By Laura Tanna, Contributor
James Lim and his sister Euphemia 'Effie' Lim as teenagers circa 1924-43.
WHEN WAR was declared in 1937, Jim Lim's whole world was shattered. Known to us in Jamaica until his retirement in 1993 as Senior Executive Vice President of Desnoes & Geddes Ltd, Part One of this interview explored his Chinese heritage and life in Peking, now known as Beijing. Lim was devastated when, as a nine-year-old child, his Scottish mother died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Beijing and his Singapore-born Chinese father, Dr. Robert K.S. Lim, was taken up with his duties as first Head of the Chinese Red Cross and then Head of the Army Medical Services for the Chinese soldiers fighting Japanese invaders. After war was declared, Jim not only lost the only home he'd ever known, but lived through a succession of different cities, schools and cultures as he travelled with his Chinese godmother.
Says Lim: "She was the third daughter of a former Manchu Premier of China, whose last name was Chu. She was Mrs. C.M. Chen. Her husband was a Singapore Chinese, engineer educated at Oxford, England, who became head of the Chinese Railroads. I think she became my godmother because of the Singapore connection between Dad and her husband. She became friendly with Mummy and felt sorry for her, because here is this poor Scottish girl. She didn't know one end of anything, plunked in China, in a totally foreign environment. She helped Mummy through all her problems. Then she had five still-born sons. It later turned out that she and her husband had a blood disorder, which today we know about. In those days they didn't. All her sons died so I became the apple of her eye. I used to call her "Gan Ma." It means "Dry Mother". You know a wet nurse? Well, the godmother is the dry mother. But she now actually brought my sister and me up. We were on holiday staying at her family place in Pei Ta Ho. When the Japanese attacked Beijing, we immediately claimed British citizenship. We took the train from Pei Ta Ho to Tien Tsin, the seaport. The Japanese held us there and eventually let us go as we had British Passports. We never went back to our home in Beijing. We were put on a ship. Dad was so lucky that we could get out. Otherwise he would have been caught in there and having been involved in the Red Cross with the Chinese Army, he would have been in a lot of problems."
The ship stopped first in Osaka, then Hiroshima and at every port of call they were refused permission to go ashore until finally in Kobe they were allowed ashore only under surveillance, then briefly in Hong Kong. Finally, they disembarked in Singapore. Because his grandmother and step-grandmother had both died and his grandfather was living alone, he remembers: "We lived with this lawyer/cousin of ours who was much younger and had a bigger house. My Chinese godmother had her three daughters, myself and Effie, five children, six people just plunked down on these poor people but we stayed there and went to school. I went to St. Andrews School in Singapore and the girls went to Raffles School.
"We were a very close family when mother was alive. After she died, I had very little to do with dad. I felt abandoned by him because he literally went off to war and we were put with this lady, who was kind of foreign to me, although I knew her. Basically, I did feel a bit abandoned. I didn't know what happened. All I knew was that he disappeared. Gan Ma's girls were very close with my sister. Gan Ma's eldest daughter, Ming, was two years older than me. Then Hui, the next daughter was my age and Betty was the younger one. The three older girls, Ming, Hui and Effie had a little coterie so that kept them. I was on my own."
I asked how at the age of ten that year in Singapore was for him: "Weird! Weird. I found it very strange. I was just basically surviving. I played a lot with various kinds of Chinese toys. I went to see the Singapore family. I was curious about them and they, of course, were curious about us. I spent quite a lot of time with grandpa, in his house. He was basically very happy with us, very pleasant to us. When he sat on his back patio, the monkeys used to come. He taught me how to feed the monkeys. In Singa-pore they have this big place where they sell food. He went there every night. He had his buddies and he'd take me from time to time and I'd sit beside him, eat whatever I wanted and listen to all the talk. By this time, even the Chinese who had become wealthy, they'd learned English. We stayed there roughly one year. My Chinese godmother couldn't stand it. She didn't like Singapore, the cousins, the relatives. She just didn't like it at all so we left there and went to Hong Kong."
I asked where his father was. Lim replied: "As Head of the Chinese Army Medical Services, he was located first in Nanking, which was the capital of China. Then they were basically retreating from Beijing. They kept retreating and retreating. Chiang Kai Shek was his boss at that time as head of the Army. Dad was basically in the Army. But he had around him his old cadre of all the doctors that he had taught and grew up with. All the doctors in China in those days had graduated from this one university. Then they were pushed back into the interior of China. We had very little communication. There was none. It was very hard. I think it was much harder on Gan Ma than on any of us. Her husband became, I think Ambassador to Indonesia, so he went to Indonesia. Their relationship had broken down.
