in the Orient, where dirt clung to everything. I asked Arden how she did it. “It’s because,” she said, signaling the waiter for a Manhattan, “Americans are among the great dry-cleaning peoples of the world.” I adored her immediately. She had the best teeth I had ever seen. Arden, who became a life-long friend, contrasted sharply with the dishevelled-looking woman who edited the women’s page of the China Telegraph. Mildred always looked like the heat had wilted her, even in winter; her hair was plastered flat on her head. After a little coaxing she suffered her male companion to order her a martini. He had on a bow tie and a coarse tweed jacket and corduroy trousers that he wore even on the hottest days of summer.
That evening, I ran into Becky Chan for the second time, at a party in Kowloon Tong. Arden, a few Post reporters and I stopped by the Hongkong Hotel for another aperitif and then popped into Mac’s Grill for steaks and whisky. We were a little tight and not at all comfortable on the ferry ride across the choppy harbour to Kowloon. We walked into the party with shouts to the hosts and bottles of Scotch under our arms. There were men and women, Chinese and Western, in every room of the house. It was only a few weeks after I’d met Becky at the shrine to Wong Tai Sin. She wore a cheap and ineptly made teal-coloured dress.
The décolletage came down in a V-shape, culminating in an unnaturally large artificial blue rose in the centre of her bosom. She was seated by herself and had just poured a bottle of Coca-Cola into a tumbler. She uncovered the sugar bowl on the tea set next to it, spooned sugar into the Coca-Cola and then tried to dissolve it with a vigorous stir.
“You’re making quite a sweet drink there,” I said.
“I like it this way. It brings out all the flavour,” Becky said from the sofa. “You’re the guy from Wong Tai Sin, aren’t you?”
I was glad that she remembered me. “Did you get your French heels?” I asked. She held her feet up and showed them off with such a gleeful look. She hunched her shoulders and giggled. Becky was bursting with energy and fun. Through the back window came the sound of a late-night train clattering up the Kowloon-Canton Railway toward China. I couldn’t bear watching her dump even more sugar into her soft drink.
Becky had just finished a picture at the Southern Electric Film Company, a tin-bucket little Cantonese studio. They had exactly three sets, which they painted and repainted. A skyline backdrop, frequently viewed through a fanciful window featured just a single building painted on canvas (Becky said they couldn’t afford more than one building). It was no joke about getting the job, though. She had pursued Southern Electrics managing director relentlessly, shoving her face in his car window when he arrived each morning at the front gate, almost yelling at him about what a good actress she was. She was a glamour girl standing in a gown in the dust beside a collection of shacks that made the studio. Coolies with shoulder poles and baskets full of night soil stared at her and muttered sexual speculations to one another. It wasn’t pretty or dainty, and Mildred would have found her grotesquely unladylike, but Becky aimed to survive.
Eventually, to get her out of his face, the Southern Electric man hired her at one dollar a day. She got a place to live in the studio dormitory with twenty-five other girls, sleeping on bunk beds. In the narrow spaces between the beds she’d perform a ribbon dance for the girls of the sort one saw in Chinese cultural movies put out by the Communist studios on the Mainland. Instead of orbiting long strands of colourful ribbons in great circles, Becky made do with two rolls of toilet paper that she slowly unrolled on her fingers. It was actually kind of artful until the spools of toilet paper slipped off the inner cardboard tubes and flew in opposite directions across the room, leaving her with nothing but the tubes on her fingers, which she stared at in mock confusion. The other girls loved it — they clapped their hands, screamed with laughter and called her “toilet theatre goddess.” It was all so innocent and earnest.
“Come and meet some people,” I said and made her leave her Coca-Cola. I introduced her to some European men and she charmed them just as she had charmed me, with big handshakes and American slang culled from the cinema. But when I guided her toward some Western women, she pulled back on my arm. “I left my drink in the other room,” she said, her voice getting smaller. I said to never mind that and brought her over to meet Arden and Mildred. Arden had good manners and returned Beckys howdy handshake in similar spirit. But Mildred assumed a dryness and spoke in a tiresome morgue. “How do you do, Miss Chan?” she said. “Tell us about your family.” Mildred pronounced it “fem-lee” and closed her eyes, feigning a London suburbanite’s idea of how aristocracy behave. Being in charge of the China Telegraph society pages meant Mildred had to set some sort of standard of behaviour. She continued in on Becky. “Are you a Hong Kong Island Chan or a Kowloon Chan?” And here Mildred gave off a great horsey noise.
“Mildred, what a weird joke,” Arden said, and Mildred’s face grew a little taut. Becky didn’t have a clue what Mildred was talking about.
She wasn’t finished, she still saw some sport in Becky. “What a lovely creation you’re wearing,” she said. Becky knew enough to be wary because she had closely scrutinized Arden’s up-to-the-minute bouclé sweater and silk skirt. Becky was learning that she was cheaply dressed. “It’s a bit loud, isn’t it, Miss Chan? And that big blue rose right here —”
“Let’s go get your Coke,” I said to Becky and guided her by the arm back to the other room. I glanced over my shoulder at Mildred but she had closed her eyes and stretched her mouth wide as if victory was hers. But as we left the room I could hear Arden revving up, something very direct, something like “you scrawny pompous cow ...”
Becky said nothing about it for that evening. But when I took her to dinner one evening she asked where she could read about Parisian fashions. We went to the City Hall library on a Saturday afternoon and went through current issues of Vogue. She snapped the pages of the magazines as she turned them and they gave off little firecracker noises. She stopped on a photo feature and pointed at a gown.
“How do you say that?” she asked.
“Givenchy.”
She repeated it with a Cantonese spin, “Ji-bon-ch’i,” she said. “Where do I get a Ji-bon-ch’i in Hong Kong?”
“They cost a fortune.”
“I’ll make one just like it.”
And she did. Using fabric she bought in the Gilman Street cloth market she refitted her wardrobe with homemade approximations of Givenchy and Chanel. She stayed up late in a corner of her dormitory at Southern Electric, sewing by hand with a peculiar technique of keeping her thumb pressed up against her palm. You couldn’t even see her thumb when she sewed. She also cadged time on the costume department’s sewing machine. In just over one month she reinvented herself as a chic young woman. If you felt the cloth with your fingers you realized it was second rate, but it was good enough to present to the tin horns.
The night I brought her in on my arm to the lounge at the Press Club the European women turned around and gaped at us. Arden rushed over and shook her hand. “Atta girl,” she said. “Knock these sad hens dead.” The European men jumped to their feet as we approached, their mouths forming little rictuses. They politely wished her good evening and made room for us to sit down. It was too wonderful. And Becky adopted a newfound hauteur, her make-up toned down, her hair grown longer and given a soft permanent wave. She even stopped yelling at waiters to come to her table, the way she had done when I first met her. Now she began her requests to them with a whispered “Mm-koi?”
This anecdote, the sort that Sunday supplement writers thank God for when it falls out of the sky at their feet, ended in a way that confused me at the time. Becky grew oddly unhappy with her new wardrobe. She said she didn’t deserve it. I had no idea what she meant. “Of course you do,” I said, “you made it.” But she didn’t wear the dresses for a while, choosing instead extremely plain Chinese dresses, like you’d see sales girls behind the counters in Lane Crawford wearing. Then one day, the mistress from the Southern Electric costume department (it was more of a back storage room than a department) asked to borrow the dresses for use in movies. Instead, Becky demanded rental fees. They dickered, agreed on a price and suddenly she felt much happier