Small Lives, Big World

by R. M. Green

  Thus, the unfortunate Henri was scrabbling for every last cent (and losing most of it by his persistent gambling) so that he could return to his red-painted shack in the middle of a forgotten province miles from the shining ocean-front towns populated with retired Americans and gleaming shopping plazas. His beloved Angel Mart which, despite being not much more than a tin shed (which suffocated the occupants in summer and drove them half insane with the unending hours of tropical rain drumming on the metal roof during wet season) with half a dozen small refrigerator cabinets and a few shelves, which looked like they had been made from Meccano, was nevertheless a very profitable venture since the nearest competition was thirty-five minutes away on the infrequent and unreliable bus service along a dust-choked road in summer and a treacherous slick of mud in the rainy season. Besides, even if the local population in the village of San Juan and the neighbouring hamlets of San Pedro and La Virgen did catch the bus to the coastal retirement resort of Santa Cruz, peopled principally by Canadians, Americans and oddly enough, Belgians over sixty years old, some twelve miles away with its brand new and haughtily named, Mall de Las Americas, they could only go to see the Mall as a modern wonder, a tourist attraction, rather than as a retail experience since they were victims of the economic apartheid so prevalent in that part of the world. In the decent restaurants and outlets, malls, clinics and even cemeteries, the local people would be the ones making great efforts to provide outstanding service in return for perhaps the hope of a one dollar tip from a wealthy foreigner. Yet none of these locals could dream of eating or shopping or being seen by a doctor or even being buried in these exclusive venues. “It is as if we are not the owners of our own country,” was the general lament and such sentiment had propelled the former communist-backed guerrilla leader and ex-dockworker, Horatio Dominguez, to the presidency some twelve years before but under whose auspices the expansion of the ‘gringo’ towns had doubled and inflation now ran at an uncomfortable 27%. However, Horatio had the knack of staying in power thanks to an irresistible combination of several phenomena: intimidating his equally corrupt political rivals; lengthy vocal rants every month on the radio (still the only form of mass communication that reached the provinces since the internet, mobile phone coverage and cable TV were unaffordable and largely inaccessible thirty miles outside the capital and two of the larger provincial cities and, of course, the expatriate populated resorts) railing against the moral decay of capitalism, imperialism and other equally abhorrent “isms”; free and equal education and healthcare to all citizens (and true enough, education and healthcare were free, mostly because there was less than 4% of the budget directed into them and equal because they were equally awful no matter where you were in the country); and finally, and most significantly, the unadvertised and immense income diligently raised and judiciously allotted from the vast amount of drugs, arms, luxury goods and even people trafficked through the borders. The President and his henchmen had, of course, never been involved in any illicit trade themselves but the unofficial levies raised on the thousands of shipments known to most people as the ‘Look-the-other-way Tax’, provided what Interpol suggested could be as much as 60% of GDP.

  So even as Henri juggled phone calls while negotiating traffic and terrifying his Dutch tourist passengers on the way to see the Tian Tan Buddha at the Po Lin Monastery, all he could think of was returning to his tin goldmine in the back of beyond and worry what was happening to his business left in the less than capable hands of his seventy-two-year-old father, Pascal.

  Here it might be well to explain how the Cheungs had the decidedly un-Chinese forenames of Pascal and Henri. Well, to understand that, one must consider the unusually high number of retired Belgians in the country. And that is directly a result of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the final decades of the nineteenth and opening decade of the twentieth centuries.

  When Leopold I, King of the Belgians, hatched his outlandish plot to gain a colony for his country and the concomitant wealth and fame, his beady eye cast around the globe for a suitable colonial candidate. Having discreetly enquired into a possible purchase of various territories including the Philippines from the Spanish and several islands from Britain, Leopold decided to concentrate his efforts on the vast Congo basin in Africa but not before a little known venture in Central America. During his father’s time, a disastrous attempt had been made to colonise a portion of Guatemala. This venture lasted some fourteen years before yellow fever and malaria carried off most of the settlers and any mention of the region slipped quietly into obscurity. So, although you will find documentation of the Guatemalan venture during the reign of Leopold I, only a very few have ever heard of Leopold II’s dalliance in Latin America in the final years of the nineteenth century. It was never official, never sanctioned and so when, inevitably, it failed after nine years, no one really noticed except the three thousand ‘colonists’ and their families and servants, most of whom, although better defended from malaria due to quinine, were left to make their way back to Belgium, or anywhere, unaided, bankrupt and forgotten, or stay and forge some sort of life, or simply rot. However, the early years of the adventure were a whirl of construction, over optimistic reporting on natural resources and exuberance that Belgium was taking its rightful place in the brotherhood of empires with the savage world carved up into coloured slices each according to their colonial masters; red for Britain, blue for France and so on.

