The Rice Paper Diaries (10 page)

‘Hold on to me.’

It was Wang. The thugs disappeared back into the mob. We went out onto the street again. I used one hand to hold the front of my tunic
together as best I could. There was a high
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pitched whine in the air and an explosion somewhere up the hill, and the putter of some kind of gunfire. Wang pushed against the backs and shoulders in front of us. People shouted and tried to push back, but we got through. We saw why this street was clearer than the others: there were bodies all over the road. There was one woman lying on her back with part of her stomach blown away. Her flesh was the violent red colour of ripe tomatoes cut open and turned inside
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out. I tried to look away but I couldn’t. Her face was still intact, perfect, apart from a large mole that protruded over her top lip. Lying next to her was a boy, three or four years old, his hand in hers. He was dead too. I don’t know why I thought of Father, then, instead of Mother. It was always Mother who held my hand and showed me things, told me stories when I was a young girl. Not Father. He was always tired and grumpy, telling us we weren’t working hard enough. My stomach was turning over, pushing my breath up into my chest.

As we turned back up the hill, I saw the letter
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writer coming towards us, carrying his leather suitcase.

‘Wei!’ I knew his name, just as well as he knew mine.

‘Lin,’ he said, but his voice was swallowed up by the sound of an air
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raid siren, so loud that it felt it was coming at us through the ground. Dust had settled into his hair and in the creases around his eyes, making him looked old. I put a hand out and held onto his forearm.

We passed an abandoned tea shop. Tea sets had been shot at, and a crate of bamboo handles had spilled across the pavement. Tins were buckled and peppered with bullet holes.

Wang came to a halt outside his parents’ shop, and called out, ‘Mother! Father!’

Someone pulled the shutter with its ornate top back a little way, and a head popped out. His mother.

‘Quick, come inside,’ she said to us.

Two portly English men in suits carrying briefcases were standing in a doorway on the other side of the street.

‘Come,’ she called over to them, and they ran across the street.

We all went down to the tiny cellar. It smelled damp and cold. No one spoke. We sat side by side. Lam had stopped crying. One of the English men had a newspaper folded on his lap. He saw me looking at it and passed it over.

At first I thought the shapes jogging up and down under the headline’s fuzzy newsprint would disappear when I blinked, but they didn’t. In the photograph men on horseback were riding through Central. Men in uniforms, with moustaches. Another group followed on behind. There was one man out front on his own, wearing white gloves, his right hand raised in a victory salute.

The soldiers were all Japanese. There was no one in the picture who wasn’t Japanese.

We sat listening to the sound of each other’s breathing. Wei took the newspaper out of my lap.

‘What does it say?’

He read quickly, translating as he went along:

Enemy Aliens to Report TO Murray Parade Ground

The Japanese military have sent out an order for enemy aliens to gather at Murray Parade Ground at 9.00 am on Monday 5th January, 1942. All passports must be presented. Further details will be released shortly.

‘Who are the enemy aliens?’ I said.

‘Us?’ Lam asked the English men.

‘No,’ said the one who had given us the newspaper. ‘It
means us.’

6

We had no nappies for Mari, no powdered milk, and no clean clothes for any of us. Lam said the best thing would be for us all to go to the
kongsi fong
to shelter, and Wang and Wei could go out after dark to try to find something to eat.

But as we turned the corner of
Wing Lok Street, we saw there were roadblocks barring the way, and a Japanese soldier carrying a bayonet. When he saw us approaching, he took the gun down from his shoulder and held it with both hands, pointing at the ground.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘We need to get through,’ Wei said.

‘You can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘We are keeping the British here for now.’

We looked up at the windows above the closed shops. There were no hawkers on the pavement, and the lines that hung over the street from building to building were empty of washing. But there were pale faces at the windows, peering out through the dust and grime that covered the glass.

