Bridging Generations in Taiwan by Silverman Philip;Chang Shienpei;

Author:Silverman, Philip;Chang, Shienpei;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 6

Lee Family

A Bitter Life

This life story represents a departure from the others in that the interviewee is the mother of the interviewer. Because of this great deal more is known about this life review than is revealed in the narrative. While the same procedure as before is followed in presenting the life story of the mother, we occasionally provide information known to the interviewer but not mentioned in the narrative. Because the interviewer has been alienated from and at times in conflict with her mother, it was feared this would make the encounter more difficult. In fact the anticipated difficulties never emerged; once the daughter presented the interview as important to her work, even though the purpose might not have been completely understood by the mother, it went quite smoothly.

Born in 1941, Lee-Ma remembers her early years as a time of great hardship. Practically the only food available was wild vegetables, the dry sweet potatoes left over from other people’s gardens, and the leaves from sweet potatoes, at the time a vegetable considered only food for pigs. The period she spent with her own parents turned out to be relatively brief since at age four she was adopted out; during this time adoption was a fate many girls from poor families were destined to experience. When her parents told her she was to be sent to an adoptive family, she cried and didn’t want to go, but her family needed the 600 NT dollars received for her (that amount was approximately several months income of an average wage earner in the 1940s).

She became the second adopted child in the family she was sent to, the other also a daughter who was about four years older. The stepsisters didn’t get along, often fighting during the years they grew up together. She remembers that both of them were beaten by the adoptive parents, especially the mother who previously had been “. . . a woman of the liquor house,” that is, a prostitute. When angry she would pull hair, pinch, kick and punch the girls heartlessly. From a very early age hard work was expected of Lee-Ma. She described her childhood years as full of misery: “Well, childhood was difficult—work, yes; food, no. Also physical beatings. Don’t you think that it is difficult to work and no food? I got the same vegetable every meal, either in soup or blanched. Eating so much of that made my menstrual bleeding look like the water from that vegetable. Don’t you think that was terrible?” One chore she found particularly onerous was collecting the waste from the pigs in two buckets that were then carried on either side of a pole balanced on her shoulders and brought to the fields for fertilizer. She blames the heavy weight of the buckets, a job she continued to do until in her twenties, for her modest height (somewhat under five feet).

At age seven she was allowed to begin school and was successful in completing six years. That

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