According to her strict Chinese upbringing, Ching Yun Bezine should be a homemaker and the obedient wife of the Chinese doctor selected by her family, not a novelist, educator and newspaper columnist married to an American.
But Bezine, now 55, managed to rearrange her life and do what she wanted, becoming a writer while still a teenager in China and writing 14 novels in Chinese after she came to America in the early `60s.
One of her novels was made into a feature film, ”Motherly Love,”
released in the U.S. in the late `70s, and two were made into television movies: ”Journey,” a series that began airing in the U.S. in 1981, and ”The Legend of Maple Grove,” which was shown in Taiwan in the late `70s. All were made by Chinese companies in Los Angeles.
Her first English-language novel, ”Children of the Pearl” (Signet, $4.99)published in 1991, dealt with the Chinese-American experience in San Francisco at the turn of the century and sold 47,000 copies in three months. A second, published last spring and called ”Temple of the Moon” (Signet, $4.99), and a third, ”On Wings of Destiny,” to be published by Signet in October, contain more of her own experiences in America.
Bezine was born in Ching-dau, near Beijing, in 1937 and raised according to the strictest rules of the Chinese culture. Bezine is the ninth and youngest child of a woman who had successfully fought the ancient Chinese tradition of binding feet when she was a girl.
Bezine`s mother, Shi Shaw-mei, insisted her daughter study law instead of the arts. And she chose a husband for her daughter according to the family wishes that she marry a doctor.
”By the time I was born,” says Bezine, telling the story of how her rebellious mother became such a strict parent, ”my mother was 40. She had forgotten that she was once a young fighter. Now she wanted to raise her children as her parents had tried to raise her. So they raised me, especially, since I was the last one, in the old-fashioned way.”
In 1949, when the Communists took over the mainland of China, Bezine and her family sailed to Taiwan, where she grew up. By the time she was 12, she wanted to write and study ballet, two endeavors her traditional Chinese mother disapproved.
Despite that, Bezine did both. As a teenager she paid for her own ballet lessons by selling stories she wrote to a magazine in Taiwan. Her mother never knew. She thought Bezine was getting the lessons for free because she was helping to clean the ballet school mirrors.
Still, although Bezine`s interests were in the arts, she agreed to go to law school to please her parents.
”When I was two weeks old my parents were fleeing the Japanese invasion on the Chinese mainland,” Bezine says in explaining what compelled her to please them. ”We were with a large group, and when I began to cry everyone wanted my father to kill me so I would not give our position away to the Japanese. My father refused and fought for my life. Later when I didn`t want to go to law school, they said they had risked their lives for me and the lives of other refugees. I had to go. The guilt was tremendous. I still feel the guilt, for telling the story.”
Bezine graduated from the law school of Chungshing University in 1960 and passed the bar exam the same year. Her parents decided that at age 23 it was time for her to marry, so, still trying to please, in 1961 Bezine married the man her parents chose: her brother`s classmate in medical school.
”Your parents lay out the stepping stones for you and you follow,” she says. ”They teach you that if you skip a step you might fall and get hurt. You go from one step to another with no pause in between.”
She says she felt terrible being married to a man she didn`t love. She thought that ”death was a long way away” and she would have to live with this man until she died unless she found a way out.
The way out was America.
”I started to apply for (a) scholarship the day after my marriage,” she says, ”but it took me three months to accomplish it.”
Bezine left her husband to attend school as an exchange student majoring in art education at Blue Mountain College in Blue Mountain, Miss.
Her husband was opposed to her leaving for America, she says, but at the same time, he bought her new clothes and told her to go because he knew that having a spouse in America would make it easier for him to emigrate if he wanted to later.
Bezine says she intended to leave her husband for good. When she arrived in the United States, however, she discovered she was expecting a child.
