Old Photographs

Gwenllian Sou Kang Chan Lee, World War Two

I was thinking about my mother the other day. Her birthday was the 30th April. She would have been 102 this year. She died three years ago. As is increasingly frequent these days, although she was quite physically fit, during the last seven years of her life she suffered from encroaching dementia. The COVID pandemic didn't help. You'll remember it was difficult if not impossible for relatives to visit those confined to care homes. It was during a belated visit during COVID that my mother had to admit she didn't know who I was. We continued to have conversations, however. For me she was my mother, for her I was an interested stranger.
Her memory of the last sixty or so years or so of her life seemed to have disappeared completely, but she could still remember her childhood, her youth. It was a one-sided conversation. I provided her with prompts about her parents and brothers and she happily reminisced. It was during one such conversation that I asked her what she'd liked and disliked most in her life, or at least what she could remember of it. What she'd disliked was almost predictable: having to work in the Chinese laundries her father ran, first in Liverpool and then in the North Wales town of Rhyl. She detested that work. When she still had her faculties I'd asked her to record here recollections of Chinese laundry life. In that account she was very factual, talking about the routine of the laundry life; you'll find it elsewhere on this website. 
What surprised me was more what she had appreciated in her early life, and that was the time she'd spent in the WRENS (the Women's Royal Naval Service) during World War Two. She was stationed in various places around the country, in Scotland and in East Anglia and in London. She said she'd "loved' being in the WRENS and regretted not staying in the service after the war. But she'd left the navy to help out at home in the laundry, the cafe, the greengrocers. All those businesses would soon close down. By then, my grandfather's interests were once again in Liverpool where he had a cafe that served also as a gambling house. That venture, along with his interests in Rhyl, succumbed to historical events and that story, which embraces the history of the mass deportations of Chinese seamen from the United Kingdom during 1946-1947, is told in my book The Eighth Chinese Merchant. 

What brought to mind the reminiscence about the WRENS was not so much that I'd been thinking about my mother on her birthday, but that it coincided with my coming across a photograph of her in her WRENS uniform, and that in turn made me think of her avowing she'd never been so happy as when she'd been in uniform. Perhaps it was the freedom of being away from home; subject to military discipline and yet free of the restrictions of family with a Chinese father. Perhaps, it was the general liberatory, devil-may-care ambiance that many who went through the war recalled fondly.
She hadn't been obliged to join up, of course. She'd been working in a munitions factory when the recruiting agents came along. And the navy, no doubt, seemed a more exciting prospect that the factory workbench.
Moreover, she had no business serving in the British military. My grandfather had taken out Chinese nationality for his children and had them renounce UK citizenship at the beginning of the second world war. He didn't want any of them fighting a war for Britain. He was after all born near Canton at the tail end of the nineteenth century in a country gravely impacted by the Opium Wars and British imperialism. And yet, three of his four children did serve in the UK forces; how else were they to continue their attempt to pass?
I've always said that I'd wait until my grandfather's children (my mother, my uncles) were all dead before I turned to telling their story. Yet, now they've gone I find myself hesitating. But, the day will come.

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My grandfather with two of his sons, his daughter, and his wife pictured on their Chinese nationality papers