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As for how it was decided what to leave in and take out—with a palette as rich as this with which to paint your picture, there is little need for artistic license, or censure, the truth lies around every corner and in every one of a billion faces.
You were born in England but married into a famous Hong Kong family. Can you tell us a bit about how you came to be called Pai Kit Fai, and what this name means to you?
If my impressions of China needed any qualification, this came as a treasure trove of information when I married into one of Hong Kong’s founding dynasties, with branches in Shanghai and Macao. The Civil Library of Hong Kong was donated by the family, as were many of the colony’s hospitals and colleges, so there was no shortage of history.
When a person of foreign blood takes up professional life in Hong Kong or on the Chinese mainland, he or she is automatically given a Chinese name to have printed on the flip side of their business card. A chop or seal bearing the adopted name is also carved from soapstone in the traditional manner.
The great honor of being received into the arms of a Hong Kong family, especially one of notable heritage, requires certain standards of behavior and acceptance of ancient customs on behalf of the foreign member. The most important of these is the choosing of a Chinese name by which he or she will be thought of by the family elders. The choosing of such a name is the responsibility of the patriarch or matriarch, and is taken very seriously. The newcomer is observed for weeks or months until a name is chosen to best translate his or her character and calling. In my case, an elderly aunt who had devoted her life to the education of Hong Kong’s young people—a very dear lady with a doctorate from Cambridge University—provided me with the name of Pai Kit Fai, which loosely translated means something like “Person of Letters and Grand Ambition.”
While I take the name most seriously, its interpretation is of less importance as it can differ with each new ear, eye, and tongue. A Chinese guest once took me aside at an important banquet to advise me (in a whisper) that my name could also be translated as “Large Mountain of Lup-sup,” which I discovered was the Cantonese term for unpleasant garbage. Fortunately, I also discovered that the bearer of this disturbing news was a sworn enemy of the family and an uninvited troublemaker. So, Pai Kit Fai it is and always will be.
Behind the Novel
Concubines and Bondservants:
A Historical Perspective
For centuries before the early 1900s, there was a prominent male domination in China. Women were deprived of all rights and were present mainly to serve men. Women served as slaves, concubines, and prostitutes. What follows is a brief social history of the Chinese custom of female enslavement as portrayed in The Concubine’s Daughter.
“Girls [are] by definition ‘outsiders’ in a patrilineal society.”
Although urban areas had seen progress in the condition of women’s lives—in the abolition of foot binding and in professional and educational opportunities—rural women were scarcely affected. Their vulnerability was due not only to a perpetuation of patriarchal values but also to the absence of economic opportunities, which maintained the time-honored role with which women were still associated—to do with domesticity reproduction, as well as sexual services. Thus patriarchal dicta, coupled with the demands for unpaid domestic labor for prostitutes and concubines, plus Chinese women’s lack of general economic independence, contributed to a disparate situation: While educated Chinese women clamored for political rights, women from the poorer social strata were still being sold into slavery.
Hong Kong was not only an entrepôt for inanimate goods between China and the rest of the world, but also for human beings. Girls of Chinese descent born in Singapore, in the Dutch Indies, in the Straits, and in Macao were brought to Hong Kong for profit; girls from Shantou, Shanghai, Tianjin, and the rural hinterlands were sold by way of Hong Kong to Southeast Asian markets. All these girls shared a background of poverty, whether rural or urban. Some girls could recall farms on which the whole family had eked out a living; perhaps at some stage the family lost its tenancy, drifted to the nearest city, and during the phase of alienation from what had constituted the family’s rootedness in social and moral values, the sale of a daughter would occur. Disassociation from a supportive context of kinship relations eroded many of the social inhibitions parents might have had in selling their daughters into an unknown fate.
In times of greatest desperation boys, too, were sold, mostly to be adopted; but this was the last resort and an admission of ultimate defeat. Girls, being by cultural definition “outsiders” in a patrilineal society, sooner or later to be married off to another family, went first. Patriarchal evaluation of the female sex, supported by the absolute authority of the pater familias to decide the fate of his family, provided for an obvious solution in times of material crisis: to sell the daughter, and grant the rest of the family at least a temporary respite.
At these times of crisis, parents, when parting with their daughters, were not always indifferent or callous to their fate. With the same reluctance but resignation in the face of an unrelenting fate with which families left their home villages to face an unknown future in search of a living, they may have resorted to the next step in a downward spiral of despair—offering their daughters on the market.
