a family, we loved living in Hong Kong in the mid-sixties. The work was compelling and the surroundings exotic. Sheila and I took an ample apartment at 2 Old Peak Road overlooking the botanical gardens and the harbor and located across the street from Canossa Hospital. Adam and Oliver, Tiger Number One (Dahu) and Tiger Number Two (Erhu), were soon to be joined by Nicholas Jr., Tiger Number Three (Sanhu), and we wanted good medical facilities close by. (As it turned out, I found myself assisting at the delivery of Sanhu, when the anesthetist was unavailable for his midnight arrival).
The children settled in at British schools nearby. Oliver was the fastest infant at Victoria Barracks Infant School, down the hill. Adam went to Glenealy, a Hong Kong government school up Old Peak Road. The Wang family of Anhui Province, immigrants from Shanghai who fled the Mainland in the 1950s, moved in to work for us, providing expert household service and the lively company of three young children roughly the age of ours, who gave them a feel for Chinese friendship, the language, and local life. The Wang family had suffered every horror early twentieth-century China could inflict: famine, war, dislocation, even a tiger eating an older daughter alive. They taught us that hardship could produce sympathetic, accessible human beings. Years later, the Wangs immigrated to the United States and prospered in the employment of Joe Alsop’s sister, Corinne Chubb.
Social life for transient foreigners in Hong Kong was organized around occupations and activities. The more different things one did, the more circles of people gave you access. In addition to watching China, we played guitar and sang folksongs and choral music, went to church at the Cathedral, and rowed and played squash competitively for the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. Sheila began her social work career as a volunteer, doing house calls in her fluent Chinese for a nonprofit agency that cared for refugees from Mandarin-speaking parts of China. Our continued language study with the painter Tang Hung gave us a look at Hong Kong’s artistic community.
Tang was a student of the world famous painter (some say forger) Zhang Daqian. He took us one day to meet Zhang at his “studio” in a rundown apartment building in Kowloon. The place was jammed. Students, concubines, clients, and critics all milled about, watching Zhang paint. There was not an easel in sight. The Master had a painting of a different style or period under way in each room, on whatever surface was handy. A trademark horse scroll was working on the bed, a lotus and bamboo in the Chan (Zen) Buddhist style on the top of a dresser, a Ming landscape taking shape on the dining room table, a delicate circular Qing bird forming on the sofa in the living room. Zhang went from room to room, surrounded by a cloud of observers, adding brush strokes and colors, a bird beak here, a flower there, a flying horse’s hoof on another. The audience marveled at the rapid, flawless work, the seamless transitions from one style and century to another.
Hong Kong was less crowded and polluted in the sixties than it is now. The population was under four million, as against seven million plus today. But it was a confining place, particularly since the Mainland was closed tight. To get away, we bought a sailing junk and hired a boatman. The boat was a converted fishing smack, painted blue, with bulging eyes set into the bow, almost thirty feet long and ten feet wide, carrying three sails and a one-lung diesel engine. It cost US$900. We named it Star Elephant, and shared it with Inger McCabe (now Elliott), whose then husband Bob was the Newsweek correspondent.
The boatman was from a fishing family in Aberdeen. He and his colleagues used a big tree beside the road on Middle Bay as their office, with awnings stretched between branches and a telephone nailed to the trunk. On an hour ’s notice, he would be ready after work when the family and a picnic arrived to set sail into a sunset on the South China Sea. Regulations required that boat owners pass elementary navigation and engineering exams. The reward was a certificate describing the bearer as a “licensed junk master.”
Sheila and I told each other from the first day of our years in Hong Kong that “these are the good old days.” That said, the history of the territory from 1964 to 1968 was dotted with crises of different kinds. We arrived in the midst of the massive drought of
1964, when water supplies to apartment houses were limited to three hours every four days. CEOs and Taipans would leave board meetings abruptly when the water came on in their zone. A frequent topic of analysis at gatherings of China experts during the dry days was the best way to flush a toilet.
The year 1965 saw the drought broken by nine consecutive typhoons, which frightened us all with torrents of water dashed against the picture windows by ferocious, quirky winds that played strange tricks. One tore open the closet doors of a friend and hurled his entire wardrobe out into the night.
In 1966, Hong Kong’s financial bubble burst. The boom/bust cycle in the years before the territory’s economy became the vestibule for Mainland growth in the 1980s was between three and five years. Stocks tumbled, real estate prices plummeted. Our landlord called on us and begged that we accept a 30 percent decrease in rent. The entire period, climaxed by torrential rains that triggered unprecedented mudslides and deaths in collapsed buildings, has been immortalized in James Clavell’s novel Noble House.
In 1967, we had to deal with the Cultural Revolution in Hong Kong itself. But, as I wrote my family then, “We are actually thriving on our diet of disturbance. The boys are well, and Sheila, whose political sense is as sharp as her others, has been fascinated. As for myself, I can only admit to having a ball. Political trouble is what we are trained for and wait for.”
5
The Cultural Revolution
Earthquake Warning
The first tremor of the political earthquake that almost destroyed the People’s Republic hit Shanghai in late 1965. Publication in the local press of a review fiercely criticizing the revival of an opera, Hai Jui Resigns His Office, set off alarms throughout China and among the Watchers in Hong Kong. Hai Jui was an official revered in history for having the courage to criticize a misguided, overbearing emperor and to retire in protest. The opera was seen as an allegorical attack on Mao. The stinging review, experienced hands in the Mainland Section agreed, was aimed at Mao’s enemies. It was the kind of sensitive signal that sends snakes and roaches scurrying before a seismic event. Something huge was in the offing.
My placid apprenticeship as a China analyst came to an abrupt end as we struggled during the following months to track the torrent of media attacks, first on the leadership of the Beijing Party Committee, and then during the summer of 1966 on the top leaders of the national party apparatus. The Red Guards made their debut then at a series of gigantic, hysterical rallies in Tiananmen Square worshipping Chairman Mao that launched their rampage throughout the country and the society. They first attacked their teachers and parents and all remnants of traditional culture and then, directly, the party apparatus throughout China.
The early vehicles of attack were “Big Character Posters,” handwritten broadsheets, pasted by the thousands to the walls of buildings throughout China’s cities. Historically used by students to voice their protests, these sprang up everywhere, excoriating Beijing Party boss Peng Zhen, President Liu Shaoqi, Party Secretary Deng Xiaoping, and others down the line. Red Guard groups began publishing their own newspapers expanding the attacks. On the ground, mass public criticism sessions ended with target officials paraded through the streets in dunce caps, their arms stretched out wide behind them in a derisive and painful position known as the “jet plane.” Red Guard student groups ravaged historic sites, destroyed valuable old books and paintings, and ratted on their parents and teachers.
The Origins of Upheaval
Most simply, as we pieced it together over time, leftists in the party, led by Chairman Mao, his wife Jiang Qing, and Army Chief Lin Biao, had organized and launched the movement in an effort to restore the primacy they had lost
