Golden Boy (19 page)

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Authors: Martin Booth

BOOK: Golden Boy
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Only one class of person was completely pickpocket proof: the US Navy ratings who carried their wallets folded over the front of the very tight waistbands of their uniform trousers. They were in full view of any pickpocket but not one could pull a wallet clear without the owner knowing.
Although these kinds of street theft must have ruined many
a holiday, I could not bring myself to condemn them. The perpetrators were often boys even younger than myself, street urchins, the children of squatter shack dwellers and pavement sleepers. They were doing the best they could to stay alive and I could not help wondering whether some of their fathers had owned cars and horses in China and were now reduced to sweeping out offices or serving in restaurants. Or worse.
Despite their criminality, I felt at one with them. They were expatriates who had made their home here. So was I. There were even moments when I wondered how I might join them in their illegality, but I realized I would not have had the stomach for it. And that was the difference between a
gweilo
and a Chinese: we were bound by the rules that ruled the rulers and they were not.
 
 
One sweltering day, the humidity over 90 per cent, my mother and I went shopping, our mission to buy a wedding anniversary gift for my paternal grandparents.
Under normal circumstances, I would have strenuously attempted to avoid this outing. Traipsing in my mother's wake round shops containing little of interest to me, in streets I had explored and which were now fairly sterile to me, was not my idea of an ideal morning. However, I wanted to take part in the choice of a gift for Grampy.
With a military methodology, my mother went up and down the streets, traversing Tsim Sha Tsui in a mental grid, but she could find nothing suitable. It was either tourist tat or too fragile to post, or too expensive and therefore likely to cost my grandparents inordinately high customs duties. Finally, having exhausted most of Tsim Sha Tsui – and me – we had a Coke each at a
pavement stall and headed up Nathan Road at a brisk pace. My shirt clung to my back: through my mother's sweat-soaked blouse I could see her bra strap and felt very embarrassed that it was so prominent. None of the Chinese women seemed to be even lightly perspiring.
My mother's intention was, if she could find nothing in an area catering mostly for European taste, she would have a go in that providing for the Chinese. Turning into Shanghai Street, we started to patrol the shops selling crockery. It was utilitarian stuff but one variety caught my mother's attention. Known as rice-patterned ware, neither of us could understand how it was mass-produced. Each dish, bowl or cup was made of white porcelain with a patterned blue border and base, between which the porcelain was speckled with what looked like rice grains fired in the matrix. If the bowl was held to the light, each grain appeared translucent.
‘This is it,' my mother declared as she held up a large serving bowl to the light. ‘Bugger the fragility! This is the one, don't you think?'
I agreed. My grandmother would regard it as a nice bowl to put on the dresser but my grandfather would see it for what it was – an exotic piece sent from a far-off land with all my love brimming out of it. It cost only a few dollars.
‘It's a bit on the cheap side,' she commented as the shopkeeper wrapped the bowl in wood straw and newspaper.
‘It's the thought that counts,' I remarked.
She smiled and sauntered round the shop, picking up a piece here and a piece there. I sat on a stool and sweated. The shopkeeper did not offer me a drink for he no longer had reason to keep us in the place. We had parted with our money and the cost of a Green Spot would simply erode his profit margin.
Finally, my mother returned to the counter, said, ‘Sod it!'
and ordered a six-setting complete dinner service of the same sort, asking for it all to be delivered to the Boundary Street address.
The shopkeeper beamed, shouted for an assistant, relieved my mother of $110 (about £6) and gave us each a chilled bottle of Watson's lemonade.
‘I don't think,' my mother said as we walked at a leisurely speed towards Nathan Road, ‘that we need to mention this to your father.'
‘Why not?' I asked. ‘How can you hide ninety plates and bowls and things?'
My mother took my hand and jauntily swung it back and forth as we walked on.
‘I'm a wife,' she answered obtusely.
The arcaded pavement ahead was obstructed by a row of barrels being off-loaded from a green lorry with a canvas awning. As we entered the restricted space, we were ambushed by a young Chinese woman. She wore the clothes of a coolie – a stiff black cotton jacket and matching baggy trousers. She was barefoot, her hair awry and her face, as my mother would put it, in need of a kiss from Mr Flannel. In her arms she carried a baby about a month old. There was no way we could avoid her without turning heel.
‘Missee! Missee!' she said as she approached us.
My mother opened her handbag, snapped the catch on her purse and took out a violet-coloured dollar bill. To my mother's surprise, the young woman refused it.
‘No
kumshaw,
missee. No
kumshaw
!'
The woman held the baby out. It gurgled with infantile pleasure and kicked the air. Its legs were podgy. I could see it was a girl.
‘You tek, missee, pleas'.'
My mother stopped dead in her tracks. The look on her face was one of sheer bemusement.
‘Missee! You tek. You tek.'
She reached forward with the baby, trying to convince my mother to accept it in her arms.
‘You tek, pleas'.'
The woman was pleading now. The pain in her soul tainted each of the only four English words she knew, had learnt especially for just such a confrontation.
‘Pleas', missee. Pleas', missee.'
I looked at my mother. Tears ran down her cheeks. She made no effort to wipe them and they dripped on to her already sweat-dampened blouse. She shook her head.
The Chinese woman made one last attempt, as if she was a stallholder pressing my mother to buy something she did not need.
‘
M'ho
,' my mother murmured.
At that, the woman turned and disappeared down a narrow and fetid
hutong
from which blew the stench of open drains.
We walked on in silence until we reached a rickshaw rank. My mother hailed one and we travelled home together. Once in the apartment, my mother poured herself a gin and tonic and sat heavily in a chair.
‘What did that woman want?' I enquired.
‘She wanted to give me her baby.'
‘Why?' I replied, taken aback at this information.
‘Who knows,' said my mother with a sigh. ‘Perhaps she can't afford to feed it. Perhaps the father told her to get rid of it. It was a girl …'
‘So what?' I came back.
‘In China, boy children are precious. They are even sometimes called little emperors. Girls are not.'
I could see no difference between a girl baby and a boy baby, other than the obvious anatomical one, and said so.
She took a big swig of her gin and tonic. ‘To the Chinese, nothing is more important than keeping the family name going. So sons are important and daughters, who will marry and take another name, aren't.'
‘But what will happen to the baby girl?' I half-wondered aloud.
My mother was silent for at least a minute before speaking.
‘She will die. Either her parents will smother her or they'll take her into the Kowloon foothills and leave her to die of exposure.'
‘But that's murder!' I exclaimed.
‘Yes,' my mother agreed dully, ‘and this is China.'
‘Can't we go back again?' I began. ‘I don't mind if …'
The appeal of an adopted Chinese sister was suddenly growing on me. And it was now of paramount importance to me that we did something.
‘No,' my mother said, ‘I'm afraid it doesn't work like that …'
She patted the cushion on the settee beside her. I sat down and she put her arm around me.
‘It is terrible, but it has been going on for centuries in China. There's nothing we can do about it. You cannot change a culture overnight.'
‘What about calling the police … ?' I suggested.
My mother sadly shook her head and said, ‘She's long gone now.
That night, lying in bed with the lights of Boundary Street barred by the venetian blinds on the ceiling, I wondered if the baby was already dead. I wanted to cry – and felt I should – but found I could not. I had already accepted the inevitable cruelty of life in the Orient. It was, I considered as I drifted warily to sleep, no surprise China was so full of ghosts.
 
