China Bound and Unbound: History in the Making - An Early Returnee's Account

Foreword

xi Living with History, Dancing with Time Insights and experience along with wisdom and understanding are some of the benefits we acquire with the years. And with the diversity of encounters that Professor Frances Wong has had in her life as a student and academic in the colonial society of Hong Kong, China under Japanese occupation and eventually China liberated from foreign influence, tyrannical warlords and corrupt selfseeking republicans, she has a rich and colourful past to draw upon for her memoirs and reminiscences. It is difficult for a non-Chinese person to visit, much less explore, the mind of a young Chinese woman in the archly conservative colonial society of Hong Kong in the 1930s. The daughter of a well-to-do and well-educated Chinese family, Frances was sent to a Christian girls’ school where the students were predominantly Eurasian, Portuguese and Chinese. Yet the language of teaching was English, with no Chinese spoken except in the playground. Moreover the curriculum was designed to equip girls for life in a British colony, with further education in a university where the language was English and the professor of Chinese an Englishman. Under expatriate English teachers, they learned English poems and songs, the appreciation of Western art and culture and the beauty of Shakespeare, the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, but sadly little of their great neighbour and motherland China and its 5,000-year civilization, culture and language. The presumption of course was that this colonial environment and British hegemony would continue forever (world without end. Amen.) under a lease of FOREWORD p xii China, Bound and Unbound perpetuity which the interport trading city of Hong Kong then enjoyed. No one then ever thought that China would suffer foreign occupation, that the guerrillas waging war in their long march through the remoter provinces of China would one day march in triumph into Beijing and initiate the People’s Republic, and that forty-eight years later Hong Kong would be returned to its national home — albeit as a valued asset. To a young Chinese woman in the 1920s and 30s, the failure of the Lytton Commission to redress pre-war (World War I) colonial plunder and the subsequent May Fourth Movement gave out a promising prospect that things would change, that the revered traditions of a great civilization would once again be re-established and strengthened, that Chinese people would look to the coming of a new nationalism that would see pride and courage become harnessed to the virtues of dedication and struggle to lead the country to a new era of greatness. If few shared the feelings of Frances Wong at that age this is because Chinese nationalism was not viewed sympathetically by the largely merchant-class parents who sent their children to her school. Yet it offered the best education available in Hong Kong in a city where the official language of trade, law and government was English, and Cantonese the majority vernacular. How much this played on the mind of this young woman, how much she felt the discomfort and indignity of being an alien in her own community, her writings reveal. After completing her education, however, Frances felt the need to forsake the familiar comforts and relative prosperity of Hong Kong, and return to her cultural roots and take up life in her own society; indeed she would spend the rest of her life there, sharing the skills and learning with a China that would need an understanding of English to speak to the world on equal terms. This is Frances Wong’s story — reflecting a major cultural transition and acceptance of what being Chinese meant in the tumultuous post-war years of a country struggling to come to terms with communism and nationalism and to forge a dynamic future under a troika of Chinese values, free market economics, and communist discipline and administration. Looking back on her long and varied life, the political strife, the personal hardships and the sense of alienation, Frances tells her story with great insight xiii and her experience is one she relates with candour and clarity. I commend it to all who share a love of Chinese history and its great civilization with a continuing interest in her progress towards becoming one of the world’s great powers — from low man on the totem pole to become the eagle on the top. Robin Hutcheon Former editor...