”I was pregnant, in a girl`s college, and I didn`t have a husband with me, and people were not certain if I ever had one,” she says. ”There was just no place for me, and I had no choice but to leave and go to live with my husband`s parents, who were living in Chinatown in Los Angeles where my father-in-law worked as a cook and my mother-in-law as a seamstress. And soon my husband came to America to join me.”
Life with her husband, in-laws and a baby daughter, Julia, born in 1962, was difficult for Bezine. She says her in-laws and husband resented her desire to study and be a part of American society. And they were upset with her because the child she had was a girl.
”I said (to her husband and in-laws), `Let me take the baby and leave you,` ” she says, ”but they said, `You can go, but the baby stays. She is ours.` I could not let a girl stay with them. If it had been a son, I would have known that they would take good care of him. But I knew that they did not value a girl, and I could not let them raise her. So I stayed.”
During their 12 years of marriage, they also had a son, Everett, and Bezine`s husband advanced from being an intern to having a lucrative medical practice.
During Bezine`s marriage, and over the course of various family moves, she returned to school and studied art education and fine arts. She earned a bachelor`s degree from Brescia College in Owensboro, Ky., and a master`s degree from Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green.
She also wrote 14 novels in Chinese in order, she says, to keep her sanity. These were published in Taiwan by the same company that had published her magazine stories as a teen; the novels are still popular throughout Southeast Asia, but she received only a small fee for each, and no royalties. In 1972 she was teaching art at an elementary school in Bowling Green, where the family had moved after her husband took a new position.
At that time, she and her husband became American citizens and at the naturalization ceremony the judge made a speech that profoundly affected her. ”He listed all the freedoms we now had as American citizens,” she says, ”and I realized I never had them. I was never even close to them. I never even had a few of them. It`s like a flower garden far away. I didn`t even get to smell the fragrance of them.
”By this time things were very bad between my husband and me. He already had a trailer parked on our property with another woman living in it, and they already had a child. This is acceptable in the (old) Chinese way. But I still didn`t have the courage to get a divorce.
”But that day I stayed in the courtroom for a long time, crying. And I stayed in my car for a long time, crying. And, finally, I drove to a motel and called home and asked the baby sitter to bring the children to me. Three days later I took both children (then 10 and 7) and went to an attorney.”
Bezine explains that to her in-laws, who followed old traditions, a daughter-in-law is property and if she remarries, their ancestors will ”cry in heaven.” She had to agree in writing never to marry again, and her in-laws moved in with her so they could watch her.
Still, at this point, Bezine says she felt free because she no longer had to go to bed with a man she didn`t love.
The family moved to Nashville, and Bezine began to attend George Peabody College (now a part of Vanderbilt University), working toward a Ph.D. in international and comparative education. It was here, in 1974, that she met Frank Bezine, an American psychologist and educator and a guest lecturer at the school.
”Frank is 12 years older and very different from me,” she says. ”He could not understand why a person would not act the way she wants to act, or speak what is on her mind. He is everything I`m not, and he wouldn`t let me run away from him.”
After they had known each other a short time he came to her house and told her in-laws, with the help of a translator, that they had to get out of her house, that they were no longer her in-laws, and that he was courting her and wanted to marry her.
She resisted at first, even leaving the school, because Frank Bezine was still married at the time. In 1975 he was divorced and the two were married later that year.
”I never finished my degree, but I really love Frank Bezine. We love each other. We married with everybody`s objections, even the minister`s. Only our mothers approved. My children chose to leave me and live with their father, although Frank wanted to adopt them. They have become completely my ex-husband`s. Even their hearts belong to him.”
Daughter Julia, now 30, is a paralegal secretary, and Everett, 27, is studying pharmacy in New York. Bezine says she is unhappy that she has almost no contact with her children.
Bezine and her husband now live in Bark River, Mich., and, in addition to writing novels in English, she writes a column about Chinese tradition for The Daily Press, a local newspaper.
”I am a columnist in America,” she says with obvious pride. ”I can`t believe it.”
