The biography of Low Bee Mui should be written in at least three languages but can only be rendered in one.
She was a Teochew from Guangdong province and grew up in the port city of Swatow. Bee Mui’s father was an uneducated fisherman, her mother an uneducated breeder of children. Bee Mui had four older brothers and two younger sisters, only one of whom she would see again after leaving China for good.
On June 19, 1939, two days before Japanese forces invaded Swatow, Bee Mui boarded a steamship with little more than the clothes on her back and a hastily procured letter proving she was the wife of a wealthy heûng kêh—an immigrant trader who’d made his fortune in British Singapore. The agreement between Bee Mui’s father and the trader, a first cousin, was that Bee Mui would be delivered to him when she turned fifteen. But the coming of the Japanese necessitated that the pact be sealed a year in advance.
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