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1941. Two weeks later, on 7 December, across the Pacific in Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers attacked the American fleet. Japan was suddenly in league with Germany and at war with America and her European allies. At that precise moment (8 December in China), Japanese soldiers in armoured vehicles were orderefl to roll over flimsy barbed wire barricades and take over the foreign concessions of Chinese treaty ports. Simultaneously, Japanese marines invaded Malaya and bombed Singapore. In one day, the Sino-Japanese conflict had merged with the war in Europe, expanded into Malaya, involved America and turned into the Second World War.
    In Shanghai and Tianjin, British and American settlers, formerly almighty and invincible, were herded into Japanese concentration camps. The French Concessions were transformed
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    overnight into malleable puppets at the mercy of the Japanese. All trading, especially that between China and the West, was being closely monitored by the new masters. The Vichy French law court presiding over Father’s business affairs now found itself headed by a freshly appointed judge from the New Order in East Asia, a puppet government led by the traitor Wang Jhing-wei during the Japanese occupation.
    The few American businessmen in Tianjin hurried to escape with their families and what they could salvage of their possessions. A robust eighteen-year-old peasant girl now came to us, introduced by one of Father’s interned American colleagues. She applied to be a wet nurse for Susan and demanded three times the going wage, stressing that she had come from the employ of an American couple and was accustomed to the ’highest standards’. Her goal was to save up 500 yuan by the time Susan was weaned, buy an ox, return to her village and raise her own baby at the side of her husband.
    It caused the most dreadful commotion. Niang was determined to hire this girl. No one else would do. She seemed to think that only a woman who had suckled a white American baby was good enough for her own daughter. Father acceded to her wishes, even though the new maid’s thirty-yuan monthly salary infuriated all the other servants. Her wages were supposed to be secret but the entire household staff soon discovered the discrepancy. Franklin’s maid demanded parity for herself and everyone else. Accusing Niang to her face of unfair discrimination, the spirited maid simply packed her belongings and left.
    Aunt Baba was now entrusted with the additional care of two-year-old Franklin. She took on the task with reluctance but Grandmother pointed out that Franklin was as much a nephew to her as all the rest of us. So Franklin joined me and Aunt Baba in our bedroom. She used to buy us dragons’ eyes to snack on. This was a summer fruit rather like lychees, said to make children’s eyes grow large and bright.
    Aunt Baba was unsparingly kind to both of us and started
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    teaching us elementary Chinese characters. Lydia was attending St Joseph’s, from which school Niang had graduated in
    1937. I was also enrolled there in kindergarten in the summer of 1941.
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CHAPTER 5
Yi Chang Chun Meng
    An Episode of a Spring Dream
    My own memories of Tianjin are nebulous. Early photographs show a solemn little girl with clenched fists, pressed lips and serious eyes, dressed in pretty western frocks decorated with ribbons and bows. I enjoyed school and looked forward to going there. Lydia and I were pulled there and back daily in Grandmother’s black, shiny rickshaw. It had a brass lamp on each side and a bell operable by foot. When I revisited Tianjin in 1987,1 was surprised to find that it took only seven minutes to walk from our house to St Joseph’s.
    I remember Lydia as an imposing, rather intimidating figure. Between us there were three brothers and a gap of six and a half years. We were a world apart.
    Lydia liked to exercise her authority and flex her muscles by quizzing me on my homework, especially catechism. Her favourite question was, ’Who made