years, stopping the foot's growth. In those days, small feet were a ugn of a woman's obedience and of a family's importance. Grandmother's feet caused her pain all her life. Later, she bravely refused to cause her own daughter o suffer in this way. In 1911 when Aunt Baba was six years old, Dr Sun Yat Sen was named President of China. One of his first acts was to stop the custom of foot-binding My grandparents grew to love each other and had seven children. Of those, only the first two lived. Aunt Baba was born in 1905 and my father two years later. Ye Ye supported his family by hiring out boats on the busy Huangpu River. He was careful with money and by the age of forty he was quite a rich man. Then he was asked to become the manager of a business in Tianjin, a port city more than 1,500 kilometres north of Shanghai. Ye Ye had a secret. He suffered from seasickness and hated to travel in his own boats. So he decided to sell them and move to Tianjin. Not wishing to interrupt his children's schooling, Ye Ye went there alone at first