“House of Kwa” memoir chronicles upbringing in a Chinese-Australian dynasty

To look at Mimi Kwa today, she has got it made. She is a glamorous and serious Australian journalist for ABC, where she has been a TV newsreader for 20 years. She is married with 4 children. To arrive at that point though has been no easy feat. The ultimate success may be that she has survived at all.

Mimi Kwa’s memoir, House of Kwa (柯), starts in the contemporaneous present when the author receives notice of a lawsuit by her father against her: Kwa v. Kwa. The author sees this as a fated tension, the father as a dragon, the daughter as a tiger. If conflict is at the core of drama, then this memoir has plenty of it.

Then, the story involves a long flashback, beginning in 1884, with the author’s great grandfather. He is claiming direct descendance from the Emperor of China, an assertion which is stated but not supported or unsupported, either way. He is yelling for his servant, Chen She, to find and set up his opium pipe. This time period is told with an overlay of fairytale and folklore  and Western fictional sensibilities, with some historical evocations: “The two stone lions at the compound gate bristle with alarm. Up on the roof ridges, terracotta dragons turn to one another in panic.” This is a world of spirits and extra-human awarenesses.

The culture is male-dominant, with Chinese women of the upper classes with erotic bound feet, and men able to have multiple wives and concubines. The women are in contention for power among themselves within the family. The family goes to Chinese astrology for advisement for important matters like marrying off children. Girls marry early at 14 and boys at 16.

Lotus Flower is the 4th concubine of the Great-Grandfather. She and Ying Kam, the 1sts on of the 3rd wife of the patriarch run off together to make their way in the world. The world is both ordered and disordered, with the older generations trying to hold back striving youth. Superstitions are common, such as a bride having to cry copiously on her wedding night to bring luck and avoid misfortune. Shaman are brought in to disperse evil spirits and to fortune tell and to predict whether or not a couple will have children. The couple seem to not be able to bear children, so they adopt a child instead. That adoption opens the floodgates, and over the years, Ying Kim fathers some 31 more children.  Second Wife is Happy Shadow. Third wife is Ng Yuk.  Theirs is a brutally pragmatic family, with a focus on Kwa “blood” as the true measure of belonging. This means that once a person has served their purpose, they are left by the wayside.

Yim Kam is prone to “dragon outbursts”: “He isn’t himself when he gets like this, the dreamer boy travelling on dragon hide to become the dragon itself. Sometimes he doesn’t know who he is. Servants cower, and wives use their wiles, but no matter their status or number all meet with blows from time to time.” The women are there to bear children and maintain the household, in a throwback value.

The family has to be entrepreneurial to survive. Yim Kam enters into the textiles trade. When the forced British trade in opium ends, the silk trade becomes much less. The patriarch has to work as a rickshaw drive. Fortune is a changing and erstwhile thing, with one observation reading: “Fu bu quo san dai.  Wealth does not sustain beyond three generations.”

There is a move to Hong Kong where the work opportunities exist. Even as the family grows and changes, macro-geopolitical realities change the social landscape. There is a sense of ripening threat on the island, with the Japanese on a conquering rampage.

The Japanese invade China in the Second Sino-Japanese war. The Rape of Nanjing results in some 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese dead. Japan invades French Indochina. It is WWII, and the Japanese are rampaging through East Asia (Guam, Philippines, British Malaya, Thailand, and others). The atrocities are numerous.

There is also an elusive sense of what the Kwa family means.  The memoir reads like a dreamscape, with the past informing the present in mysterious ways:

“House of Kwa is smoke from an opium pipe, gently coiling around a cherry tree.  As the smoke envelops the tree, a baby dragon soars into view. He curls up at the base of the tree and watches vibrant blossoms open. Some thrive while others lose their hue and shape, wilting and floating to the ground. The young dragon falls sound asleep, awaiting his own birth as a blossom on the tree.

