From the first day on, Leung would arrive at the factory to be

met by a fresh crowd of desperate labourers begging for work. They

offered to work for less than Leung’s ten men, suggesting wages

that could barely have kept them fed, but my great-grandfather

remained loyal to his original workers and the agreement he’d

Leung’s plan of action was simple but effective. When the

modest factory was built he split his team into two. Three or four

were assigned to the harvesting and grinding of the soy beans,

and the rest were tasked with carrying the endless buckets of

water needed to dilute the pulp, or to lugging the tanks of

finished sauce.

Like Leung, they were ordinary farmers with families, but now

that the Guangzhou region was being sapped by share-cropping

they had fallen on hard times and were grateful for the chance my

great-grandfather offered. They were adaptable – they had to be –

constructing the hut itself first, then becoming skilled and loyal

factory hands.

He took the gamble of not selling his soy bean crop at the local

markets, but turning it into soy sauce itself – a premium product

that he could sell to the highest bidders as he chose. He set aside a

small amount of farming land to build his tiny factory, a hut for

processing the raw beans. He took on ten men to do the work, and

as he had no money to pay wages, he promised them enough rice

and soy to feed their families for half a year. They could barter the

rice for other goods in the markets, too.

I like to think that Leung’s single-mindedness is a trait that runs

down through the generations of our family all the way to his greatgranddaughters.

We have always been able to make the best of any

situation. My grandmother was to transform herself from penniless

immigrant to the owner of a flourishing business in 1950s’ Britain,

and my mother and father changed the course of the family’s

Meanwhile, Leung was determined to find a way to bring that

better life to his family. Even though he worked in the fields like

any of the other villagers, they had him marked out for his ambition.

Leung had a plan, and now he set about putting it into action

while everyone else carried on just as their parents had done before,

whether out of fear of change or laziness.

Later her mother comforted her, but she still cried herself to

sleep. Her father had told her the story of the man who moved the

two mountains, and Tai Po had explained that for a short period of

sacrifice, a better life could be built in the future, and the little girl

had to steel herself with those thoughts.

Her hand began to swell and blister and the five year old burst

into tears, in terrible pain. No other child or woman spoke up to

defend her or take the foreman to task; not even her own mother,

Tai Po, dared do anything. Young as she was, Lily understood that

she must not protest, or else she and her mother and sisters would

lose their jobs, and there were hundreds of other peasants who

would willingly fill their places.

When Guangzhou’s swampy weather was at its most sweltering,

the conditions indoors became even more excruciating. There was

no let-up, and the children had to remain standing for the whole

12-hour shift. One day Lily couldn’t take it any more and lost

consciousness, slipping to the floor. She had barely opened her eyes

There were no such thing as workers’ rights and the manufacturers

wielded the power of any feudal landlord, exploiting the

women and children as they fancied. For a short period, the shifts

were even dragged out to 16 hours a day using the excuse that the

Chinese must work harder than the Japanese in order to save

China. The children’s fingers peeled from constant contact with

hot water and the fine thread sliced into the women’s hands, but

they had no choice except to continue to work.

Tai Po and the other women spun the silk into thread on iron

looms, and then the fibre was rolled on to drums. The factory was

flooded with steam from the boiling vats which kept the air humid

and ensured that the precious silk thread didn’t break. There was

little ventilation, and everyone struggled for breath. As the women

leaned back and forth, back and forth across the loom, beads of

sweat dripped from their foreheads on to the silk as it coiled into

piles on the factory floor, a slow accumulation of profit for the

factory bosses.

When Lily talks about her time there her face clouds over and I

can tell that her memories are not just vivid but still painful. The

women and children worked 12-hour days, 7 days a week, among

the deafening clatter of the machines, louder and stranger than

anything Lily would have known in her childhood in the village.

She was terrified.

Many families began to look to the new factories as a source of

income, and Leung was no exception. All his six daughters would

eventually wait every morning on the other side of the bridge for a

ride to Guangzhou and a job in a silk factory, and my grandmother

was just five years old when she joined her mother and older sisters

on the factory floor.

It was a simple life, lived at subsistence level and its pleasures

were simple too, despite the hardships. Days, weeks, months and

years slowly passed by, and eventually Lily was old enough to be put

to work herself. While the countryside had stagnated for centuries,

the Industrial Revolution was now spreading out from the largest

cities and beginning to transform lives in the nearby villages.

Factories were springing up to feed the silk industry, which was now

expanding with the new production methods, and flooding the

world with cheaper and cheaper silk. They needed cheap labour.

For most of the year their diet was bland and monotonous,

stoked with bowls of sticky rice flavoured with salty soy sauce.

Treats were few and far between, but families saved up to splash out

greasy nubs, like a sort of sweet salami. They were reserved for

Chinese New Year, when they were dished up on beds of fluffy

still goes into raptures remembering this delicacy, and the

way that she and her friends would suck every single grain of rice

to relish every last particle of the succulent lap cheong grease.

I can imagine how good it must have tasted to the workers after

a long, bitterly cold day on the fields; you would have gobbled it

down quickly, burning your mouth, then felt it travel all the way

down to your empty, rumbling stomach. Sweet potatoes kept hunger

away when the villagers were desperate, but my grandmother also

recalls that they made everyone fart atrociously, so perhaps that’s one

reason why they weren’t popular – when a whole family shared one

small room, flatulence was the last thing you wanted!

