Pros: unsentimental, honest, imaginative, intimate portrayal of a family sundered
Cons: heartbreaking
The Bottom Line: A family history painstakingly and brilliantly reconstructed, highlighting the struggle of Chinese immigrants to survive in a foreign land (Canada, 1920s-) while supporting their impoverished families back in China.
jc_hall's Full Review: Denise Chong - The Concubine's Children
May-ying was 17 when she found out she has been sold as a concubine to Chan Sam, a man who had gone to Gold Mountain (North America) to seek his fortune. His first ‘at-home’ wife had been left behind to mind hearth and home, but May-ying would travel there to live with him and bear sons for him. In the event, May-ying bore him two daughters but no son. She also had to work as a lowly waitress in a tea-house to earn back her passage. Beautiful and witty, May-ying worked hard and excelled at her job, earning more than Chan Sam, especially during the Depression when he became jobless. As his concubine, May-ying’s earnings went straight into Chan Sam’s pocket. He would send a good portion of the money home to China, and May-ying would bite her tongue. When their two daughters were of school-age, a decision was made to take them back to China for the first years of their schooling. When the time came for them to return to Canada, May-ying agreed to leave her daughters behind, but now heavily pregnant with her third child, she refused to give birth in China. Convinced by a fortune-teller that she was carrying the long-awaited son, the couple returned Canada where May-ying gave birth to her third daughter, Hing.
As Hing grew up, her parents separated, though this did not stop her father turning up on pay-day to collect what he considered his share of May-ying’s money. Already an inveterate gambler and a heavy drinker, May-ying became increasingly neglectful and abusive. Hing excelled at school but was ashamed of her mother and the rooming-house where they lived. While her mother spent her after-work hours in gambling dens, Hing had to assume responsibility for a baby boy that May-ying adopted to ensure that someone would take care of her in her declining years. Even after Hing married (happily, for love, to a Chinese Canadian) and had children of her own, her parents still contrived to bring strife into her life.
Hing’s second daughter, Denise (the author) was fascinated from a young age by her mom’s stories of life with her grandmother in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and has managed to weave together the history of her mother and maternal grandparents’ lives—a history that reflects the lives of first and second generation Chinese-Canadians in Vancouver from the 1920’s. At the same time, she does not lose sight of the ‘other’ family in China, the ones left behind who lived through war, famine, and Mao Zedong’s infamous Cultural Revolution.
Her brilliant evocation of a time and place (Vancouver’s Chinatown in the early part of the 20th century), the customs and mores of the Chinese immigrants, is a testament to exhaustive research over and above that for her family’s history. This has enabled her to set her mother and grandmother’s stories against an authentic and realistic background, and imbues the women’s lives with extra meaning and poignancy.
Part history, part memoir, The Concubine's Children is an amazing achievement. The author has re-created the lives of her mother and grandparents from little more than memories, a few letters and family photographs. She has filled in the blanks with a dramatist’s eye and demonstrated not just a vivid sense of imagination but a deep insight into the Chinese psyche. In addition, she has allowed no sentimentality to cloud her depiction of close family members, all of whom are shown, warts and all, in character studies that render these flawed human beings utterly, tragically, believable.
I was particularly struck by the ending, when the author accompanied her mother to visit their estranged family in China in 1987. All along, Hing had rued her unhappy childhood, half-jealous of her sisters for whom their father had sacrificed so much. He, like so many of his generation, had lived an austere life in Chinatown while sending what he could ill afford back to China. Not surprisingly, Hing felt she had been hard done by while her estranged sisters benefited from their father’s attention and financial support. Also, her sisters had had one another while Hing had always been lonely and uncared for. ‘I had nobody’, was her oft-repeated mantra to her daughters.
But in China, face to face with her Chinese siblings, Hing finally came to realize that, despite her unhappy childhood and the abuse she had suffered, she, unlike her siblings, had been spared the horrors of war, famine, persecution and the destitution that was a peasant’s lot. Rather than enlighten them to the fact that it was her mother’s hard work that had financed their house in China, she allowed them their delusions, and considered herself blessed by comparison. After all, she had been born in Canada. She had married for love, had five healthy children, all of whom were now grown up, educated and independent. If her parents had given her little, at least they had given her the possibility of a better life—perhaps the best gift of all. I like to think that the bitterness that had tormented her throughout her life dissipated in that moment of enlightenment.
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