On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (31 page)

Just before Christmas Annette’s boss Robin came to the flat looking very solemn.

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you Annette, that your father died early this morning.’

Annette took the news calmly. Bill Bailey had been ill for about fifteen years with Parkinson’s disease. He had not taken well to the fact that just when he had retired, something he had been looking forward to for many years being stuck in a dull office job that failed to stretch him mentally or otherwise, he had fallen seriously ill. Contrary to his normal fighting nature he lapsed into apathy and quickly deteriorated to a depressed state where he neither wanted to talk to people, nor make any effort to battle the disease. Just before we left England he had fallen out of his wheelchair and broken his hip, requiring a serious operation. I think it was, for him, the last bitter blow from life and he had decided to opt out.

Annette took the next flight back to UK, to attend the funeral and support her mother Betty for a short time. Annette’s brother Colin was on hand, so Betty was not left alone in her grief. Left to my own devices in Hong Kong, I was visited several times by Robin and Glynis, but had not had time to make any other friends. I visited parks, went for long walks, went to the cinema, and wrote stuff. They were at that moment changing all the windows in Vista Panorama, so I had plastic sheeting flapping in the wind back and front of the huge flat, with cold draughts whistling through the bedroom and living room. It was not the best Christmas I’ve spent, but it wasn’t the worst either.

I was at that time using an Amstrad to write my novels. Those early pseudo-computers created by Alan Sugar were a godsend to writers like me, who like to write at a hundred miles and hour. I have been able to touch-type at eighty words per minute since I was fifteen years-of-age, having been taught in the Boy Entrants to teletype. When Robin saw me struggling with floppy discs, without which the Amstrad would not operate, he said, ‘Come on, my boy, we must get you a real computer!’ and promptly took me to a huge hive of Chinese computer geeks, pirated software and hardware known as the Golden Arcade. This typically Asian den of a thousand stalls and shops, was situated in the Shek Kip Mai district of Hong Kong, on the westward side of Kowloon.

When I walked in through the door of this place, the size of an aircraft hanger, my senses were attacked from every direction by sound, colour, movement and unbridled energy. Young men were zipping here and there, carrying computer parts or discs with luridly coloured covers. Piles of computer game discs covered the stalls. Intent workers, heads bent over their task, were building or repairing computers. Those computers were everywhere, stacked in corners or on rickety-looking display tables. It really was an Aladdin’s cave of computers and Robin, who had been completely besotted by computers since they became available, sighed deeply in satisfaction, as if he were actually confronted with baskets of rubies and emeralds.

I bought a state-of-the art desk computer, with a huge 10 meg hard disc, which Robin believed was the equivalent of a war-monger purchasing a fully-armed nuclear submarine.

‘You’ll be able to write dozens of novels on that,’ he said, patting my package affectionately, as if it were the computer that was going to do the writing, not me. ‘I expect to see the first one at the end of the week.’

~

Annette eventually came back to her lonely husband and we began life in Hong Kong proper. We joined the Hong Kong long-trekkers and weekends were spent walking the hills of the New Territories and the many islands that belonged to Hong Kong in the China Sea. We also joined the Royal Asiatic Society and met David and Edith Gilkes, who were to become close friends. David was the bursar at the Chinese University. Another society we joined was the Hong Kong History Society, which like the Royal Asiatic Society, had as members and fellows expats who could speak and write Chinese fluently. How I envied those brilliant academics who get a glimpse inside the Asian mind.

Indeed, I started classes in the local dialect, Cantonese. China has many spoken languages – Cantonese (
Gwong dong wa
), Shanghai-ese, Hok Yen (spoken in Singapore), Mandarin of course, and several others – which are quite different from each other. A Hok Yen speaker will not understand a Cantonese speaker. However, the written language, memorised characters, is known to all. One could sometimes see a Chinese tracing a character on his hand with his forefinger to communicate with another Chinese who has a different dialect. An everyday reader needed to memorise 4,000 characters to read the newspaper. A scholar needed 10,000. We in the west encode and decode twenty-six letters to make our language work. There is no encoding or decoding to be done with Chinese: it is purely an exercise in memory. Such a written language has its problems with abstract concepts like ‘world peace’.

