Mah - Chinese Cinderella: the true story of an unwanted daughter

China is a big country, roughly the size of the United States. It has the worlds oldest continuous civilization, and Chinese writing has remained virtually unchanged for the past three thousand years. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, China was the most powerful country in Asia. The country looked inward and considered itself the center of the world, calling itself zhong guo, which means central country.

In 1842, China lost the Opium War. As a result, Britain took over Hong Kong and Kowloon. For about a hundred years afterward, China suffered many humiliating defeats at the hands of all the major industrial powers, including Britain, France and Japan. Many port cities on Chinas coast (such as Tianjin and Shanghai) fell under foreign control. Native Chinese were ruled by foreigners and lived as second-class citizens in their own cities.

In 1911, there was a revolution and the imperial Manchu court in Beijing was abolished. Sun Yat-sen became president and proclaimed China a republic. However, the country broke into fiefdoms ruled by warlords who fought each other for control of China. Chiang Kai-shek, a military general and protg of Sun Yat-sen, took over after Suns death in 1925.

Japan first seized Taiwan from China in 1895. It then usurped Manchuria. In July 1937, Japan declared war on China and quickly occupied Beijing and Tianjin.

When I was born in November 1937 in Tianjin, the city was still divided into foreign concessions. However, outside the concessions, the Japanese were in charge. My family lived in the French concession, where we were ruled by French citizens according to French law. My sister and I attended a French missionary school and were taught by French Catholic nuns.

On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and declared war on the United States and Britain. On the same day, Japanese troops marched into Tianjins foreign concessions. Because my father did not wish to collaborate with the Japanese, he took an assumed name and escaped from Tianjin to Shanghai. We joined him there two years later.

In 1945, Japan surrendered and the Second World War was at an end. Chiang Kai-shek was back in charge. His triumph was short-lived because a civil war soon erupted between the Nationalists under Chiang and the Communists under Mao Zedong.