By Laura Tanna, Contributor
Dr Robert K.S. Lim in 1962, James Lim's father. Left: James Lim - Contributed
PARTS ONE and two of this interview with James Lim, an executive who ended up at the heart of D&G's Red Stripe empire here in Jamaica, highlighted his extraordinary Chinese heritage in China and Singapore but nothing could compare with events in this final segment of his youth when his father was Major General of the Chinese Army Medical Services during World War II. "Dad kept after my godmother, Gan Ma. Eventually she arrived with her daughters in late October or early November. She took over the housing, organised everybody and everything. I was close to her by then. I respected her. She was not a person that was very warm in the sense of loving warm but she was a very strong woman and we knew that she meant good for us. But you just did as she told you to do. Later on she became much warmer but it was very hard on her in those days. She had all these kids to look after and a strange man in Daddy whom she didn't quite understand because she was very Chinese and he wasn't. "Pearl Harbour came along and we all realised that dad was right. Then he decided that this living arrangement was not practical so he built a house for himself, Effie and me and gave the house we were living in to my godmother. She said: "You have to go to school." She was now friendly with the Governor of the Province and he was Patron of a military school in Guichow so I was dispatched to this Chinese military school. I was an oddity there. They were all pure Chinese. I was the only sort of foreign-looking one in the crowd. So the kids thought they'd have some fun and made me squad commander. The squad commander every morning had to assemble the squad and go in front of everybody and report who's absent and who's sick. All these Chinese names I couldn't remember. I would stand at attention with all these thousand kids standing at attention and deadly silent because I didn't know what to say. I just coped with it. I didn't have anything else I could do. Guys would giggle and everything else. Because of the Governor being the patron the school commanders didn't really get too difficult with me but they were not friendly at all. "In this school everything was in Mandarin. In Mandarin I had no trouble, only thing was my left and right I never knew very well in Chinese. One day when they were marching out and the Company commander says: "Company right march!" Everybody goes right and (because of me) mine goes left. And then he's trying to get me and everyone back. Confused chaos reigns. Eventually I got back into position.
"We lived in dormitories. Then I discovered that all the instructors in the school had been to German military schools. They were all Nazis. They were indoctrinating all the students into how wonderful Nazi Germany was. So at night, in the dormitory, I would hold court with all the guys and tell them that was a lot of crap that they were talking and that Nazis were bad. I felt confident but I didn't know and got into real trouble because they heard about me. The first punishment I got was I had to kneel for the whole night in front of the flag pole on cinders. Then the next time they caught me, they strung me up by my hands and beat me with their belts. It was a military school and the discipline was very strict.
Did his father realise that this kind of pro-Nazi sympathy existed in the school? "Nobody - Dad never realised it. When I went home and told him, he said I was talking rubbish and I was a trouble maker. I couldn't take it anymore. I was having a lot of problems there so I ran away from school and ran home, about twenty miles away. I slipped out in the early morning when we went to wash. You washed in the river and when everybody went up back I just went along the river. When I got home, I was confronted by my Chinese godmother: "What are you doing home?" So I told her and she got very upset and annoyed at me. "Wait until your father hears about this." Luckily I got malaria, a very virulent form, malignant malaria. Just at that time-it's really lucky how life works out-previous to Atabrine, quinine was the only thing and quinine won't treat malignant malaria. Atabrine was discovered in America and they had sent the first supply to this hospital to test it out. I was one of the first people to try it out. I was very sick. I was delirious for two or three days and then the pill started to work. When I got over the malaria, I got jaundice which very often follows malaria because it affects your liver. Anyway, the good thing about it was that I didn't have to go back to school. So all of this took about three months. "When I got over this they decided that not only did I have to go to school, but the girls had to go to school. So they found a Methodist Canadian Mission School, outside of Jen Show, north of Chongqing. It took about three days drive. This school was fantastic. You lived in houses like a family and in our house were six of us. Mother was Presbyterian and that was my fundamental religion and my Chinese godmother was Buddhist. I learned about Buddhism from her but I really never participated with her. But this school was lovely and the food great. We had a wonderful time there. The school year finished in July '42 and we all went home. Then we heard they'd closed the school and moved it to India so that was that. "The Burma campaign had started and Dad went off to Burma. I was back home. No school again. By this time the American base was at Kun Ming, the 8th Air Force Base. An American, Colonel Weehger-land, came through. When he saw me and heard me speak Chinese, he said: "Look. I need an interpreter. Are you doing anything?" I said: "No. I'm not doing anything." He said: "You're going to be my interpreter." So I said: "What is that?" And he said: "You have to come to Kun Ming." That is the capital of Yunan Province. He took me to Kun Ming, had me inducted into the Chinese Army and had me assigned to him as an interpreter at age sixteen. That was a wonderful experience because when I was his interpreter I attended a lot of staff meetings that he was privy to.
