"Mary Chan....used courage and bravery to overcome her own adversity and her story is an inspiration to all who come across it."

Young Post
South China Morning Post

"A saint in a suffering body....a woman who rose above disabilities, poverty and disaster by sheer force of will and deep religious faith, eventually to set down her remarkable life on paper as the Egg Woman's Daughter....The bare facts of Chan's life may read like the storyboard for a melodrama, but it is one which never depresses, harrowing though it is. This was a woman with an abundance of life and optimism, a woman who encountered terrible setbacks but rejected defeat...."

South China Morning Post

The following feature story on Mary Chan Ma-lai appeared in South China Morning Post, April 11, 2001:

A saint in a suffering body: Though blind and paralysed, Mary Chan never relinquished an ounce of hope or verve. As her autobiography goes to press, Sheila McNamara recalls her friend's inspiring life

This is the story of Mary Chan, a woman who rose above disabilities, poverty and disaster by sheer force of will and deep religious faith, eventually to set down her remarkable life on paper as The Egg Woman's Daughter.

It is also the story of three heroes. Chan is one, but without the unstinting devotion of her mother and the compassionate care of a young Irish priest, her story would never have been told. Her young life would, as likely as not, have ended with her abandoned in an Aberdeen back alley and left to die. For who, in the hungry 1950s, would have taken in a blind, hunchbacked child who could only crawl on all fours?

The bare facts of Chan's life may read like the storyboard for a melodrama, but it is one which never depresses, harrowing though it is. This was a woman with an abundance of life and optimism, a woman who encountered terrible setbacks but rejected defeat despite being wheelchair-bound, paralysed below the waist and sightless.

By the time I met Chan in 1994 - she agreed to be my Cantonese teacher - she had already finished writing her memoirs on a braille computer. A publisher accepted them and I agreed with Chan to interview her when the book came out. I cannot keep that promise now, for she died in September last year, but her story is finally published this week.

But I can at least remember the woman I knew - and who taught me precious little Cantonese for all the hours of story-telling and reminiscence to which she would treat me instead.

The seven-year delay as the publishers processed the book...was just one sad twist in a life fraught with disappointments, but we could not have anticipated it when, a year or so after we met, we talked in her Wah Fu flat about choosing a background for photographs to include in the volume. One idea was Macau, a memory of the time she went to search for the midwife who delivered her.

But when Chan returned years later to seek the birth certificate she needed in order to apply for a Hong Kong identity card, the midwife was dead and her papers destroyed. That tale was told with much giggling.

Eventually she got the coveted card. But it was of little import. Chan was a citizen of the world, the centre of a global circle of devoted friends, most of them made during her long hospital-bound years as a girl, during which nurses and nuns taught her English. Hospital volunteers and visitors would similarly be drawn to the bright, friendly patient so eager to practise her new-found skills. So she told them her story, and they encouraged her to write it down. Finally, she did.

Chan was born 50 years ago into a Tanka family in Macau. The boat-dwelling Tanka live by trading, and the Chan sampan housed an extended family headed by her grandparents. Her father was the eldest son, and her mother, Leung Ho, was the first daughter-in-law - and thus, in the custom of the times, the family drudge, toiling from dawn until dark to tend the household. Her husband preferred gambling, and, as the family got poorer, opium addiction lessened the self-inflicted hardships of his lot.

Chan developed cataracts at three. Without money for a doctor, her grandmother's answer was to burn joss sticks, mix the hot ash with mud, and smear them on the child's eyes. All that remained of her sight after that was an outline of shadows.

At five, Chan had walked around the boat like a sighted child. But she could not see a hatch left open, and fell into the hold, crushing her spine. As medical treatment was not an option, her pain can only be imagined. Appallingly, tuberculosis set in. But that was when Father Edward Collins arrived. Sent from Ireland in his 20s to teach Chinese priests in a Jesuit seminary just as the Communist army advanced across China, his supply of students had dried up. So his attention was diverted to the plight of the fisher folk moored in Aberdeen in their bat-wing sampans - steadily losing their livelihood to a modern, motorised fleet.

