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My name is Jin Luxian. I was born in Shanghai’s Nanshi District1 on 20 June 1916. In 1916 World War One was raging in Europe, without any sign of a clear outcome between the two sides. China’s government declared war on Germany and Austria and, to assist the allies, many young people were sent to France to provide additional labour power in the support areas, as all available Frenchmen were at the front. The then leader of China’s Beiyang clique, Yuan Shikai, signed the treacherous ‘Twenty-One Demands’ treaty with Japan to meet the demands of Japanese militarists and to further his own ambitions. Japan planned to colonise China and seized the opportunity to occupy the Jiaozhou Peninsula. Yuan Shikai’s attempt to revive imperial rule met with the opposition of all Chinese, with the result that as the self-proclaimed Hongxian Emperor he became panic-stricken and met with an early death. After Yuan Shikai’s death his subordinate generals used the support of various foreign powers to seize political control and natural resources, setting up a series of semi-independent and internecine states, bringing the people to the depths of disaster. When in 1919 the victorious allies (the United States, France and Britain) organised the Paris Peace Conference, they decided to pass Germany’s confiscated colonial possessions in Shandong Province to Japan, causing unprecedented anger among the Chinese, leading to the May Fourth Movement and forcing the Beiyang clique delegation to refuse to sign the Treaty of Versailles. I was born at a time when the people of our country were suffering from the chaos of civil disorder and foreign occupation, so during my youth there was no National Day and only national disgrace. 1. The Chinese city, formerly walled, to the south of the Bund and the foreign concessions. 1 Youth 8 The Memoirs of Jin Luxian The day after my birth was the saint’s day of the young saint Aloysius Gonzaga so I was christened Louis in French, while my father gave me the name Luyi in Chinese. Later, when I was in middle school, the class supervisor said that Luyi was meaningless in Chinese and changed my name to Luxian (which has a similar pronunciation to Luyi in Shanghai dialect). I have used this latter name throughout my life. My father was silent at home; he went to work in the morning and came home in the evening. On Sundays he stayed at home reading, preferring novels, especially detective stories. He smoked incessantly and only rarely talked to his two sons. When I look back, it seems as if he never spoke to us at all. He had an illness that prevented him from taking communion more than once a year, because of the requirement to purify the body by not taking food or drink from midnight on the day before mass. My father was a most generous man. I remember that before Chinese New Year he would sort through the IOUs people had given him and say to my mother: “This person and that person have still not paid, let’s not ask them to pay us back.” He then burnt the IOUs. My mother always agreed with him. Many visitors came to our house, especially from my paternal aunt’s family. Among them I remember Zhang Dengtang (aka Thaddeus Tsang) who became a priest and his younger brother Zhang Dengyin who came often. After my family went bankrupt and my parents died, I once met the latter in the street and called out to him warmly, but he ignored me. I suffered from this slight for many years, thus learning a lesson in the cold ways of the world. I’ve never seen my family tree, but suspect that my ancestors were peasants for generations back, that they were poor people without any social status and thus never had a family tree. I am very hazy about my ancestors and just remember my grandfather. A village elder showed me the ring of seven tombs and told me: “Jin Family Village had seven brothers named Jin. A few hundred years ago they came to this wasteland, established boundaries, married, raised children and grandchildren , all staying in one place until it became a village of Christians where most people had the family name Jin. So it was called Jin Family Village.” Strangely enough, when the seven tombs were dug up during the ‘Cultural Revolution’, one of the tombs was found to...

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