no poet ever came. I pressed a black intercom button. The button and the metal speaker panel were encrusted with rust from the salt air. A woman’s voice squawked out of the speaker. “Wei?” I announced myself to Ah-niu, the amah, and she buzzed me in.
The courtyard was a bit of rockery Feng had contrived, an ersatz little echo of the great Soochow-style gardens. Grotesque twisted-looking concrete rocks surrounded a little pool filled with koi fish. The courtyard came alive for a moment. An annoying little dog ran forth from under the cool of the stone bench, making a huge, snarling, slobbering show as defender of the household. Feng had named her Chung Hsiang, after the Peking opera Chung Hsiang Upsets the Classroom. She barked and snarled and almost choked on her own tongue. I hated that dog so much. I wanted to take the belt out of my trousers, chase her around the courtyard and flog it, but, clever me, I knew that Ah-niu probably wouldn’t let me in afterward. Anyway, exhausted and bankrupted by her brief performance, Chung Hsiang gave up the defence, retreated under the bench and collapsed in a ball of hair.
I looked at the house. Ah-niu was standing in a window on the ground floor and she had visible misgivings. It was rare that I was allowed to visit their house. Like many people in Hong Kong, Feng preferred not to entertain at home, but chose less private, less revealing banquet rooms in Chinese restaurants and private clubs. Admittance to Feng’s home when he was not there was normally unthinkable so it was testimony to Ah-niu’s worry about Becky. I wouldn’t have put Ah-niu at risk of Feng’s anger unless I felt it were important.
Ah-niu opened the big wooden front door. Above it was a stone tablet sunk into the wall. Carved and painted in gold were the characters for “Bricks and Mortar of the Nation, ”meaning the family home. On a small sconce beside the door was a brass plaque, also tarnished by salt air, that bore the name of Master Tsang. He had been a great opera performer who had introduced that art to South China in the Eighteenth Century. Now he was a kind of deity. Cantonese opera performers and, by extension movie people, honoured him.
The amah took me to the kitchen. Feng had left for Great World hours before, where he indulged himself in the make-up department with a shave. His face lathered up, he’d watch the make-up girl slowly scrape at his chin. It made them nervous, the way he scrutinized them, and he probably enjoyed it, that complex interchange, him scowling at them, the girls holding razors to his face. He liked his female employees to be frightened of him even when they held razors to his throat. It was potent and erotic.
Ah-niu served me coffee in the kitchen on Becky’s overly fancy English bone china. The nursemaid brought the baby out for me to see. I held Amanda in my arms for a few minutes, and the baby considered me with grave concentration. Amanda tended to scowl, as if she were finding her first six months on Earth unsatisfactory. She looked about the room then back at me and eased into a noisy cry, so I handed her back to the nursemaid.
Becky could have no more children. It was cruel to have lost the ability. The hysterectomy had left Becky despondent and often prompted spontaneous crying. Feng said nothing on the subject to me — I was not family and I was a foreigner. He outwardly showed only ineffable stoicism, if not sympathy, for his melancholy wife. Ah-niu told me that Feng had become angry with Becky following the operation. The best that he could muster was to sigh impatiently and, once, he told Becky in front of Ah-niu: “All this crying will prepare you for Long Ago and Far Away. ”
Ah-niu told me that Becky had received numerous letters that bore postage stamps from the People’s Republic of China. They had been clumsily stuck on - Chinese stamps had no glue on the back; correspondents had to slather paste on them from a brush bottle in post offices. Ah-niu did not know who the correspondents were, possibly activists soliciting her help or condemning her as a tool of the British. She said the letters had been addressed to “Expel Imperialism City.” In the insanity of the 1960s, Red Guards flooded into the southern city of Canton, 130 kilometres northwest of Hong Kong. They were a paramilitary force of malevolent teenagers who sought to help Mao regain control of the Communist Party from his rivals. But they became large and potent and they went berserk, making mad orders — the madder the better, as far as they were concerned. They invaded the Canton post office and issued a decree that no mail bound for the British colony should be delivered if it bore the name “Hong Kong.” They had unilaterally and spontaneously renamed Hong Kong “Expel Imperialism City.” Any postal workers who dared question these hysterical zealots were beaten ferociously, sometimes to death. There was other madness in Canton. The Red Guards decided that since red was the colour of the Communist Party, all traffic in Canton streets should proceed on red and halt on green lights. They would stand at intersections and scream at baffled and intimidated truck drivers who had stopped on red at the city’s few traffic lights: “Go forth with the Red Sun of the Communist Party!” the teenagers screamed. “Go! Go! Go!”
“Did Mrs. Feng have any doctor’s prescriptions?”I asked Ah-niu in Cantonese. “Western-doctor medicine?”
She shook her head. “Only painkillers after the operation,” she said. “But they ran out and she didn’t renew them. ”Becky preferred Chinese medicines over Western drugs, which she said were harsh and had no underlying unity of purpose.
The first time I met Becky was in the autumn of 1948.1 was new to Hong Kong and still enthralled by the sights and smells of the colony. I’d gone over to Kowloon from my dismal flat on the island to tour the big shrine to Wong Tai Sin. It stood at the top end of the peninsula, just below the great hills that ringed the north side of Victoria Harbour. From the steps of the shrine you could see all the way down to the tip of Kowloon and in late autumn, when the air was sunny and clear, it was beautiful. The shrine was always packed because the god Wong Tai Sin had gained a fabulous reputation among refugees for coming to their assistance. His advice, conveyed through a canon known as the One Hundred Poems, led one man to start a small business sharpening knives on a sidewalk and now he owned a big shop in Laichikok. A refugee woman took Wong Tai Sin’s advice on whether to marry a certain man. The poems had indicated marriage, which turned out to be successful and there were many sons.
I had grown a very red moustache in a bid to look older than twenty-two. I wore a Harris tweed jacket, which I clutched to my sides as I dodged platoons of beggars on the steps to the shrine. Mounting the curving stone staircase to the main courtyard of the temple, I saw the gate of the temple, with its slouching tiled roof and pillars. Inside hundreds of people held clumps of smouldering joss sticks in their hands as they knelt before a stone effigy of Wong Tai Sin. Some were in rags and looked truly in need of miracles. Others wore fine woollens and silks and looked as if they ate meat three times a day, and not the gristly cuts. In among them was a slender young Chinese woman in a Western-style white dress, cinched at the waist and cut low around the neck, a cheap, vulgar thing she’d probably bought in a back-street market stall, not a fine British dress shop. She was very young, very beautiful and she knelt there among the poor and destitute, the affluent and well-fed, clutching a great fistful of joss sticks. She batted the smoke away with her free hand and coughed irritably.
She saw me looking at her and winked, a shocking gesture from a respectable Chinese girl back in 1948. She examined me, my tweed sports jacket and oyster-coloured trousers and probably concluded (righdy) that I was harmless. “Hello,” she said in English. She was truly a lovely young woman, even in that poor-quality dress. After she finished her supplication she asked me to help her insert the joss sticks in a huge sand-filled urn. She gave me half of them and we planted them together.
“What do you want?” she asked.
I was flustered because I thought she was accusing me of trying to pick her up.
“From him,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder toward an oversize stone effigy of a bearded man painted with bright enamels. “From Wong Tai Sin?”
“I was just curious about the temple,” I said.
She fired out her arm and extended her hand in a put-’er-there way she must have seen in an American movie with Eve Arden in it. “Becky Chan.”
I shook her hand. “My name is Paul Hauer.”
She repeated it several times to make her tongue get used to the feel of it.