  In a mad undertaking such as this, perhaps the maddest thing of all was the ‘Railway under the Volcano’; a bold or rather, reckless attempt to build a railway line from Colombia to Texas irrespective of the terrain. The Belgian general, General Claude Letruc, in charge of the project, being rather linear of disposition, declared that the shortest route through the territory under his command was directly north. A laudable conclusion and only flawed in that this direct route would take the railway not only through some of the densest rainforest north of the Amazon but would also necessitate the track being lain either over, under or through several dormant and a couple of not so dormant volcanic craters. The fact that two hundred and fifty miles of track had been laid before this inconvenient truth was discovered can only be put down to an unfortunate oversight. If you take a guide, a jeep and a stout pair of walking boots, you can still see where the tracks end, all too abruptly at the shore of a sulphuric pool in the ash rich foothills of Mount Ah Chuy Kak. The name was Mayan and was the name of the god of war and destruction, so that gives you an idea into the general hostility of the environment.

  However, in those heady jingoistic days of the Belle Époque, nothing prevented the sense of Belgian manifest destiny or the importation of unpaid and coerced ‘volunteers’ from Africa, and miserably paid and appallingly treated Chinese workers whose fathers had slaved and died to help bring the railroads across the United States, to now help forge a new railway for a brand new colony between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans linking north to south in a lucrative iron corridor of trade.

  Of course, it was doomed and its inevitable failure was the prevailing mood the year Michelle Audan met Li Han Cheung who followed the Asian labour gangs and was employed as an interpreter by the local bosses since he not only spoke his native Cantonese but also Mandarin, Siamese, Vietnamese and English. Li had come from a poor family but with determination and his linguistic gift, he had climbed out of his father’s fishing smack back in Hong Kong and into the Imperial diplomatic service. In his travels in the capacity of little more than a talented servant but first-class discreet interpreter, he travelled to Europe (where he added some French and Spanish to his repertoire) and later to America where he absconded and got a job with a railroad company as a liaison between the American overseers and the Chinese labourers, which gave him grudging respect from both and affection from neither. Growing tired of this climate of poverty and not belonging, Li heard that a large contingent of Hong Kong Chinese were bound for the new Belgian would-be colony in the jungles of Central America and du
ly set off to make his fortune. With a forged letter of recommendation from the non-existent Secretary of Linguistic Affairs of the United States of America, he secured an interview with General Letruc and rather than be appointed as official interpreter, Li managed to create a role and title for himself as general manager of the Asian contingent of the Belgian Imperial project in the fledgling colony of San Cristobal. What that really meant was that he was made the Belgians chief go-between with the Chinese workforce. A task made somewhat trickier than almost exactly the same job he had had in America due to the fact that slavery was officially illegal (although this was largely ignored by the Belgians) and the Chinese were supposed to actually receive payment for their labour. However at a meeting between Li, General Letruc and a lean government lawyer from Antwerp called Cornelius Neeskens, an elaborate set of rules and charges was established by which the Chinese workers were paid 8 Cristobals (the newly introduced colonial currency and utterly worthless) a day. However, their room and board in the 50-man leaky wooden shack accommodation provided by the Belgian employers cost 5 Cristobals a day and the rest they were allowed to spend as they pleased. The fact was that the currency was unconvertible and the only place the Chinese could spend their remaining 3 Cristobals was either in the shop and canteen run by the administration or in Li Han’s little bar. This enterprising and lucrative side-line was no more than a large wooden shed with a few mah-jong sets and the nastiest cheapest whisky that Li could buy for next to nothing from the Mexican schooners that occasionally called into the one functioning port some three day’s mule ride from the railroad administration centre.

  As Belgium’s dream of Latin American riches and railways entered its decline, accelerated by the newly exploited riches in The Congo, Li was quite a wealthy man having expanded his gut-rot saloon into a whore house for the Americans who had swooped in to prospect in the volcanic rivers in what was a short-lived, violent and ultimately abandoned gold-rush. The madam of this shanty bordello was Michelle Audan, born in Liege and former mistress of a Belgian officer who had died of dysentery after three months in San Cristobal and who had been obliged to make ends meet by discreetly entertaining those officers whose wives had not yet, or never would make the journey from the Belgian motherland. As those colonists who had not succumbed to disease, madness or desertion began to leave by whatever means they could and return unsung and unknown to Brussels and beyond, Michelle found that her health and looks had faded to such an extent that she could no longer seduce her passage back to Europe and at that moment, in her hour of desperate need, she met Li Han. Li was just in the process of building his brothel which was to be ‘staffed’ by a few local fallen women (the nineteenth century term for a single mother), several opium-smoking Vietnamese girls, an Austrian seamstress who made the dresses and who drank gin in frightening quantities and a ‘Scottish’ woman called Blanche who had a different story of her origins for every client. In fact, Blanche was born and raised in San Cristobal to an indigenous mother who had a fling with a Jesuit called Graham from Ayr during a moment of weakness, which he realised was a crisis of the soul and who promptly hanged himself out of guilt and after consuming almost a gallon of rum. Li realised that beating alone would not keep the girls in check so he offered Michelle a home and the position of madam and in return, Michelle agreed to marry Li and this marriage of seedy convenience actually grew into one of genuine affection and one unexpected result of the union was a baby boy whom Michelle insisted be given her father’s name, Henri.