Osborne Barracks had a language school, for teaching officers who needed to communicate with Chinese officials. Officers like the Military Attaché to Beijing. The classes often had a space spare and I would fill that space at no cost to me. It was a good arrangement, because they needed classes of ten or twelve to generate discussions and I was happy to join them. However I have never been good at languages and though I attended more than one course I never got beyond ‘getting by’.

Learning Cantonese is quite different from learning Malay, German or Greek. Or even Arabic. All of which I had a smattering at the time, having lived in those countries. Cantonese has no tenses, no plurals, no articles and no multi-syllabled words. When a Cantonese speaker says in English ‘Me sell many camera yesterday,’ that’s exactly what he would say in his own language. No ‘the’ or ‘a’, no tense, no plurals.

Simple, eh? What an easy language to learn – not.

The difficulty of Cantonese, and I imagine Mandarin and all the other dialects, is that it is a tonal language. One word means nine different things, depending on the tone used.
Jai
means God, but it also means pig, and several other things, depending on the tone used. ‘Good morning!’ in Cantonese is
‘Jo san’,
but ‘
Jo san
,’ said slightly differently could mean something quite different. So I sat in class for a week, saying, ‘
Wan, wan, wan – wan, wan, wan,’
in several different tones. (Six was all that a newcomer can cope with, the other three being ‘clipped’ tones.) Once the tones have been mastered, one learns ‘classifiers’ which help the listener to understand the context of what is being said.
Goh,
before a word means that what is being talked about is either ‘round’ (like a ball, or an orange, or the world) or a human being.
Tiu
means that the following word is long and thin, and flexible, like a tie or a piece of string or a long and winding road. (I know, a road is not ‘flexible’ in the true sense of the word, but it
looks
as if it should be flexible. Thank Goodness the Beatles came from Liverpool and not the Chinese province of Gwong Dong.)

So, I learned a little Cantonese, enough to help in the markets and in taxis, two places where English was not spoken. I tried practising on our Amah, the lady who cleaned and occasionally cooked for us, Ah-lai. But she always insisted on speaking China Coast pidgin. Pidgin is not a put-down language, so I was told by a lecturer at the Royal Asiatic Society, but a real go-between language which both parties find easier to communicate in than the languages spoken by each other.

There are some lovely phrases in China Coast pidgin, though I never heard them used by our cleaning lady, Ah-lai. One is a ‘piano’ which in pidgin is ‘toothy-face, bashy-in, cry.’ And the other is ‘mix-master from sky’ which apparently means ‘helicopter’. Those are pretty elaborate phrases, but more simply Ah-lai’s ‘udder one’ meant anybody else other than the person you were talking about. Thus when I came home one day and Ah-lai said to me, ‘Udder one say missy gone Stanley wid udder one,’ I knew exactly what she meant. The first ‘udder one’ was our neighbour, the second ‘udder one’ was a guest who was staying with us. Thus translated the sentence communicated: ‘Your neighbour says that Annette has gone to Stanley Market with your guest’.

This leads me nicely on to our relationship with Ah-lai, who is a remarkable woman. We have been back to Hong Kong several times to see her since leaving in 1992 and she has once come to stay with us for two weeks in England. When she was a young woman she lived in a very poor village north of Shenzen, in Mainland China. She ‘escaped’ over the border into Hong Kong, where she met and married ‘a Hakka man’. (The Hakka are a Chinese tribe, mostly fishermen.) Ah-lai’s new husband was a fireman for the Hong Kong fire service and thus had a good job, but Ah-lai wanted to work too, so she became an Amah for the expats. When we knew her she worked for about three or four families. She eventually gave birth to a son, Kong Wing, and also took in the daughter of her brother, smuggled over the border from China.

Ah-lai used to invite us to her home on Chinese festival days. There she would treat us to traditional food and drink. Her one-roomed flat in Tai Po measures four metres by eight metres. There is literally only a single room, containing kitchen, bedroom and living-room space. The toilet is out on the narrow balcony and beds are folded down from the walls at night. In the late ’80s two adults and two teenage children lived in that one room. It was not an unusual flat, it was typical.

