My mum's story
The story of Chang Ching Fang (張菁芳)
By Telisa Minami
My mother was born in 1973 in Kaohsiung, a bustling industrial city in southern Taiwan a year after her sister, and two years after her brother. She often tells me she is a dreamer, and that she is forever eighteen years old.
As a tween, she buried herself in romance novels, envisioning having lots of children. She dreamed of being a childcare teacher, just because, or being a baker because she loved to watch fuzzy animations of people eating warm bread in the mornings. But as the youngest child of blue collar workers who wanted a child who could read business-legal jargon in a sterile air conditioned office, she studied business instead. I want to go into all the complexities of my mother’s life, but still categorise it in a comprehensible way. So here it is: three of her life changing moments (among others) that have altered her very being.
1 - Visiting Japan in grade 11, and what comes after.
For two to three weeks, her family got enough money to let her participate in a student exchange in Japan. It was her first time leaving Taiwan. She tells me how wowed she was; the clean streets, organised traffic, and rule-abiding citizens were such stark contrast to what she knew. Her host family was warm and generous like sunlight, and she tried real Japanese sashimi. For the first time, she realised that the world wasn’t just Taiwan, and so the wondering began: if a place so close could be so different, what about places further away? Ching Fang wanted to fly.
Teen Ching Fang and her host mother in Japan
With three children, her mother’s words were harsh but true: “if you want to see the outside world, you need to rely on yourself.”. And so she did. After high school, she started working at an English resource translation agency as the administrative assistant, where she met people from Western countries. As per her mother’s request, she continued her education on the weekends, and worked full time from Monday to Friday. She worked for three years in central Taiwan in Taichung where she met her second mother in her homestay, and then worked two years back in Kaohsiung. At the ripe ages of 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22, she confesses that it was hard working when her friends studied, and studying when her friends partied. It was hard choosing a different route to what society demanded was best - being the outlier. However, she learnt how to be independent and pay her bills. As hard as it was, she was loved and supported by the people she wouldn’t have met otherwise. I ask her why she didn’t give up and her only reply: “I had committed to my decision, so why should I?”.
2 - Arriving in Australia, and what comes after.
February 1997, Ching Fang touched down in Melbourne, Australia, at 23 years old knowing that school was spelt s-c-h-o-o-l, but not how it was pronounced. Originally she had planned to go to Japan but she would have only lasted three months with what she had saved up for five years. With 1 AUD to 16 NTD, she could at least last one year in Australia. Her whole family berated her for having too big of an ego; her smarter older brother and sister were more terrified for her than she was. To them, going to a big isolated English speaking island 5,164km away with just a bulky translator to make up for her utter inability to communicate was incomprehensible. “Looking back, even I must say I was pretty fearless. I admire myself,” she often says with the fondness reserved for a favourite lover.
Calling was difficult and very expensive back then, so mailing letters was a more efficient way to reach her family back home. My mother forgets names left and right, but she remembers the exact face of the post office lady she encountered at her first visit to the post office. Ching Fang was struggling to tell her that she needed her letters sent to Taiwan. With absolute contempt and impatience the lady told her “Come back when you speak better English.”. How humiliating and stupid and hurt she felt, blundering her way out to the exit. She wasn’t blind to body language and facial expression. Outside, she cried for the first time on this unknown land far from home. Was this all for nothing? Maybe she was too idealistic, just like everyone else had told her. But she had come all this way, and five years of blood, sweat, and tears couldn’t have just been for nothing - she could only overcome it. So she swore to herself: she wouldn’t be deaf or a mute. She would learn English well. And so she did. She listened to English podcasts whilst walking, recited vocabulary on the bus, and studied at the library on weekends. She even went to a rural campus to escape her Mandarin speaking friends. A year flew by, and my mother graduated language school. Despite burning through her savings, she stayed to complete two years of vocational education, earning a level 3 and 4 importer and exporter certification, as her family was now able to provide financial support after her siblings had graduated.
Due to some life drama not excluding relationship challenges and stolen money, she abruptly returned to Taiwan for three years to work as the purchasing manager at the biggest seafood importer. This is also how she met my father at 25, a Japanese man who also left his country and now worked as the sales manager at a seafood exporter in New Zealand. Despite huge corporate success, Australia called, and she returned to this once foreign land to complete her masters in international ecommerce, graduating in 2003.
Fast forward a few years and she owns seven accessory retail stores across South Australia called Rainbow Hosiery. She tells me of one of the Australians she is most grateful for, Kylie, a contractor at one of the shopping centres she had a store at. Kylie was always fair, and never racially discriminated against her. Because most Asian immigrants were extremely hardworking, they received a lot of racism and prejudice for supposedly ‘stealing the jobs and homes of real Australians’. It was the era of unchecked racism in Australia. My mother tells me how she received more discrimination being an Asian rather than being a woman. It was Kylie who occasionally reprimanded her workers when they were off task and who encouraged her to get a lawyer involved when her new contractor, for no reason, chose to not renew the contract.
The greatest lesson she learnt from Kylie was to be strong, because soft people, particularly minorities, would only be exploited in Australia. “The day you can negotiate and fight with a Western is the day you become Australian,” Kylie always said. And so Ching Fang did. I always pity the poor Optus employees who pick up the phone to my mother when their company has poor services and laugh every time I hear her pull the I’m-a-16-year-old-customer card. She tells me: “I am a business woman.”.
3 - Birthing me, and what comes after.
At the peak of her business, having already reached financial independence at thirty-three, Ching Fang gave birth to me in April 2007. She planned to get her father and mother to Adelaide, South Australia, in part because she needed support taking care of me, but mostly because she wished to take care of them as their wrinkles deepened. And like all the goals she set out to do, she succeeded. But successfully? No.
She wanted all the people she loved under one roof, the one condition she had when marrying my father. “I was too naive back then,” she says matter of factly now. Fundamentally, my father does not respect my grandparents and he has a very different view on how to use money to my mother. He took over the finances. Since she closed her hosiery business she needs to ask him for money. Oh, how the roles have switched.
If only she knew that her husband cared more about himself. She wouldn’t have entrusted her business revenue to him. She would have bought her parents a separate house when she still had money. She wouldn’t have had to carry so many people on her back. She wouldn’t have needed to open a homemade organic artisan bakery two years ago to try and be financially independent for the second time in her life. She does love it though. She wouldn’t have had to push herself so hard again, running on an average of four hours of sleep and standing upright for ten plus hours a day. Maybe a month ago she wouldn’t have gotten valvular insufficiency - a malfunctioning heart - that had forced her to finally come to a screeching halt.
Why not just divorce? When asked to answer this, my mother always hums. “Because though he sucks the joy out of my life, he is not a bad person. He may not be good to my parents but he is good to me in the only way he knows how. At the end of the day, I made the choice to marry him so I bear the responsibility. If I can’t change him I must change myself,” her kindness almost hurts.
If given a second life, she wouldn’t marry him. She would rather spend her life single, taking care of herself and her parents, using money to bring joy, not anxiety. It used to hurt knowing that that would come at the cost of not having me and my brother, but I understand now.
Chang Ching Fang belongs to no one but herself, and that fills me with joy.
