After developing an appetite for hanging out with lads and playing baseball) My father decided that something must be done with so unnatural a daughter, so he made arrangements for my sister and myself to enter a real Chinese school. Understand, we were not to give up our studies in the Mission School, but were to continue these and attend the Chinese school also.

For the next five years then, I went to school from nine o'clock in the morning until seven o'clock at night! The average Chinese father is not so concerned over the health of his children as is the American father. He wishes his children to be studious and obedient. Their physical well being can take care of itself.

The Chinese school keeps open the year 'round, every day in the week except Sunday. I don't know, I'm sure, why they gave us that time off. Possibly because we made up for it on Saturdays, studying right through from ten a.m. until seven p.m. On the regular school days, we attended the Mission School from nine a.m. until three p.m., and the Chinese school from three-thirty p.m. to seven p.m., some ten hours.

The Chinese school was conducted in a long, narrow room in an old building down in Chinatown. The teacher sat at his desk, a bamboo stick beside him. If one of the pupils showed signs of restlessness or disobedience, whack went the stick across the hands of the offender. Serious disobedience was punished in a severe manner - and not across the hands either! We were put over a knee and spanked soundly.

The teacher in the Chinese school certainly doesn't have it as easy as American teachers do. Not only did he have to devote nearly every hour of every day to teaching, but he lived in a small room partitioned off at the back of the school room. Here he cooked his own meals, and slept. There certainly wasn't much variety in his life. It's not much wonder that he was often stern with us and spanked us with the bamboo stick.

There were some bright spots in our lives, however. We were always thrilled when a motion picture company came down into Chinatown to film scenes for a picture. I would play hookey from school to watch them at work, though I knew I would get a whipping from my teacher and later a spanking from my father, for it. I would worm my way through the crowd and get as close to the cameras as I dared. I'd stare and stare at these glamorous individuals, directors, cameramen, assistants, and actors in greasepaint, who had come down into our section of town to make movies.

My determination to act independently brought a very definite penalty with it, for my father gave my teacher instruction to spank me every time I missed