The Concubine's Daughter (77 page)

If my impressions of China needed any qualification, this came as a treasure trove of information when I married into one of Hong Kong’s founding dynasties, with branches in Shanghai and Macao. The Civil Library of Hong Kong was donated by the family, as were many of the colony’s hospitals and colleges, so there was no shortage of history.

When a person of foreign blood takes up professional life in Hong Kong or on the Chinese mainland, he or she is automatically given a Chinese name to have printed on the flip side of their business card. A chop or seal bearing the adopted name is also carved from soapstone in the traditional manner.

The great honor of being received into the arms of a Hong Kong family, especially one of notable heritage, requires certain standards of behavior and acceptance of ancient customs on behalf of the foreign member. The most important of these is the choosing of a Chinese name by which he or she will be thought of by the family elders. The choosing of such a name is the responsibility of the patriarch or matriarch, and is taken very seriously. The newcomer is observed for weeks or months until a name is chosen to best translate his or her character and calling. In my case, an elderly aunt who had devoted her life to the education of Hong Kong’s young people—a very dear lady with a doctorate from Cambridge University—provided me with the name of Pai Kit Fai, which loosely translated means something like “Person of Letters and Grand Ambition.”

While I take the name most seriously, its interpretation is of less importance as it can differ with each new ear, eye, and tongue. A Chinese guest once took me aside at an important banquet to advise me (in a whisper) that my name could also be translated as “Large Mountain of Lup-sup,” which I discovered was the Cantonese term for unpleasant garbage. Fortunately, I also discovered that the bearer of this disturbing news was a sworn enemy of the family and an uninvited troublemaker. So, Pai Kit Fai it is and always will be.

Behind the Novel

For centuries before the early 1900s, there was a prominent male domination in China. Women were deprived of all rights and were present mainly to serve men. Women served as slaves, concubines, and prostitutes. What follows is a brief social history of the Chinese custom of female enslavement as portrayed in
The Concubine’s Daughter.

Although urban areas had seen progress in the condition of women’s lives—in the abolition of foot binding and in professional and educational opportunities—rural women were scarcely affected. Their vulnerability was due not only to a perpetuation of patriarchal values but also to the absence of economic opportunities, which maintained the time-honored role with which women were still associated—to do with domesticity reproduction, as well as sexual services. Thus patriarchal dicta, coupled with the demands for unpaid domestic labor for prostitutes and concubines, plus Chinese women’s lack of general economic independence, contributed to a disparate situation: While educated Chinese women clamored for political rights, women from the poorer social strata were still being sold into slavery.

Hong Kong was not only an entrepôt for inanimate goods between China and the rest of the world, but also for human beings. Girls of Chinese descent born in Singapore, in the Dutch Indies, in the Straits, and in Macao were brought to Hong Kong for profit; girls from Shantou, Shanghai, Tianjin, and the rural hinterlands were sold by way of Hong Kong to Southeast Asian
markets. All these girls shared a background of poverty, whether rural or urban. Some girls could recall farms on which the whole family had eked out a living; perhaps at some stage the family lost its tenancy, drifted to the nearest city, and during the phase of alienation from what had constituted the family’s rootedness in social and moral values, the sale of a daughter would occur. Disassociation from a supportive context of kinship relations eroded many of the social inhibitions parents might have had in selling their daughters into an unknown fate.

In times of greatest desperation boys, too, were sold, mostly to be adopted; but this was the last resort and an admission of ultimate defeat. Girls, being by cultural definition “outsiders” in a patrilineal society, sooner or later to be married off to another family, went first. Patriarchal evaluation of the female sex, supported by the absolute authority of the
pater familias
to decide the fate of his family, provided for an obvious solution in times of material crisis: to sell the daughter, and grant the rest of the family at least a temporary respite.

At these times of crisis, parents, when parting with their daughters, were not always indifferent or callous to their fate. With the same reluctance but resignation in the face of an unrelenting fate with which families left their home villages to face an unknown future in search of a living, they may have resorted to the next step in a downward spiral of despair—offering their daughters on the market.

Excerpted with permission from
Concubines and Bondservants:

The Social History of a Chinese Custom
by Maria Jaschok

(© 1988, Oxford University Press, East Asia)

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