Things Mother Told Me About Her Life

To make it from Yangzhou—the village where I was born—to Shanghai on a good day involved riding a rickshaw 12 miles, followed by a two-hour boat ride. On a rainy day, the miles of dirt road were a muddy mess, and we often had to walk part of the way. Back then, records weren’t kept the way they are now, so it is hard to know the exact month I was born. But I was told I was a cow (in the Chinese zodiac) and that would mean I was born around 1925.

I was blessed as a child. (“Blessed,” fu in Chinese, has the meaning of “endowed with fortune and good luck.”) My grandparents on my father’s side owned a house, a farm, and rice paddies, so we had fresh vegetables and rice at every meal. Being the only girl, growing up with both an older and a younger brother, I enjoyed a new set of clothes every new year and never had to wear hand-me-downs!

Nainai, my grandmother, treated me kindly, patiently teaching me how to sew and cook and help around the house. I wanted to go to school like my brothers, but she insisted that a girl’s place was at home. In my generation, so few girls were given the privilege of schooling.

After several years, Nainai reluctantly sold the family property because no one in the family was willing to work the farm. My mother preferred making money by serving the rich and urbane in Shanghai. While she worked as a housekeeper, my father went to work as a cook in Nanjing. I lived with Nainai until I was 13, when Mama sent for me and asked my uncle to bring me to Shanghai.

Slowly, I grew to like the city. My job was to take care of the child of a wealthy Chinese lady, which was easier than working in the rice paddies and having my legs bitten by scorpions. I carefully saved up my money and gave it to my mother. Then during the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival and New Year’s celebration, my mother would take me home to Nainai’s, bringing back our hard-earned money, mooncakes, and gifts for the whole family.

When I was 15, I met an elderly Christian woman preaching on the streets. I called her Haopo (“Good Grandma” in Chinese). Haopo introduced me to Jesus. I believed in Jesus and was so happy. But there was much I didn’t understand. Then this dear lady who had appeared in my life had to go live with her son, and I floundered, becoming emotionally confused. Mercifully, after a year, the confusion lifted.

At age 17, I went to work for a Japanese couple with two young daughters. I’ll never forget working for this family. While we ate fresh rice every day, and I used rice starch to iron their clothes, I knew that many Chinese were starving to death from the war. They would have gladly eaten the leftover rice we threw in the garbage.

Finally, at age 21, I went back home to marry. My husband was actually my cousin, my mother’s older brother’s son. Not long after we married, the Yangtze River overflowed its banks, flooding the region. Gongs sounded the alarm throughout the surrounding villages. People mounded earth to support the stressed banks and stem the raging river. As my husband trudged through the mud hauling heavy bags of earth, he hurt his back. Over time, he lost the ability to walk.

On June 28, 1947, I gave birth to our son, Xia Shengchuan. When he was five months old, I went to Shanghai to work as a nanny, leaving him in the care of his aunt. While I weaned my son off my breast milk, I breastfed the baby of the household I served. It was the concession I made to have money to send home to buy medicine for my husband.

During these years, the situation in China was growing increasingly unstable. My elder brother had moved to Hong Kong and sent word that I should come. He thought the working conditions might be better. While I was living in Hong Kong, I learned that my husband—at the young age of 29—had succumbed to his illness and passed away. Our son was just six at the time. He wore the traditional white mourning suit and continued to stay in the care of his Nainai. A year later, I returned to China to bring him to Hong Kong to live with me. But he had grown very attached to his Nainai and wanted to stay. I was wary of leaving him, but I gave him a gold watch and left, not knowing when I would see him again. After returning to Hong Kong, I worked for another nine years, during which travel in and out of China was suspended. I was no longer able to see my son.

While in Hong Kong, I became acquainted with the Mr. Zhao, a diplomat at the United Nations, who had brought his family for a visit. A friend of mine, knowing that Mrs. Zhao was looking for someone to work for them in America, referred me to them. Since I had no close family in Hong Kong (my older brother had moved to Brazil), I was free to go, and I was game for something new! I was 35 years old and about to start a whole new chapter of my life.

In the U.S., I served the Zhao family for one year before going to work in a garment factory. It was during that year that I returned to my faith. I had always believed, but now I started going to church. Grandpa Zhang worked at the factory and kept a tally of our piece work. He took me to his church, which was Cantonese-speaking. One day as he was making his rounds, he tallied 20 skirts for me. I told him I had only sewn 14 skirts. He smiled and said, “You’re a real Christian.” Later, another seamstress, invited me to her church, which I preferred, because people spoke Mandarin. On July 4, 1963, I was baptized. I felt truly free because my life belonged to Christ.

