Becky Chan. Jared Mitchell

      Feng Hsiao-foon demanded to know what I’d done with his wife, Becky Chan. It was July, hot outside, and the air stank of diesel exhaust and rotting garbage. The back of my shirt was damp with sweat from a trip across the harbour to the Royal Observatory in Kowloon. I’d been reporting a story about atmospheric radioactivity. The beta activity of airborne dust samples had dropped to ninety-six pico-curies, which would come as a relief to those who worried about such things. Fallout over the China coast had been fluctuating following an atmospheric test of a hydrogen bomb in the distant region of Sinkiang. I’d glanced up at the sky over Hong Kong, and while it looked the same as it did every summer, bluish-white, hazy, stunningly bright, I almost wished for a cheery iridescence, something to physically imply the story. Becky Chan was my best friend. Feng said she was missing.

      That day was July 2, 1967. I had known Feng, as well as any outsider could know him, for more than fifteen years. He was the chief of production and principal shareholder of the Great World Organisation. His greatest star, Becky Chan, was the Goddess of Mercy, and she presided over those most hallowed of Hong Kong temples, the cinemas of the Great World circuit. The 1958 super-production of The Goddess of Mercy, was her greatest success. It was Great World’s greatest picture and she was its greatest artistic asset. She had played a dual role in that film. The first was that of Koon Yin, the merciful deity draped with snow-white robes and lying on an emerald lotus pad that floated in a purple moonlit sea. She daubed her mystic dew from a willow branch, the dew fell through the purple sea down to our world below, and it brought relief to mankind’s innumerable sufferings. She also played a poor peasant woman, whose family Koon Yin saves from catastrophe. The baroque sets, the brocade costumes, the process photography, The Goddess of Mercy brought great prestige to Feng’s studio. The only thing it failed to do was make a profit.

      The rest of Becky Chan’s films, plastic comedies and overheated melodramas, all made profits, and in the jumped-up merchant mind of Feng Hsiao-foon, that made them worthier. Almost always before and after The Goddess of Mercy, Becky’s pictures made money for Great World. Thus, you can understand why Feng Hsiao-foon was deeply concerned about his wife’s disappearance.

      My face must have changed when Feng said Becky was missing because Billy Fong, the China Telegraph’s one-eyed copy boy, glanced at me twice. He stared sideways to get a focus and the gesture exaggerated his interest. It unnerved me so I looked down at my desk, fiddled with things on it, shifted a disorganized heap of papers in a wire basket. I pretended to search for something important. I glanced over at Mary Wu, the Chinese switchboard operator, visible at her station through a rectangular cut-out in the cream-coloured wall on the side of the newsroom. She was taking a message from an English-speaking caller and I could hear her bawling into her headset: “How to spell please?” Over by the entrance to the washrooms, prematurely wrinkled from worry, a young Chinese janitor poured water into a zinc bucket from a red rubber hose. A drunken correspondent from the British Press Association had once offered the janitor ten dollars to take him into the loo and beat him with that hose. The janitor had just enough idea of what sexual fetishes were to decline, though in much agony, for he urgently needed the money. Over by the window, Sonny, the Ceylonese copy editor who was apt to daydream, looked out at the weird sight of a double-decker China Motor Bus on the steep grade of Wyndham Street just outside the window, waiting for the traffic light at the bottom of

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