bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Inside were little pots of make-up creams, lipsticks and eye shadow. There were also capsules of Peking Royal Jelly, a box of purgative tea, aspirin, mouthwash and deer horn extract. Under the sink, in the cupboard, there were a few boxes of Hazeline Snow face powder and five aerosol cans of hair lacquer.
I quoted an old saying which Ah-niu took to and she repeated to herself: “Beautiful women are ill-fated.” It was what women in movie audiences explain to themselves on why the blessedly glamorous really are damned, and how they, the ordinary women of the world, have the real advantages.
Feng was an inveterate showman who loved to trot out his pretty wife at lavish parties, like a prize chicken. In Cantonese slang, associating women with chicken is an obscene comment, but in my poisoned opinion not at all inappropriate for Feng. Like Cecil B. de Mille, whose movies condemned extreme depravity but showed it in loving detail, Feng Hsiao-foon knew how to indulge the public’s sex fantasies while vigorously decrying them. Many of his “decadent” Mandarin-track pictures were about nightclubs, rich people’s idle cares, airline stewardesses, singers and the police. In films such as Pink and Deadly or Don’t Bargain with Fate, Becky plays night club singers who turn their back on normal domestic lives with husbands, children and in-laws so they could perform on stage. It is pre-ordained that the adventuring woman head ends in ruin, reassuring the audience about their mundane domestic arrangements, but the public got a good gawk at the fun she had before the end. Yes, beautiful women really were ill-fated.
Ah-niu’s anxiety peaked when I went into the Feng’s bedroom. It was wildly over-decorated in a Louis XIV style, with blue satin cushions and oppressively over-carved furniture that Feng and Becky had shipped in from the United States. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the items on Becky’s night table. There was a script for an upcoming picture. Recorded at the bottom of the title page, in Becky’s hand, was idle gossip of no great importance. So-and-so spent $4,000 on legal fees to petition for divorce. So-and-so’s wife is pregnant. It told me nothing about Becky. There was a Royal Doulton figurine of a woman holding the edge of her billowing yellow dress. Her right hand was missing, chipped off probably when it had got knocked to the floor. There was a big book of Chinese medicine, detailing cures for various ailments. Chinese cinnamon to treat yang-deficiency in kidneys. Clove tree to counteract vomiting. Powdered oyster shells for heart palpitations. Wild turmeric for chest pains and semi-conscious states. There was no bookmark, no annotation, nothing to indicate just what Becky had been looking through these medical journals for. It told me nothing more than she had a general interest in disease, illness and its treatment. It was the first time I’d ever set foot in her bedroom and I noticed something missing that caused me a moment of sorrow and emptiness. Despite our two decades of close friendship, there was nothing in this room, or anywhere in Becky’s home, that showed any physical evidence that I had a place in her life. No little photo of me in a collection of similar pictures on a side table, none of the trinket gifts I’d given her over the years. I sighed and put the books back on the night table. Ah-niu had become so anxious about my sitting on the bed that when I stood up she frantically swept the creases out of the bedspread.
I thanked Ah-niu for her cooperation and left. I stepped outside. The day was growing very hot. I glanced up at the words over the front door, “Bricks and Mortar of the Nation.” Chung Hsiang came to life again, for just a moment, when I came out the front door. She barked and slobbered furiously, trailing me to the metal gate and, once satisfied that I had closed it behind me, turned and went back to the shade in triumph.
FOUR
How different Becky’s movie roles were from the beautiful but gawky and naïve young woman I first met back in 1948. Both Becky and Hong Kong offered a new start for me, after a bad life in Canada. Like the refugees from China, I found a safe haven in Hong Kong, far from personal turmoil. I had once dreamed of a career as a singer in Canada (I referred to myself as a “song stylist”) but I never got further than paying for two years of university at United College in Winnipeg by performing part-time. I appeared during intermissions at the Uptown Theatre, a cinema on Academy Road. Between the shorts, co-feature and the main film I would rise grandly out of the basement on an elevator platform, surrounded by an eight-man orchestra. I sang dance numbers, my specialty being animal songs. I performed “Arfie the Doggie in the Window,” “Mr. Bluebird,” and “Wolf Call,” which I spiced up with realistic howls. While I performed, little gold lights in the blue ceiling of the Uptown would twinkle like stars.
My father disowned me, quite violently. A letter from the United College dean’s office arrived at my home, addressed to my father. It stated that the college had expelled me. My father disbelieved it at first and made an increasingly humiliating telephone call to the dean’s office, hotly denying the charge of “personal indecency.” After my father raved on the telephone to the dean about how preposterous the sexual allegation was, I quietly took the phone from his hand and hung it up. “It’s true,” I said very quietly. Then the police arrived, I was taken in and formally charged. My father grew furious, first with them, then with me. His doubts began to spread around the edges of his confidence in me like slime on a favourite swimming hole. In silence he drove me home from the police station on James Avenue. I wanted to bolt from the car when we crossed the Redwood Bridge and dive into the brown waters of the river, so frightened and ashamed I was. The idea actually fascinated me for a few minutes. When we were home again, I had one of those scenes everyone dreads: the increasingly hostile examination by the father, the palliative cups of tea from mum, her feckless attempts to calm the father, the steadily rising timbre of his questioning. It ended with him giving me four or five good hard smacks on my face with his fist. I fell clear over the back of the chesterfield. Mum got a raw steak from the fridge, then started to cry quietly as she pressed it to my cheek. It’s been half a century since then, and I still don’t like to talk about it.
I had been caught in bed with my history professor and a mechanic who worked for Grey Goose Bus Lines. We had been introduced to one another through a very private and secretive circuit of men in Winnipeg into which I had only just insinuated myself. The Winnipeg police (who in contrast to their counterparts in Hong Kong had very little with which to preoccupy themselves) had been keeping an eye on the professor for some time. They burst to his house, I yanked the sheets over myself, the professor sputtered about search warrants and the bus mechanic fell off the far side of the bed. The professor went to jail briefly. As for myself and the mechanic — I remember he had bus grease under his fingernails and it made him terribly exciting - we were given suspended sentences. The whole city learned of it somehow. Winnipeg was a hostile place. No man even used an umbrella back then, since such devices were considered effeminate. And if a simple black umbrella were a lacy parasol in the minds of right-thinking Winnipeggers, sex with another man was beyond abomination. People whispered when I walked down Portage Avenue and some morally outraged young man in front of the Lyceum Theatre threw a Coke bottle at my head.
My father informed me that I was not his son and that I was to get out of his house by the week’s end. I went to my room, examined the relics and mementos of my recently concluded childhood and had a quiet cry. When I finished, my mother knocked on the bedroom door and pushed our ancient black Labrador, Duke, into the room. “He wants to see you for a while,” she said and closed the door again with barely a sound. I was so grateful for Duke’s cataractic gaze, his white muzzle on my lap.
As I told myself with brave nonchalance the next day, my fortunes lay elsewhere. My mum put me on a Canadian Pacific train to Montreal; my father refused to take time away from work to see me off. While we waited in the depot she kept scratching Duke’s neck and talking only to him. “Poor old Duke,” she said. “You’re so very sad that our Paul is going away, aren’t you? You don’t know what you’re going to do, do you?” She didn’t always talk exclusively to the dog; only during times of personal crisis. Everything of significance went through the dog. She walked Duke up to
