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I meant to prod my grandma for the details about her and grandpa, but the flow of the conversation turned to this and I clarified a bunch of things about her early life — as you will see, I’d misunderstood a lot. She also talked a lot more about her parents.

As an aside: my grandma does not swear. I’ve sprinkled in some cuss words when I translated them loosely from Cantonese just because I can’t quite get the English to have the same level of disdain without the cussing.

The Yips did not have a farm, but they did have the largest house in Dongguan (東莞). That is because her grandfather was the doctor. “You get off the train and ask for the house of the Yips,” she said, “and people will lead you here.”

The pride she had in her grandfather was evident in her scathing description of her parents:

“My father was an opium addict, but that was not the worst of it. If opium was it, if that was all he did, it’d be alright since he wouldn’t have left the house, useless as he was.” She pulled on a rubber glove to do the dishes. It seemed almost like she was about to engage in a duel. Maybe she was. “But he was so filthy — he went to the brothel, a lot, and wound up with all kinds of diseases, and my mother would go and look for him there. Stupid, shameful woman!”

Her grandma urged her mother to leave, promising to care for my grandma and her sister if she does. “Grandmother even offered — she had a sister in Singapore who worked as a maid, which was a really good thing made quite a bit of money. She offered to have my mother sent there to work for her. But my mother refused. The devil knows why.

“She was very unhappy, and she would take it out on my sister and me. She’d say to us, ‘I should have remarried if it wasn’t for you scoundrels!’ but with grandmother on our side, we’d talk back. Heh heh. I would say, ‘Why don’t you? Grandmother takes care of us anyway!’ and my sister would add, ‘Yeah, if you went to Singapore you’d be sending us money. We’d all be rich already!’”

But her triumph was short-lived. Her father started pawning off their heirlooms. “We were wealthy, not by today’s standards of course, but we did have the biggest house. Our hall used to be decked with china and paintings and other wares. We had a main front door, and two back doors leading to two big gardens, where we had all kinds of fruit trees, any sort you can imagine. My father, he would take our stuff and leave by the backdoors — our house was so damn big we couldn’t guard it. So you can see why my sister and I became the butts of all manners of jokes at school.”

She went to a school nearby, started grade one when she was six. She boasted that she started a year younger than everyone else. She remembered, amusedly, that her sister was the opposite — she’d started late and then got stuck at third grade. After failing three times, and grandma was about to skip ahead of her, she refused to go to school again. Her grandfather insisted that she must have an education, so she wound up at a neighbour’s house to be home schooled. “She couldn’t do math, couldn’t learn her letters, hated the idea of going to school. But she sang very well.” She heaved a small sigh. “Today we would have sent her to a music school, but back then, what did we know?”

She was very athletic. She played every sport the school had to offer, even though her elders objected — it was considered quite unwomanly to be running and jumping around all day! Indeed, her mother dressed her as a boy until about ninth grade, since she had craved a son.

Anyway, around that time, the bombing began. Though her grandmother was deaf, she could read the fear on her family’s faces when the air strike sirens came. Grandma said that she would panic, and try to run, but on her bound feet couldn’t get very far, and she wasn’t really trying to get anywhere anyway. She just wanted to run. When she couldn’t run, she would sit by herself and cry.

She was so pitiful that they wrote letters to an uncle who worked in Guangzhou for help. He saved up some money, and bought them train tickets to get to him. The trains, grandma said, were as crazy and hectic and scary as films nowadays make them out to be. They had to run and squeeze in and it was crowded and took forever. “My grandma was very fat, which didn’t help,” she said, with just a tinge of sadness. “She probably had pretty bad hypertension. She would have fainting spells. We practically had to lift her up the steps, while she cried the whole way.”

Next: grandma’s move to Hong Kong, then Changping (常平)