After leaving Queensland, Agnes and William travelled to Hong Kong and then inland to Shekki, arriving in mid April 1932. Their reception from William’s father was cold. He disapproved of his son’s decision to marry Agnes. Three days after arriving in Shekki, in Agnes’s words, ‘a big family consultation was held as to the attitude to be taken towards us and on its completion we were informed to get out of the house’.^[35] William was to be disowned.

Agnes had experienced another shock on her arrival in China. It appears that she had been unaware of William’s Chinese wife, Li Yunying, and the place she held within the wider Lum family.^[36] Li Yunying had been living with her parents-in-law since her marriage to William four years earlier.

At first, Agnes and William, together with Li Yunying, went to stay at the Shekki home of Thomas Wing Lun, whom they knew from Townsville. After two months, they had to find other accommodation after their hosts were intimidated by the wealthy and influential Lum Mow. They moved to a flat on the main street of the town. Cards and letters sent home by Agnes, and photographs taken during the holiday, show that in spite of these difficulties there was continuing contact between Agnes and William and his family (there is a photograph of Agnes and other young women from the family, for example) and there was the opportunity for day trips, sightseeing and shopping.^[37]

Agnes’s son was born at the beginning of August, but his birth was the cause of increasing family conflict. William was an eldest son, her son likewise. For the extended Lum family, this child belonged first and foremost to their lineage, not to his natural mother. Agnes felt that Li Yunying was very jealous of the baby and stated that, besides her father-in-law’s wrath, ‘the only unpleasantness I experienced was from my husband’s so-called Chinese wife who was prepared to vent her spite when the opportunity offered more particularly after the birth of my baby’.^[38]

Convinced that a family reconciliation was impossible, Agnes became anxious to return to Australia. She wrote to her parents. They contacted the local Salvation Army, who arranged a passage and informed their Hong Kong colleagues. Her situation was, in Agnes’s words, ‘apparently exaggerated to Hong Kong’ and her ‘rescue’ was effected in the manner described earlier. Agnes stated that she could have left of her own accord, but her main concern was whether she would have been able to take the baby with her if she had. Her father-in-law had promised to pay for her passage home only if she left the baby behind. Agnes also knew that William would oppose the baby’s departure; she said that her departure from Shekki went so smoothly only because her husband had been out of the house at the time she and the baby left: ‘[H]ad my husband been home at the time there would have been trouble.’^[39] Their departure shocked William and he wrote that the ‘sudden and unexpected taking away—even without a parting word between wife and husband—had broken my heart’.^[40] William regretted the way in which Agnes left, but at this point he and Agnes felt that their marriage was not over, that they would be reunited in Australia at a later date.

Agnes waited for 16 days in Hong Kong for the next boat to sail for Australia. She was in communication with her husband, who came to Hong Kong to see her, ‘but on hearing of rumours of the treatment held in store for him from the Anzacs he immediately returned to Shekki’, without even seeing her.^[41] Agnes and the baby stayed with one of the Anzacs, a Mr J. P. Way of the Manufacturers Life Insurance Company, and the Anzacs presented her with a birthday gift of $HK100 before her departure.^[42]