There were Japanese flags everywhere, on government buildings, banks and hotels. They were tied to the ferries that were still running, carrying the conquering army and their mules over from Kowloon. All along the waterfront we saw soldiers landing and unloading crates and trunks like any weekday docker, and no one trying to stop them, and on every street corner we saw a red
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on
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white circle of sun rising into the sky.

Wang said we should go back to the apartment to find what food and drink we could. If the prisoners were to gather on Murray Parade Ground in a few days’ time, our
kongsi fong
would be vacated soon enough. We should hide in the apartment until the British were herded to the parade ground, he said. Lam gulped back another sob as she listened to us talking. Ryan’s ring and money would be long gone by then.

There were more roadblocks, with people clustered around them like moths’ eggs. One soldier, instead of answering a man’s halting questions, gave him a jiu
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jitsu kick in the face. The rest of the group scattered quickly.

We doubled back on ourselves and headed back to the Peak. The first British soldier we saw was a dead body hanging out of the window of a car. His face was upside
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down but you could still see the surprised look in his pale eyes. The air around him smelled bad.

Mari was heavy on my back as we walked up the hill. She was awake, and bored, and kept beating against my shoulders with her sticky fists, and pulling my hair. I knew she was hungry, but every time she tugged at my plait it made me want to cry.

‘Do you want me to take her?’ Wei said.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘We’re nearly there now.’

We turned round and looked back over the water. A cruiser had been torpedoed and was leaning on its side. The city was pockmarked with gaps where bombs and shells had fallen.

In the cul
-
de
-
sac leading to the apartment block there were reddened footprints on sandstone, broken walls with chunks gouged out of them by grenades, even a bloodied khaki shirt, but the apartment itself was as we’d left it.

Once we were safe inside Wang boarded up the front door with scraps of wood from the garage. Lam went to the kitchen to look for tinned food and dried milk, taking Mari with her.

I went to Mrs Elsa’s dressing room. I pulled down three cases from the top of the big wardrobe with the inlaid walnut panels: one for Mrs Elsa, one for the captain, and one for Mari. I put a good quality woollen blanket at the bottom of the cases even though they took up a lot of room, then I packed each bag, rolling up sports dresses, plain coats and jackets, jumpers and slacks. For Mari I packed romper suits and a worsted knit jacket, a crochet sweater and one of her peek
-
a
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boo bonnets.

I had to call Wei to sit on the cases to get them shut.

‘Won’t they be too heavy?’ Wei asked.

‘The captain can take some things out if he wants,’ I said. I was trying not to think about the ship we could see down in the harbour – almost under water, with a hole bored through its middle by a Japanese torpedo. I tried not to think about the captain rushing to the ticket office, certain he was doing the right thing, getting a safe passage home for the three of them before the fighting got any worse. I knew that once he had decided what he was going to do he wouldn’t have turned back. He would have gone all the way to the harbourmaster’s office, queued up with the others, waited his turn, not given up, not taken no for an answer.

That night we closed the doors onto the verandah because it was cold.
We could have sat in the sitting room to eat but we went into the kitchen, where it was warmer, and sat around the table. Wang said it would be too dangerous even to light a candle, and there was no point in letting people know we were there. As the darkness settled in folds around us, we talked and talked. I sat opposite Wei, listening to him speak about his aunt, how she had taken him in after his mother died, how growing up as a poor child in Hong Kong hadn’t been so bad after all.

Lam started to tell him about our childhood, our work on the farm, the bare facts of our existence.

He nodded, listening carefully as if he had heard none of it before. I sensed him glancing over at me. I wondered how much of all the stories I’ve told him since I came to Hong Kong I’ve forgotten myself in the daily rush just to get by. His silhouetted face showed me that he had forgotten nothing.
You, Third Sister, and Mother and Father all live even more vividly in his imagination now than you ever have in real life. I don’t remember when you last wrote to me. Is Mother still coughing? Are you even still on the farm, Third Sister, or have you managed at last to run away to Canton after trying so many times?
You were always so fixed on going your own way, to meet the world before you were ready.
I was so afraid for you, watching as Father dragged you back to the farm by your plait. But maybe working in a sweet shop in Canton wasn’t so dangerous a proposition for a young girl after all. Perhaps the most dangerous place for you was home, always within reach of the back of Father’s hand.