 
By early May 1953, Hong Kong was gripped by Coronation fever. A vast
pi lau
, a sort of Chinese triumphal arch, was erected across Nathan Road near the Alhambra cinema. Made entirely of bamboo poles lashed together by bamboo twine, it looked like the scaffolding on a building site, within which it was intended to construct a pagoda-cum-watchtower. By the week before the Coronation, it was festooned with gold and scarlet decorations, a row of lanterns, a picture of the new Queen and the letters
EIIR.
These also appeared on virtually every lamppost on every major thoroughfare. Shops displayed framed pictures of the Queen, sometimes next to ones of Chiang Kai-shek. It was a brave shopkeeper who displayed the Queen next to Chairman Mao. Even if he had Communist sympathies, which some had, discretion was deemed the better part of colonial valour and he joined in with the festivities.
On Coronation Day itself, there was a huge parade on Hong Kong-side. Keeping to Queen's Road, it wound its way through the city for six miles, the pavements jammed with tens of thousands of spectators. The queues for the Star Ferry on Kowloon-side stretched for well over a mile but we avoided these by crossing the harbour on a Royal Navy launch from which we were ushered into a dockyard office building overlooking Queen's Road and allotted seats at a window.
The parade was interminable. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marching military bands, St John Ambulance volunteers, Boy Scouts,
kai fong
associations, nurses from the Bowen Road and Mount Kellett military hospitals, police and fire brigade marched by in dizzying, monotonous ranks, flags flying, pennants whipping the warm air. The tedium was only relieved by a drive
past of tanks, howitzers, scout cars and other military paraphernalia. Several times, I tried to make my escape to explore the dockyard but had my collar felt by my father and was forced back into my seat.
It was just as well. After the pageant of imperial militarism, and a break of a quarter of an hour during which I managed to get my father to buy me a Coke, came the Chinese half of the parade.
At the head were two stilt-walkers and a classical marching orchestra – and it did not play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In' but stirring melodies and lilting airs. Other Chinese bands followed, instilling in me that day a lifelong love of Chinese classical music. Between each of them were several flatbed trucks decked out as floats with tableaux being enacted on them by children dressed as characters out of Chinese mythology. They wore pancake make-up, as detailed and as stark as a Chinese opera singer's. My mother commented several times on how uncomfortable it must have been for them under the hot sun.
The highlight of the whole parade, however, were the lion and dragon dances.
Their approach could be guessed at by the increasing agitation of the crowds on the pavement opposite us. They began to grow restless, craning their necks and pointing. Finally, to the clashing of cymbals and striking of hand gongs, the lion appeared. It consisted of a brightly coloured stylized head on a bamboo frame, with fur-lined jaws and bulbous eyes. As big as a barrel, it was held aloft by a dancer who swung it to and fro, ducked it down and lunged forward with it, shook it from side to side and generally acted in a ferocious fashion. Behind him was the lion's body, a covering of less decorated cloth under which another dancer jostled and jived. The movements of the head were dictated by the cymbals and gongs. It was, for all intents and purposes, a sort of legendary Oriental pantomime horse.
Stilt-walkers and jugglers followed the lion, there was a gap and then the dragon arrived on the scene.
It was magnificent. Its head was at least nine feet high, excluding the horns on top. Its mouth – red-mawed and lined with white teeth – was big enough for me to have sat in. The mouth was operated by a man walking in front of the dragon with a pole connected to the dragon's lower lip, whilst the remainder of the head was held high by one man. As with the lion, he swung it to and fro, lowered it to the ground then looked at the sky, in time to the percussion instruments. Several yards in front of the dragon pranced a man with a paper fish almost as big as himself on a pole, with which he teased the beast. Behind the head was a one-hundred-yard-long reptilian body constructed of coloured cloth painted in scales and stretched over a series of bamboo hoops. Under this danced several dozen men, only their legs showing and giving the dragon's body the appearance of a multicoloured circus centipede. The body curled in on itself, twisting across the road and generally behaving in a serpentine fashion. The crowds applauded, the cymbals clashed, the gongs clanged and then, with two police wagons driving side by side, it was all suddenly over.

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