poise, looking pretty shabby. Between them and the doddering, comedie Chinese waiters they called “boys,” it was difficult to assess who was more likely to drool over the plates of food. “Oh, Jess!” two women crowed in unison on the first morning of my residence. They were greeting a third who made her way into the canteen with the benefit of a cane. “How’dja sleep, luv? Poor Jess, you look all in already.” Jess, whose badly mottled skin reminded me of marbled cheese, came and sat down and began to enumerate all the miseries of trying to sleep in a tropical climate. What she and the other women were doing in Hong Kong I never found out. Probably visiting their sons in the British Forces garrison or, like my Mr. Trebilcoe, possibly castaways who had roamed from colony to colony until they were out of money and hope. Either way, here they lived and every morning discussed their miseries with the intensity of young sports reporters at KMB games.
Initially I was very lonely and still really very sad over my father’s dam-burst of hatred for me. He never, in the rest of his life, wrote me with any indication of reconciliation, and I guess I never made much of an attempt to seek forgiveness. It was over between us, and it was over completely. Even in 1967, almost two decades after, it still ate at me with regret and, increasingly, unfocused anger.
The first flat I rented was in Causeway Bay, then a sleepy neighbourhood on the edge of an extremely unsanitary typhoon shelter, a little basin of breakwaters stocked with decrepit fishing boats and excrement. My apartment toilet was criminally mischievous: it flushed efficiently enough but then several minutes later would suddenly regurgitate its contents up through the drain of the bathtub (this sometimes happened while I was entertaining guests). The apartments builder had prized privacy above views. He had fitted the windows with frosted glass, and I was left scratching my head as to what was going on around me. Wavy wrought-iron typhoon bars on the inside made it impossible to stick my head out the casements and see what was out there. At night I could hear mah-jong games clattering in the next flats and the voices of the players, but I never saw who the players were. The streets were often just as unyielding. I passed a pawn shop on Fleming Road in Wanchai which had saloon-style louvred doors just high enough so that I couldn’t see inside. I was too shy to go inside to look but I could hear clients haggling with the pawnbroker, their voices rocking off the green stone walls of the shop. When a deal was consummated, the pawnbroker brought his chop down on the sales agreement with a clap. Someone with a small treasure wrapped in an old smock once bustled in through the spring-loaded doors, affording me a momentary view of the brokers in their cages. But the doors swung back and hit me in the nose, bloodying it.
My loneliness amid the fusty wrecks who worked for the China Telegraph propelled me into making friends with a new generation of Hong Kong people. In need of company my own age, I went to a few bars in Wanchai where the matelots hung out, but the fighting and the bar girls made me uncomfortable.
Through the press club I met young Europeans and Chinese who mixed freely at inter-racial parties. This was considered brazen and unwise by our European and Oriental elders so we felt stimulated even more to flout their expectations. Being young.
I started one evening with some work-mates from the China Telegraph and the South China Morning Post. We had drinks at the Press Club in Central, watching the tinhorn society come and go. An American who did a music program on radio station ZBW came in wearing a navy blazer on his shoulders, affecting a European look that took some imagination to appreciate. He came with a young woman named Arden Davis who worked in the public relations firm of Feltus and Robertson and she was an exception to the cheap pretenders in the room. She was a smart creature in a beret and white angora sweater that should have been impossible to keep clean in the Orient, where dirt clung to everything. I asked Arden how she did it. “It’s because,” she said, signaling the waiter for a Manhattan, “Americans are among the great dry-cleaning peoples of the world.” I adored her immediately. She had the best teeth I had ever seen. Arden, who became a life-long friend, contrasted sharply with the dishevelled-looking woman who edited the women’s page of the China Telegraph. Mildred always looked like the heat had wilted her, even in winter; her hair was plastered flat on her head. After a little coaxing she suffered her male companion to order her a martini. He had on a bow tie and a coarse tweed jacket and corduroy trousers that he wore even on the hottest days of summer.
That evening, I ran into Becky Chan for the second time, at a party in Kowloon Tong. Arden, a few Post reporters and I stopped by the Hongkong Hotel for another aperitif and then popped into Mac’s Grill for steaks and whisky. We were a little tight and not at all comfortable on the ferry ride across the choppy harbour to Kowloon. We walked into the party with shouts to the hosts and bottles of Scotch under our arms. There were men and women, Chinese and Western, in every room of the house. It was only a few weeks after I’d met Becky at the shrine to Wong Tai Sin. She wore a cheap and ineptly made teal-coloured dress.
The décolletage came down in a V-shape, culminating in an unnaturally large artificial blue rose in the centre of her bosom. She was seated by herself and had just poured a bottle of Coca-Cola into a tumbler. She uncovered the sugar bowl on the tea set next to it, spooned sugar into the Coca-Cola and then tried to dissolve it with a vigorous stir.
“You’re making quite a sweet drink there,” I said.
“I like it this way. It brings out all the flavour,” Becky said from the sofa. “You’re the guy from Wong Tai Sin, aren’t you?”
I was glad that she remembered me. “Did you get your French heels?” I asked. She held her feet up and showed them off with such a gleeful look. She hunched her shoulders and giggled. Becky was bursting with energy and fun. Through the back window came the sound of a late-night train clattering up the Kowloon-Canton Railway toward China. I couldn’t bear watching her dump even more sugar into her soft drink.
Becky had just finished a picture at the Southern Electric Film Company, a tin-bucket little Cantonese studio. They had exactly three sets, which they painted and repainted. A skyline backdrop, frequently viewed through a fanciful window featured just a single building painted on canvas (Becky said they couldn’t afford more than one building). It was no joke about getting the job, though. She had pursued Southern Electrics managing director relentlessly, shoving her face in his car window when he arrived each morning at the front gate, almost yelling at him about what a good actress she was. She was a glamour girl standing in a gown in the dust beside a collection of shacks that made the studio. Coolies with shoulder poles and baskets full of night soil stared at her and muttered sexual speculations to one another. It wasn’t pretty or dainty, and Mildred would have found her grotesquely unladylike, but Becky aimed to survive.
Eventually, to get her out of his face, the Southern Electric man hired her at one dollar a day. She got a place to live in the studio dormitory with twenty-five other girls, sleeping on bunk beds. In the narrow spaces between the beds she’d perform a ribbon dance for the girls of the sort one saw in Chinese cultural movies put out by the Communist studios on the Mainland. Instead of orbiting long strands of colourful ribbons in great circles, Becky made do with two rolls of toilet paper that she slowly unrolled on her fingers. It was actually kind of artful until the spools of toilet paper slipped off the inner cardboard tubes and flew in opposite directions across the room, leaving her with nothing but the tubes on her fingers, which she stared at in mock confusion. The other girls loved it — they clapped their hands, screamed with laughter and called her “toilet theatre goddess.” It was all so innocent and earnest.
“Come and meet some people,” I said and made her leave her Coca-Cola. I introduced her to some European men and she charmed them just as she had charmed me, with big handshakes and American slang culled from the cinema. But when I guided her toward some Western women, she pulled back on my arm. “I left my drink in the other room,” she said, her voice getting smaller. I said to never mind that and brought her over to meet Arden and Mildred. Arden had good manners and returned Beckys howdy handshake in similar spirit. But Mildred assumed a dryness and spoke in a tiresome morgue. “How do you do, Miss Chan?”
