IT happened over 50 years ago now, but to Ah Gum it was as if it happened yesterday. ''I was barely 10,'' she says. ''Early one winter morning, my father made me walk without shoes for two hours. Then he sold me to a family as a mui tsai (servant girl).'' For 65-year-old Ah Gum, born in Xi Chao Gao Zhou village in Guangdong and now working as an amah in Hong Kong, choice was a luxury she never had when young.
Sold by her father to be another family's servant, and later married to a stranger she had never seen before, Ah Gum is a living reminder of the hardships faced by millions of women in China earlier this century - some of which are re-emerging today as reports about women forced and sold into marriage reveal.
Ah Gum's father, a teacher in Nanhai County, smoked opium and his addiction led the family into poverty. When money ran low, he sold Ah Gum, the oldest of his four children, to buy more of the drug. ''My father was the root of all evil,'' Ah Gum recalls bitterly.
Later he sold Ah Gum's brother. As a boy, he was bought by another family to be their son. Ah Gum, a girl, was not so lucky. Sold to a farming family in Dongguan, she was treated like a slave.
Every day she had to get up before dawn, go to the fields to look after the cows and pick grass to feed the pigs. She was given just one meal a day - porridge with a little rice in it. It contained little nutrition and Ah Gum's health soon deteriorated.
''Because of the food I ate, I always had to go to the bathroom to be sick. When I stayed in the bathroom for a long time, my family accused me of being lazy,'' she says.