Daughter of the Flood was a working title for my mother’s memoir. I also considered Princess of Two Rivers and Princess of the Flood. Then, my editor suggested Spring Flower, which is my mother’s Chinese name and was one of the working titles my mother had also contemplated. I became receptive after we added the subtitle A Tale of Two Rivers. I wanted to include river or flood in the title or subtitle because it signified the beginning of my mother’s life.
My mother was born in 1931 in a dirt-poor farming village on the northern banks of the Yangtze River. By then, China had been ravaged by military conflicts for decades, enduring a succession of food shortages and pandemics. And 1931 saw one of the world’s deadliest natural disasters in the twentieth century. The Yangtze floods claimed 4 million lives from drowning and after that from starvation and infectious diseases. A local Scottish American missionary Georgina Phillips Perkins (who would become my American grandmother) wrote, “Ordinarily, at Kiukiang, the river was about 1½ miles wide, but at flood time that year, it was over 30 miles wide! It got even wider downstream, nearly 120 miles wide near Nanking! The flood covered a wide area of the north bank of the river. Kiukiang, on the south bank, was well-flooded but not to the same extent.”
Although President Chiang Kai-Shek briefly unified the country in 1928, his Republic Nationalist Government offered little assistance to the flood refugees. Most were poor like my mother’s biological parents. So, refugees were largely left to their own demise, and some were fortunate enough to find humanitarian aid at refugee camps and food distribution centers set up by foreign missionaries. In that atmosphere of suffering, my mother’s biological parents had little ability to raise a girl child. So, my mother faced a dire beginning with the odds stacked against her, especially as a girl.
The presence of Christian missionaries empowered girls and women in China. Because of the missionaries’ efforts and influence, by 1931, the status of women in China had improved significantly. Girls and women could attend school and pursue professions like teaching, nursing, and even becoming doctors. However, gender discriminatory practices continued, especially in rural areas. Boys could work in the fields and carry on the family name, whereas girls were deemed economic burdens. If baby girls were not given away as servants or sold to wealthier families to become their sons’ brides sometime in the future, they might be abandoned on the roadside and left to die.
However, my mother was fortuitous because her biological parents didn’t consider leaving her on a sidewalk to die. Her biological mother was determined to save her. Across the river from their hut was a refugee camp set up by missionaries, and her mother went there regularly to get food and milk. After numerous trips for provisions, she offered my mother to Georgina Phillips Perkins, quoted above, and a few months later, Georgina and her husband, Dr. Edward Perkins, agreed to adopt my mother, by then a year old. Thus, for my mother, the disaster was also a blessing. The need for food and milk led to the food depot, which led to a radical change in her young life. She became a kind of princess living in comfort, with servants and love, and some years later, English-language education.
My adoptive American grandparents were medical missionaries who had opened a hospital near Kiukiang, directly across the Yangtze River from the hut where my mother was born. In her letter describing that tragedy and her own good work, Mrs. Perkins continued:
In 1931, there was another great opportunity to help the Chinese people when there was a great flood of the Yangtze River. The farmers on the north side lost their tools and equipment. Their animals and homes were completely underwater. So, they came to Kiukiang, where flood relief was carried out. At the Waters of Life Hospital [which the Perkins started], many temporary little homes popped up for flood refugees, and a clinic was held daily. We were happy to have milk to give to the babies. We got to know a number of the babies, and one of them was named Spring Flower.
My mother, Dr. Jean Tren-Hwa (Spring Flower) Perkins, acknowledged these events in Spring Flower: A Tale of Two Rivers: “I had two sets of parents. The first gave me birth; the second gave me life. Without their love and tender care, I wouldn’t be alive to this day. And thanks to them, I was given a small role to play in this world.”
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The Yangtze, which flows from the Tibetan plateau to the East China Sea at Shanghai, is the longest river in Eurasia and the third longest river in the world. It is rich with history, with evidence of human life in the Three Gorges Area that dates back 27,000 years. One-third of the inhabitants of China today (which means 450 million people) live in the area covered by the Yangtze’s river basin. The Yangtze basin provides two-thirds of China’s rice; and industries and farming there contribute as much as 40 percent of China’s economy. It’s a huge body of water in a huge country with a huge population and a nearly timeless history. In her memoir, my mother wrote: “Since ancient times, the Great Yangtze River has provided ‘water of life’ for the dense populations of the Southwest, Central, and Eastern regions of China. Wars came and went, and dynasties changed hands and names every few centuries, but the great river has always been there. The history of China and that of the Yangtze River have intertwined seamlessly over thousands of years.” And, for worse and for better, its tragic flooding in 1931 set the course of my mother’s life.
Author
Richard Perkins Hsung was born in China in 1966 and was one of the first teens to leave China legally after Mao’s Cultural Revolution. He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago and became a professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, retiring in 2022. He spent ten years editing and completing Spring Flower (Earnshaw Books) by his mother, Jean Tren-Hwa Perkins, MD. The three-volume memoir chronicles her life as an adopted child of American medical missionaries, survivor of China’s brutal communist regime, ophthalmologist, immigrant, and mother. Hsung lives in Madison with his wife, where keeping squirrels from digging up his backyard has become a daily scientific obsession. Learn more at Yangtze River by the Hudson Bay.
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