Struggling to Make a Living

In the decades since our marriage, while the children were in school, I was often struggling to make a living, worrying where the money would come from.

My husband’s rank was master sergeant. When the children needed money most for their studies, his pay was only enough for seven mouths to live on.

Our children were all good students. Every term they brought home certificates for their father and mother.

Seeing them recognised at school comforted both my husband and me. I told the children: as long as you study hard and can get into public schools, I will find a way to see you through. I cared deeply about education because I was one year short of finishing primary school when, near the end of the War of Resistance, the whole family fled into the mountains and everyone caught malaria. With no doctor, it was my eldest sister’s husband who hired a lorry and brought the whole family down from the hills to his home and found a doctor for us.

In that chaos I could not continue my schooling—the regret and pain of a lifetime. I did not want that loss to happen to my children. I kept reminding myself: whatever the difficulty, they must have the best education I could give them. They were all capable students; I only had to find ways to earn money. My husband and I divided the labour. His shifts were not long—six hours a day.

Early, middle, and day and night shifts rotated. After a night shift he could rest a full day.

On night shift his days were free, so he had more time for housework. We agreed: he would shop and cook; I would look after the children, do laundry, and carry water. In the eyes of the neighbour wives, Mr Tang was the model good husband. They often teased me: “How come the husband shops and cooks while the wife only plays with the children?” I felt wronged, because I was slow at chores—you could not do childcare and marketing and cooking all at once. Their father did not want to mind the babies; minding infants left no time to rest, so he preferred the kitchen.

At first I altered uniforms for servicemen, with no fixed income.

When the youngest started primary school and the eldest sat the senior high entrance exam, yearly expenses grew and we would not survive unless we found something more.

Laomei Catholic church opened a kindergarten because Laomei Primary’s attached kindergarten rooms had been given to new Year One classes and there was no spare space. After discussion with the priest, the church took in the little ones.

The church had begun with a temporary nursery—half-day fees and snack money fifteen dollars a month per child. It improved gradually; years later the nursery became a registered kindergarten and half-day became full day.

To put the eldest through senior high, I became a nursery worker at the church, five hundred dollars a month. When the youngest was in Year One of primary, classes were only half a day—one week mornings, one week afternoons. I worked mornings at the church kindergarten and was off in the afternoon, but I got home around eleven thirty. The child needed lunch and had to be at school by half past twelve. Afraid he would be late, I talked it over with my youngest son: “Mum will teach you to wash rice and cook. Use the rice cup in the electric cooker—one cup of rice, rinse three times, one cup of water in the inner pot, a small notch of water in the outer pot, plug it in. I will cook the vegetables when I get back so you will not be late. Father and I work, your brother and sisters are at school—you stay home quietly till Mum returns, all right?” He was very good; he was only six. When his father left for the early shift, the little boy was alone at home.

He managed better than I had imagined. I was only trying to bring in a little more, and had to ask the youngest to bear it. One day Mrs Feng, the neighbour I was closest to, came to see me. She said the public toilets had no one cleaning them; the two of us could take the job—half an hour a day, one carrying water, one scrubbing, done quickly. Four hundred a month, two hundred each—“good money.” I hesitated and asked whether it would be embarrassing if people saw us cleaning toilets. Mrs Feng’s husband had been posted to an officers’ course in Pingtung for two years and money was tighter, so she wanted extra income. Hearing my worry, she said: “At noon everyone naps. We work while they sleep—half an hour and nobody will know.” I thought, two hundred a month is not bad, and agreed.

At noon the village was quiet. We started work. I forget how long we had been at it when the welfare officer spotted us.

He saw us—one with a broom, one with buckets—heading for the toilets and followed curiously. Mrs Feng asked nervously what to do. I said: “Never mind—tell him straight we are earning on the side.” After he heard us, he smiled and said: “That is really hard work.” Once he knew, we finished that month, then found someone outside the village to take over the toilet cleaning, as something we owed the village head.