Excerpted with permission from Concubines and Bondservants:
The Social History of a Chinese Custom by Maria Jaschok
(© 1988, Oxford University Press, East Asia)
Recommended Reading
World Without End
by Ken Follett
Tai-Pan
by James Clavell
Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden
The Bonesetter’s Daughter
by Lisa See
Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an
Unwanted Chinese Daughter
by Adeline Yen Mah
The Talented Women of the Zhang Family
by Susan Mann
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow
by Wang Anyi,
translated by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan
Reading Group Questions
Keep on Reading
1. Discuss the similarities and the differences between Li-Xia and her daughter, Siu-Sing. What matters most to each of them, and what does each do to achieve and preserve it?
2. Pai-Ling tells Li-Xia to “gather your thousand pieces of gold wherever you may find them and protect them with all your strength.” What do you think this means? How do Li-Xia and Siu-Sing gather their “pieces of gold” throughout the story?
3. What role does learning, from books and otherwise, play in the principal characters’ lives?
4. Discuss the tradition of foot binding in Chinese culture. What are the deeper implications, aside from the obvious physical handicaps of the practice?
5. The Concubine’s Daughter is the story of three generations of women, all of whom are faced with challenges. How does the experience of one generation influence the next? What does the novel have to say about continuity with the past?
6. Myths and legends are recurring elements in the story, and link generations with a common thread. How are stories used to explain the violent forces that barrage the lives of Li-Xia and Siu-Sing? What role does spirituality play in the characters’ lives?
7. Although society in the novel is explicitly dominated by men, in what ways are both major and minor women characters able to assert some sort of power over their destinies? In what ways are they powerless? Although the position of women has obviously changed since that time, can you see any similarities to the role of women in contemporary society?
8. What motivates some of the women in the story to help their fellow women, while others try to thwart them?
9. Discuss the roles of the various men in the story, and Ben Devereaux’s role in particular? What do you think Li-Xia finds most attractive about Ben? And how great a factor do you think his otherness plays in that attraction?
> 10. How does Siu-Sing’s childhood, which is idyllic in some ways, prepare her for a world beyond the mountains? How does it leave her vulnerable?
11. As young readers we are taught that every story has a “moral.” Is there a moral to The Concubine’s Daughter?
12. The Concubine’s Daughter is set in an exotic world that often seems to date back many centuries instead of less than a hundred years ago. What seems most alien to you about this world, and what, if anything, reminds you of life in our own times?
Table of Contents
TITLE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PART ONE: CHILDREN OF THE MOON
PROLOGUE: A Thousand Pieces of Gold
CHAPTER 1: The Fox Fairy
CHAPTER 2: The Happiness Tile
CHAPTER 3: Lotus Feet
CHAPTER 4: Ten Willows
CHAPTER 5: The Family Mung-cha-cha
CHAPTER 6: The Ghost Tree
CHAPTER 7: The Comb and the Mirror
CHAPTER 8: Sky House
CHAPTER 9: The Shop of a Thousand Poems
CHAPTER 10: Chinese New Year
CHAPTER 11: The English Garden
CHAPTER 12: The Bella Vista and the Palace of Fat Crabs
CHAPTER 13: The House of the Kindly Moon
CHAPTER 14: The Yellow Dragon
CHAPTER 15: A Thrush in the Rigging
CHAPTER 16: The Villa Formosa
CHAPTER 17: The Ginger Field
PART TWO: RED LOTUS
CHAPTER 18: Little Star
CHAPTER 19: Under a Pear Tree
CHAPTER 20: Red Lotus
CHAPTER 21: Yan-jing-shi
CHAPTER 22: The Legacy of Li-Xia
CHAPTER 23: The Last Disciple
CHAPTER 24: The World Beyond the Mountains
CHAPTER 25: The House of Double Happiness
CHAPTER 26: The Tavern of Cascading Jewels
CHAPTER 27: The Taipan
CHAPTER 28: Nine Dragons
CHAPTER 29: The Happy Butterfly
CHAPTER 30: The Valley
CHAPTER 31: The Storm
CHAPTER 32: Return to the Villa Formosa
CHAPTER 33: The Cloud Garden
CHAPTER 34: The Amulet
CHAPTER 35: Di-Muk
CHAPTER 36: Angel’s Garden