Her father is Wing Nin (aka Tak Lau and later, “Francis”). He is called by a girl’s name to fake out “immoral gods and human defilers.” (Humans are beset by a complex world of deities and spirits and people.) In the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, the locals have to hide their children against rape. Many return to the mainland. There is bombing by the friendlies (the Americans and the British, former overlords of the British colony) trying to oust the Japanese, and there is terror on-ground from the Japanese subjugating the Chinese and jailing the expats.

The memoir reads as more authentic as the narrative moves closer to the present. In the historical narrative, there is a sense of collapsing time, with lifetimes spent quickly and absorbed into unwritten histories. In many ways, the Chinese are not sympathetic to readers. They are self-important, abusive to servants, socially hierarchical, and vain. And yet, they are also driven by a strong survival instinct (with the family learning to collaborate with the Japanese to survive and to acquire extra rations) and strong family loyalty. This is a fraught period for not only the Kwa family but the larger world, which is deciding the lives of the next generations globally.

Rich households such as that of the Kwas live as self-sustaining social units, with maids that serve as tutors. When war arrives on the island though, the British fold quickly (17 days) and retreat after days, and the Japanese soldiers go on killing sprees and capturing prisoners and raping women and children. In 10 days, tens of thousands of women and children have been raped. Internment camps have been set up for POW British, East Indian, and Canadian soldiers. There is mass starvation, with people resorting to eating leaves off of trees. There are routine beheadings, shootings, and bayoneting by the Japanese soldiers, at whim. The occupiers enforce a Japanese language only policy, with no Chinese and no English allowed. Reeducation camps are set up to indoctrinate the teachers and others in the population to the Japanese way. Teachers are given 3 months to learn the language or face death or expulsion to the Chinese mainland. Children take on jobs to try to provide for their families.

A glowing member of the Kwa clan is Theresa Wai Ching Kwa (“Aunty”), who becomes a flight attendant for a British airline. She saves up for her nuclear and extended families to promote their education and well-being. Her generosity extends for generations and is life-changing. Francis (the author’s father) moves to Australia to pursue education and opportunities. He is promptly robbed of his life savings and his shoes. He experiences a cold and racist Australian “welcome,” with constant taunts and unprovoked fights. He is accused of taking Australian jobs, and as he gets older, white Australian women (who are charmed by his being). “Why should we pay for you to go to school? Go back where you came from, bloody chogie,” reads one taunt. He connects with a Chinese family running a restaurant in Geelong (a small town) and finds a job in their laundry. He later moves to Perth.  While the experience is of racism, the larger society seems to be open to actual merit and initiative. Many of Australia’s immigrants find ways to thrive.

The author herself emerges first as the voice of a fetus from the womb who is aware and powerful. Her mother is Mela, a young woman who hears voices and has undiagnosed mental health challenges, and her father is the older Francis (who is 20 years senior to his wife’s age). What follows are various adventures and the revealing of family secrets. This memoir has a wonderful insert in the middle of the book with historical photos, in both black-and-white and color.

While there are family tensions with her father, Mimi Kwa balances that with her empathy with his struggles. She shares misadventures of her own in her growing up years and her experiences with sexual violence. She addresses issues of self-destructiveness and also suicidality in her family. The shift to her own lived experiences suddenly slows time from the historical period of “old Kwa” to the present-day ones. She describes a hotel her father owned and ran during her teen years and some of her experiences there with world travelers.

The Kwas are survivors, if nothing else. They make opportunities wherever they go. They are beautiful people, with several in the author’s generation serving as models (with higher education). Her book is a kind of “long goodbye” to the lives of her recent ancestors. It serves, she writes, as a form of letting go of a traumatic past. It is a way of coming to terms with fears of mental illness in her family and finally getting help for her mother after a number of destructive incidences. This book is about overcoming and surviving, even as Mimi Kwa grew up wounded and also wounded.

House of Kwa serves as a powerful cultural bridge to historical events and the Chinese immigrant experience in Australia, a racist receiving country but one with some leeway for human potential. This is a singular and riveting memoir that celebrates family but also understands the dissipations of time, which render all families as crumbling edifices.

People come to the fore for a moment in time, and then they pass off the ancient calligraphy brush for the next generations to write their own sacred and precious lives.