nice girl like the girl she was in her younger days.

Another detail I would like to add, trivial at the time but memorable in retrospect . One sunny afternoon in the year 1940 sometime before Pearl Harbor when I was about ten years old, I was sitting at father’s desk in our home on Sasson Rd, HK, doodling over a blank piece of paper and idly chewing on my pencil looking out of the bay window with the huge structure of Queen Mary’s Hospital not too far away on the green mountain side, My mother had insisted that as dutiful grandchild it was time for me to write my periodic letter to my grandma in Shanghai when she found me sitting there absent-mindedly and not getting on with the letter, suddenly in a fit of fury , she came flying from her couch and hit me in the head from behind me with the sharp knuckle of her tiny finger, delivering a stunning blow which caught me unawares. “remember your grandma? Write your letter now”, she shouted . A slow motion woman usually curled up on her couch my mother could be impetuous sometimes but it was a good lesson for me.

“祖母大人膝下敬禀者………I started writing, the words came easily!