House of Kwa

by Mimi Kwa

  Tak Lau is confused. If we are joining the enemy, he thinks, why must we hide my sisters? He nods anyway.

  Ying Kam is tired. The boy is too young for the truth, so he smiles and pats his son on the back before handing him a fistful of bills and coins. ‘Go buy me a small black notebook like this one.’ He points to a leather-bound journal on his desk and sends Tak Lau away.

  The boy needn’t be asked twice – he stashes the money in his pocket. The youngest boy of thirty-two siblings tears off down the hall on a mission for the most important man he knows.

  A sullen maid emerges from a bedroom off the passage way. ‘Where are you going?’ She can tell he’s headed for the front door, wearing a cap thrown on in his haste to leave on his father’s errand. ‘I’ll get in trouble if you go out without a chaperone,’ she snaps.

  Tak Lau sighs. He is often out on his own; the servants don’t seem to care once he’s beyond view. He has never actually witnessed his maids on the rough end of Ng Yuk’s beatings when he goes missing, so he doesn’t understand why this maid would want to stop him. He shrugs and puts his hands in his pockets. Then his eyes light up with an idea.

  Tak Lau hands the maid a bill from his trousers; she looks around nervously and it disappears into the folds of her shabby oversized pinafore. He has just learned something about maids: they can be manipulated with beatings and money – except that one maid, Puddle. She was different.

  The boy looks past the sullen maid to see his little sister Mary in the arms of a wet nurse. He thinks the nurse looks sour too. ‘Sour milk,’ he mutters, and laughs quietly at his own joke. Mary is almost two, so she will be completely weaned soon. Tak Lau thinks she is the sweetest thing on earth but would never admit it. ‘What a baby.’ He rolls his eyes and races down the hall to the relative freedom of Hong Kong’s streets.

  Peril is on its way to engulf the territory, but Tak Lau is full of excitement as he picks up his pace.

  The best part of a year has passed since the Kwas went on high alert. They decide to relax, as yet another year may go by before war is officially declared, or perhaps it won’t happen after all.

  However, the Kwas and all of Hong Kong are taken by surprise on 8 December 1941. Tak Lau is six, and Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor. As the world scrambles to process that news, Japanese troops storm Hong Kong. Enemy bombs rain down on the British colony while soldiers swarm over the border from mainland China focused first on taking the Kowloon side, where Wu Hu Street is, and then the Island. On the same day, Japan wages coordinated attacks on the Philippines, British Malaya and Thailand.

  Hong Kong is in utter chaos, a war zone of mortars and grenades. The deafening sound of high-speed shells sends people running onto the streets. Everyone but the Kwas.

  ‘It’s too dangerous to attempt to make it to the bomb shelter,’ Ying Kam tells his family. Their house, the most structurally sound on the street, may just be strong enough to withstand the assault. The Kwas stay inside and take their chances.

  Buildings crumble nearby. Homes are ransacked. Shops are looted. The shelling of civilian houses goes on for days in a relentless pulverising of Hong Kong, and all that families can do is struggle to hide wives, daughters, sisters and mothers.

  Tak Lau and his siblings slip through newly installed trapdoors and hide under floors in their home whenever troops march by, while Ying Kam, Happy Shadow, Ng Yuk and their servants pray, giving the ancestral joss sticks a workout like never before.

  They are all Kwas and look out for one another. The competition between Second and Third Wife is still stiff, but since Ying Kam left First Wife in China, they keep their squabbles between themselves, not wishing to be old nags to their husband and bear the consequences.

  House of Kwa hangs on for a miracle.

  Tak Lau’s sister Theresa, five years his senior, wraps an arm around him. The two of them are hidden in a cavity beneath a trapdoor, while the other Kwa children are concealed elsewhere around the house. Since birth, Theresa has retained her old soul demeanour and avid curiosity, and she has acquired a protective maternal instinct.

  The daily Japanese military march along the Kwas’ street towards the docks and back again has finished, but soldiers are known to splinter off suddenly on a spree of killing civilians and taking prisoners. So far, the House of Kwa remains untouched as if cloaked by a force field.

  The children have been playing games to distract themselves. Theresa has shown the others how to thread beads onto string to make a necklace, and they do the same jigsaw puzzles over and over again.

