Through The Dragon's Gate by Jean O'Hara

Author:Jean O'Hara [O'Hara, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood
ISBN: 9781861517388
Publisher: Memoirs Publishing
Published: 2017-03-20T05:00:00+00:00

If there were no visitors, my grandmother would enjoy a film in the afternoon, often just finishing when we returned from school. Sometimes it would be a Peking Opera, with all the high pitched wailing and period costumes that went with it. I was often amazed at how many of the songs my grandmother actually knew. The stories of course, were well-known classics, and grandmother had many favourites. They were all fairly similar though. The one I remember was about a woman and her children who had been thrown out into the streets when her husband died. They ended up being taken in by a nasty landlord. Those who lived on his land were abused and maltreated, beaten and starved by this heartless man who had cheated his way through life, taken from the poor and lived on the fruits of their labour. In a desperate attempt to stop the misery and hardship which had befallen his family, the eldest son bade farewell to his mother and journeyed far away to sit the series of open, competitive imperial civil service examinations. If he passed, it would allow him to rise above his social status. Regardless of birth, background, age or appearance, a man could leap from rags to riches overnight if he was successful. Children of mandarins did not automatically inherit their fathers’ titles. They had to sit the exams like any ordinary peasant or labourer. Education was the only way forward.

And this peasant had worked hard at his books, studying the four Confucian Classics.

During this young man’s absence, his mother and sister had been thrown out of their humble shack, and had been left to roam the streets, begging for their keep. I remember the tears in my grandmother’s eyes as she empathised with the peasant woman, reliving her grief and misery.

‘You’ll never know,’ she whispered to me during the film. ‘Your grandmother has so many sorrows and heartaches, buried deep inside. You are too young to understand.’

And I did struggle to understand. I was frustrated by my limited mastery of the Cantonese dialect. All I could have with my grandmother was a child’s conversation. I did not know the words or the language to comfort her; physical displays of affection were not customary. My educational career, rooted in the British school and university system, took me away from my Chinese roots, and I never acquired the language to say what I wanted to say, even as an adult. But intuitively I felt for my grandmother, and our relationship was deep and profound and unquestioned, but it was never verbalised. After all, it was she who looked after me as a child when my mother returned to full-time work when I was two weeks old. It was she who comforted me when I was in pain; who nursed me through illness. It was she who clothed and fed me, and who was there at home when I returned from school. I can see now how it must have hurt

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