Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
ors. All in all, our house was still quite good, better than most people
could say they live in, even in comparison with today’s multimillion-
dollar San Francisco homes. My father’s family had a longtime
cotton mill business and the department store Honesty, which my
grandfather had started in 1923. It was maybe one degree less presti­
gious than the department store Sincerity, and while our store was
not as large, our merchandise was just as good, and in the case of
cotton goods, the quality was even better for the same price. All my
father’s foreign customers said so.
He was a typical high-class Shanghainese: absolutely traditional
in matters of family and home, and completely modern in business
and the outside world. When he left our gates, he entered another
realm and adapted himself to it like a chameleon. When necessary,
he could speak in other languages, and the accent was absolutely
particular to the tutor he had chosen for reasons of class distinction:
the English was Oxford, the French was Right Bank, the German
was Berlin. He also knew Latin and a formal kind of Manchu into
which all the literary classics had been translated. He wore pomade
in his sleeked-back hair, smoked filter-tip cigarettes, and conversed
on subjects as wide-ranging as riddles, the physiology of different
races, and the curiosities of other cuisines. He could argue persua­
sively on the mistreatment of China in the Treaty of Versailles and
compare the political satire in Dante’s Inferno with Tsao’s earlier ver­
sion of A Dream of Red Mansions. When he stepped back through
the gates of our family home, he reverted to his private self. He read
much, but seldom spoke, and truly, there was no need in a household
whose women worshipped him and anticipated his needs before they
ever occurred to him.
His foreign friends called him Philip. My brothers’ English names
were Preston and Nobel, which were auspicious, sounding like the
word “president” and the name of the prestigious prize that comes
with a lot of money. Sweet Ma chose the name Bertha, because my
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