Merger & Dissolution
1932-1933
Han Liang’s political misadventure of January 1932 surely marked out the year as an “annus horribilis”, even before the January 28 bombing of Shanghai by the Japanese. But worse was in store on the personal front.
Although China was initially insulated from the western world’s Great Depression, the Ho Hong Bank was among the first China businesses to feel the global headwinds. First, its remittance business dropped along with prices for Malayan rubber and tin. Then on September 21, 1931, three days after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the UK and other countries went off the gold standard. Ho Hong's large holdings of British pounds, once a measure of its ability to hold its own in the forex business against the likes of Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, suddenly plummeted in value. At the same time, it had to cover deposits denominated in Hong Kong dollars. Despite Hong Kong's status as a British colony, the Hong Kong dollar was pegged to the Chinese dollar, a silver-based currency which was now appreciating.
The problem was international in nature, but the solution devised was homegrown Hokkien: a merger was proposed among Ho Hong Bank, its precursor the Chinese Commercial Bank (CCB), and the third ambitious Singapore bank, the Oversea-Chinese Bank. The latter bank had been started after Ho Hong to emulate its model with more than twice its paid-up capital, but without branches in Hong Kong and Shanghai, it was still outstripped by Ho Hong in terms of assets.
According to the terms of the merger, the three banks would collectively become the "Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation" (OCBC; 華僑銀行 Huaqiao Yinhang), with Ho Hong chairman Chee Swee Cheng in charge. The instigator of the merger discussions was CCB's Vice Chairman Lee Kong Chian, a son-in-law of Tan Kah Kee, the rubber magnate who had started the University of Amoy. OCBC was for many years Singapore's largest company and still exists today. The 120 Kiukiang Road building chosen under Han Liang's watch remains its Shanghai address. |
Although Han Liang had left the bank two years before, at the age of forty and a bit, the formal evaporation of Ho Hong must have underlined like nothing else that he was both a retired government official and a retired banker – and still without children. Even his younger cousin, Han Yang, had already had two children, although the effort to set him up at the bank would soon come nought.
Han Liang’s childless marriage was moving into its ninth year and Han Ho’s daughter Mary was approaching the age of seven without siblings. The family’s reproductive failings weighed heavily on the Yuyuen Road household. For some years now, Grandmother Yu Koon had been desperate for heirs to cap her sons’ career achievements – and now even those achievements were looking wobbly. Exacerbating matters, at barely sixty years of age, Grandmother Yu Koon developed what’s believed to have been cervical cancer. She received experimental radiation therapy at the Pasteur Institute that caused its own discomforts. Mary recalls her mother Peggy’s exhaustion after sleeping on the floor by her mother-in-law’s bedside. The disease was not getting any better. In late 1932, in a final effort to appease Grandmother Yu Koon’s wish for more grandchildren, Peggy and Han Ho traveled with Mary to the Peking Union Medical College to seek gynecological treatment. Mary had been a large baby, beyond the capabilities of the Amoy midwife. There was reason to believe that Peggy was unable to become pregnant again because of complications, which the country’s premier, Rockefeller-backed hospital might be able to correct. |
Pampered, unable to speak Hokkien and unwell herself, Mo-li was not a realistic candidate to take Peggy’s place at Grandmother Yu Koon’s bedside. And so it was decided that a nurse would be hired to help out while Peggy and Han Ho were away. It's not known if the young woman sent over from St. Elizabeth's Hospital was someone who had at some point previously taken care of Grandmother Yu Koon as an in-patient, but Grandmother Yu Koon definitely took a liking to the new arrival to Yuyuen Road.
Indeed, finding opportunity in illness, Grandmother Yu Koon mounted a campaign. If Mo-li could not bear children, her son should take a concubine, and her beautiful young caregiver, twenty-five-year-old Zing Wei Tang, now residing with them in the house, was the ideal prospect.
What Mo-li, Zing Wei, or Han Liang felt about Grandmother’s plan will never be known, but essentially they all fell in line with the arrangement, minus one important modification: there would be no further three-way cohabitation. Han Liang made the decision to take Zing Wei not as his concubine, but as his wife, and to end his marriage to Mo-li. In doing so, Han Liang steered a middle course, acknowledging the modern and Christian sensibilities that he, Mo-li and Zing Wei would all have subscribed to to some degree. Not so different from the West of the time, divorce was by this time well enshrined in law and was becoming more common, though still frowned upon. Practically speaking, the main higher power that Han Liang had to appeal to was Mo-li’s brother, Bang How – and if there was any truth to the rumor that brother and mother may have been rather too silent about the status of Mo-li’s health when she and Han Liang were quickly engaged in 1923 or 1924, Bang would have been in no position to disagree. |
Had Han Liang cared to be more cavalier, there was certainly ample precedent involving plenty of people well known to him: Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek had both blurred the lines between divorce and concubinage to eventually marry their respective Soong sisters. Celebrity poet Xu Zhimo (徐志摩) not only abandoned an arranged marriage for another woman, but later also caused the break-up of the marriage of Ken Wang, Han Liang's Princeton classmate, for still another woman.
In early 1933, Peggy and Han Ho returned to Yuyuen Road with the promising news that they were expecting a child. Grandmother Yu Koon was close to the end, but they were in time to share the news with her. Now Peggy's mother-in-law wore her out with the job of procuring the garments necessary for a proper laying out and burial. Skirts and tops would be required in twelve layers. Grandmother Yu Koon died in late May or early June and Mary recalls that, as was customary, she was laid out at home for a week.
In early 1933, Peggy and Han Ho returned to Yuyuen Road with the promising news that they were expecting a child. Grandmother Yu Koon was close to the end, but they were in time to share the news with her. Now Peggy's mother-in-law wore her out with the job of procuring the garments necessary for a proper laying out and burial. Skirts and tops would be required in twelve layers. Grandmother Yu Koon died in late May or early June and Mary recalls that, as was customary, she was laid out at home for a week.
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AFFAIRS OF THE HEART For the messy love lives of various Republican-era figures, see the Love-Love: Tennis Anyone? page. |