One-on-one with James Torrance Lim Part One - Extraordinary childhood in the Far East
By Laura Tanna, Contributor
James Lim. Right: The Department of Physiology at Peking Union Medical College, June 2002, exactly as it was in 1937 when Lim's father worked there.
THE FIRST time I met Jim Lim I was intrigued that his mother was Scottish and his father not only Chinese, but a Major General in Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalist Army; in fact Head of the Army Medical Services when the Nationalist and Communist Chinese troops were united in fighting the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. Many who know James Lim as the Senior Executive Vice-President of Desnoes and Geddes (D&G) Ltd., who retired from D&G in 1993, and who celebrated his 75th birthday on October 2, 2002, may not realise what an illustrious family history he has, nor what an absolutely incredible childhood he had in the Far East prior to settling permanently in Jamaica in 1958 after his marriage to Beatrice Desnoes in 1957. In June, he visited China for the first time in 65 years and upon his return, I interviewed him about that trip and the extraordinary story of his early years.
Because Lim himself was born in Scotland and his father in Singapore, he began: "I want to say something about Grandpa which is very important because it sets the stage. He is the really only genuine Chinese in the family in the sense that he was born and grew up in China." "Grandpa" was Dr. Lim Boon Keng, born in Fukien Province, China in 1869 and as a young man, migrated to Singapore to become the first Chinese to win the Queen's Scholarship. He gained a First Class Honours degree in Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, returned to Singapore in 1893, where he distinguished himself by serving with the Legislative Council from 1895 to 1902, heading a Commission of Enquiry into the sources of poverty in Singapore in 1896, co-founding the first English language school for Chinese girls, the Singapore Chinese Girls' School in 1899, co-founding the Straits Chinese Reform movement at the turn of the century and campaigning for the removal of the queue or pigtail. In 1912, he was a founding member of the Kuomintang, Singapore Branch, the Kuomintang being the National People's Party, founded primarily by Sun Yat Sen in 1911 and led by Chiang Kai Shek from 1925 as mainland China's dominant party until 1948. Dr. Lim Boon Keng was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1918. His grandson, Jim Lim, told me:
"He was the first educated Chinese doctor to come to Singapore and just when the British were easing off and the Chinese entrepreneurs were coming up. But they had no education and no money, so they scrabbled. They went into rubber, tin and all those things. When Grandpa got there, they came to him as patients and as an advisor. He could read English and advise them on contracts and things like that. They had no money so they gave him shares in their companies. After about twenty years, grandfather became a very wealthy man. Just to give you an example, one of these companies was Tiger Balm. He had shares from the ground floor. Grandpa only went back to China to start the University of Amoy. Even today, it is one of China's premier universities. They changed the name of Amoy, the town, to "Haimen", which literally means "Door on the Sea." He took all his money, built the University of Amoy, started it and went back as the first president. He came back to Singapore after the University got going and he retired." He became the first president of the China Society in 1949 and remained its patron until his death in 1957. Jim Lim's father, Robert Kho Sheng Lim, as the oldest son, followed in his own father's footsteps by studying medicine at Edinburgh University. Jim continues: "A Scottish Presbyterian minister took a liking to dad and offered to take him back to Scotland with him, to bring him up. dad left Singapore at age seven and never went back until he was twenty-seven. That's why he spoke no Chinese. In fact, he was as Scottish as they come. He had a Scottish burr in his accent and of course he married a Scottish girl, before he returned. Margaret Torrance was her name and everybody called her Peggy. Dad met her at a summer resort, Oban, in Scotland. That's where there is a West Indian connection. Dad's best friend was Dr. Gomes from Trinidad. Gomes and Dad were classmates and met these two sisters, my mother and Aunt Jessie. They married the two girls and Gomes went back to Trinidad as a doctor, became the resident doctor in Nevis, developed appendicitis and died very early. They had had three girls." Lim's Scottish aunt and his three cousins returned to Scotland where his Scottish grandfather was a naval architect. Says Lim: "He was one of the architects of the Queen Mary. I remember going on board when it was being built, in '34 or '35 when mother went back to Scotland." Lim's own parents remained in Scotland, where his father, Dr. Robert K.S. Lim became a lecturer at Edinburgh University in Physiology, under the famous Scottish Physi-ologist Dr. Sharpie until his father was recruited to return to China. Lim explains: "Rockefeller Foundation was building this medical school in Peking (Peking Union Medical College) and dad was recruited as a lecturer in Physiology. He was very well paid because Rockefeller was very generous. When you look at the quality of the stuff that they built." Lim compared a photograph of the medical school on an old postcard an exquisite building with ornate, green-tiled roof, upturned corners and ceramic decoration with a photograph he took on his recent trip and declared it: "Identical. The Red Guard didn't touch the hospital, evidently because it was a teaching hospital, although it was very Mandarin, as you can see with all the roofs." His parents moved to China in 1923 or '24 with their first two children, his older brother Teddy and older sister Effie, short for Euphemia. The initial three-year contract then allowed them nine months home leave. Teddy died age seven of meningitis before they went back to Scotland, where Jim was born in Glasgow in 1927. He was barely a year old when they returned to China in 1928. Says Lim: "My very first memory was kindergarten. I sat there and I didn't like it at all. I remember locking the teacher in the closet. So I got expelled from kindergarten! I was thrilled. I'd dealt with that problem. The other memory I have is puttering around Dad's car with the chauffeur. In those days, it was an Essex, British made. They had carbide lights. It's a chemical. You put it in water, it gives off a gas and you light it. It has a very bright light. I was fascinated by these carbide lights. The car had to be cranked to start. Those are the first little things that I remember.