  A distinctive knock followed by a chair scraping the floorboards signals it is safe for the siblings to come out. Theresa whispers, ‘Are you ready?’ Tak Lau nods. Together they push against the wooden door above them until a crack appears, enough for Father to wrap his fingers around the edge and pull it up.

  He reaches down to help Theresa and Tak Lau out, their small hands in his.

  ‘The Japanese have taken the Island,’ Ying Kam says.

  The children stare at their father, knowing from his expression this can’t be good news.

  It’s 18 December. The Kwa family has survived ten days since the Battle of Hong Kong began.

  As many as ten thousand women and girls have already been raped; their families have been murdered or are powerless to help. Refugees are fleeing. Even disease-ridden, famine-distressed areas of mainland China offer more appealing prospects than here in Hong Kong.

  The Kwas are growing hungry, but they don’t know when to risk venturing out for supplies or where to obtain them. At least they still have water, if only for a few unpredictable hours a day. In the beginning their well-stocked pantry was a blessing, but for a large family and staff it only went so far. Western treats such as honey and jam were shared and savoured by the quarter teaspoon as the Kwas huddled around a gas lantern in a boarded-up room. Luckily, one of the maids had purchased a large sack of sugar before the battle; it had been hard to get, with everyone panicking and stocking up. Sweet sugar tea was such a treat, but then they ran out. The maids were too terrified to go out since then and besides could not be trusted with the mission of buying provisions anymore, so by day ten Ying Kam was forced to forage under cover of darkness for anything edible he could find, and tree foliage was better than nothing. Now the family is managing on food scraps mixed with leaves and bark, topped with weeds and berries: strange grey broths of no distinct flavour.

  But the whole family has survived so far, along with their house, while most buildings on Wu Hu Street are either unrecognisable or razed to the ground. While any remaining neighbours flee or scramble to rebuild and repair, against the odds, the House of Kwa lives and breathes.

  Surprisingly, the family knows of only two places near the Hong Kong shoreline that have been spared any structural damage at all: their home and the central financial district, which the Japanese avoid attacking. The enemy forces are careful not to destroy the commercial centres because they want to take Hong Kong, not obliterate it.

  Ying Kam knows it’s no accident that the House of Kwa is untouched. ‘It’s fate and the will of the gods,’ he says to himself, venturing a glimpse outside from a top-floor window. He sees scorched streets and mangled corpses on neighbouring lots, and he knows there will be some way to go before he and his family can come out of this unscathed.

  Few neighbours remain on Wu Hu Street. Most have fled to join the hordes of refugees fleeing across the border to China. Those who stay lie low to rake through the rubble of their homes for lost loved ones and clutch at the dust for missing valuables. All the while they keep checking the coast is clear – Japanese soldiers sometimes burst into what’s left of Wu Hu homes, ripping jewellery from ears and necks and chopping off fingers when rings can’t be effortlessly removed. Horror and fear blanket a city under siege.

  ‘You cannot be too careful,’ whispers Ng Yuk to no one in particular as she crouches and rocks to soothe herself while she listens to screams drift in through her window. />
  CHRISTMAS AND HOLLOW PIPES

  AFTER SEVENTEEN DAYS OF TERROR, IT’S CHRISTMAS. JAPANESE soldiers set upon a hospital, bayoneting injured Allied military men in their beds, while nurses are raped and murdered.

  A few hours later, on the third floor of the Peninsula Hotel at the corner of Nathan and Salisbury roads, British officials surrender to Japanese authority and a new occupation of Hong Kong begins. Today is Black Christmas.

  Tak Lau wonders if the deal with the enemy means he and his family will be able to eat a proper meal again, and to see the sky.

  From now on, the Japanese will demand identification papers at checkpoints. Enemy civilians – mainly British ex-pat men, women and children – will be forced from their homes, relocated to camps, starved and beaten indiscriminately. Gazes will be lowered. Shoulders hunched. Ordinary native Hong Kong people will be given ration cards and risk life and limb to bring even the most meagre amount of food to the family table. Commerce and industry will grind almost to a halt. Schools will shut. Children will have nowhere to play. And the eldest House of Kwa girls will be hidden. ‘The sky will wait for you, child,’ Father tells Theresa. Then he closes the partition wall to her room with Clara.

