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.