An elderly couple who went to a church in Queens introduced me to your father. This couple assured me that he was divorced from his wife who attended their church and whose brother pastored the church. Your father was nice enough at first. He took me out to Atlantic City and other places outside of New York City. On April 11, 1962, I married your father in a civil ceremony because I wanted to stay in America. Shortly after we married, your father started hitting me, and I had no qualms hitting him back. Sometimes we fought because he wanted to go back to his former family. He would buy groceries for them because his first wife had four mouths to feed. Once, I called his first wife and told her to take him back, but she said, “I can’t take him back. The children are afraid of him.”

But I stayed with your father and can testify that through the thick and thin of life, the Lord was always with me. And that’s the promise I want others to know: that the Lord never leaves us nor forsakes us (Hebrews 13:5).

One day, after hearing a sermon preached by Rev. Wang about how Jesus didn’t retaliate, I felt so convicted that I started weeping. I confessed, “Lord, I’m wrong too!” Jesus’ example brought me to tears, and I repented for my part in our fights. From then on, I was determined not to talk back to your father.

But the threat of a storm often lingered in our home. In the end, it was your dad who decided to move out. The next year, he filed for divorce, and three years later he remarried and moved to New Jersey. Four years later he died, and I dreamt of him once. Then I said to the Lord, “Now that he’s gone, please don’t let him bother me anymore.” After that, I never dreamed of him again.

Even after all this happened, I was happy. Some people didn’t believe me, and others laughed at me, not understanding how I could be happy when I didn’t have a husband or a house to call my own. But I was at peace.

Memories I Cherish About My Mother’s Life

Mom told me that when she was going to give birth to me, she promised the Lord that if I was healthy, she would dedicate me to God. Her words instilled a sense of purpose in me. Even before I knew what “dedicate” meant, I knew that I meant something to God.

Many years later, I learned how hard my mother fought to keep me. She was seven months pregnant when my father told her to abort the child inside her womb. She refused, with the retort, “Wo yao ta, bu yao ni.” (“I want her, not you.”) She knew she would risk everything if my dad walked away, and she would lose face because divorce in Chinese society was shameful. She would lose my father’s income, because he was making far more than she was working in the garment factory. And she had no other family in America. She was in a foreign land where she hardly spoke any English.

As God would have it, my mother gave birth on the day before Chinese New Year in 1965. God guarded my life, and my mother honored her prayer by raising me to believe in God. She prayed for me, read the scriptures with me, and took me to church. There wasn’t a time in my life when I didn’t believe that God was watching over me.

Mom cherished reading and hearing God’s Word preached. She had a library of sermon tapes that traveled with us every time we moved. She pored over the scriptures on her own and got excited when a Bible passage she happened to read during the week corresponded to the one preached on Sunday. Reading the Bible was the first thing she did after she woke up in the morning and the last thing she did before closing her eyes at night. Sometimes, she was so tired from work that she’d fall asleep with the Bible on her lap.

As a girl growing up in the Chinese countryside, mother never went to school. She only learned to read when she was in her 40s, thanks to a sister at our church in Philadelphia. At first mother couldn’t recognize a single Chinese character. But Huang Mama was patient, closing each lesson as she began it, with prayer. Mother began recognizing words and stringing them together in the first verses of John’s Gospel, her English primer. Elated, she now had the motivation she needed to press on. She felt so blessed to be able to read God’s Word.

Although my mother lived most of her life in the city, from time to time, she would comment on how tasty the vegetables were back in her hometown in Yangzhou. She never forgot her childhood in China. She had grown up on the land, where the river flooded annually, enriching the soil, and where she picked rice from the paddies in her bare legs. As a kid whenever I didn’t want to finish the rice in my bowl, she would remind me of how hard farmers labored in the rice paddies.

Mother often said that loving God and loving others were the most important things in life. “Thank you, Lord” always remained on her lips. Despite how difficult it was for her to walk during her last year of life, whenever she made it through the door of our apartment, her first words were not “I’m so tired” or “Glad we made it,” but “Ganxie Zhu!” (“Thank you, Lord!”) Gratitude was like an instinct for Mom.

I don’t know when my mother started saying, “I love you.” But at some point, she did, and she’d also give me a kiss goodnight and a kiss when I left on a trip. The older I grew, the more she said it, and the more I said it! Chinese parents tend to express their love in other ways, yet along the way, my mother learned to speak fluently my two primary love languages: words and touch. Even when Parkinson’s slowed down her responsiveness, whenever I said, “I love you” to her, she’d instantly reply, “I love you, too”—always in English!

I can still hear her say, “When all is said and done, ‘the greatest of these is love’”(1 Corinthians 13:13).

Loving God and loving people formed the focal points of Mom’s life.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind….And love your neighbor as yourself ” (Matthew 22:37, 39).

Personally, I wished Mom had not talked about our family problems so freely. But she was convinced that people needed to hear how God had rescued her from a bad marriage, her own mistakes, and some close calls—proving that God is faithful!

Grace May is an associate professor of Biblical studies at William Carey International University.