  Sadly, the Hans bliss did not last all that long. When Henri was nine years old, his mother died of an unidentified disease and Li lost heart, sold his business at a huge loss to the Mayor of San Cristobal which was shortly to be renamed Independencia and where today an overgrown Belgian cemetery can still be found. With the money, he bought passage for himself and Henri, and sailed for his native Hong Kong with his little boy that same year. Li Han did not survive the voyage probably dying of the same disease that had claimed his wife and was buried at sea, in case it was contagious. His son, Henri arrived in Hong Kong for the first time in his life, aged ten with a handful of his mother’s fake jewels and his father’s jade ring in his pockets, a few clothes tied up in a sheet and a book in French given to him by his mother on his ninth birthday. The book, which he could read as fluently as he could Cantonese, was Voltaire’s Candide.

  It is ironic to think today that the significant number of Belgians who have retired to the land (although they are overwhelmingly in the coastal resorts rather than the region around Independencia) of tropical heat, low taxation and American-staffed private health clinics and a land for which those few who know the story feel a sentimental attachment, are treading in the footsteps of so many of their compatriots who perished in the ‘stinking jungles and swamps of benighted San Cristobal’.

  Henri Cheung, only son of the late Li Han and Michelle Cheung now found himself an oddity in a strange land. With his Chinese facial features inherited from his father but with his mother’s blue eyes and mousey brown hair, he found it hard to be accepted totally either by the Chinese or the Europeans. However, as he spoke French, Spanish and Cantonese and a few words of English, his skills were always in demand. Li Han had a brother, Bao Zhi who owned a chain of large laundries, which serviced several embassies and the grander of the hotels. Bao was an irascible, avaricious and very cunning man who had made a modest fortune from his forty years washing others people’s dirty linen. He had made good. Coming from nothing and by sheer will and ruthless determination, Bao now lived in a two-storey house in Kowloon with his own servants. Nevertheless, Bao Zhi had loved his brother and so, when his ten-year-old orphaned nephew appeared, lost and distraught over his parents’ death, Bao took him in with open arms and treated him as if he were his own son. This kindness was returned doubly by the love and respect Bao Zhi received from Henri, and equally rewardingly by the increased business that his polyglot nephew brought in as he could negotiate directly with the British hotel managers and the French speaking diplomatic staff in the embassies.

  Henri was a diligent and valuable member of Bao Zhi’s staff and Bao, who had been ‘cursed’ with five daughters and no sons, was nearing eighty years old as Henri turned thirty, had decided to retire and hand the business to his favoured nephew. By this time, Henri had been married three times; his first wife dying in childbirth with their third son and his second wife, having born four more children, two boys and two girls, had been run over by a British Army staff car whose driver had a heart attack at the wheel. His third wife, Ah Lam, who was the daughter of a Chinese doctor and who had been trained as a nurse, was clever and pretty and a devoted mother to her seven step-children and her own baby daughter, and was proud of her husband who was about to become a very wealthy man indeed.

  Just as everything seemed to be in place to guarantee a happy and comfortable life for Henri’s clan, misfortune intervened with devastating effects. Bao Zhi died suddenly and disastrously for Henri, without writing down in his will that which he had often discussed with his nephew. Although a few weeks shy of his eightieth birthday, Bao was wiry and strong and in excellent health. The suspicion is that one or more of his five daughters poisoned him in order to prevent Henri taking over the business. Nothing was ever proved and Henri’s cousins claimed the business and merely offered him a job managing the major customers but no share in the business, which his uncle had wished him to inherit.

  Poor Henri! Eight children, and with Ah Lam five months pregnant with her second and his ninth child, he was turfed out of his home by the sisters who took possession of Bao Zhi’s house for their own offspring. Although Henri had been careful with money and had a tidy sum put by, he reasoned that supporting a wife and soon-to-be nine children and finding somewhere to live was going to be a struggle unless he took some drastic action. The drastic action he took was to forsake the land of his ancestors and return to the land of his birth.

  Six months later, He
nri, Ah Lam and eight children (the passage proved a rough one and Ah Lam’s new baby boy died on board after just two days and joined his paternal grandfather, Li Han in an ocean grave) were settling into a new life some two hundred miles from the former Belgian enclave of San Cristobal. Henri had used the bulk of his life’s savings, which was enough to pay the passage and buy a surprisingly spacious but rather run down two-storey building in a shabby area of the city but one just a five-minute walk from the Plaza General Menendez. The General was actually an escaped murderer and horse thief who had jumped on the opportunistic bandwagon of the fight for liberty from Spanish rule stirred up by Simon Bolivar in the 1820s. Along with his unsavoury band of cutthroats and ne’er-do-wells, Pablo Menendez had seen the struggle for nationhood as a perfect chance to get rich quick and exploit the general chaos. He became a hero of the nascent republic when he single-handedly brought down the cruel and corrupt Spanish governor, Diego Jesus Valdez de Jimenez, as he attempted to flee the country to enlist the help of Prussian mercenaries, who were between wars at that time and relaxing in Antigua, to come and crush this impertinent uprising and exact terrible revenge for defying Spanish rule. What actually happened is that the Governor was desperately trying to get to the coast with his wife and daughter, three servants and a chest of golden coins so that they could go to the United States where he hoped to buy a cattle ranch.