car batteries.
Three big studios dominated the Hong Kong industry: Cathay, Shaw Brothers and Great World. The Big Three produced the whole range of pictures: contemporary musicals, classical Chinese dramas, sword-play epics, gentle, weepy domestic tragedies and even, once, a western featuring all Oriental cowboys. The Big Three prospered. Cathay, Shaws and Great World had sound stages, distributors, theatre circuits, and they had talent. Cathay’s great star was a slightly plump beauty known as Laam Toi. She made Cathay a great deal of money but she was deeply miserable and she committed suicide by overdosing on phenobarbitone in 1964. Hysterical fans at the funeral overturned the hearse. Shaws had Peter Chen Ho, Betty Loh Tih, Chen Ping and Wong Yu. But the biggest star of them all, the greatest box office draw wherever Chinese movies played, five times voted Empress of Stars at the annual All-Asia Film Week, the queen of the Hong Kong cinema: Great World’s Becky Chan.
Feng almost failed to put Becky under contract when I brought her to his attention back in 1951. She was out of work and afraid of starving to death in a town packed with talented artists who had fled the Communist revolution. Feng wasn’t interested in Becky: she was Cantonese and he was a Northerner. He didn’t speak Cantonese yet and had little interest in making movies for that little market. He concentrated on shooting Mandarin-track films with the strange and futile hope of getting them to the huge market in Communist China. But the Communists had no interest in decadent musicals about nightclub singers and silly comedies about the idle rich. That world had vanished and in the new China, Feng Hsiao-foon was unnecessary and unwanted.
After I’d personally introduced them to one another, Becky pursued Feng relendessly, standing outside the gate every morning with flowers or almond cookies or some other pathetic little offering. She kowtowed when his car sped in the gate of his new studios. Whether she actually lifted the hem of her skirt like other would-be actresses I don’t know — and I didn’t want to know. She ground him down with persistence and eventually he signed her on as an extra.
Her bit-part acting impressed him. Becky worked hard and with great loyalty. Within a year he relented to the reality that most of his Hong Kong audience understood only Cantonese so he started a local-dialect division and gave her leading roles. After she won her first award at the All-Asia Film Week in Tokyo for a Cantonese-track picture, Feng couldn’t ignore her talents, and he put her into Mandarin pictures.
Becky was a big enough star to appear in every kind of picture Great World made. In 1966,1 met a young man from Wyoming, a soldier on leave from Vietnam who was delighted when I told him I knew Becky. He had seen one of her comedies at the Metropole cinema in Saigon. In The Trouble That Money Brings, Becky and comedian Li Chi-chuen star as a newly rich couple. They take delivery of their first refrigerator, only to see it take off on the delivery men’s dolly down the steep grade of Cloud View Road in North Point. They chase after it frantically. The fridge barely misses a taxi and forces a grocery-laden amah to jump out of the way. It crashes into a fruit stand and sends oranges in all directions. The affluent couple learn a lesson about the trouble that money brings. The picture was mostly tedious except for Becky and Li’s abilities to chase the fridge, flailing their arms so they looked like they were running much faster than was humanly possible.
Becky had even greater success with tragedies, in which she’d played in Cantonese-track films in the early 1950s. Back then there had been hundreds of thousands of refugees in the colony. You might have thought that refugee audiences in Hong Kong, when they scraped together ten cents to go to a cinema, would have wanted happy stories: giddy comedies, costume dramas adapted from Chinese history or Eastmancolor musicals, something to take their minds off their hideous lives. Instead they favoured weepers that really punched them in the guts. Middle-class Anglo-Saxons who have never lived through a cataclysm like that of Twentieth Century China usually find the plots of Becky’s melodramas mawkish. But to Hong Kong audiences in the 1950s they were the touch of an electrified wire. In the dark of her temple, where no one could see them, refugees could crouch together and watch the most excruciating sufferings and know exactly what it was like. Becky’s cinema tragedies were emollients for pent-up tears.
In A Mother’s Burden Becky played a refugee woman forced to sell her youngest daughter to prevent the rest of the family from starving. The night before the little girl is to be delivered, Becky makes her daughter some sesame cookies or something, I don’t recall exactly what, only that it was the little girl’s favourite treat. The sight of that innocent three year old clapping her hands in delight and the reverse angle of Becky’s face in such raw, profound pain as she hands her daughter the dainty treat brought such a deep moan of agony from all sides of the Ambassador Cinema that I was chilled. The second act of A Mother’s Burden takes place years later. Becky, still living in poverty, goes to work in a rich family’s home. Naturally, the daughter she’d sold has been adopted by them. Becky realizes this but it is her sacrifice to say nothing, to admire her teenaged daughter in silence. The girl treats Becky badly, and mistakenly accuses her of stealing a necklace. Becky works hard to clear her name and the daughter flings herself into remorse and asks her forgiveness, never once realizing Becky is her natural parent.
“Have you ever been a mother?” her daughter asks. Becky is so fighting her tears that she cannot speak, only nod slightly. “One day,” her daughter says, holding Becky close, “I will be as good a mother as you.” They kiss and Becky goes off into the night. She stumbles to a tram-stop and huddles against a pole, tears streaming down her cheeks.
When the film ended and the lights came up, ushers literally had to pry women from their seats. The women collapsed on the stone floor of the lobby, screaming remorse for their own hidden pasts, shouting the names of children. After some shows ambulances had to be called. Feng added a sixth daily screening, and A Mother’s Burden played for an unprecedented three months.
TWO
I asked Feng if he had contacted the police. He had done nothing, other than order his publicity man to track her down. He had made inquiries among Becky’s friends and at the studio but no one knew anything. The publicity man had Telexed a lot of private detectives, overseas Chinese men who worked in Southeast Asian countries. They were watching the Manila Hotel lobby, the sitting room of the Oriental in Bangkok, and the coffee shop of the Shangri-La in Singapore.
“We have to call the police at once,” I said. Feng balked. “What if she’s been kidnapped by the Communists?” I said. “Or by organized gangs?”
Feng was silent for a few moments. I guess he hadn’t figured that. Then he assembled an answer. “It is not suitable for Chinese people to contact the police,” he said. The condescension infuriated me. I knew what Chinese people found “suitable.” I’d lived in Hong Kong for almost two decades. I repeated my suggestion and again he said no. I began to have the strange and plausible idea that Feng might be of two minds about whether Becky should be found at all. She might have been his biggest star, but she was in her thirties now, a decade older than most actresses in Hong Kong movies, and she wasn’t achieving the kind of box office that she used to. Her fame had been in decline since she’d returned from Hollywood in 1963.
I wanted Becky found, regardless of what Feng felt, and decided to go behind his back. She could be in danger. I told him I would make some discreet inquiries. He considered this but became worried. “It would be very harmful to Becky,” he said, “if you were to publish a story about her disappearance in your newspaper.” I disagreed and said it could help find her. He became cross and lectured me about the supremacy of his decisions. He was angry because he could not control me. We left it that I would telephone friends who worked for airlines in Hong Kong to see if she’d left the colony.
I idly turned the carriage knob on my typewriter and my story on radioactive fallout slipped free.
