by Michael Kaan
We had only vague memories of where the factory was. We had accompanied our father there on a few business trips, and I remembered seeing the quilts piled up in stacks so high there were ladders to reach the top. I recalled the sound of looms and sewing machines farther down a long corridor, clicking and whirring in an oddly muted way as their sound faded into the piles of thick cloth.
We passed a small shop that sold blankets and other cloth goods including quilts, and my brother asked the owner where they came from. At first he told us to get lost — he was closing up for the evening and was doing a final sweep of the flagstone steps outside the store; only one light was left on inside. Everywhere around us, the other stores were closing as well, dimming, sweeping, the lids of normal life shutting as for sleep and the hope of darkness.
Leuk asked the store owner again, begging him this time to help us. The man stepped out into the street and waved an arm towards the far end, telling us to turn there and follow the road to the factory. We didn’t fully understand him but didn’t want to ask a third time. He shut his shop door behind him as we ran down the street.
The factory was in a very old building with heavy wooden doors over which a single lantern hung. I pounded my fist against them so hard it hurt, and yet I seemed to make only a soft thud. We both pounded on them, four hands, shouting towards the high windows that we were here to see Mrs. Yee-Lin Leung and her little sister and friend. Take us in too, I thought. Let us come off the road at last.
The irate old woman who opened the door held a lantern so close to her face I thought she might be blind. She questioned us carefully and looked around to see if we were alone. Then her expression changed and she let us in.
They were sitting in a small, comfortable room on the second floor, with landscape paintings on the walls. It was a kind of living area for the senior factory staff, isolated from the noise by the stacks of quilts below. Yee-Lin was sitting with a cup of tea, looking out a window, and next to her was my little sister, reading as though she were back in her room at home. We ran to meet them and Wei-Ming leapt up as I hugged her.
It had been maybe only a week since they left us at the horse farm. But it had been much longer since I had felt such joy — weeks, months, time stretched out into emptiness on the road away from home and from my mother. I held Wei-Ming and wept to see her and Yee-Lin, and to be safe at last.
At first I didn’t say anything about Ling, and it wasn’t until the next day that I asked my sister-in-law where she was. It troubled me for many years that I was so slow to ask. I had cared for Ling while I knew her. Her life had been far harder than mine, and she had no one left to look out for her. I worried what it was in me that could suddenly let go of someone in such need, and as I grew older the question disturbed me even more.
Yee-Lin told me that they had walked a similar route to mine and Leuk’s, though they hadn’t gone down the river. One morning before dawn, Yee-Lin woke to the sound of Ling whispering in her ear. She told Yee-Lin that she was leaving to find the way back to Shantou. She rolled her things up in a blanket and walked away, and though my sister-in-law had asked her to, Ling sent no message back. Like so many people in those years, she wandered back into what we saw as a dark mist but she herself saw as her only hope. It was no rasher or more dangerous than our own journey back to the city. For a few days after Yee-Lin told me about Ling’s departure, I felt I had a real choice to go back and find her, to retrace a road I now knew and save her from her solitary walk. But I didn’t do that, and even years later I regretted it.
I never forgot her and often wondered where she was, and my memory of Ling was forever intertwined with my doubts about myself. Even now I feel that pang, though the worry has retreated into grief. I can see her only as a girl still frozen at sixteen, a ghost, searching the roads alone because her only friend, in a moment of rare joy, has turned away from her.
Yee-Lin, Leuk, Wei-Ming, and I spent six months at the quilt factory. Mr. Chin, the owner, put us up in his home and paid for us to attend the nearby school. He tried many times to take us home, but the fighting near the harbour and in other parts of the city was still too intense. Yee-Lin sent a message to Sheung. We had no way of knowing if it was ever delivered.
It was difficult to be the closest we’d yet been to home yet be unable to go back. We had no news of my mother, and the cruel words of the Hunan boys echoed in my dreams so that I woke up crying at night from visions of their fulfillment. I slept next to Leuk, and he was very patient with these interruptions. He never knew what to say until I settled down, and then he would simply ask if I was warm enough.
