27
Tungtang):
Papa gave in, and Rosalie [Suyin] and Tiza [her younger sister] went to the Catholic Chinese school; every morning there was half an hour of Bible story, and in this version St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary were Chinese, born in Shantung province.
Rosalie asked: “How can this be? The Western School says born in Judea, and the family were all Jews."
"That's what they say, but we here believe it is in Shantung,” replied the Chinese lay-sister who taught Catechism.
Rosalie was not happy, and talked to the other children about it, and three days later Mother Superior sent for her after school and told her to stop asking questions.
“You must understand, my child, that the others don't know any better. They are Chinese.'
The devastating atmosphere of her childhood years made Han Suyin write a bitter paragraph in Chapter 11 (The End and the Beginning), taken from volume five, Phoenix Harvest. In this episode, she describes the family's difficult life in pre-revolutionary China:
Their [Han Suyin's parents'] decades together were of sorrow and pain and insecurity, of war and running away and making do; and seeing their children despised for being Eurasians. Only I had the courage (or the foolishness) to scream against the general contempt for Eurasians, "But we are the future."
In her early teens, Han Suyin had the courage to think of a sky-high virtually impossible dream for a female Eurasian in pre-revolutionary China, namely of becoming a medical doctor. In order to at least partially finance these very costly studies, she first had to learn typing and shorthand writing, and then got a secretarial job with P.U.M.C. (Peking Union Medical College). At P.U.M.C., this child of barely fourteen was immediately confronted with inequality in payment for equal accomplishment, depending on the employee's racial status, white, Eurasian in various different proportions, or simply Chinese. In Chapter
27
Tungtang):
Papa gave in, and Rosalie [Suyin] and Tiza [her younger sister] went to the Catholic Chinese school; every morning there was half an hour of Bible story, and in this version St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary were Chinese, born in Shantung province.
Rosalie asked: “How can this be? The Western School says born in Judea, and the family were all Jews."
"That's what they say, but we here believe it is in Shantung,” replied the Chinese lay-sister who taught Catechism.
Rosalie was not happy, and talked to the other children about it, and three days later Mother Superior sent for her after school and told her to stop asking questions.
“You must understand, my child, that the others don't know any better. They are Chinese.'
The devastating atmosphere of her childhood years made Han Suyin write a bitter paragraph in Chapter 11 (The End and the Beginning), taken from volume five, Phoenix Harvest. In this episode, she describes the family's difficult life in pre-revolutionary China:
Their [Han Suyin's parents'] decades together were of sorrow and pain and insecurity, of war and running away and making do; and seeing their children despised for being Eurasians. Only I had the courage (or the foolishness) to scream against the general contempt for Eurasians, "But we are the future."
In her early teens, Han Suyin had the courage to think of a sky- high virtually impossible dream for a female Eurasian in pre- revolutionary China, namely of becoming a medical doctor. In order to at least partially finance these very costly studies, she first had to learn typing and shorthand writing, and then got a secretarial job with P.U. M.C. (Peking Union Medical College). At P.U.M.C., this child of barely fourteen was immediately confronted with inequality in payment for equal accomplishment, depending on the employee's racial status, white, Eurasian in various different proportions, or simply Chinese. In Chapter
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