'She was a frail, pathetic little thing,' he recalls of his first meeting with Chan, his memory at 83 still sharp and vivid. 'Eight or maybe 10, but looking much younger.' Chan's book tells how the priest, a regular companion as she lay in hospital for months on end instead of laughing with other children at school, eventually found a gifted surgeon to carry out the experimental operation that straightened her spine.

She often spoke, too, about lying for a further nine months, encased in a steel frame, her head in a rigid metal halo. The scars were still visible where six rivets were drilled 2.5cm into her skull. Others were pinned to her pelvis. It was unremitting agony, she would recall, wincing at the memory. But it was all worth it when the frame was removed and, hardly daring to believe it, she stood tall for the first time at the age of 21. She walked straight out and got a job.

Being able to find work - making dolls' clothes in Shau Kei Wan - and thereby contributing to the family income was worth any pain. Travelling alone, changing buses and navigating crowded streets, she at last had independence and a sense of normality. It was her proudest, happiest time.

But something went wrong. Her legs began to give way without warning. No one helped when she fell. As she would lie helpless with her clouded eyes, passers-by would assume her to be drunk or mentally retarded. Once again, she was back in hospital, only to find that a tumour had developed on her spine. And the gifted surgeon had gone.

An inexperienced doctor carried out two intricate operations the day Chan was admitted. She woke permanently paralysed and spent eight years in hospital. The other patient never regained consciousness and remains comatose 20 years on.

But Chan was someone who - were she ever to give it a thought - would scorn self-pity as a waste of time. 'Sure there were occasions when she was low,' says Collins, 'but she always came up again, bright as ever. I called her the unsinkable Mary Chan.' Medical staff at Sandy Bay hospital, Red Cross visitors and the American Women's Association fell under her spell. She had such zest, such inspiring self-sufficiency that she drew people to her. At blind school, fellow pupils called her Hoi Sum Gwo - Happy Heart - and that she was.

In this spirit, it is best to talk not of the illnesses and hurts, but of the triumphs: how Chan got to St Francis Canossian College, one of the most prestigious grammar schools in Hong Kong; how years later friends clubbed together to buy her a braille computer so she could write her story; how, in the background, two people were constant pillars helping to hold up her world, Collins who was there whenever problems arose and Leung Ho, the mother who ignored family urgings to take the 'blind ghost' ashore and desert her. Instead, without money for bus fares - and when Collins was not on hand to drive them in his battered old 'puddle-jumper' car - Leung carried her daughter on her back three kilometres to the clinic for check-ups, plaster cast and all. And never once, through all the hospital years, missed a single visit.

The book's title - while an affectionate reference to the Tankas' origins of daan ga, or 'egg family' - comes from Leung's attempts to add to the family's income by keeping hens on board their sampan. Yet they were frequently so hungry that their lodger went out catching stray cats to make a meal. At first light, Leung was up collecting used drinking straws from a factory to fuel the junk's stove. Every hour of her day was spent in unremitting toil. That was the lot of all poor women then, but how many would have had the courage to devote such care to a deformed child? Chan's mother and Collins are both now in a Catholic retirement home. For Collins, because of his faith and the wisdom of age, Chan's early passing is not a matter for regret.

The guide and friend who got her into her blind school, found the doctors she needed, encouraged her schoolwork and was able to help in securing a specially adapted flat where she lived with her mother and sister, is not saddened that Chan never lived to see her book in print. 'She wrote it, that was the main thing. That was her great achievement,' he says.

But perhaps the greatest achievement of all was friendship. People enjoyed her company so much that she was invited all over the world, revelling in her adventures in the United States, New Zealand and Europe. Again thanks to the priest who had already performed many minor miracles for the child he had taken under his wing, she even went to Lourdes. She returned unchanged in body, but stronger in faith.

'She had inner peace,' says Collins. 'She was without bitterness. People were inspired by her because she was an example of courage and determination. In my opinion, she has all the attributes for canonisation.'

Chan, with her tendency sometimes to be too forthright for her own good, would laugh at the idea. But her book tells a story so unusual that these paragraphs can only hint at how it unfolded. In addition to heroes, readers may conclude that there are indeed some saints in Chan's story. And that two of them still live in Aberdeen.

'The unsinkable Mary Chan', whose life was a triumph over adversity has finally found peace and recognition

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