May 28th, 2008
reading-guide.pdf (click to download this reading guide) I hope you enjoy this reading guide as you are reading my book, Sweet Mandarin. I am happy to join your book club by telephone – email me to book an appointment on sweetmandarin@gmail.com . I’d love to know what you think of my book…please share your comments on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Best wishes
Helen
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May 28th, 2008
Publishers Weekly
For Tse, looking ahead to her future meant taking a step back into family history. In 2004, Tse and her two sisters all abandoned promising professional careers to follow a family tradition and opened a family restaurant. “My sisters and I were immersed from birth in the Chinese catering business-the fourth generation of our family to make a living from food.” Tse begins with her grandmother’s birth in 1918 in a small farming village in southeastern China. Each successive chapter chronologically follows the family’s struggles and triumphs from peasant life to prosperity and heartache in Hong Kong in the 1930s, the horrors of the Japanese occupation, life in England from the 1950s to today. Tse poses a question that serves as the core of this delightful, well-written and at times painful memoir: Why would three young, successful 21st-century women, Tse an attorney, one sister an engineer, the other a financier, return to a family business they struggled to escape? In answering this question, Tse engagingly tells the larger story not only of her grandmother’s and mother’s struggles but the shared story of the many Chinese immigrants who made the journey from mainland China to England and “who also carved out a place in their new homeland through the catering trade.” (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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May 28th, 2008
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
made. He gave them a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and they
gave their all in return. The soy sauce began to flow.
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May 28th, 2008
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.
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May 28th, 2008
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.
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May 28th, 2008
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.
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May 28th, 2008
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
fortunes in the 1970s, but Leung was the first to lift us out of the
cycle of rural deprivation.
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May 28th, 2008
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.
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May 28th, 2008
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.
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May 28th, 2008
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.
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May 28th, 2008
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
again when the foreman seized her hand and plunged it into one of
the open vats to ‘wake her up’ – anyone who held up productivity
must be made an example of, after all.
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May 28th, 2008
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.
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May 28th, 2008
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.
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May 28th, 2008
The silk-worm cocoons were softened in vast vats of boilingwater that steamed and churned constantly, then skimmed out andgiven to the youngest children whose small, nimble fingers wereconsidered best suited to picking off the floss before the cocoonspassed on to the next stage.
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May 21st, 2008
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.
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May 21st, 2008
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.
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May 21st, 2008
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.
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May 21st, 2008
Each family carried their food back from the cooking area to eat
it at their own hut, perched on small stools with a bowl of rice in
one hand and a set of chopsticks in the other. When Lily talks about
the village of her childhood, it’s the aroma of the food that she
remembers first, snaking out from the great oven that glowed in the
heart of the village, and down the small alleyways between the
shacks, drawing the young girls home to their family and to supper.
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May 21st, 2008
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
on lap cheong, strings of dried and fatty pork sausages studded with
greasy nubs, like a sort of sweet salami. They were reserved for
Chinese New Year, when they were dished up on beds of fluffy
white rice flavoured by the aromatic lap cheong juices. My grandmother
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.
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May 17th, 2008
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