Emigrating from Hong Kong in 1970 with little money or security, Lyling Lee was faced with the task of building a new life without the language, connections or education so many others took for granted. Fifty years later, she left tens of thousands of pounds to the Oxbridge colleges her children attended.
Lyling passed away around a month ago, peacefully and surrounded by her family. Her will had been hidden away, untouched for years: the last thing her daughter Sue expected was a generous bequest to Girton College Cambridge and St Anne’s College Oxford, each. The colleges her and her brother Michael went to thirty years ago.
Sue was very moved – “I finally realised how highly she valued the opportunity of a quality education.” Lyling’s approval, being the typical strict and frugal Asian mother, hadn’t been easy to obtain. But here it was: a true testament to her pride, in her final words.
Lyling led a hard life. Her childhood was scarred by the brutal Japanese occupation of China during the Second World War, and it eliminated any chance of a secondary education. Once she had two children to care for, she and her husband decided to do the unthinkable: leave behind the country they had lived in their whole lives, and dive head-first into a cold, unknowable foreign land, to forge a brand-new life from nothing.
All this not even for the guarantee, but simply for the faintest hope of a brighter future for their children. Sue and Michael were too young to go, so they stayed with their grandmother while their parents worked to make a home for them. Sue thinks about how difficult it must have been for a mother to say goodbye to her six-month-old self: “I suppose I never understood that really essential time that you have with your child, and how heart wrenching it is to have to leave [them] behind both physically and emotionally.” When Sue arrived four years later, she didn’t even recognise her mother at first. “I was taken somewhere where I met these two people who I’d never seen before, and it was a surprise to me that it was my mother.”
Lyling’s life in England, as Sue remembers it, was one of never-ending toil. She would work all hours, cooking and cleaning for the takeaway and sewing for extra money in her spare time. She was a grafter; willing to do anything to ensure her family’s happiness. The family of four lived and slept in a tiny one-bedroom flat, where the children would help with the business, on top of schoolwork. Money was always short. The cost was not just pecuniary: Sue and Michael were British kids, speaking more English than Cantonese, going to English schools with English friends: living a life Lyling could never truly understand.
Sue often wondered how her mother felt about the decision to risk it all, and leave her children so young. What went through her mind as she sewed on her Singer machine in the dark hours of the early morning, hands calloused and chapped from handling hot woks and countless plastic boxes? Did she have doubts, worries, regrets?
Now Sue feels she finally knows, from those few lines of bequest in her mother’s will. Moving to England, her countless sacrifices and her determination gave her children the opportunities she could never have. It was all worth it in the end. As Sue concluded: “It makes me so happy that thanks to her gift, someone else’s children can benefit like we did.”
