I usually forgot to fill my water barrels on the day my neighbourhood had its turn so I went without. My kitchen sink filled with dishes and glasses and I would come home on a water day to find I’d left the tap open and there was water splashing everywhere in obscene and chaotic abundance. In the slums of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, women shoved one another in ill-policed queues next to forlorn little public stand pipes, their only source of water. They’d spend the better part of a day filling up the square metal cans and taking them back to their shacks in the hills then coming back for more. The drought had left Hong Kong reservoirs nearly empty. You could see them from the hillsides: sadly reduced ponds edged with steep chalky orange banks, wrinkled and arid in the summer sun. There had been no typhoons to replenish the reservoirs and a secondary source of water, through a pipe from China, could not be increased. No local bureaucrat in south China would dare make a decision on increasing water without worrying about whether he was going to be charged with aiding the British imperialists in Expel Imperialism City.
At most times, China seemed as far away as Europe from the cares of life in the British colony. China nevertheless could occasionally intrude on our lives with dramatic impact. My good friend, Sergeant Jack Rudman, faced down increasingly militant labour agitators who had been emboldened by bullying Marxists in the nearby Portuguese colony of Macau. Eager to gain favour with Maoists on the Mainland, Hong Kong leftists launched the biggest period of unrest Hong Kong has ever known in peacetime and Jack was getting it in the face. While I covered stories about demonstrations, riots and bombings for the China Telegraph, I would see Jack and his men in the Emergency Unit, firing tear gas into crowds of young people waving Mao’s Quotations. In turn the leftists would hurl back anything they could lay their hands on: flower pots, sharpened bamboo spears, metal bars, rattan chairs and all sizes of stones. In one riot an enormous sledge hammer came whirling through the air at Jack. It missed him, but struck a Chinese colleague, breaking his shoulder.
I would call Jack every evening to see if he was all right. Sometimes he was too tired or weary of stimulation even to take my calls. He showed all the tedium that came from too much excitement. “The only thing I want to do at the end of the day,” he said, “is go back to quarters and wash the tear gas out of my hair. It’s a simple thing, and I wish more people realized that. Please don’t call again until the weekend.” I felt like a nuisance and I was a bit ashamed of my preoccupation, as though I were a fretful old woman.
And so I devoted myself to my news stories. The agitators’ disruptions to daily life were often ingenious: teenaged boys boarded buses and released bags of snakes, creating a blind panic that almost resulted in a crash. Little schoolgirls, hounded and intimidated by leftists, were instructed to position themselves between the demonstrators and the police. They would stand there with their arms linked, caught between two determined forces. You could see them crying in terror and wanting to bolt. The Communist press was standing by to witness a brutal police attack on little girls so it could publish stories and photographs of the cruelty. I heard one leftist hectoring a little girl who was about to break ranks and flee, using a threat understood only by the two of them: “Li-li! Remember what I warned you! I will tell your father what happened!”
Ah-niu finished filling the water barrels in the pantry and placed lids on them. She put the hose away and looked out the tiny window over the sink. There was nothing to see but the wall of the house next door. All at once she burst into tears and turned her head away from me. “Gangsters have kidnapped her,” she said.
She wiped a handkerchief over her face and tried to busy herself in an already tidy kitchen. She plugged the electric kettle back in to make more coffee.
“How do you know that?” I asked her.
“I don’t. It just makes sense, ”Ah-niu said. “She wouldn’t just run away. She has to work hard. She has a new baby. She has many responsibilities.”
“She wasn’t happy. She hasn’t been happy for years,” I said,
Ah-niu thought the remark irrelevant and it showed how far apart our worlds were. “What is happiness? Happiness is for the idle. She has a family to feed and care for. She has a hard job.”
“Do you think that Mr. Feng has hurt her?” I asked. “Do you think he arranged for her to go away?”
Ah-niu pulled the plug of the kettle out of the wall. “Perhaps,” she said. “Mr. Feng has been very cold.”
She brought me a fresh pot of coffee. I drank a cup in silence. When she thought I wasn’t looking, Ah-niu sneaked her hand into the sugar bowl and took out a single cube. She put it into her mouth, closed her eyes and concentrated on the sweetness. Becky did the same thing all the time. The gesture made me think of her.
Ah-niu let me look around some more but she was growing nervous with the length of my stay. I was snooping about the Feng household shamelessly. Ah-niu walked behind me to scrutinize my every move, polishing a sofa table after I’d touched it, as if Feng would lift fingerprints when he got home. She was keenly aware that my presence could get her fired. I went into the main bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Inside were little pots of make-up creams, lipsticks and eye shadow. There were also capsules of Peking Royal Jelly, a box of purgative tea, aspirin, mouthwash and deer horn extract. Under the sink, in the cupboard, there were a few boxes of Hazeline Snow face powder and five aerosol cans of hair lacquer.
I quoted an old saying which Ah-niu took to and she repeated to herself: “Beautiful women are ill-fated.” It was what women in movie audiences explain to themselves on why the blessedly glamorous really are damned, and how they, the ordinary women of the world, have the real advantages.
Feng was an inveterate showman who loved to trot out his pretty wife at lavish parties, like a prize chicken. In Cantonese slang, associating women with chicken is an obscene comment, but in my poisoned opinion not at all inappropriate for Feng. Like Cecil B. de Mille, whose movies condemned extreme depravity but showed it in loving detail, Feng Hsiao-foon knew how to indulge the public’s sex fantasies while vigorously decrying them. Many of his “decadent” Mandarin-track pictures were about nightclubs, rich people’s idle cares, airline stewardesses, singers and the police. In films such as Pink and Deadly or Don’t Bargain with Fate, Becky plays night club singers who turn their back on normal domestic lives with husbands, children and in-laws so they could perform on stage. It is pre-ordained that the adventuring woman head ends in ruin, reassuring the audience about their mundane domestic arrangements, but the public got a good gawk at the fun she had before the end. Yes, beautiful women really were ill-fated.
Ah-niu’s anxiety peaked when I went into the Feng’s bedroom. It was wildly over-decorated in a Louis XIV style, with blue satin cushions and oppressively over-carved furniture that Feng and Becky had shipped in from the United States. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the items on Becky’s night table. There was a script for an upcoming picture. Recorded at the bottom of the title page, in Becky’s hand, was idle gossip of no great importance. So-and-so spent $4,000 on legal fees to petition for divorce. So-and-so’s wife is pregnant. It told me nothing about Becky. There was a Royal Doulton figurine of a woman holding the edge of her billowing yellow dress. Her right hand was missing, chipped off probably when it had got knocked to the floor. There was a big book of Chinese medicine, detailing cures for various ailments. Chinese cinnamon to treat yang-deficiency in kidneys. Clove tree to counteract vomiting. Powdered oyster shells for heart palpitations. Wild turmeric for chest pains and semi-conscious states. There was no bookmark, no annotation, nothing to indicate just what Becky had been looking through these medical journals for. It told me nothing more than she had a general interest in disease, illness and its treatment. It was the first time I’d ever set foot in her bedroom and I noticed something missing that caused me a moment of sorrow and emptiness. Despite our two decades of close friendship, there was nothing in this room, or anywhere in Becky’s home, that showed any physical evidence that I had a place in her life. No little photo of me in a collection of similar pictures on a side table, none of the trinket gifts I’d given her over the years. I sighed and put the books back on the night table. Ah-niu had become so anxious about my sitting on the bed that when I stood up she frantically swept the creases