  Upstairs, many of Happy Shadow’s children have long moved out to start families of their own. She sits silently with her remaining teenage sons and her youngest boy, Patrick. Her two daughters, nineteen and twenty-one, go to their room and lock the door. Happy Shadow places her hands over her ears to block out the Japanese shouting and Cantonese pleas for mercy drifting past the outside of the building.

  The two sons of Ng Yuk, six-year-old Tak Lau and thirteen-year-old Elder Brother, step off the porch and survey the carnage. Their mother didn’t want her boys to go out, but there was little choice with the whole family starving. Because the servants were all female, they might be raped or killed and not come back. Food is now only available in rations, which the boys will try to collect from a local bakery.

  Fifty paces down the road, the boys pass a man crouching in a doorway with an injured, bleeding child in his arms. A door, half a facade and a few ground-floor rooms are all that’s left of this home. The man rocks silently; the child, listless and still, must be dead. Tak Lau and Elder Brother avert their eyes just as a pair of Japanese soldiers approach on horseback.

  From his position in the saddle, one soldier catches Elder Brother’s temple with the butt of his rifle. No provocation is needed for any act of Japanese violence against Hong Kong Chinese. The other soldier says something in Japanese, and the assailant brings his gun to rest against his pommel. The boys fall to the ground, kneeling and covering their heads. Elder Brother’s scalp begins to bleed from the blow. The soldiers jeer and ride off, probably returning to base; a number of Japanese troops have set up residence in the theatre on Bulkeley Street around the corner.

  The brothers slip along alleyways, exploring their changed city. A face peers through balcony shutters on a third floor, but when Tak Lau looks up it disappears. Most streets are deserted.

  There’s a long line outside the bakery. Everyone in the queue has downcast eyes; no one wishes to stand out. A Japanese soldier barks in a dialect none of the locals understands and marches alongside them. He pulls one man out of the line, flings him to the ground and kicks him in the stomach before taking a document from the writhing man’s jacket, holding it high and shouting again. The Chinese people get the idea now and pull identity papers from their pockets, so the boys do too.

  Last night and the night before, a van with a megaphone drove through the streets declaring in Cantonese that the colony had surrendered to Japan. But no one needed to be told the news – they’d known the moment the sounds of gunfire and shelling stopped.

  The Allies decide that if they cannot hold Hong Kong, they will at least make life difficult for the Japanese. In October and November 1942, the US conducts four air raids, shelling the city in an attempt to drive out the occupiers. Over the following two years, they will attack more than twenty-four times. Before the end of World War II, the number of Allied air assaults on Hong Kong will be fifty-one.

  House of Kwa is deep in among it, watching B-25s and P-40s soaring directly overhead. Mostly the targets are Japanese cargo ships in Victoria Harbour at Whampoa Dock at the end of Wu Hu Street.

  The floating targets are obvious, but occasionally bombs go astray. The closer you live to the docks, the higher the risk. The Kwas begin a ritualistic rush back and forth between their bomb shelter and home. They didn’t make it there during the Battle of Hong Kong, but the dugout in the hills near Hung Hom was a good decision after all.

  Through the doorway in the darkness, Tak Lau can just make out the shapes of maids as they scurry up and down a corridor, carrying blankets and bread. Probably stale, he thinks. He hasn’t had fresh bread in weeks.

  ‘Children,’ says Father, fixing his eyes on Theresa before his gaze bores into Tak Lau. ‘The bombs are coming closer tonight.’ He holds a candle up to his face. The distant sounds of soaring followed by thunderous explosions then earth tremors do seem more powerful than usual. ‘The US and British are bombing the water again to try and save us.’

  Tak Lau’s eyes light up. ‘Are they are aiming at Japanese ships on the harbour again, Baba?’

  ‘Yes, but as I’ve told you, sometimes they miss.’ Ying Kam leads the family to the door. ‘We are not safe tonight.’