"The American 8th Air Force was based in Kun Ming there to help Chiang Kai Shek because the Burma campaign started and went badly. The American General "Vinegar" Joe Stillwell was the head of the whole China/Burma/India Command and was trapped in Burma by the Japanese. Dad was trapped in Burma. We lost touch with him. Stillwell was north of dad and we all got these various reports about seeing dad being blown up beside a truck. All kinds of things. None of it seemed to make too much sense. Stillwell eventually escaped into India. Dad also escaped into India. But this took weeks. Then they had to fly back to China and regroup. By that time though, the plan was they were starting to move Chinese and American troops into position to sweep up the China coast to attack Japan. There was a master plan of Gen. Mac Arthur. He was going to move up along the islands and then this other group was going to move along the China coast and they were going to attack Japan. All this planning was going on. (As an interpreter) I was listening, you know, and being part of this thing. Then dad escaped and came to Kun Ming and said: "No, you can't stay here. You should continue with your education."
"I'd been there for about two months. So dad spoke with the Colonel and he said: "I agree, but what are you going to do?" So dad went to Stillwell and said: "Can I get permission to send my children to India?" Cause the only way to get to India was to go on an American plane. They were the only planes flying. He loved dad and was very much enamoured with what dad had done (providing medical services for the American, British and Chinese soldiers) so he said: "Whatever you want." So we were flown from Kun Ming to Calcutta and from Calcutta we were sent up to this school in Mussoorie, in Northern India. There was an American missionary school there already and the Canadian missionary school amalgamated with it. You know the school is still there!
"So it was a whole new school all over again for a year. Part of that school was to enable me to qualify to get into an American college, because their certificate was accepted in America. Then the problem was to get to America when we graduated. My sister Effie developed a very severe pain in her back. The doctors found she had T.B. of her spine so she was flown to Coral Gables. The Biltmore Hotel was an army hospital and from there she was dispatched to New York to the best spinal surgeon. She had gotten to America before me.
"Stillwell approved my being allowed to go on a troop ship, the only ships going. Since I'd served in the army, this was his excuse. Just a wave a somebody's hand. The same way I got in, I got out. It was amazing. I just did what I was told to do. Two weeks before Christmas 1944 I got out on an American troop ship headed for San Pedro, California. We went to Bombay, to Melbourne, Australia, dropped off 3,000 Italian prisoners of war that they'd picked up earlier, went to New Zealand, dropped off about 1,000 New Zealanders. The big rumour was that we were to go to Okinawa to pick up wounded. We were on sealed orders when we left so there was a great hurrah when they said no we didn't have to. We were going straight to San Pedro, California just south of San Diego, the troop shipping centre. "In California they had arranged a ticket for me to go on the train right across the States to New York. Dr. Jerome Webster met me in New York, took me out to his house in Westchester County, N.Y. Dr. Webster was married to a relative of the Rockefellers. Her aunt was married to John D. Rockefeller. They were extremely wealthy and had this beautiful home. I'm seventeen, coming out of nowhere and he meets me in his Cadillac and takes me to this house with servants. The clothes I had were just unacceptable. They were Indian clothes, so we had to go shopping. He takes me in to De Pinna's in New York on Fifth Avenue. I'm looking at the prices and say: "I can't afford any of these." And he said: "No, no. Don't worry. I'm buying them. You need two of these, three of these" and I was outfitted in two twos. Two days later I was dispatched to Holderness, a private Prep School in New Hampshire started by Dr. Webster's father."
And that was the end of Jim Lim's extraordinary childhood and education in China and the Far East. He graduated with a liberal arts degree in physics from Trinity College in Connecticut and a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University in Illinois before ending up in Jamaica. But that's another story! As for his father, Major General Robert Kho Sheng Lim, after the war ended with Japan, he was instrumental in the transfer of all the medical services of the Nationalist Government from China to Taiwan, became Professor of Physiology at the University of Illinois and then at Creighton University before becoming Director of Medical Sciences Research Laboratory at the Miles Laboratory in Elkhart, Indiana. For his work as Director of the Emergency Medical Service Training Centre at Guiyang where more than 13,000 medical personnel were trained in the six years of its operation and other wartime services he was awarded the Legion of Merit and the Medal of Freedom, the highest award given by the United States Congress to foreign nationals. He died of cancer in Kingston, Jamaica in 1969 having spent the last six months of his life at his son's home.
