her again that I was willing to stare at her giant projected image as a substitute. An insistent usher tugged me to my seat. Long Ago and Far Away was Becky’s 190th film. The story was unusually sophisticated and represented a high point in the career of Becky’s favourite director, Chen Lo-wen, a veteran of the pre-war Shanghai movie studios. In it, Becky plays a tragic woman riding a train through the countryside. She sits at the window with her hair fashionably swept to the side and heavily lacquered, the way smart women all over the world wore it in 1967. Like all Mandarin-track movies made in Hong Kong, this picture never exactly spelled out where the story was set - certainly not Hong Kong, a small, provincial city that Shanghanese filmmakers such as Feng and Chen disdained. It was probably supposed to take place in some fantasy of a modern, affluent China, near a middle-class Shanghai-like city that had never existed, a conceit every bit as proud and weirdly unreal as the notion of making Mandarin pictures in a Cantonese market, or a colour film with black-and-white lighting. Everything Feng did was proud and weirdly unreal.
The device on which Long Ago relies on is that whenever Becky’s train stops in a station, she sees something on the platform that reminds her of her past. At the first stop, while a soft rain drizzles down the window, she sees a little girl in a fancy Western dress being tugged along by a happy father. That triggers a memory of the heroines own childhood. She had grown up in a wealthy home. But from early childhood her character has been pledged by her parents to marry the ugly, cruel son of a neighbouring wealthy family. At another station, there are two happy lovers pooling their pennies to buy dried salty plums. This makes her think of how she had once met a poor but kind and handsome artist with whom she fell in love long ago and far away, putting her at odds with her family and their promise to marry her off to the cruel boy.
And so the story goes, with this train of memories pulling in and out of stations. Great World had used the British section of the Kowloon-Canton Railway and, with studio efficiency, shot the entire picture in twenty days. Becky had spent three days just riding the KCR’s big olive-coloured trains back and forth while the crew filmed her. She held a hankie to her mouth every time the diesel engine roared through the mile-long Lion Rock Tunnel, spewing blue exhaust and overwhelming noise into the cars behind.
At one point, and for no intended reason, Becky sings. Even in first-class Mandarin dramas things sometimes happened for no reason - moviegoers expected a song. Feng Hsiao-foon understood this as a ritual rather than logical device and gave moviegoers what they wanted. She sings a Mandarin version of the famous song from the 1944 American movie Cover Girl, which justifies the film’s English title. It actually carries more freight in Becky’s picture than it had in the American one, serving as a soliloquy.
“Long ago and far away, I dreamed a dream one day; And now that dream is here beside me!”
As Becky’s character made her way down the railway line, suffering and agonizing, I glanced about the movie theatre at the patrons. This might have been the film’s premiere, but it was no exclusive Hollywood-style gala. Tickets had been sold to the public at regular prices, just as with any other performance. Money had to be made at every showing. There in the audience, their faces illuminated by the screen’s reflection, were Becky’s fans. They were refugees: about one-third of Hong Kong’s population of three million had recently fled China for the British colony. These movie-goers were middle-aged, married women with their hair pulled back into ponytails and fixed with rubber bands who came to escape the monotony of their tiny, drab homes in Kowloon housing estates — the ones where your kitchen was nothing more than a small brazier on a balcony and the lavatory was a malfunctioning communal toilet down the hall shared by twenty-four people. And there were hawker women who sold vegetables or cheap plastic goods on Hong Kong’s crowded and bustling sidewalks who now sat in the Ambassador in light day-pyjamas.
There were lonely single men, mostly factory workers, who had fled China’s upheavals and had become the lost souls of Hong Kong. One man used to turn up for every single premiere of a Becky Chan picture. That had been years before, in the ’50s and early ’60s. He always wore the tattered and faded uniform of the Kuomintang Army, which had been vanquished by the Communists on the mainland in 1949. He and other hapless Kuomintang soldiers had been forced to flee to Hong Kong when the Communists ultimately proved victorious. Had they stayed behind they might have been imprisoned in the vengeful early years after Liberation, or slaughtered. They wandered around Hong Kong like ghosts, still wearing their uniforms and trying to make a living at odd jobs.
Whenever people saw that pathetic man at Becky’s premieres they spoke of “Chiang Kai-shek’s lost brother.” He would sit down at the front and stare up at Becky. Before The Goddess of Mercy, he would sit in awe and contemplation, perhaps adoration. His oily face shone in the movie reflection and you could see two bumpy cheek bones sticking out on his Cantonese face, the faded Republican Sun flashes on the shoulders of his worn-out uniform plainly and pathetically visible. He had inspired in me endless questions about where he had come from, what he had done with his life, and why he always came to worship the Goddess of Mercy. People joked at her premieres that Becky should say hello to her biggest and grubbiest fan, but so far as I know Becky never did. He wasn’t around anymore; nobody had seen him in years, and I often wondered what had happened to him. Now I looked up at Becky on the WorldScope screen, so magnified, so vividly coloured. This was my friend, this was the Goddess of Mercy. She was gone. It wounded me to be left with no more than her shadow.
THREE
The following morning, I took the ferry from North Point to Kowloon City. Down on the water the salt and morning mist smelled fresh after the all-night stink of Hong Kong Island. I sat on the lower deck and stared without purpose at the airport runway, which jutted into Kowloon Bay. It was only a few hundred feet from the ferry’s route and I dumbly watched a Thai Airways Caravelle thunder down the runway and climb out. A few weeks before, an inbound Caravelle had fallen short of the runway during a typhoon, resulting in many deaths. This morning, the sun was still low and a fresh South China Sea breeze was funnelling in through Lye Mun, and for the only time in twenty-four hours I felt cool and clean. The day would be scorching hot again.
At the Hongkong and Yaumati Ferry wharf in Kowloon City I walked down the stone steps to the bus bays. I was to cover an expected leftist demonstration outside a plastics factory. Feng Hsiao-foon had forbidden me to telephone Ah-niu, Becky’s maid, at their home. He didn’t know that I already had. Like a schoolboy, my instinct was to disregard him. In fact, I intended to visit Ah-niu in secret. At the bus plaza, three forlorn-looking palm trees invigilated over the daily ebb and flow of passengers. Young factory women, Ting Ying’s Transistor Girls, stood in corrals made out of welded grey steel pipes, waiting for buses. When a Kowloon Motor Bus No. 11B swung around a curve to the bus bay, its driver trying to keep to an impossibly tight schedule, the huge double-decker leaned over precariously toward the Transistor Girls like a great red and cream-coloured slab about to entomb them. While the women pushed and shoved each other to get aboard, the driver clambered out a little door on the side of his cab with a garden watering can to top up his radiator.
I boarded my bus and rode in the upper saloon through the squalor of Kowloon City to Kowloon Tong. Crowded into the heaving bus, I read that mornings edition of the paper. On the front page was a story about a mob of Maoists paying teenagers to throw stones at passing Kowloon Motor buses. Adjacent to that story, and this was so typical of the schizophrenia of the China Telegraph in the summer of 1967, was an overly enthusiastic item headlined “Stars Have a Ball at New Kowloon Bowling Complex.” Hong Kong didn’t have a reliable supply of drinking water, people slept in the streets and Maoists were pelting buses, but we had modern bowling lanes. The story ran with a photo of young Josephine Siu Fong-fong firing a bowling ball down an alley in the new Star Bowl.
Hong Kong’s Chinese movie business was regular news and avidly covered by the China Telegraph.
