and left. I stepped outside. The day was growing very hot. I glanced up at the words over the front door, “Bricks and Mortar of the Nation.” Chung Hsiang came to life again, for just a moment, when I came out the front door. She barked and slobbered furiously, trailing me to the metal gate and, once satisfied that I had closed it behind me, turned and went back to the shade in triumph.
FOUR
How different Becky’s movie roles were from the beautiful but gawky and naïve young woman I first met back in 1948. Both Becky and Hong Kong offered a new start for me, after a bad life in Canada. Like the refugees from China, I found a safe haven in Hong Kong, far from personal turmoil. I had once dreamed of a career as a singer in Canada (I referred to myself as a “song stylist”) but I never got further than paying for two years of university at United College in Winnipeg by performing part-time. I appeared during intermissions at the Uptown Theatre, a cinema on Academy Road. Between the shorts, co-feature and the main film I would rise grandly out of the basement on an elevator platform, surrounded by an eight-man orchestra. I sang dance numbers, my specialty being animal songs. I performed “Arfie the Doggie in the Window,” “Mr. Bluebird,” and “Wolf Call,” which I spiced up with realistic howls. While I performed, little gold lights in the blue ceiling of the Uptown would twinkle like stars.
My father disowned me, quite violently. A letter from the United College dean’s office arrived at my home, addressed to my father. It stated that the college had expelled me. My father disbelieved it at first and made an increasingly humiliating telephone call to the dean’s office, hotly denying the charge of “personal indecency.” After my father raved on the telephone to the dean about how preposterous the sexual allegation was, I quietly took the phone from his hand and hung it up. “It’s true,” I said very quietly. Then the police arrived, I was taken in and formally charged. My father grew furious, first with them, then with me. His doubts began to spread around the edges of his confidence in me like slime on a favourite swimming hole. In silence he drove me home from the police station on James Avenue. I wanted to bolt from the car when we crossed the Redwood Bridge and dive into the brown waters of the river, so frightened and ashamed I was. The idea actually fascinated me for a few minutes. When we were home again, I had one of those scenes everyone dreads: the increasingly hostile examination by the father, the palliative cups of tea from mum, her feckless attempts to calm the father, the steadily rising timbre of his questioning. It ended with him giving me four or five good hard smacks on my face with his fist. I fell clear over the back of the chesterfield. Mum got a raw steak from the fridge, then started to cry quietly as she pressed it to my cheek. It’s been half a century since then, and I still don’t like to talk about it.
I had been caught in bed with my history professor and a mechanic who worked for Grey Goose Bus Lines. We had been introduced to one another through a very private and secretive circuit of men in Winnipeg into which I had only just insinuated myself. The Winnipeg police (who in contrast to their counterparts in Hong Kong had very little with which to preoccupy themselves) had been keeping an eye on the professor for some time. They burst to his house, I yanked the sheets over myself, the professor sputtered about search warrants and the bus mechanic fell off the far side of the bed. The professor went to jail briefly. As for myself and the mechanic — I remember he had bus grease under his fingernails and it made him terribly exciting - we were given suspended sentences. The whole city learned of it somehow. Winnipeg was a hostile place. No man even used an umbrella back then, since such devices were considered effeminate. And if a simple black umbrella were a lacy parasol in the minds of right-thinking Winnipeggers, sex with another man was beyond abomination. People whispered when I walked down Portage Avenue and some morally outraged young man in front of the Lyceum Theatre threw a Coke bottle at my head.
My father informed me that I was not his son and that I was to get out of his house by the week’s end. I went to my room, examined the relics and mementos of my recently concluded childhood and had a quiet cry. When I finished, my mother knocked on the bedroom door and pushed our ancient black Labrador, Duke, into the room. “He wants to see you for a while,” she said and closed the door again with barely a sound. I was so grateful for Duke’s cataractic gaze, his white muzzle on my lap.
As I told myself with brave nonchalance the next day, my fortunes lay elsewhere. My mum put me on a Canadian Pacific train to Montreal; my father refused to take time away from work to see me off. While we waited in the depot she kept scratching Duke’s neck and talking only to him. “Poor old Duke,” she said. “You’re so very sad that our Paul is going away, aren’t you? You don’t know what you’re going to do, do you?” She didn’t always talk exclusively to the dog; only during times of personal crisis. Everything of significance went through the dog. She walked Duke up to the train platform to see me off. The train pulled out of the CPR station in the middle of a blasting rain storm, and I felt about as wretched, ashamed and condemned as any twenty-one-year-old boy could.
It was the era, of course, but every time I saw a soldier, sailor or airman on the train I felt even more intensely wicked. A whole pack of them boarded at Fort William, looking so brave and heroic, even when they told each other obscene jokes or picked their noses. These were men who served their countries and honoured their families. All I had done was disgrace mine through sexual perversion. My carapace of guilt only began to break in Montreal, where I looked for work as a nightclub singer. Some of the irre-pressibility of youth returned when I saw the boîtes of St. Catherine Street. It proved more difficult to break into nightclubs in Montreal than I’d expected. Managers didn’t think that intermission singing in Winnipeg cinemas was sufficient, and more than one actually walked out during my audition song, a childish anthem called “Let the People Sing” that was utterly inappropriate for Montreal’s champagne-and-gun fire nightclubs.
I did not stay long in Montreal. I managed to get myself run out of town there too. I was caught in bed with a nightclub dancer. He was thrilling, he was muscled, he was from Martinique and he called himself “Othello.” He let me wear the sharks-teeth necklace he used in the Folies Nègres routine at the Club La Framboise and he showed me how to do the splits. Even more thrilling than Othello was getting caught in bed with him by the police. Othello knew his way around Montreal and had the sense to lick off five ten dollar bills from a small roll in his pocket for the good constables. I didn’t, so I was arraigned on gross indecency yet again. While I was awaiting trial I went to the Canadian Pacific office and bought a ticket on the next boat for England. A few months later, from Hong Kong, I wrote to my United College history professor, who was now lecturing the cons in Stony Mountain on Benjamin Disraelis career and dodging them in the showers, and told him that I had decided to go east. I just hadn’t realized just how far east I would go.
I arrived in the colony feeling renewed, blue-eyed and hearty. With the last of a lot of money my mother had given me secretly, I bought a ticket on BOAC to the Far East. My idea had been to become a foreign correspondent in Japan. When the BOAC flying boat splashed down in Kowloon Bay, the British authorities put me off because I had no accreditation to continue on to U.S.-occupied Japan. In Hong Kong I found a job with the weakling rival to the South China Morning Post. The China Telegraph was a small broadsheet that the managing editor called “a working man’s newspaper.” The managing editor was a man named Trebilcoe, a veteran of second-rate newspapers in Britain and India, and, like his colleagues around the world, he was going to pieces on alcohol. He had a pink face and his grey-blond hair was malodorous. You could smell gin on his breath at ten in the morning, thanks to a twenty-sixer in his desk’s lower drawer. “May your career at the China Telegraph be a long and restful one,” he said on my first day. This wreckage was no place to make friends for an eager young man who had just rescued himself out of Canada.
Mr. Trebilcoe must have invested in me the last of his tattered hopes because he made sure that I was always busy, covering every sort of story there was, as if I were a surrogate fresh start for him. Mr. Trebilcoe was one of a breed of itinerants who spent a few years in any city in Asia that had an English-language newspaper: the Bangkok World, the North China Herald, the Straits Times, the New Straits Times and one paper I thought