The Woman Without a Beginning
She was born in 1912, the year the Ch’ing Dynasty collapsed.
She did not know where.
No one ever told her.
She was sold as a toddler — not uncommon at the time, in a China cleaved by famine and warlordism. A wealthy Cantonese apothecary in Tientsin bought her to be raised as a daughter. He had sons, but no girl, and so this child — whose mother may have wept, or may have walked away — became the daughter of herbalists, growing up surrounded by scales, dried roots, and rows of glass jars filled with ginseng, saffron, and goji berries.
They fed her well. She spoke only Cantonese in those years. Her health remained remarkably strong for the rest of her life, and her grandchildren would later half-joke that it was the daily goji berries that made her indestructible.
Her identity, her original parents, her birthplace — were all lost to time.
Then, around 1930, she stepped into fate by accident.
There was a public funeral procession in Tientsin, sombre and elaborate. My great-grandmother — still only eighteen, elegant and composed — went out with the crowd to watch it pass. She was spotted there by a woman in the crowd: a niece of Gao Lingwei. The woman was struck — not just by her beauty, but by the air she carried.
The niece brought word to her uncle, Gao Lingwen, who had recently become a widower. His second spouse had died two years earlier, shortly after childbirth — worn down by grief and shame for not bearing a son. She neglected her recovery and passed away, leaving behind two daughters, the younger only two years old at the time.
And so my great-grandmother — a girl from nowhere, who had known only goji berries and Cantonese, who had never even heard the name “Gao” — entered a household of scholars and history.
She married into the family.
She raised her youngest stepdaughter as her own, but the child — affectionately nicknamed Yu, meaning “extra” — sadly died before reaching adulthood.
She adapted — not by erasing herself, but by studying everything and forgetting nothing.
She never received formal education. But she could learn a household, a dialect, a tradition. She went from herbalist’s daughter to the matriarch of a family descended from ministers and educators.
And when the Red Guards came decades later — to shame, to destroy, to erase — she stood up and shouted:
“I am a diligent person who worked!!”
It was not a slogan.
It was the truth.
And it echoed louder than any drum or denunciation.
But there was more to her than grit and duty.
She was also easy-going, light-hearted, and full of quiet humour. She loved to watch Peking opera at the theatre, where the music stirred something that even revolution could not silence. At home, she often played card games with others, laughing and bantering. Her husband — the solemn, bookish Gao Lingwen — once gave her a nickname that remained in family lore:
“The restless rabbit.”
And perhaps that is what she was:
A creature of quiet energy, always moving, always learning —
Her story is not a footnote.
It is the quiet centre of everything this book remembers.