Were any of us ever happy? I can still see myself lying underneath the thick leaves of a longan tree, cracking open the fruit shells and letting the juicy insides burst open in my mouth and feeling something like contentment. But then I left to follow Lam, and on that day when I sailed downriver to Hong Kong I felt myself splitting into two, me then and me now, and I’ve been caught between the two ever since. Wei is the only person who can bridge the gap. He is the person who gives me life.

That night, when we lay down next to each other on sheets that still smelled of Mrs Elsa, it was me who pulled him towards me, who pressed my fingers into the soft skin on his buttocks that had never seen the sun and squeezed them as he came inside me.

I got up in the middle of the night because Mari cried out from the nursery.
When I came back Wei had fallen asleep on his stomach, with one arm outstretched, his hand fanned out over the empty space where I’d been lying. I moved it gently, lay down again, and fell straight back to sleep.

7

It was a clear morning.
The streets around the parade ground were empty, apart from a single delivery man with hunched shoulders and bent legs pulling a trailer loaded with fish buckets. The azalea bushes leading up to the entrance greeted us harshly, their petals closed one minute and open the next, like a beggar pushing out cupped hands and refusing to take no for an answer.

The parade ground was covered with people from end to end. They looked as if they had been bleached of colour overnight. Everything about them seemed unfinished. There were women wearing coats without belts, and men in shirts that didn’t do up. Hair that was normally oiled back sprung away from foreheads, and painted
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on lips that usually pouted their way in and out of conversations had faded back into thin, pale lines on their owners’ faces.

Some people had bags, or blankets that were being used as bags, tied clumsily and held together anyhow. Some were empty
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handed, and they were the ones I felt the most pity for. Their hands hung at their sides, making their shoulders stoop and pulling all their features to the ground too. Some of the men had bruises and cuts to the face.

It was the women who were talking to each other, not the men. Hundreds of female voices rose up into the air with a shrill insistence, like caged canaries at the bird market. Mrs Vernon looked like a parrot chained to its perch, with grey feathers and red eyes. Next to her was Mrs Elsa. I don’t know if she was still wearing her night gown, because she had got hold of a coat from somewhere. It was too big for her, even with the buttons done up and the sleeves rolled back. She turned around again and again, peering up at the Peak behind. I knew what she was doing. She was thinking of Mari, unable to prevent herself from trying to catch a glimpse of our apartment windows, tiny as they were from here. Over the last few days this gesture must have become a nervous tic, because the captain, who was standing next to her, put his hand on her shoulder to stop her.

Then she looked up and saw me. I was standing with Lam and Wang and Wei on a small rise towards the south side of the parade ground. Even though it was overrun by this time, and she was maybe twenty rows into the crowd, I could make her out clearly. I saw the pain in her face. I wanted to make some kind of gesture to show that Mari was all right, tucked safely away on my back, but there were Japanese soldiers moving through the crowd with clipboards and pens, taking details, then gathering together in little groups out front with their heads together. They wore loose
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fitting military jackets, and long boots to the knee. They had canvas peaked hats that sat on top of their heads like one of Mrs Elsa’s china pepper pots. They seemed happy enough for us to stand at the edges of the ground and stare at our captured masters. But when a man close to us stepped out of our line dragging a heavy trunk over to his master, who had positioned himself on the outer edges of the group, one of the soldiers appeared instantly and started hitting the English man over the head with the back of a bayonet, until he fell over. I saw Mrs Elsa glance over again, and she must have caught sight of Mari’s goose
-
feather hair sticking up over my shoulder, for the expression on her face contracted, then loosened.