okay?” Billy asked.
I nodded and picked up the telephone. I called some friends at the airlines: Thai Airways International, JAL and Pan Am. They checked passenger manifests for me — back then such favours were possible. They found no record of Becky on any flights. Next I tried to telephone some of Becky’s colleagues at Great World, but they were all shooting on stages. There was a big musical film in production called Life’s Like That which required lots of contract players to appear as a nightclub audience. The scale of Hong Kong movie-making meant that leading players sometimes filled in as extras on such shoots. Feng was paying them anyway, he might as well have kept them busy. I left messages for several of them.
Then I called Becky’s home in Kowloon Tong and spoke with one of the servants in Cantonese. Ah-niu was the maid and had been with Becky for years. She started to cry when I spoke to her. I asked a lot of indirect questions about whether Becky and Feng had been quarrelling but she was reluctant to speak about her employers, especially over the phone. She only allowed that Becky had been especially anxious for about a month, something I had noticed too.
Finally, I called my friend in the Hong Kong Police, regardless of Feng’s wishes. Jack was in the Emergency Unit, the riot police, and would not investigate personally, but he could get inquiries going much faster than I could. When I called, Jack was out patrolling in Kowloon City. I left a message.
That evening I decided to attend the premiere of Becky’s newest film, Long Ago and Far Away. Great World employees would be at the Ambassador and I wanted to talk to them about Becky. I almost couldn’t get to the theatre. The police had found a brown cardboard box left by Maoists on Nathan Road tied to the steel fence that ran down the median. Fearing a bomb, they cordoned off the street so traffic and pedestrians had to find another route through the narrow, jammed side streets of lower Kowloon. Traffic came to a complete halt and pedestrians were reduced to a maddening shuffle. It turned out that the brown box was a hoax designed to cause just such chaos. It contained an old pair of shoes and a note in Chinese that said: “British imperialists! Use these to run away from the proletarian masses!”
As I approached the Ambassador Cinema, a flock of startled pigeons took flight with the first frantic burst of a Maoist song issued from a trio of loudspeakers on the overhang of the Astor cinema. The Astor stood across Nathan Road from the Ambassador. It was operated by a company controlled by leftists sympathetic to China’s Mao Tse-tung. The whole building was completely covered in red bunting, red lanterns with gold tassels and an enormous, brilliantly painted billboard showing Chinese industrial workers, women activists, People’s Liberation Army soldiers and peasants walking arm in arm. They were smiling because above them, where the sun should have been, was a golden cameo of Chairman Mao radiating the brilliant light of his invincible thought. The picture was titled Chairman Mao Joins a Million People to Celebrate the Great Cultural Revolution. It came with a “supporting colour short,” The Pearl River Delta Today, produced by the Central Newsreel & Documentary Film Studio. While such pictures were numbingly dull compared to the glamour, fun, sex and sadness of Hong Kong movies, they did find audiences with dutiful leftists who yawned through four performances a day and joined earnest discussion groups during the intervals. The propaganda music that came honking out of the loudspeakers pounded down on pedestrians packing the sidewalks, one more indignity of urban noise.
On the opposite pavement, a huge hand-painted billboard for Long Ago and Far Away completely masked the Ambassador’s façade. A three-storey painted billboard showed Becky in a head scarf, looking sad. The disembodied heads of supporting actors, comparative Lilliputians, floated in the background at odd angles, like runaway balloons. Long Ago and Far Away was a tragic love story about arranged marriage. It was as free of politics as the Astor’s Communist film was larded with it. The Chinese title of the picture gave a different angle on the story: She Must Smile at a Man She Does Not Like.
Fans were buying tickets to the premiere and I lined up to get one from the booking windows. In Hong Kong you still bought cinema tickets from a paper seating plan the cashier presented to you. You pointed to your seat, either in the front stalls or in the balcony’s Dress Circle. Before the Second World War, only the British got to sit in Dress Circle, but they really had to dress — evening clothes were a requirement of admission. Now everybody sat wherever they chose, and evening clothes for Dress Circle was only a peculiar, faint memory. If it was a quality film in a classy house like those on the Great World circuit, you might get a promotional gift with admission, such as a new brand of soft drink or a tube of lipstick. Great World tried tie-in contests — to promote Becky’s 1965 picture That Day at the Airport, which featured the repeated image of a wristwatch, Feng raffled off Tissots, the Swiss Omega company’s cheaper brand.
There were a few Great World performers in the lobby, mobbed by fans. I spoke to the company’s publicity chief. He was cagey and too much of a creature of his employer to reveal anything. I was getting nowhere. Then I spotted Netty Leung, a Cantonese star with Great World. Netty appeared in as many as seventy films a year. In 1964, she too had abruptly disappeared from the studio to flee her workload. She had been acting in three pictures simultaneously and her disappearance forced Feng to shut all of them down. A few days later, the general manager of Feng’s Malaysian theatre circuit spotted her in a Singapore restaurant.
Netty’s excuse for running away: she was just plain exhausted. Feng fined her six months’ pay as a warning to other would-be bolters. For half a year she was indentured labour at Great World.
“Have you seen Becky?” I asked her. I must have appeared so upset that Netty chuckled with embarrassment and bobbed her head to encourage me to find my equilibrium. Netty said she knew nothing of Becky’s disappearance. “Although,” she said as she went into the auditorium, “if she walked out, good for her.”
I was going to leave at that point. I didn’t want to sit around in a movie while my best friend was missing. I could hear the film begin with the familiar trumpeting fanfare of the Great World Organisation. Feng, who was almost pathologically vigilant about production costs, hated colour. Back then, Feng had to double his lighting budgets for Eastmancolor. He had shot his first colour production almost in defiance of practicality, using black-and-white-film lighting levels. The performers’ faces came out a bilious green, but, with typical patience, cinema-goers didn’t seem to mind. At first, Feng was going to keep working that way. Part of him did want his films to look better. So up went the lighting budget. Great World didn’t have a colour-processing lab for several years so Feng had to air-freight negatives to Rank Laboratories in England, raising costs and causing unacceptable delays. He ordered that all editing be done on a clipboard, with directors and film editors keeping track of film can numbers and ordering on the spot which pieces of film to use in the final product. Once the processed film was flown back from Rank, a Great World negative cutter pasted the picture together in twenty gruelling hours. Feng also committed his theatre circuit to wide-screen projection using the CinemaScope process, which he renamed WorldScope. Shooting was often rushed and clumsy, so the extremities of images were blurred. Again, Chinese movie fans didn’t mind - they loved the colour and WorldScope dimensions, the vast brightness a respite from their hard lives in the grey, cramped streets of Hong Kong.
I grew curious, standing in the empty lobby of the Ambassador, listening to the Great World fanfare. Feng had complained of the expense of reshooting the Great World fanfare sequence in colour: the old one had featured a revolving Plasticine globe hovering on a cloud of carbon dioxide. Technicians would have to go out to an electrical goods factory and buy a new electric motor to make the Plasticine globe spin because they had failed to keep the old one they’d used when they’d shot the black-and-white version. So he ordered that the spinning globe be ditched in favour of a beautiful young woman opening a fan in front of her face. Painted on the fan was a map of the world. She became framed by the superimposed Chinese characters Tai Shai Kaai and their English counterparts: “Great World.”
Then
