in charge of the China Telegraph society pages meant Mildred had to set some sort of standard of behaviour. She continued in on Becky. “Are you a Hong Kong Island Chan or a Kowloon Chan?” And here Mildred gave off a great horsey noise.
“Mildred, what a weird joke,” Arden said, and Mildred’s face grew a little taut. Becky didn’t have a clue what Mildred was talking about.
She wasn’t finished, she still saw some sport in Becky. “What a lovely creation you’re wearing,” she said. Becky knew enough to be wary because she had closely scrutinized Arden’s up-to-the-minute bouclé sweater and silk skirt. Becky was learning that she was cheaply dressed. “It’s a bit loud, isn’t it, Miss Chan? And that big blue rose right here —”
“Let’s go get your Coke,” I said to Becky and guided her by the arm back to the other room. I glanced over my shoulder at Mildred but she had closed her eyes and stretched her mouth wide as if victory was hers. But as we left the room I could hear Arden revving up, something very direct, something like “you scrawny pompous cow ...”
Becky said nothing about it for that evening. But when I took her to dinner one evening she asked where she could read about Parisian fashions. We went to the City Hall library on a Saturday afternoon and went through current issues of Vogue. She snapped the pages of the magazines as she turned them and they gave off little firecracker noises. She stopped on a photo feature and pointed at a gown.
“How do you say that?” she asked.
“Givenchy.”
She repeated it with a Cantonese spin, “Ji-bon-ch’i,” she said. “Where do I get a Ji-bon-ch’i in Hong Kong?”
“They cost a fortune.”
“I’ll make one just like it.”
And she did. Using fabric she bought in the Gilman Street cloth market she refitted her wardrobe with homemade approximations of Givenchy and Chanel. She stayed up late in a corner of her dormitory at Southern Electric, sewing by hand with a peculiar technique of keeping her thumb pressed up against her palm. You couldn’t even see her thumb when she sewed. She also cadged time on the costume department’s sewing machine. In just over one month she reinvented herself as a chic young woman. If you felt the cloth with your fingers you realized it was second rate, but it was good enough to present to the tin horns.
The night I brought her in on my arm to the lounge at the Press Club the European women turned around and gaped at us. Arden rushed over and shook her hand. “Atta girl,” she said. “Knock these sad hens dead.” The European men jumped to their feet as we approached, their mouths forming little rictuses. They politely wished her good evening and made room for us to sit down. It was too wonderful. And Becky adopted a newfound hauteur, her make-up toned down, her hair grown longer and given a soft permanent wave. She even stopped yelling at waiters to come to her table, the way she had done when I first met her. Now she began her requests to them with a whispered “Mm-koi?”
This anecdote, the sort that Sunday supplement writers thank God for when it falls out of the sky at their feet, ended in a way that confused me at the time. Becky grew oddly unhappy with her new wardrobe. She said she didn’t deserve it. I had no idea what she meant. “Of course you do,” I said, “you made it.” But she didn’t wear the dresses for a while, choosing instead extremely plain Chinese dresses, like you’d see sales girls behind the counters in Lane Crawford wearing. Then one day, the mistress from the Southern Electric costume department (it was more of a back storage room than a department) asked to borrow the dresses for use in movies. Instead, Becky demanded rental fees. They dickered, agreed on a price and suddenly she felt much happier about her clothes. She started wearing them again.
Becky never lost her dry-eyed approach to making a living. I recall an incident at Great World, during the making of The Goddess of Mercy. A payroll clerk came on set and gave her the weekly pay-cheque. Resting against a diagonal board to protect her costume and head-dress, she snapped open the pay envelope and scrutinized the deductions hawkishly. There was just one penny too great a deduction. At once, the Goddess of Mercy stood up from the slant board and marched off to find Feng Hsiao-foon. She argued over the penny until he was fed up with her and ordered a corrected cheque cut. It was no wonder that the women refugees of Hong Kong had such a bond with her.
We found a camaraderie in physical complaint, Becky and I. It was in Hong Kong, during those early years that I first fell victim to crashing headaches that began with jagged violet lines pulsating before my eyes, followed by crippling pain and finishing up with some good hard retching. I sought out an American physician, who had a practice in Alexandra House. He diagnosed migraines and prescribed cold compresses. But the headaches were still agony. Becky found out about them over coffee one afternoon.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“What’s wrong?”
“A bad headache.”
“I knew it. I knew you were the sickly sort. I will make you better.” She insisted that I be treated by a Chinese herbalist at once. We couldn’t wait until I felt better: we had to take care of it right then and there. In my agony I boarded a bus with her and we trekked out to a Chinese medicine shop on To Kwa Wan Road in Kowloon City. Becky insisted we go there with the fervour of the mixed-train enthusiast at the European Y. No other shop would do. The place was nothing to look at: very dark and open to the street on one side. It had a lot of drawers, painted black and standing in rows right up to the ceiling, each one labelled in gold paint with a single Chinese character. The drawers contained dried roots, leaves, bugs and animal parts. The smell would have been pleasant if I hadn’t been suffering from a migraine, which magnified potent odours. The medicine man declared that my gall bladder was out of whack and prescribed prunella vulgaris to cool my internal fires and restore the flow of vital energy up to my head. I took it for years but with only variable efficacy.
The actual truth was that this young actress was not interested in cures, at least for herself. She was trying to make herself very sick, which sometimes worked and she would succumb to raging headaches and stomach pains. She confessed to such self-loathing, but only rarely. She would become lugubrious at lunar new year or during the Moon Festival. “Don’t forget,” she would explain, “I’m an orphan.” She would let the comment out as if it were a lone soldier banished from a heavily fortified citadel. She would let no more information forth. At first I pressed her but then I learned she was an intensely private young woman who rationed information about her real self. For most of our long friendship she told me little of substance, and never as a response to a direct question.
Becky loved movie-studio costumes and sometimes made little contra deals with the Southern Electric costumer, her faux Givenchy, for whatever they had in stock that month that looked like fun. When she was more confident about her appearance she arrived at a mixed-race evening in dark red lipstick and wearing a monocle and floral hat covered in a coarse veil — Chinese and Europeans alike recognized a spoof of Mildred, and we laughed knowingly. She especially favoured big ball gowns with enormous, fluffy skirts. She turned up in a taxi outside at a party in Kowloon Tong with a skirt so big it poured out the windows of the tiny cab like an enormous pile of rising bread dough. Inside the hostess’s flat, she used the dress to antic effect when the hostess, a tea service on a tray in her hands, looked about bewildered for the coffee table. “You’ve got it under there, haven’t you?” she said. “You’ve got the whole table under your dress.” And Becky would be standing there in that fluffy skirt, her hands behind her back, looking up at the ceiling, trying desperately not to laugh.
FIVE
