Thread by @VintageShanghai

In 1933, #Shanghai magazine ‘The Young Companion’ featured this lady in a swimsuit on its cover. I want to repeat '1933' for you to feel how extraordinary it was. Who is she? A 🧵 on my avatar 👇 (1) twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

She is Yeung Sau-King，#China’s first female Olympian swimmer. Born a natural swimmer, she dominated at an early age. (2)

I will give you one example: She won all five women's swimming titles at the 5th National Games held in 1933, including the 50m freestyle, 100m freestyle, 100m backstroke, 200m breaststroke, and the 200m quadruple relay. (3)

And she got all the limelight a modern superstar athlete would – praise by politicians, newspaper articles all over the place, advertising, and movie deals. She was known as the “Mermaid of China”.(4)

At the peak of her career, she was picked in China’s Olympic team for the 1936 #Berlin Olympics. I think she saw Hitler there. (5)

But Berlin Olympics was a disaster for Team China. Yeung was eliminated in the preliminaries. The 'Mermaid of China' fell from her grace and was mocked by the papers. Of all the Olympians, she was the biggest target. One extreme example is this cartoon: 'Fashion of Zero.'(6)

She didn’t have a chance to prove herself again. War broke out between China and Japan soon after. She married a Hong Kong Jockey in 1939 and moved there.(7)

Hong Kong fell after Pearl Harbor. According to #Japanese files declassified in the 80s, she served as a special agent for ROC. When her cover was blown, she was interrogated by the Japanese 'Gestapo': “Kempeitai.”(8)

Then came the most mysterious part of her life. She moved to occupied Shanghai in 1943 and worked there until the end of the war. Did she collaborate with the Japanese? It’s hard to believe otherwise if she was caught by the 'Kempeitai'. (9)

But 'Mermaid of China' was safe after the war. She had a stint as a journalist in #Shanghai and divorced her first husband. She was still showered with media attention.(10)

Yeung remarried and left China. She died in 1982 in Vancouver, #Canada, at 63.(11)

What intrigued me most about this extraordinary lady was her wartime years. Did she work as a double agent? Did she pretend to collaborate but secretly work for China? The mystery's answer is probably in the KMT archive. It will resurface someday, and I am waiting.(12)

@thechinaproj