Afterword

I have loved hearing stories since I was small.

I remember at four often going with my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandmother to the cinema. Films had no sound then; someone narrated from start to finish beside the screen. It was fascinating.

From five or six I began borrowing whole sets of world-famous children’s tales from a classmate’s home: Grimm’s fairy tales, Cinderella, The Emperor’s New Clothes, Snow White, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Little Princess in the Tower, and many books whose names I have forgotten—all in Japanese. This classmate Ye’s father was a well-known doctor in Hemei Township. Whenever there was a good book he would buy it for his children, and so I too had the joy of reading fine books.

I spent a very long time with my paternal grandmother—until I married. Grandmother was a woman of the old days steeped in the Four Books and the Analects.

Grandmother’s cousin—my second great-aunt by marriage—when she married into our Tsai family, grandmother accompanied her. Two years later she and my grandfather consummated the marriage. Grandmother told us younger folk these things later.

Before her marriage into the Tsai family, grandmother studied the Four Books and the Analects with my grandfather’s second elder brother, who ran Wenkai Academy. Grandmother doted on her grandchildren. When she taught us how to behave she always used maxims. Grandfather’s work was assisting that second elder brother as a tutor in the Chinese classics school.

On quiet evenings he would call eight or nine of us, all in primary school, to his side and tell Liaozhai, Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, dynasties one after another—as if the stories would never end. Many vivid, moving scenes I have not forgotten to this day. Grandfather explained the lessons of conduct in the tales as he went. I absorbed a great deal of knowledge from those stories.

I was born under Japanese rule and had a Japanese education at primary school. When I rose to fifth year the times changed: Japan surrendered, my stepmother paid me no attention, and I left school.

I did not give up learning. Wherever there was a good book I would borrow or rent it. I remember in 1944, when the war against Japan was fiercest, the government ordered every household at night to keep lamplight from showing outside, lest American planes take it for a bombing target.

Every home put a black shade on the bulb. I often read secretly in that dim light until I finished, then slept.

If father caught me I pretended to sleep; when he left I read on. After retrocession, when I was fifteen, military instructors and the local government together ran a Mandarin cram class. Father, my cousin, and I enrolled.

Father was a policeman and badly needed Mandarin. We studied free for a year, every evening seven to nine, rain or shine. On graduation day there was a Mandarin speech contest. The teacher had me memorise a script and compete. The topic was equality between men and women; I came third. In the class I learned the fifty zhuyin symbols seriously. After that I read by zhuyin, counted strokes, looked up the dictionary; Japanese had already taught me some Chinese characters, and bit by bit I took in Chinese. Married early and with children, I often told myself I must broaden my knowledge so that when they grew up, finished their studies, and came home with wider horizons, I could keep up the conversation.

I had loved books from childhood. From Japanese to Chinese I found my own way: unknown characters I looked up or asked my husband. All along, whenever there was a good book—even without electric light, after I had lulled the eldest son to sleep I would read by kerosene lamp until my husband came off the night shift. From 1953 in the Tainan dependants’ quarter until our years in Laomei Mingde Village I could always read Today’s World monthly—another source of knowledge.

Reading brings so much good. A fine book can open the mind of a mother standing at a crossroads, unsure how to decide her child’s future. After reading Mr Wang Shangyi’s experience in The Evening of the Wild Pigeons, I suddenly saw clearly and agreed that my eldest son need not go to teachers’ college but could follow the path to university he wanted.

I especially like personal memoirs: Feng Feng’s Dawn Light, Chow Yu’s Taiwan Auntie, the story of Acer founder Stan Shih’s mother, Sun Cui-feng’s The Patriarch’s Daughter, Tang Hua-hua’s Cheer Up, Ulunana, Chang Kuo-jui’s Ohara’s Guide Dog Diary, Dr Lin Jian-long’s Gangster Professor, Lai Tung-chin’s Son of a Beggar, and Chiung Yao’s novels. Whenever the newspaper advertised a book I liked, I asked my eldest daughter to buy it or borrowed it from the library where she volunteered—and I still do. Though I loved reading from childhood and usually read the papers, I seldom put pen to paper. This memoir I began under my children’s and grandchildren’s encouragement.

At first many characters I could not write; sometimes I asked my husband, sometimes the dictionary. When I finished each piece, the fourth son Guangde typed it into the computer and sent it to the children and grandchildren. They wrote or rang with their thoughts. Encouraged again and again, at roughly one chapter a week I finished in a year. I never thought I would have a book of my own—a small witness to the age I have lived through.