My stepmom, an Italian spy for the Japanese in China
Staff Reporter
2014-04-07
Bianca Tam meets Yang Ai-may for the first time in New York in 1993. (Photo courtesy of Acropolis Publishing)
The Taiwanese children of a Chinese colonel have penned a memoir exploring their father's relationship with an Italian countess accused of spying for the Japanese during World War II.
Yang Ai-may (Nee Tan) and Tan Hsiung-fei, both in their 60s, are promoting their new book, The Forgotten Times: Two Tan's and A Female Spy, about their father Tam Gian Ciau's first marriage to Bianca Tam, the famed writer of Opium Tea.
Yang and Tan are two of Tam's four children from a second marriage. In 1948, they moved with their parents from Guangzhou in southern China to Taiwan, where they lived until immigrating to the United States in the 1980s. They had been forbidden in the family home from discussing their father's first marriage but finally decided to break their silence following the death of their parents.
The first part of the book traces Tam Gian Ciau's life from his birth in Guangzhou in 1910 and details how he met Bianca whilst attending military school in Italy. In 1938, Tam returned to China with his new wife to join in the Second Sino-Japanese War under the leadership of Kuomintang general Sun Li-jen. In 1955, after Sun was implicated in a coup against KMT chief Chiang Kai-shek, Tam was demoted two ranks and transferred before passing away from throat cancer in 1960.
Bianca, on the other hand, had married the Chinese soldier and moved to the Chinese countryside against her parents' wishes. She bore him three children and was pregnant with a fourth when she discovered his affair with a nurse, who would go on to become his second wife. After leaving him, Bianca moved to Shanghai, where she became prominent in the city's social circles. She was later involved in smuggling gold and arrested and accused of being a Japanese spy by the CIA. She was eventually found not guilty and returned to Europe with her four children.
The second part of the book tells of how Yang managed to track Bianca down after her husband discovered a photo of Tam in Bianca's novel Opium Tea in 1991. The two later met for the first time in 1993, about six months before Bianca passed away due to illness. Yang and Tang have since kept in touch with their step-siblings, who have gained a renewed interest in their biological father and have even started learning Chinese
