we, lords of the Oriental English-language press, sat ignoring it. Four British reporters sat on the edges of two desks, swinging their feet and talking sports.
I suddenly felt very tired. I dreaded the possibilities, that Becky might have been kidnapped, that she was lost, or dead. Many people suffer through a difficult year some time in their lives; 1967 was my difficult year. Becky’s disappearance was going to exhaust my endurance. An all but overpowering urge to burst into tears crept over me. Becky was the only true friend I’d ever had. The orphan girl from the refugee shack towns that ringed Kowloon. The jade girl, the pretty teenager who had started out performing ingénue roles in Cantonese opera. The local apprentice actress who slaved for cheesy film companies that came to Hong Kong from Shanghai following their closure after 1949 by the triumphant Communists. When she joined Feng’s Great World she had her best years, first in cheap but touching Cantonese stories about sacrifice and suffering, later in unlikely Mandarin comedies and dress-ups. In the early ’60s she had a brief career in Hollywood in stupid, forgettable pictures with Oriental themes: Almond Eyes, Panic on Grant Avenue, Chopsticks. She sabotaged her own career in Los Angeles and punished herself for it by coming back to Hong Kong and marrying Feng Hsiao-foon. He put her under contract at Great World again and, because she was now his wife, he paid her no salary. Becky admired Western directness and sometimes when I put a blunt question to her she shot back with rare revelation. I asked her why she had gone back to that dreadful man’s employ. “I always outlast my jailers,” she said.
Becky and I got on brilliantly. She constantly came down with colds and the flu, and during those illnesses I would listen patiently to her minute analyses of each minor viral assault. She reported their progress with the intensity of a radio sports commentator. Illness and the possibility of getting sick fascinated her. She was actually disappointed when chest X-rays absolved her of tuberculosis. She told me about the hardy bacillus in an odd little lecture over tea in a hotel coffee shop. “If you have tuberculosis,” she’d say to me, “and you spit on the street, the bacilli are in the spit. Even when the spit dries up it’s still alive. So when the dust blows, the bacilli are carried into the air and gets into someone else’s lungs. Then she’s got it.” She sat back and sipped her glass of Coca-Cola, looking terribly stimulated and even hopeful.
She in turn listened to my singing, something that was to have been my intended career. I taught her goofy Western novelty songs. She found their foolishness to be uncomplicated source of fun and laughed innocently and heartily. “Wally the Walleyed Mackerel,” “Thanks for the Buggy Ride,” “The Prune Song.” I sang “The Wee Hoose ’Mang the Heather,” exaggerating the Scottish burr monstrously. “Though A’m far away frae Scotland and the scenes I loov sae weel. There’s a beat for the auld country that in ev’ry pulse I feel!” She couldn’t have liked it more. The song was even more absurd for her than it was for me.
In our early, easy-going years we had an uncomplicated affection for one another in a city that was being strangled by the complexity of its relationships. I did not worship false goddesses. I had no other true and dependable friends. I was not married and had no possibility of becoming so. My society was Becky and I was her window on freedom.
In the 1960s, telephone lines under Victoria Harbour could be unreliable and that day the line that carried Feng’s call intermittently crackled and honked as if afflicted with emphysema. Feng was angry, almost shrill, as if I were still an employee of his to be tossed about by the mighty gusts of his supreme will. He purposefully tried to confuse me so I would lose my guile and confess to crimes I had not committed. He asked me why I was harbouring Becky. I hadn’t even known she was missing. I was as worried as he was. He didn’t believe me.
He said she had left their home in Kowloon Tong the previous morning without saying anything. She had instructed her amah to walk down to Waterloo Road and flag a taxi. When the amah returned with the taxi, Becky came out of the house with a small suitcase. She got in, the driver turned his vehicle about, drove back to Waterloo Road and turned right. That meant she was heading into central Kowloon. The amah thought that was unusual because Becky should have been going to work at Great World’s studios out in Tsuen Wan, which were in the opposite direction. Ah-niu assumed Becky was going to a location shoot and thought no more about it until the director of her current picture called the house asking where she was. The amah called Feng. That had been yesterday and Feng had yet to notify the police. “She left the baby behind,” he said.
He then asked me a series of questions and provided me with alternative answers that might satisfy him, all of them pointing to my culpability in some foggy conspiracy to humiliate him or to ruin the Great World Organisation. I put my head on my hand and let myself get beaten up. The damp sweat patch on the back of my shirt was now very cold in the China Telegraph newsroom. Air conditioning was the worst innovation to come along in the 1960s. Workmen came in and constructed a false ceiling to hide the conduits, which made a merry old runway for the office rats. Late at night you could hear them up there, big, lusty, whiskered things, pounding the top side of the asbestos panels as they dashed above your head.
I listened to the scurrying feet of Feng’s questions and gave short answers. His inquiries had a circular quality leading to an invariably terrible conclusion, like dud missiles you’d see in news-reels, the ones that rose from Florida launch pads then made pin-wheel courses a hundred feet above the Earth and exploded. I told him that I didn’t know where she was and I could tell by his comments he didn’t believe me. He kept spinning about. Feng always assumed that something was hidden, that nothing was wholly visible and innocent. He earnestly believed that, like him, everyone had something hidden, something complicated and soundless, like that penthouse machinery that enables elevator cars to scuttle up and down dark hoist ways and disclose different places to passengers without cohesive explanation.
I could picture him at the other end of the telephone call, taking off his glasses and blinking unseeing at the air. His questions and demands suggested that he couldn’t make sense of where Becky was. He had never really known her, not like I had. He did not want to see her the way I did. He saw her as something to be dug out of the ground, smelted and refined into something useful and then sold off. I really believe he thought that that. I still do.
Feng attempted an oblique threat. “It may be necessary,” he said, “to call the authorities. They might come to your office and ask questions.” This meant more to him than it did to me. Feng had a poor idea of what could scandalize a newspaper reporter. The police turning up at his studio office would be devastating for a senior member of the North Kowloon Rotary and one of the most socially ambitious Shanghanese businessmen in the colony. Although he was a movie showman used to generating publicity for the studio, he wouldn’t do anything that undermined his sorry, sad little pursuit of personal respectability. Feng just didn’t get why Chinese bankers, industrialists and colonial government officials never wanted him around.
As rich as he got, he never found the degree of respectability he thought they owed him. Highly stratified and wary of Northerners, elite Cantonese society shared their charity boards with him and invited him to their banquets — but only when they wanted him to do something for them. Or when they wanted him to write a big, fat, greasy donation to Po Leung Kuk, the society to aid women and children. But he was never a close friend to any of them. He never went to their card games or drank their tumblers of iced cognac in private rooms of fine restaurants while they opened the secrets of their social connections. No messengers hand-delivered invitations to high-caste weddings. There was no personal warmth, only utility. Such subtle exclusions only made him try harder, but in weird ways. When he failed to get an invitation to dine at Chinese New Year with the Tsengs, a banking family who lived on Shouson Hill, he issued a press release stating that thereafter, Great World’s Mandarin-track motion pictures would switch from black and white to colour. He ordered a copy of the release sent to the Tsengs’ offices. I suppose he thought that by adopting colour he would so magnetize himself socially that the invitations would fly to his office and stick to the outer door. He didn’t know that when the Tsengs and other quality families thought of movie producers, weak smiles