  The Kwas huddle in pairs or groups of three, taking turns to slip out into an alleyway at the rear of the house. The night air is warm and humid. Three-year-old Mary, the youngest Kwa, lets out a squeal as she trips on a cobblestone. ‘Shh,’ twelve-year-old Theresa says abruptly, scanning the road. Her eyes are adjusting to the moonlight; she can only see the shadows of Father and several men the children call Uncle. The tall figures have positioned themselves at lookout points along a route to the bunker. Ying Kam has invited as many people as the shelter can hold, so other families are headed in the same direction. The Japanese tend to stay away from this area after dark, knowing how vulnerable it is to stray Allied bombs. But nevertheless, as everyone in Hong Kong now knows, you can never be too careful. Theresa picks up Mary, who continues to complain about her grazed knee.

  Tak Lau falls into step with two friends – even in darkness he would know his street football playmates anywhere. Sometimes they roam the territory together too. They are older boys by perhaps two or three years, and he feels grown up being around them. Whenever Elder Brother grows tired of playing Tak Lau’s childish games, these are the boys he turns to.

  Before the darkness of occupation, the boys even rode the light rail once without paying. They leaped off from the far door as an angry conductor made his way after them through the crowded tram carriage. The bigger boys had jumped first, then they called to Tak Lau to jump too, arms outstretched and shouting, goading him on. Adrenalin coursed through his body and Tak Lau leaped. He stumbled, but one of the boys grabbed his hand to steady him and they ran down an alley without looking back. The face of a beggar, curled up on the corner with an empty bowl, had crinkled with laughter to see such mischief. The boys ran laughing too, all the way home.

  The walk to the bunker is supposed to be a sombre one, but a friend of Tak Lau has a twinkle in his eye. Everyone calls him Einstein because of his crazy hair. He is always on the lookout for adventure, and tonight is no exception. ‘C’mon,’ he says, motioning to Tak Lau and their other friend. ‘Look, the Bogies.’

  The Bogie Boys is a gang known for its Humphrey Bogart hairstyles and tough image – so far as eight- to twelve-year-olds go. They are never unfriendly to Tak Lau and his friends. He enjoys catching up with them; he’s lucky that there’s always someone to play with in his neighbourhood, and they rarely comment on his upper-class wardrobe.

  ‘I went to the top of the hill with them last time.’ Einstein sounds excited. ‘To see the lightshow.’

  The friends catch up to the three Bogie Boys, and together the six of them walk in moonlight to
wards the communal bunker the Kwas have funded. Their closest neighbours and friends have priority after the family. Then it’s just whoever else can squeeze in.

  As they start the climb, Tak Lau realises he and the boys aren’t headed for the bunker. He sees the silhouettes of his sisters being ushered into the cavernous hole in the ground. Other families crowd in. He knows the drill well. They will be in total darkness until a large barn-like door has been pulled shut by the strongest men. Only then will it be safe to light an oil lamp. They will sit shoulder to shoulder in the damp, cramped room until Father says it’s okay to come out. It isn’t airless in there because builders have installed hollow pipes to various surface points; they are covered in mesh to stop debris falling in and are large enough for a small child to climb through to safety if the door becomes blocked. An outsider in the know could even roll down food and provisions if things got really dire. It’s not airless in there, Tak Lau thinks. But it does feel like you’ll suffocate.

  In the dark clamber to safety, it’s no wonder Tak Lau’s family haven’t noticed he’s missing. He is already well away, hiking up the hill. The six boys wade through tropical shrubbery, pushing swathes of long wet leaves aside. The only way is up, but just as they near a small plateau, Tak Lau stumbles; he feels blood trickling down his shin and touches his wounded knee. ‘Don’t look down. Don’t look down.’ He thinks of Mary’s grazed knee and how Theresa kept her quiet.

  The boys emerge beneath the stars at the top of their ascent. From this vantage point, they see Hong Kong Island and Victoria Harbour, moonlight striking the water and rooftops. There are no lights on in the buildings or any bustling of people in the Jade Market in Jordan. No streetlights illuminate the footpaths leading to unsavoury haunts down alleyways towards Kowloon, and there’s no one shopping on Tsim Sha Tsui’s main streets. Hong Kong has been quiet for an hour now. It is as if the Allies drop warning bombs to give civilians a chance to get away before unleashing the full force of their friendly fire.