Books – Excerpt from Chapter 1 (Day 82 to the USA Launch)
April 18th, 2008
THE LITTLE SACK OF RICE
GUANGZHOU, CHINA 1918–1925
‘The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step’
She didn’t make much of the deprivation she’d known as a child, but I knew that unlike me, she’d never taken the comfort of a warm bed and a well-stocked kitchen for granted. Her China was still recovering from its catastrophic losses in World War One when the 1918–19 Spanish Flu pandemic struck, killing over 20 million people – even more lives were lost than in the war itself. Piles of corpses littered China’s vast plains.
Her father, Leung, and her mother, Tai Po, were betrothed to each other long before the war broke out. The marriage wasn’t founded on romance, but a contract formulated by their parents, and they were only four years old when the match was made. Their engagement followed a strict set of practices dictated by a Chinese tradition called ‘Three Letters and Six Etiquettes’ which marked the progress of their union from match to marriage, and all families, rich or poor, observed these stages which had been laid down over two and a half thousand years previously during the Warring States period of Chinese history.
The most important of the six etiquettes came first. Leung’s parents singled out Tai Po as a suitable daughter-in-law by hiring an astrologer to make calculations based on the date and place of her birth; they then dispatched a matchmaker to formally propose to the newborn girl’s parents. Tai Po and Leung grew up knowing about their engagement, and even met a few times. Each of the etiquettes was marked by a ceremonial performance or a formal letter.
The ‘Gift Letter’ detailed an inventory of goods that formed a kind of inverse dowry, sent by the groom’s parents to the bride, rather than vice versa. To Tai Po, who was all of 11 and had nothing to call her own, it must have seemed like a dazzling array. Parcels of teas and spices, lotus seeds, baskets of fruit and red and green beans, bottles of wine, spindles of hair ribbon, bridal cakes and packages of delicacies were showered on her. Who knows whether she could have fully understood the implications of accepting them, but she wouldn’t have had much choice in the matter.
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