This is a fascinating book, and for two reasons. It's a particularly astute example of the ever-expanding From-China-To-America genre, and it features a very famous Taipei school for girls, the First Girls' School, or Beiyinu (
In fact, it does not so much feature this elite academy as center itself entirely round it, tracing the life stories of four pupils of the school during the 1950s, one of whom is the author's mother.
All came to Taiwan from China with the KMT in 1949, and all are now living in the US. All were daughters of very important people in pre-communist China, and none of them expected to stay in Taiwan for long. Three of their fathers had been educated abroad -- Berkeley, Heidelberg and Oxford -- and all routinely supported the KMT. (Only those who had gone to school in France, Chang wryly comments, proved exceptions, Chou En-lai being the most notable example). Some of the families of those even more highly placed than theirs had already moved directly to the US, bypassing altogether what in those days was looked on as the "Taiwan stage."
Quite why the author chose these particular three of her mother's classmates is never made clear. It seems there were many more possibilities. When a reunion of the Beiyinu "Class of 55" met in Hawaii in the early 1990s, 39 women turned up, all of whom almost immediately recognized each other. Leslie Chang, who was there with her mother, must have had plenty of material to choose from. But the lives of the four girls she did choose provide vivid insights into the life of the times.
There was Xiao Mei (now Dolores Fung) whose parents, incredibly for China in the 1940s, had divorced. Her mother had been a National Assembly member in the KMT capital, Nanjing. And there was Ling from Guangzhou (today Suzanne Koo). Her father had been senator for Guandong Province, where their house had six servants.
Man-hua (Margaret) from Beijing was the daughter of the president of a university in Manchuria that had been under the sway of the warlord Chang Hsueh-ling. As the latter had been behind an attempt to kidnap Chiang Kai-shek (
Lastly, there was Han Man-li, also from Beijing, whose father had been a general in the KMT forces before he was killed at the Battle of Siping in 1947. She was the author's mother.
All crossed over with their families to Taiwan in the mass exodus of 1949, Man-li and her children in March in a boat holding four families on a stormy trip that lasted three days.
The daughters eventually all appeared at Beiyinu, albeit as a result of a competitive examination. "We used to call the school zai men, the narrow gate," one former pupil explained to the author. Ninety percent of the graduates from her class received scholarships to Taiwan National University (Taida), and from there it was an easy route to study in the US, she said.
The key point was that entry to the States with a student visa was for most the only realistic route to eventual American nationality, owing to the nature of immigration rules at the time.
Chang notes how far her mother and her contemporaries at Beiyinu had moved from traditional Chinese society.
Their grandparents had been instrumental in overthrowing the imperial dynasty. Their parents had studied abroad during the 1930s, and at some of the best universities in the world. Yet the school itself was inflexibly traditional, ruled by codes of obedience and rote learning and almost a throwback to an earlier, Confucian, age. It is evoked in considerable detail in this book, and forms the hub of the early part of the narrative.
In those days Beiyinu's junior high and senior high sections were both housed on the same premises. School was six days a week, with Saturday afternoons devoted to an intensive cleaning program, in which students polished the red wooden railings and the green tiles that rose a third of a way up the walls. Lunch-boxes, collected into a giant net, were collectively steamed in the kitchens. During her mother's third year the obligatory white blouse was changed to dark green (as it remains today), reputedly because Chiang Kai-shek had decreed that white made the girls easy targets for enemy bombers.
Nearby was the site used for practice by the national basketball team. Chang describes one romantic liaison, enormously discreet by modern standards, consisting largely of long mid-evening phone calls. But it nevertheless was enough to see the pupil spirited away prematurely by her parents to North America. The girl, not surprisingly, became the subject of intense gossip, then glamorous legend, at the school. But it is her story, when the author finally tracks her down in modern America, that eventually turns out to be the most surprising of the four.
Not all the families were rich by the time they arrived in Taiwan. Gold bars may have been sewn into the clothing of many migrants, but others had little more than their pride and their talents.
Some of the girls declined to go on school outings to Yangmingshan simply because their families didn't have the spare cash available.
Any girl who scored high grades was automatically entered on a college course in science or engineering. Studies in the humanities were not smiled on by ambitious parents. In this as in other details, little would seem to have changed.
Leslie Chang points out how her family, and those of many of her school friends, were the former administrative elite of a nation of over 500 million people arriving on an island of just 10 million. Needless to say, this book represents the viewpoint of this former highly skilled and consequently privileged class, albeit those of them who have now migrated to, and flourished in, America. It is an intelligent and thoughtful account, and the whole story is set into relief by the author's own struggles to come to terms with her Chinese inheritance, the theme on which the book ends.
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