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Under the fire was an oven were the women baked soya beans

and rice. When times were hard and stocks fell low, there was sweet

potato to make up the shortfall. They grew in abundance on the

small strips of land that weren’t rich enough for the more valuable

crops, and would be roasted in their own husks, giving off a whiff

of toffee as they caramelised. Peel off the skin, and the pulp inside

is cooked to a sweet, piping-hot mush – real comfort food, even if

it didn’t have much nutritional value.

The open fire was also used for cooking with large, round, iron

pans called woks. The women fanned the cinders with bamboo

bellows until the coals glowed red hot, and flames escaped that were

large enough to lick all the way round the pan and sear the food that

‘breath of the wok’, and takes some mastering, but it makes the wok

the most versatile of cooking tools. You could stir fry vegetables or

braise a freshly caught fish whole, and the intoxicating smell of the

food being skillfully turned this way and that by a savvy cook would

spread through the village, drawing a hungry crowd.

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There was a single clay kiln oven that was stoked with wood or

coal and had two levels. The top was an open fire for boiling up

soups, a staple of the peasant diet, eked out with barley, pieces of

dried meat preserved with salt and broken bits of tofu. Ginger

would be thrown into the pot too, to keep the body warm, kill off

bacteria and add its distinctive tang to the otherwise plain broth.

The huts didn’t have kitchens, but kept their fires for warmth

alone. Everyone in the village shared a cooking area next to the

well, and as the women spent a good deal of their day there, it was

a hotbed of news and gossip about all the goings-on.

My grandmother and her sisters would dare each other to ride on

the pigs in a pint-sized Chinese rodeo – whoever stayed on the

furious animals longest won, and Lily still rocks with laughter when

she tells me how hard it was. A fully grow pot-bellied pig is almost

the same height as a little Chinese peasant girl, and the wiry hair on

their backs is wickedly ticklish. The girls would have to chase the

pigs then try to vault on to them as their friends raced behind,

pulling the beasts’ curly tails to make them buck and run faster.

Despite the privations of life in the village, the atmosphere was

communal and lively. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, and

the few hundred residents were all related somehow, either by

blood or by marriage. Leung’s family lived next to the fish-pond,

alongside the village pigpens. The pigs themselves were usually at

liberty to roam around the small yards and root for food, and they

were a great source of entertainment for the smaller children.

The hamlet sat on a vast, open plain of land crossed by a series

of small rivers, all of which led to the mighty Pearl River itself.

There were about 30 huts of different sizes, some more sturdy than

others, all backing on to a lake. At the back of each house was a set

of steps which led straight down to the water’s edge where the

women of each family washed clothes and bedrolls. At one end of

the village was a bridge that led to the road to Guangzhou, and

every morning the peasants would gather there, hoping to catch a

ride to the city to look for work.

There was no money for toys so the sisters played ‘paper, scissors,

stone’ for hours at a time, lining up opposite one another and

counting to three, before ‘revealing’ what they had in their

clenched palms. My grandmother taught my mother, and my

mother taught us 20 years later, and Janet, Lisa and I would play it

made from deep red cotton, a hand-me-down from her elder sister.

Somehow, Lily never seemed to grow into the coat, and was utterly

dwarfed by it, which made the other villagers laugh. They affectionately

called her ‘sack of rice’, and teased her mercilessly.

‘What’s that?’ her father would joke as she waddled past in the

red jacket, with only the tips of her fingers poking from the sleeves

and the collar up to her ears, ‘I’ve never seen a sack of rice that

could carry itself. Somebody catch it and store it in the barn!’ Then

he’d chase a giggling Lily round the small yard, making her scream

and laugh and beg him to stop.

There was always a crowd of younger children in the village who

were too small to help in the fields or be parcelled out to local

factories, and as there was no school they were left pretty much to

their own devices for a few years. At first Lily ran wild with the

Her father always told

her that even though she was a girl, she could earn her place in

the world and leave a legacy for her own children and grandchildren,

just like the man in the story who moved the

mountains. It was a valuable lesson, and as she lugged buckets of

water, helped her mother in the shack or laboured in the fields

day in and day out, that story must have become a mantra for

her. As Leung struggled with poverty and poor harvests, his

whole family worked together for their own survival, sowing,

watering and harvesting the crops that would fill their bellies.

Their clothes were simple, coarse cotton, and the tools they had

were primitive and mended many times over, but they were

bonded together knowing that they all depended on one

another.

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In the tale, an eccentric old man announces to his village that

he will demolish two mountains so that he can run a road south to

the Han river. His neighbour scoffs, ‘That’s ridiculous! How can

one man dispose of so much earth and stones?’ The old man replies

simply, ‘Though I shall die, I shall leave behind my son, and my

son’s son. From generation to generation I hand this task. Since

these mountains cannot grow any larger, why shouldn’t we be able

to level them?’ After five generations the mountains were finally

flattened, and the road built.

That story stuck with her all her life.

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When I was at school I always knew that I wanted to become a

lawyer, and my parents would worry that the law wasn’t the right

profession for a woman – it was a man’s world, as far as they were

concerned – but my grandmother only encouraged me. She told

me a story that her father, Leung, often told her when she was a

little girl, which summed up all he believed about the value of

patience and a steadfast commitment to one’s own ambitions whatever

happened.

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