In 1968 our dependants’ village got piped water. On the first day the new taps were turned on and water came at once; everyone was delighted—no more carrying water.

The supply came from two wells dug on the beach behind Laomei—one for the Fu Gui Cape radar station, one for Mingde Village households. Motors in the wells were switched on and off; the person in charge shut the motor off at nine every night and turned it on at six every morning, rain or shine, for two hundred dollars a month.

At first the new village head Mr Gu’s wife did the job. She was very brave—by nine at night households by the sea had shut their doors and the road was empty, yet she would go alone to the motor shed by the shore.

After a while she found it too hard and asked me whether I wanted to take it. She knew we needed side income. My husband and I discussed it. He asked: “If I am on night shift, will you dare go to the shore alone at nine to shut the motor?” I said I would ask the daughters whether they would go with me; if they agreed, we would take the job—two hundred a month still helped the household. The girls were very good; the second and third daughters agreed at once to accompany me at nine to the seaside to shut the motor—I was deeply moved. For a little more income we had to ask the children to bear it. We only did the switching when he was on nights, every four days, which was not so bad.

But after a few months orders came to post my husband to the Zhuzishan radar station—four days on the mountain, two days home, back on the third day. When he was away I had to handle the water. At five in the morning I dared go alone; at night I would not go unless the children came.

Two daughters had been enough, but leaving the two younger boys at home worried me, so all four came with me.

Summer was tolerable; rain or winter cold fronts were miserable, yet I still dragged them out to switch the motor. For two hundred dollars the whole family mobilised—blame my timidity; I dared not go out alone after dark. There was a reason: as a child I lived with my grandfather in our old Lukang house for more than a year. Cousins and our own siblings—more than a dozen children of similar age.

At night Grandfather gathered all the grandchildren and told ghost stories from Strange Tales—weird and marvellous. In the dim light he told them vividly; we listened wide-eyed, thrilled and frightened, as if ghosts were right beside us.

When he finished and went to bed, no one dared walk alone. Hand in hand we said good night and ran to our rooms, shut the door tight, and hid under the quilt. My third sister and I had to hold each other before we could sleep. I was the most timid yet loved ghost stories most, and remained a coward for life.

Though I had borne so many children, before bed I still asked my husband to walk with me to the public toilet—he was used to it. After more than a year on the mountain a sub-unit was set up near our home and he was transferred back.

After that the water job was only every few days again; the children no longer had to be woken from sleep every night to follow me to the shore. Not long after he returned, technology improved—the motor got an automatic switch. We only had to oil it weekly and change rubber rings on the bolts.

The work became much lighter; mother and children suffered less. We kept the job until 1981, when a grandson was born and we resigned. From 1958 to 1981—more than twenty years—it was the hardest, most grinding period for us as a couple, always racing the clock.

Switching water and cleaning toilets were spare-time earnings.

My real work was altering servicemen’s clothes and working as a nursery teacher at the church kindergarten. After work, when house chores were done, I sewed; time was limited, so my husband pitched in too. Besides his shifts, whenever he was free at home he helped me rip seams or hem trousers—life had made him handy with needle and thread.

From the 1960s Taiwan’s economy took off and electrical goods became very popular. The government encouraged hire purchase; in Mingde Village neighbours gradually bought refrigerators, televisions, and washing machines. We were the last household in the village to buy a refrigerator.

I remember the night it was installed—my husband and I lay listening to the motor hum, too excited to sleep.

At last we had saved the deposit; when Chun-lan brought ice cream home, there would be somewhere to keep it. Television and washing machine—we bought those last in the village too.

I worked at the kindergarten fourteen years. Pay rose from five hundred to seven hundred, nine hundred, fourteen hundred, to thirty-six hundred in January 1981; that June I handed in my resignation, and my husband and I moved to Taipei to be grandfather and grandmother.