"I went to the Peking American School with my sister but everyday when the chauffeur brought us home from school, he sat me down. We had a little gazebo in our garden and he taught me Chinese. He was insistent that I learn reading, writing and the classics. You have to remember, the help in the house were all Manchu." (The Manchu were the Mongolian people of Manchuria who conquered China in the 17th century and established the Ch'ing dynasty from 1644 until 1912.) "The Manchu all lived inside the Forbidden City. In the Forbidden City, everything was provided for. It literally was a city. The Emperor, the staff and all the functionaries, everybody lived there. It was something like sixty acres in land space. When they got booted out, they had to find something else. When the Manchu were overturned, all the court people went to the bottom of the social ladder. "I remember the people who worked for us: my nanny, the chauffeur. In a household, the staff or help had a leader and quite typical of the British, he was called "Number One Boy." That was the British terminology for the head of the staff and he was a Manchu. The cook wasn't. The cook worked in the French Embassy, was trained and actually wrote and spoke French so my mother and he communicated in French. So the chauffeur was insistent that I learn reading, writing and the classics. I think he had been like a secretary, a scribe. He wrote beautifully. My mother couldn't understand all of this. All she knew was that it probably was a good thing for me to learn Chinese, because she and Dad didn't know any. I was bilingual from I grew up, because my nanny taught me. Nai Nai, that's what the Chinese call nanny. She spoke with me in the normal way. She was a Manchu also and had bound feet."
For an hour or more every day for four years, from age six until ten when Lim left Peking, now known as Beijing, he was tutored in Mandarin by a Manchu which he says "was the grounding, even til today, for my ability to speak Mandarin and my ability to write. I loved the calligraphy. The Chinese calligraphy is an art form and the more you know about it, the more it is you realise how beautiful or how technical you get. You see a scroll, and right away you know whether it's good or bad. The interesting thing, I came out Chinese, inside, and my sister Effie came out European. She had very little interest to participate in any of this. She learned to speak because that was just convenience. I used to spend all my time with the staff in the house and I went sometimes to their homes with them."
Although Rockefeller Foundation built accommodations in a compound away from the school for medical staff, after three or four years Lim's father purchased a house in a Chinese community in which their family lived. It's one of the few houses that still remain, very near the Forbidden City. Says Lim: "Originally our family was five children. There was Teddy, my sister Effie, then my sister Margaret, a year older than I, died of meningitis; then my sister Joannie, a couple years younger than I. She died of an eye tumour. I don't remember Margaret at all but I remember tip-toeing downstairs when Joannie was very ill and all the doctors being there. I kept asking: "What's happening? What's happening?" I remember seeing her bandaged up in one eye. It was really very sad. She was three or four when she died. Then my mother died when I was nine, in 1936, of a cerebral haemorrhage.
"When Mother died, things in China were very tense because the Japanese had already started their machinations in Manchuria. They'd put in the government in Manchuria which they controlled. People like Dad knew that their intentions were to attack China. He was head of the Chinese Red Cross. The Chinese Army at that time was made up of different Warlord Armies that Chiang Kai Shek had beaten and amalgamated. They had various soldier groups, none of them had any medical facilities whatsoever, so the Chinese Red Cross was the only unit that had doctors and nurses. It was in existence but in a very haphazard way. Dad put it together mainly because the soldiers were fighting the Japanese long before the war actually started. The Japanese were feeling them out, pushing into various parts of China to see what the resistance was.
"The war actually started in 1937. We were on holiday in Pei Ta Ho. When Mother died, dad was very devastated and didn't know what to do. He had these two children and he was very much involved in his work. My Chinese Godmother stepped in. That's very important, because she was a tremendous influence from that time on."
