many sons.
I had grown a very red moustache in a bid to look older than twenty-two. I wore a Harris tweed jacket, which I clutched to my sides as I dodged platoons of beggars on the steps to the shrine. Mounting the curving stone staircase to the main courtyard of the temple, I saw the gate of the temple, with its slouching tiled roof and pillars. Inside hundreds of people held clumps of smouldering joss sticks in their hands as they knelt before a stone effigy of Wong Tai Sin. Some were in rags and looked truly in need of miracles. Others wore fine woollens and silks and looked as if they ate meat three times a day, and not the gristly cuts. In among them was a slender young Chinese woman in a Western-style white dress, cinched at the waist and cut low around the neck, a cheap, vulgar thing she’d probably bought in a back-street market stall, not a fine British dress shop. She was very young, very beautiful and she knelt there among the poor and destitute, the affluent and well-fed, clutching a great fistful of joss sticks. She batted the smoke away with her free hand and coughed irritably.
She saw me looking at her and winked, a shocking gesture from a respectable Chinese girl back in 1948. She examined me, my tweed sports jacket and oyster-coloured trousers and probably concluded (righdy) that I was harmless. “Hello,” she said in English. She was truly a lovely young woman, even in that poor-quality dress. After she finished her supplication she asked me to help her insert the joss sticks in a huge sand-filled urn. She gave me half of them and we planted them together.
“What do you want?” she asked.
I was flustered because I thought she was accusing me of trying to pick her up.
“From him,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder toward an oversize stone effigy of a bearded man painted with bright enamels. “From Wong Tai Sin?”
“I was just curious about the temple,” I said.
She fired out her arm and extended her hand in a put-’er-there way she must have seen in an American movie with Eve Arden in it. “Becky Chan.”
I shook her hand. “My name is Paul Hauer.”
She repeated it several times to make her tongue get used to the feel of it. “You’re a tourist?”
“No, I live here. I work for a newspaper.”
“What do you do for it?”
“General reporter.”
“A newsman,” she said. “Some glamour.” We finished putting the joss sticks in the sand and she clapped her hands together. “Uck, everything’s so dirty here. Hey, I got a story for your newspaper.” She told me that the temple was far holier than the crowds, smoke, noise, peanut vendors and playing children made it appear. “Even the Turnip Heads had to pay to harvest the bamboo stands that surrounded the temple when they were here,” she said. “They were so in awe of Wong Tai Sin.” She was talking about the Japanese forces during the Second World War, using the defiant slang the Cantonese used for their tormentors in the darkest years of occupation.
“Let’s go ask the god for advice.” She led me toward an arcade covered with corrugated tin roofs. Inside were fortunetellers. “You want anything from the god today?” she asked. She turned and looked at me for a second then asked, “Do you see everything in blue?”
I didn’t understand.
“Your eyes are blue. So is everything you see blue?”
I asked her if she saw everything in brown.
She smiled beautifully and rolled her eyes to the side. “Hey, is your hair naturally blond or did you dye it? I’d like blond hair too. It would be fun.”
I couldn’t resist her. She was jaunty, vivacious and a bit out of her depth with her forwardness. She must have helped my frail ego by showing interest in me then appearing vulnerable with her naïveté. I went with her to the sheds at the side of the temple. There sat sage fortune-tellers, smoking long metal pipes and examining the One Hundred Poems for answers to the questions put to them by subscribers. She sat before one man who had a couple of long wiry hairs sprouting from a mole, considered decorative, like bonsai trees, I suppose. I stood by while she fished out a couple of coins from a pasteboard purse that looked like a miniature version of a child’s lunch bucket. It was pale pink and so tacky I couldn’t help but smile. She was sweet, but the girl needed tutoring in Western fashions. I had enough sense not to tease her about her clothes.
Becky put her question to the fortune-teller. He gave her a tin canister, perforated at the top, which held a number of sticks. She shook the canister and a single stick rattled out through one of the perforations. The fortune-teller looked at it through his spectacles, sighed in bland recognition, then looked through a book for the corresponding poem. He read it aloud to her in Cantonese and then gave her an interpretation. All the while she listened very intently, very gravely, asked a few questions in Cantonese and then thanked the man. I stood by and watched without comprehension. When she was done the fortune-teller gave a jaunty little wave and considered me, thought I might be business and beckoned me over. I just waved politely and escorted Becky back to the main compound. “What did you inquire about?” I asked.
She gave me a cheerful smile. “French high heels,” she said. “I want them so badly, so I sought advice on how to get them. They’ll be lovely when they arrive.” She glanced up in the air then winked at me again. “They’ll be here any time soon,” she said, as if they were about to plunge out of the sky and hit the ground in front of her.
Becky told me that the fortune-tellers in their decrepit sheds were the principal conduit to Wong Tai Sin’s munificence. With explicit instructions from the One Hundred Poems she had, she claimed, overcome a clumsiness that had confounded her parents. They were Mother and Father Chan and they had adopted her out of the Door of Hope Orphanage and put her to work in their Cantonese opera troupe. She said that through his actions her father had taught her to come to Wong Tai Sin and ask for help.
That day in Wong Tai Sin Temple, while refugees were praying for a roof over their heads, redemption from illness or just plain money, Becky was clapping her hands in divine pursuit of French-made high heels. Or so that’s what she told me. I couldn’t understand Cantonese yet so I didn’t know what she had spoken to the fortune-teller about. I had to laugh at her frivolity about shoes amid the squalor of Kowloon. I gave her my business card and invited her to call. “Hey,” she said, slapping my arm with the back of her hand. “Is this a pick-up?” I blushed fiercely and she laughed. “Hey! Do that again. Change colour like that. Can you turn other colours? Green or blue?” We went down the steps and beheld the view of Kowloon below, a panorama today lost behind a wall of modern high-rises. She stopped before a beggar child and gave him a coin.
She looked back at me and said, “Next time I will pray to Wong Tai Sin for a telephone, so I can call you.” I didn’t know her yet so I couldn’t tell just how thin the top layer of her frivolity was and how networked it was with fissures, like crackle-glazed porcelain. It was a such fine day in October 1948 and we were both young and more adventurous than we realized. She seemed like a fun person to me, as I said in my diary that evening, and I probably seemed exotic to her. So we began to pal around. It never occurred to me to date Becky. The fun we would have in those early years would go a long way for both of us.
I took Becky and a party of others — there was a BOAC crewman I wanted to hanging around with that year, an American reporter, and two other actresses who worked for the Southern Electric Film Company - to a gambling den. I thought it would be a fantastic adventure. The women said they didn’t want to go, but the presumed authority of their Western male friends got the better of their judgement. I took them to a back street in Hung Hom,
