In those poverty-stricken old days, a 10-year-old girl was sold as a child bride because her father was sick. Fortunately, her adopted parents treated her as their own child. She got married to their eldest son at 17 and she is now a happy mother and grandmother.

Li Yu Kuan was born in a poor family in China. Her parents came and lived in Malacca after their house in China was burned in a fire. And she came later with her aunt and lived with her parents when she was 5 years old.

Unfortunately, her father suffered a stroke when she was 10. They had no money for medical expenses and she was sold as a child bride at RM150 to a Catholic family. Her mother brought her to Triang by train and left the next day when she was sitting in the church while eating melon seeds she bought with the money her adopted mother gave her, crying.

Her adopted family treated her well and send her to study in a Chinese primary school when she came to the age. Also, she learned needlework from her adopted mother after school.

When she was in standard three, her adopted father asked her to write her own name and 500 Chinese words one day. She obediently did it and her adopted father was satisfied. He believed that 500 words would be enough for girls and thus, her study was suspended. She learned to use abacus from her adopted father instead.

“My adopted parents treated me well. As far back as I could remember, I was whipped only two times by my adopted mother. One for doing wrong in sewing and another for dropping a dish on the floor. After I got married to their eldest son, I was busy taking care of my children and my adopted father showed his sympathy by buying a sewing machine for me,” Li said.

Li did well in embroidery and sewing. She even sewed her own wedding gown and cloths for her children.

There was a Chinese custom in which the prospective bride had to get a blessed woman to do facial threading for her and comb her hair. It was said the bride would be blessed like the woman and they would have same number of children.

Li did not get any blessed woman, but her adopted mother, did it when she got married. She laughed that what the custom said was not true as she got more children than her adopted mother had.

During the Japanese occupation era, the Chen family suffered a hardship. Li had to grow vegetables and paddies; as well as farm chickens and pigs for self-sufficiency and to make money. In those days, the family ate sweet potatoes and cassava more than rice.

After the Japanese had surrendered, she did rubber tapping. She rode a bicycle to a rubber estate at 5am every morning and even though she fell off the bicycle when she was pregnant, she still kept working.

She told Sin Chew Daily that her children were very sensible at that time. They helped her to tap rubber and sometimes, they sold deep-fried fluffy dough sticks, bread and ice-cream.

Mentioning about her children’s education, she laughed and said her highly-educated husband wished to teach their children by his own but she insisted to send them to school. They even had several arguments on that issue.

Li retired in her 60s and she is now a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother to about 100 descendants.

Li was good in midwifery, too. She delivered six of the children herself.

Li was studious and she once spent RM3 to buy a fan in order to learn making fans by herself. She then made one which was exactly the same as the one she bought.

One of her grandson, Chen Gen Chuan said that his grandmother is very popular with children. She buys a lot of candies and snacks each time she goes out and she always brings a pair of scissors with her. When her grandchildren or great-grandchildren come to pay a visit, she will give them the snacks and help them to open the packaging with her scissors.

“She speaks Hakka, Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin and Malay. She knows to do everything and one of her strengths is to urge her children and grandchildren to get married. Otherwise, we might not get married so early,” he added. (Translated by SOONG PHUI JEE/ Sin Chew Daily)