Lim continued: "So we moved to Hong Kong. She had an apartment and her fifth sister lived there. Hong Kong was a big change because we were in a very Chinese part, half way down the peak. I went to Chinese school, King's College. That was the first time I'd ever gone to a Chinese school. I had to learn Cantonese. I actually learned to speak every dialect of Chinese except Fukien, eventually. When we lived in Zechchuan I learned to speak Zechchuanese. When we lived in Guiyang, I learned Guichow. When we were in Shanghai, I learned to speak Shanghai dialect. There were a lot of Eurasians (at the school). I didn't feel out of place at all. I just had difficulty with the language. I was there for about a year and for at least five months of it I was struggling. But I didn't miss a grade. Really it's amazing, because I went to twelve schools in twelve years in two different languages. When I got to America, I found my education was actually better than what my contemporary Americans had had.
"Then Gan Ma didn't like Hong Kong and we went to Shanghai. Now Shanghai was interesting because the Chinese part of it was captured by the Japanese. Shanghai was divided up into Concessions as a result of the Boxer Rebellion. They had a French Concession, the British Concession, the German, the Japanese and we lived in the French Concession. It was like part of France. The police were French, the law, everything. The Japanese couldn't enter there in any way. We went to the Shanghai American School in the French Concession and lived in a very comfortable four bedroom apartment near the school. Those were very happy days in Shanghai. Gan Ma was happy because two or three of her sisters lived there so she had a social life. The school was excellent. It was 1940 so I was thirteen. I played tennis and basketball. We had a great life in sports and the girls went to dances. I had my first Coca Cola there in Shanghai. We had a soda fountain right near to our apartment. They were very happy times for all of us.
"Then 1941 came along. The summer of '41 Dad wrote and said to Gan Ma that we all had to leave because the Japanese were going to attack the Americans. Gan Ma said: "Your father has gone off his head again, as usual. Pay no attention to him." Dad cabled: "If you don't come, I want my children to come." She said: "If he's going to be that way!" So she dispatched my sister and me from Shanghai to Hong Kong and from Hong Kong we flew into China, to a place very near Guilin. We flew over a war zone. It's a bit strange to me how that happened. The Japanese evidently allowed it. We went in and were met by Dad in his staff car. I hadn't seen him for four years. It was very stilted. He was in his uniform. By this time he was a Major General. He was in a staff car and I remember feeling very, very nervous. At the first check point we came to I felt Dad tense up and I thought: "My God. Here's a guy who's supposed to be a General and he's nervous at a check point." (With their own soldiers) I asked him and Dad said: "Well, you know we're in a war zone. You never know who is going to do what or say what and they'll take you and shoot you right there and then."
I asked Lim if his father still thought this was safer than Shanghai?
He replied: "Yeah, because the Japanese were going to occupy Shanghai. Then from there we drove way into the interior where the army medical base hospital was, a place called Guiyang, in Guichow Province which is in the interior of China. It was very mountainous. Dad had a house there which was obviously somebody's that they had taken over. It was kind of primitive. The bathrooms were outdoor toilets but the house was very comfortable. We arrived in September. I was fourteen. There weren't any other children on this army compound so I didn't go to school. I acquired some dogs and played with my dogs. It was very weird because Dad was very much involved so he didn't have much time for us and we, my sister and I, were on our own."
Did he and his sister become closer? "No. She became very reclusive at that stage. She resented having to leave Shanghai. Thought Dad was crazy for bringing her into this God forsaken place that we were in so she kind of just took it out on me. But I got along with the Chinese, servants and everybody. So I had immediate friends. But she was kind of isolated because she didn't have the same rapport with them that I did. They spoke Guichow so I had to learn the dialect. That was very easy for me at that stage. A new language, a new place I quite liked it because it was mountainous and I had a lot of free time with nothing to do but play."
Was the war something distant? "They bombed us regularly but they were terrible. Dad explained to me that the Japanese used the hospital as a bombing training centre, because it had a big Red Cross on it. They kept missing. The Chinese anti-aircraft had a range, I think, of 19,000 feet and they flew at 22,000 feet so the Chinese couldn't hit them but they were high enough that they couldn't bomb very accurately. It got so that after a while we never even bothered to go to the bomb shelter. They were just as likely to hit the bomb shelter by mistake as to hit the hospital."
Next: The War Ends
