The Songs and The Changs

China was on the road to recovery.
Shanghai would recover - much faster than the rest of the country.

Shanghai people were resolute, resourceful, and dogged.- with a Can Do attitude. Like bamboos, we bend, but we didn't break too easily.
One by one, the foreign companies came back. One by one, the beautiful Art Deco buildings along the Bund opened up for business again. Hundreds of people poured into the City from the country everyday. There was housing shortage. Building industry was booming. Old business reopened. New business sprouted up. Soon, the city regained much of its prewar glory.

My mother was a Song - not related to the famous Madame Song, wife of General Chiang Kai-Chek, President of The Republic of China. (My mother-in-law, however, was friends with the other Song sister, wife of Dr. Sun Yat-San, Father of the Republic of China - I will tell you more about that later.)  

My maternal grandmother came from Soochow which was noted to have the most beautiful girls "under the Heaven" (we did not say under the sky). The grandmother I remembered, however, was the widowed lady with somber-colored and shapeless clothing, with straight cropped hair; never ever had any makeup on; and wore few jewelry. To me, she looked very old - she was probably only in her forties at that time, but she looked over seventy. I don't remember ever hearing her laugh. She did smile. She was, however, loving and kind.

My maternal grandfather was the oldest son of a family with five boys. He passed away when my mother was only 5 or 6 years old. My mother, an orphan, and her widowed mother lived with the whole extended family. She was more or less raised by her Number Three Uncle who was the family genius and respected breadwinner. All his brothers worked for him, in one way or another. He reportedly created several very successful businesses, including the Ferry Company that carried passengers and goods across the river between Shanghai and Potong. (Potong was consisting of farmlands and fields then. It is now an ultra modern city, with one of the tallest buildings in the world.)
Number Three had a Trucking Company, a scrap-metal business, a salad-oil business, a shipping company, and others companies. My father, in later years, was in some of the businesses with Number Three.
Number Three had been to Europe, so his nephews and nieces called him Foreign BaBa. Everyone was in awe of him, including his children - may be with the exception of his oldest son, Peter. 
Number Three favored my mother and somehow trained my mother to be his right-hand person. My mother was a math whiz though she only had junior high schooling. She also had great managerial skills in her younger days. Whenever there was any function in the family, my mother would be the "Manager". Later, both my father and my mother would be "managers" at all large family functions. My parents ran most of all the social events for Number Three. 
My mother's cousins called my mother "Big Brother", although she was a female cousin. She was also quite a bit older than all her uncles' children. When those cousins were older, instead of going to their parents, they would come to my mother and father for advice on any problems they had, financial or otherwise.
So, my Number Three Granduncle was like my grandfather.
Number Three with his wife, and six children, three boys and three girls, lived on Bubbling Well Road, in a Villa. I remember the imposing Italian style four-story home, with stone balustrades on verandas like you see in pictures of Italian homes. They even had a butler's pantry.
His oldest son, Peter, who is a year older than I, and I were particularly close - we grew up together. I, also was the only child who was not afraid to go into the Drawing room, sat on the sofa, and chatted with Number Three. He treated me like a grown-up, giving me advices on life and so on. If only I had taken some of those advices. I was too young and too ignorant to heed him.
However, he was the one, later on, encouraged my father to let me go to the university. By the way, he was the one who prevented my grandmother from binding my mother's feet.
He was the one who gave me my first bicycle, in spite of the fact that my father thought it was not ladylike for me to ride bicycles. Those days, I did not wear slacks. They were for servants or the working-class girls only. How we have changed!

When I was very young, on weekends, he would send his chauffeur with the car to pick me up so I could spend the weekend at his house. I would take my little Weekender, packed with my clothing and some tiny little doll dresses I made for his daughters' dolls (I was a little older than his two younger daughters and I was learning to sew and design clothing, even at the age of eight or nine or ten) and I would heave myself up to the backseat - and off we went for my weekend visit at the villa. Came Sunday evening, the chauffeur would bring me home. Number Three's wife, my Grandaunt Number Three, would give me a couple of dollars. When I reached home, I would give the chauffeur one of the dollar bills for a tip and saved the other one for myself.
I have lots of fond memories at Number Three's home. 
Oftentimes, he would have us kids make up plays and filmed us. Sometimes, we played cops and robbers and he filmed us. Other times, he showed us movies -  Charlie Chaplin and cartoons.
Peter is still my best friend to this day.  
What did Number Three's father, my great grand-father, my mother's grandfather, did for a living, I did not know. He was a Shanghainese. Years later, I was told that he was a carpenter. He  ran away from home when he was young. He apparently never told anyone much about his Family. I remember him -  he was in his eighties, a tall, slender figure with a goatee, bouncing a tennis ball on the ground as his daily exercise. He smoked opium for medicinal purposes. Peter and I used to sneak up into the upstairs backroom to watch him smoke opium. I can still smell the pungent odor today. He died when he was eighty-four.
My mother met my father through Number Five. Number Five was my father's classmate. He was the matchmaker. Yes, I know, in those days, there was no "boy meets girl"; but my parents did. Number Five arranged for my father to "meet" my mother on a tram (a street car), I believe. I don't think they had any conversation. I guess my father fell in love with my mother. After the encounter, he and Number Five manged to persuade Number Three to allow him to marry my mother.

My father's family came from Ningpo, a town south of Shanghai. My grandfather came from a long line of business people, I believe. Although my mother used to mention that some of my grandfather's ancestors bought some official positions under Ching Dynasty court. I have a little worn book that recorded my father's family, going back to Emperor K'ien-Lung of Ching Dynasty, noting that my great, great, great, great grand-father was a North Sea Official during 17th century. The book mainly recorded names, dates - birth and death - no careers were noted. When did the family move to Shanghai? I don't know. When did my grandfather started running a business in Manchuria? I don't know either. I think my grand-father was born in Shanghai, but he spoke with a heavy Ningpo accent. He was an only child. I do know that my father was born in Shanghai.
Can I call my little book a genealogy?
Our family name is Chang. In China, there were three big families, the Changs, the Wongs, and the Lees. We had one hundred family names and there is this book which, in the old days, children had to memorize in school (actually there are a couple more names than that); it meant we all came from these one hundred families. And the largest families were those I mentioned - the Changs, the Wongs, and the Lees. The Pinyin spellings are a bit different now-a-days, but they still mean the same names. I guess, we Changs are like the Smith family.

My paternal grandmother also came from Ningpo. But I have no knowledge about her family, except that she was a Kim - which means Gold. I do know that there are a lot of Koreans named Kim. I don't think, however, she had any connections with the Korean Kims.
Grandma Kim was somewhat aloof and not kids-friendly. She did not like to have us kids mess-up her rooms. She was only a bit close to me just before I had to leave Shanghai.
I remember that she loved to go to the Casinos. She was tall and slender, always well-dressed - Mother of Miss Tientian, my father's youngest sister.

Both my grandmothers had bound feet. Grandmother Kim's feet were smaller than my other grandmother's.

My mother was not much older than Number Three's wife. They used to go to a lot of social functions together back in the 30s, before the Japanese occupation. 
She had a woman who came to our house to fix up her hair. And the Flower woman would deliver flowers to our house for her to wear in her hair.
I used to watch her get dressed in the evenings. She would put on some most gorgeous silk chongsans - those traditional form-fitting, sexy high-slits Chinese dresses. I remember one in particular. It was a black lace long dress with a black silk slip underneath. The backside of the slip had an open web design, cut very low in the back and very intricate.
I thought she was beautiful. 

Those were the days before Japanese Occupation.