The Unwanted

1. Meeting the Queen

That Friday was a summer day—6 July 2001. I was invited to Her Majesty the Queen’s reception for a celebration of thirty years of Chinese education in Edinburgh.

In the morning, I opened my camphor wood trunk.

Those scents again, filling the living room, had never changed even a little after years and years. The wooded mountains, the ravine streams, my mother’s breast, my little sister’s milky-sweet aroma; they came faintly from seemingly far away.

‘The Queen must wear red,’ I thought.

I finally chose a dark teal green silk quilted cheongsam dress instead of my favourite one in gold. Golden clothes used to be only worn by kings in China. It was a royal colour.

People always say the cheongsam is the ‘poem’ of the Chinese woman. That dress would be the most sophisticated, handmade in Hong Kong by a famous cheongsam maker. It would just lie on your body beautifully, no matter if you had a slender waist or a fuller figure. A well-cut cheongsam expressed a woman’s virtuousness, elegance, and gentleness. I called it magic clothes. I knew I would look good and feel good.

I closed the trunk, the copper-mounted corners still fitting perfectly in place. The scent faded slowly, like the wind, like the breeze.

Two months prior, I had been selected by members of the Chinese Community Association in Edinburgh to be the first person in the queue in the reception line.

‘Aunty Doris, you are the most suitable person to be the first to meet the Queen,’ said the chair, Mr Lau who was well known by the Chinese community and the city council.

On that sunny day with some showers—typical Scottish weather in the summer—my taxi was on the way to the city hall on the hill of the Royal Mile where I would meet the Queen.

I was thinking of a little story in the fifties in Hong Kong.

My husband Andrew, in his sergeant uniform, was hanging his hat and said with a smile, ‘Darling, today Jimmy said his wife Susie was found by the police because she was invited to Her Majesty’s yacht, Britannia, as a special guest to have a meal.’

‘Oh really?’ I was surprised. Susie was one of those girls who used to work on Prince Philip’s ship, HMS Tamar. They cleaned, washed and painted. She was given a lot of sweets.

‘We joked with Jimmy that his wife was Philip’s dream lover,’ Andrew said.

We couldn’t hold in our laughter. Jimmy was Andrew’s colleague. He was a naval officer during the war. He joined the Hong Kong police instead of coming back to England. He married a Tanka girl, Susie, whose family lived on the boats for generations.

Jimmy was famously very good at swimming. He could easily cross the water between the Hong Kong islands and Stonecutters Island, Ngong Shuen Chau, where there was an important naval base and where my husband worked once.

I still remember that day, down to what was on our dinner table—it was wok-grilled whole bream, char siu, the roasted pork, and fried water spinach with spicy bean curd, called Chinese cheese. Our nine-year-old adorable daughter was wearing a sky-blue dress with yellow and white chrysanthemums, her new favourite dress that I had made for her.

It was May 1959, a lovely evening. I couldn’t help but wonder if our Queen knew about Susie.

The taxi finally stopped outside the city hall.

‘Seven pounds please.’ The driver looked younger than my daughter.

‘I don’t think so, it is always five pounds,’ I insisted.

‘Your kind of immigrants should pay more,’ he replied as he looked at me from the mirror.

‘Your free school meals were on my tax bills I paid,’ I said.

The taxi driver couldn’t say anything. He took five pounds.

The Queen walked in slowly with her iconic warm smile. She wore a long pink blossom floral dress, almost as I had guessed. It surprised me that the Queen was much prettier than she was on the television. Her face looked extremely soft, it seemed to have no wrinkles at all, like an egg that had just been peeled out of its shell.

Seven years younger than me, the Queen walked toward me. I curtsied.

‘How long have you been in England?’ she asked after I rose from my curtsy.

‘Since 1946.’

‘Oh, quite a while,’ the Queen smiled, ‘I hope you are happy in my country.’

‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

2. An Unwanted Girl

A Baby Girl Was Born

My name is May Oi. Beautiful words with beautiful meanings: ‘pretty’ and ‘love’. I was named by my grandfather.

The day I was born, he said to my father, ‘A girl?’ He hummed on his opium bed, ‘Girls should be born last, not first. Call her… May Oi.’ In Cantonese, the pronunciation matched my grandfather’s meaning completely: ‘The girl should come last, not first’.

That was 1919, in Hong Kong.