In Hong Kong we often saw youngsters sitting on the steps of some public monument, doing their homework, using the space and relative peace. Young married couples still living with their parents would go to a Bridal Hotel for nights when they were trying to start a family. Space in Hong Kong was, and still is, the most valuable of commodities. A man who had purchased two small flats in the early years is now surely as rich as Croesus.

When the situation in China relaxed after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, Ah-lai took us to the village in which she was born. Her son Kong Wing and her adopted daughter Mai Ling, came with us too. Strangely, the children were not greeted by the villagers we met, who were otherwise most hospitable. If you consider there must have been uncles, aunts and for Fan Ling, even a father, among those villagers, it was peculiar indeed that the two kids were not fussed over as they would be elsewhere, especially since they had not been seen by their relatives since they were infants. Annette was given a baby to hold, a one-year-old with a bare bottom. Annette was wearing white slacks. Luckily the smiling little one did not suddenly erupt.

At that time Kong Wing was about fifteen years of age and typical of Hong Kong Chinese boys, he had crimped hair, which fell about his head in nice tight curls, designer jeans and white trainers, a silk floral shirt and a nice soapy clean smell about him. His country cousins had pudding-basin haircuts, bottle-green jumpers full of holes, muddy boots on their feet and short flannel trousers. These rough ‘cousins’ confronted the decadent Hongkonger and demanded he go out with them to shoot rats. Kong Wing looked terrified and though he rarely spoke to me, the
gweilo
who employed his mother, he grabbed me by the sleeve and croaked, ‘You come too, Mr Kilworth.’ Mr Kilworth indeed did go and actually we all had a jolly good time, shooting an ancient air rifle, riding on rusty old bicycles and generally getting Kong Wing’s lovely clothes covered in mud.

He thoroughly enjoyed himself in the end.

For the rest of the day, we ate with the villagers, out of newspaper: mostly dried mussels mixed with rice making a grey mess that was not really to our taste, but hey, it probably cost them an arm and leg and who were we to turn up our noses? Then we were invited to go to a ‘rich lady’s’ house and that lady showed us real taps with running water, of course making us appreciate what we had in Hong Kong. Finally, it was time to go home and we had since realised that our visa stipulated ‘SHENZEN ONLY’. We were well outside our permitted zone and had to cross an internal border to get back into the Shenzen Economic Zone.

My heart was beating a military tattoo as we showed our passports to a rather severe-looking official on that border, but luckily she only gave them a cursory glance before waving us through the barrier. Had she looked at them properly we would definitely have spent a night or two in jail and, as with most criminals in China, have to write out an essay-long ‘apology’ to the Chinese state for transgressing against their laws.

~

We had not been long in Hong Kong before the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. I had recently got a job as a book reviewer for the
South China Morning Post
and was therefore invited on occasion to the Foreign Correspondent’s Club on the island. In the FCC was a big TV screen, which while I was drinking at the bar, began showing the terrible events as they unfolded in that Beijing square. What struck me forcibly, as I watched, was that all the kids that were being killed represented a whole generation for every affected family. One child, one family. That was, and still is, the policy in China. Every death in the square was an only child.

I choked on my drink, rushed outside to get some air, and immediately burst into tears, shocked by what was happening. I ended up being hugged by an Australian woman, a complete stranger, who joined me in wetting the pavement outside the club. Other people were sobbing too, Chinese people, not at all inscrutable.

Our friends, Jane Stokes and Humphrey Keenlyside were in Beijing when all this was happening. Humph is a journalist and lawyer whose ethics and integrity I regard as impeccable. Jane is a speech therapist who like her husband works constantly and sensibly for the betterment of this planet which we all share. I very much admire this young couple. I would call them idealists if that word were not associated with impracticability. Jane and Humph actually do get things done.

Jane and Humph later gave us their first-hand knowledge of events in Beijing and the images still haunt me.

The whole experience resulted in me writing the young adult’s novel
The Third Dragon
, published by Scholastic Books.

~