ABSTRACT
In 1980, Liu Ts’un-yan gave a talk to the Asia Society of Canberra, where he has been living since joining the Australian National University in 1962. The occasion was to celebrate the International Year of the Child and in the talk he evocatively described his early life and education, his parents and the Beijing in which he grew up until the family moved to Shanghai when he was twelve. This memoir reveals a childhood lived on the cusp of modernity. Liu was born in 1917. His father had gained the first degree in the imperial exam system in 1898, but later learned German and studied medicine before shifting to the Customs College, eventually working with the Office of Revenue and Customs in Beijing, where Liu was born. The marriage of Liu’s mother and father was arranged. She had never been to school but was, in Liu’s words, ‘not illiterate, and she was capable of reading and writing family letters, and was quite familiar with some of the story books written in verse, or in prose, but intermingled with verses’.1 Liu tells us that his father took two concubines while Liu himself was a child.