Not long after Hong Kong was named Hong Kong from an unknown village, my grandfather's father arrived to do business with people from the Hou family village, Heng Tin. My great-grandfather was a very smart man. The Hou businesses, in addition to the silk shops on Up and Down Nine Road in Guangzhou, included a mine in Guangxi. However, the main business was in Hong Kong and consisted of three flour and rice shops for both wholesale and retail. They were all named using the most important words for business, like ‘booming’, ‘lucky’ and ‘success’.

In the early nineteenth century, the wheat flour industry was the second largest industry in China. Due to the decrease in the import of foreign wheat flour and the increase in European demand, Chinese flour was exported in large quantities to Britain, France, the United States, Japan and Southeast Asia. The flour industry was a very profitable business at the time. Grandfather became a rich man in his village after many years. He had the nickname ‘Eight Million Hou’, because he was the eighth of his father’s children.

The Hou family’s largest flour and rice shop was located on Sheung Wan Road on Hong Kong Island, a very busy north-south regional business trading street. The three-storey wood and brick building was also my home. The trading shop was on the ground floor and outside the arcade. My grandfather’s office was in the shop’s side room.

When an important buyer came, my grandfather would come out of his room, ask his servant to make a nice pot of tea, sit by the well-made rosewood round table in the middle of the shop and talk. The kitchen and dining living room behind the patio yard were right in the middle of the building. Light and rain came from the sky.

My father’s seven or eight caged canaries were hung from a bamboo pole on the patio; they sang happily, non-stop every day. There were warehouses on both sides of the patio. Bags of flour and rice were hoarded into piles like hills. A few strong men would come in and out carrying big bags of wheat flour, pouring with sweat in the summer.

My favourite game was playing hide-and-seek in the flour shop with my aunts and my younger brother Gok. Once, I found a very hidden place. The flour hill next to the wall left a big gap, just enough for me to move in. No one knew about it, and no one could find me even when they looked round and round. They ran to Grandfather’s room and asked if he saw me. He took off his gold framed glasses and said, ‘May Oi? She broke my gold pen yesterday. She hasn’t paid me back yet. I haven’t seen that kind of naughty girl before—she is not even like a girl. Why didn’t she grow a little bit more in her mother’s stomach to be a boy? Get out and ask her to come to see me.’

‘May Oi, May Oi, you are dead this time, Grandfather wants you to get out to see him,’ my Number Ten Aunt shouted deliberately. I didn't dare show up. I was scared thinking of my grandfather’s cane, a chicken feather sweeper, which most likely was used more to beat children instead of clean dust and spiderwebs.

I don’t know for how long I stayed in that secret corner. I was called by my mother's gentle voice in a dream: ‘May Oi, good girl, come out quickly.’ I opened my eyes to see my mother's curved eyebrows. She was kneeling on the ground, reaching out her hand to me. ‘Oh, look at you, you are covered in white flour.’ Mother bent down and patted my water-brush-red satin dress gown, wiping my face with her handkerchief embroidered with lotus flowers.

She said softly, ‘May Oi, remember, your hair can't be messed up like this, it's not ladylike. We are waiting for you to eat. Come.’ Mother walked in front of me, her dark green gown, long, down to her knees, covering half her white trousers. She wore fashionably styled pointed-toed black leather shoes and her petite body swayed—she looked like a princess in the Cantonese opera.

Every month, my mother would ask Fa, one of our housekeepers, to shave her face. Fa used two very thin ropes to roll back and forth on Mother's face. My mother soon had two clean eyebrows and a neat hairline, like a fairy in a painting. I asked my mother to shave my face and eyebrows. She said, ‘Silly girl, not until the day you get married.’

My Mother

My mother married into the Hou family at the age of fifteen, but she was only fourteen by the traditional Chinese calendar count, which always added one year to your birth age. She became the wife of the fourth young master in the eighth house of the Hou family. She was the daughter-in-law of the most well-known, virtuous and able woman in the village.

My mother was the eldest daughter of a comfortable family whose surname, Sung, was from a neighbouring village. She had a marriage agreement ever since she was the age of five with my father who was age seven.

Their marriage was well arranged by their parents. They had never formally met before the marriage and could not even mention each other in front of people if they didn’t want to be gossiped about. Intimacy between men and women in any public place was a disgrace. This was what was taught by girls’ parents and their parents’ parents, going back thousands of years.

