Brigitte Kwan - Later Life

Later Life

After the fall of the Qing dynasty and the increasing attacks against the Qing Manchu, she fell in love with a Han Chinese, a Sun Yat-sen partisan and military commander Wong Sung-mong Huang Zhongwen (Chinese: 黄仲文) Huang Zhongwen born Y.S. Wong (Chinese: 黄玉书), rumored to be part of the Tongmenghui, was tutored by an Imperial scholar - Jìnshì (進士), and a trained physician (daifu - 大夫), before fighting in Sun Yat-sen's army in the Northern Expedition. After the end of the war, the pair found themselves stranded in a devastated, destroyed China. Following the Tongmenghui's history of raising relief funds for war efforts in China through the United States and South-east Asia, the pair secretly eloped into British zone through Hong Kong, and set sail to Nanyang (modern day South-east Asia), onto British Crown territories, stopping at Phoenix City (Traditional Chinese: 鳳城：Hanyu Pinyin Fengcheng) (modern day Kuala Lumpur), Penang and Singapore. In a bid to raise funds for poverty relief in China, the pair set up a volunteer institution teaching Confucian Classics and the classical Chinese language, and accepted the poor and the rich alike into their school. Her husband also returned to his previous practice as a physician.

Before they could return to Canton, through Hong Kong, from the British Crown colony of Singapore, they found themselves amidst a sudden invasion by the Japanese soldiers at the outbreak of World War II. Kwan, herself a male-female fraternal twin pair, gave birth to her last children, a pair of fraternal twins of different sexes. Under severe food rationing by the Japanese kempeitai (secret police), both babies suffered from malnutrition, malaria and dysentery. Kwan was forced to leave one dead infant, a boy, near a refuse pile, after it had apparently died. Her eldest daughter, however, was able to revive the child. However, the other twin, a girl, died soon after.