On the wedding day, the Hou family sent a beautiful sedan carriage decorated with silk flowers to the Sung home, carried by eight men. The carriage would be sat in only once in a woman’s life. She would be very proud to tell everyone that she was transported to her husband's home by an eight-man-carried sedan carriage. It meant she was the first wife of her husband and had power and supreme status above her husband’s other wives. Her children too.

From the moment my mother stepped out of this carriage and across the threshold of the Hou family’s big main door, she became Hou property, and they gave her the right to release her feet that had been wrapped and tied by fabric.

A lot of girls sobbed as they were forced into a foot binding both day and night; they had to wrap their feet as early as three years old because this beauty ideal was booming at the time of the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty. No matter poor or wealthy, women with small feet were highly desirable. Men were amused by women’s tiny little shoes. They also believed the way women walked with tiny feet created a better body, which they found more enjoyable.

After the marriage agreement was made between the Hous and the Sung’s, my grandfather sent a message to the Sung family: his future daughter-in-law did not have to bind her feet to as small as three inches, like a golden lotus flower, but they were not to be as big as dragon boats. The Sung family wrapped their daughter’s feet very carefully to match the Hou family’s request.

My mother’s feet had to be wrapped, but only at night up until the day before her marriage. Luckily, she was not in much pain. Her feet were small, but she could wear heeled leather shoes. They were always polished and shiny.

I mostly remember my mother’s smells. The camellia tree from her hair. The smell of camphor wood from her pyjamas, faintly unforgettable like a forest after sun and rain—so strong, so refreshing.

My mother’s hair was deep black, shiny and carefully taken care of. She always said that girls are not humanlike with messy hair. Hair became something in my life I could not take lightly.

Every time my mother wanted to wash her hair, Fa would smash off a piece of sediment from the camellia tree. This sediment was made to into a big, flat solid cake, then boiled in hot water. A towel was used to separate the residue. The water would be a clean, light brown. This kind of shampoo was used widely in Southern China; it could stop itching and dandruff and give your hair a shiny, silky look.

‘Mrs Hou, it’s ready now,’ Fa shouted with her strong Nanhai accent when the water temperature was just right. The copper water basin was placed on a wooden shelf by the patio.

My mother elegantly bent over. Her long hair was soaked in the large basin. She closed her eyes and rubbed her hair gently with her hands. When it was over, she stretched out her hand and called me: ‘May Oi, hand me a towel.’ She looked down and dried her hair. I squatted down to see her flushed face. Water dropped on my face, warm and fragrant.

Before my mother went to bed, she took down her hair bun, sat in front of the vanity mirror, and combed her hair. The foreign-style ivory, oval-shaped comb bought for her by my father was very pretty and delicate, with foreign beauties painted on the handle and matching mirrors on the back. She always put it back in the box carefully after she was done.

I lay in her arms in bed, her hair as soft as her silk pyjamas, the fragrance from her wrapping me up around.

All my mother’s silk and wool clothes had to be folded carefully and tidied up inside a large camphor wood trunk. She insisted on folding them herself, not Fa.

In traditional Chinese culture, we believe the camphor tree has tenacious vitality. It represents auspiciousness, longevity, happiness and harmony. Since ancient times, its bark, fruits and wood have been used as medicines. These easily grown trees can survive for thousands of years.

The father would plant a camphor tree when his daughter was born. The tree would grow up with the daughter in excellent shades of green until she married. The strong stump of the camphor tree would become the wood of a large trunk. This would be the best gift, a must-have from parents to daughter on her wedding day. The fragrance of the camphor wood would remain forever. It would stop all moths and damp. Their daughter’s most important belongings would be safe for a long, long time.

My mother’s camphor trunk was carved all over with phoenixes, cranes and peony flowers, the four corners covered with glistening copper. It was beautiful.

After my brothers were born, my mother would accompany me to sleep only when I had a fever; only then could I sleep with her and my father.

I shared a room with Choi, another housekeeper. She was about fifteen years old. Her snoring was like thunder, and she often talked loudly in her sleep. Once she yelled: ‘May Oi, get up and pee!’

One night, I quietly got up, opened her mosquito net, and put a big piece of salt in her mouth. The big salt was hidden in my bed for a few days, but I couldn’t wake up to tease her. That night, I decided to drink a pot of my grandfather’s premium oolong tea to keep my eyes open until Choi started talking in her dreams.

Those days in Hong Kong were happy memories.