We ate our meals with Mr. Chin in his living room, along with his servants and several staff who had lost their homes. The dining room and one of the bedrooms had been converted into a makeshift hospital run by Methodists. It was very crowded, much like our own house had been before we left. Mr. Chin told us many stories about our father, and he always praised our mother and reassured us that we would return to her.
There was still very little to eat in the city. Our meals were cobbled together from rice rations and the limited vegetables growing in Mr. Chin’s yard and improvised gardens in the neighbourhood. The water supply was often poor because the Japanese still controlled it.
Finally, in January 1943, Mr. Chin sat down with us for a talk.
“There still isn’t much news. All I hear is from tradesmen in the city. From what they say, things are a bit better. There might be a lull in the fighting right now. You can stay longer, of course, though this might be a good time to make your way home.”
While he spoke, he fiddled with a little bead bracelet that Wei-Ming had made him. He didn’t seem very confident in what he was saying, but he talked to us every day and it was the first time he’d raised the possibility of us leaving.
Yee-Lin, Leuk, and I talked about it briefly. We had no idea how reliable Mr. Chin’s news was, but we wanted desperately to go home. We packed our things and left the next morning.
It was a strange departure. Mr. Chin had the driver from the factory take us part of the way into the city, and then we had to walk for a couple of hours. Luckily, he had dropped us off in Tsim Sha Tsui, and we knew the way from there to the Hong Kong Island ferry and the road to Happy Valley. It was sad and wonderful to walk those streets again. The destruction was even worse —collapsed buildings, streets littered with glass and scorched vehicles, shelters improvised in empty lots. We looked out everywhere for soldiers, but the area was so desolate that even they seemed to have abandoned it. Yet as we walked, I smelled the same trees and heard voices from buildings I knew, and walking through those ruins was like discovering a fragment from a broken vase, with the image of a flower still intact.
We arrived at Wong Nai Chung Road at sunset, and the minute we turned onto it, Leuk took my hand. Yee-Lin was walking slowly with Wei-Ming, so she told us to go ahead. Leuk and I ran up the road even though my legs ached. We pushed open the broken gates and entered the courtyard. At its far end, by a leafless orange tree, my mother sat.
We ran to her shouting and crying. She turned and stared with a puzzled look, and shook her head and waved us off. I stopped. She rose quickly and waved us off again, pointing to the street. Leuk took a nervous step, but our mother yelled at us to leave. She started walking towards us with that irritated gait I knew too well, her finger aimed squarely at the entrance, and my heart caved in despair. Then she stopped with a stunned expression and stammered part of my name. I called her again and moved towards her, and she recognized at last who we were.
Later, she explained to us that we were so thin and changed, she thought we were boys from the country selling firewood. When she finally recognized us, she could barely say our names as she ran to us. I won’t describe it any further. The memory of that moment overwhelms me still, and it seems I’ve spent my whole life caught inside it. When I recall it, everything falls behind a curtain of sensation, and every memory from the war years is drawn behind it too, formles
s, ecstatic, and corruptible, bathed in evening light.
The end of a life is the end of memory, and so few of us are left now. Sheung and Tang have been dead for many years. Chow outlived them both, and he wrote to me once after he returned to his old village. If I recall correctly, it was five years ago this spring that my niece phoned me around midnight to tell me of Wei-Ming’s death in a care home in Kowloon. Yee-Lin had died twelve years before her, apparently from a fall.
My brother Leuk is the only other one of us still alive. He used to write me detailed letters every week, but a stroke has curbed his routine, and now I get a short note once a month, obviously written with assistance. The old letters — how I miss them. For all their banality, they were comforting, they were reliable, and they gave me a picture of the old city. He always opened with the usual greetings and well-wishes, and sometimes a short list of complaints. And then came the meat of it: the solo gambling trips to Macau, his opinion of current events, and the weather. And there’s the restaurant. Three times a week he goes to the same place for lunch with the same group of five old friends, a number unchanged over the decades. They usually order the same items, but if the manager persuades them to try a new dish, this gets its own paragraph.
Now the letters are brief, and in the willowy writing I can detect here and there some characters corrected by another hand, maybe a woman’s. One of these corrections was overwritten again in his hand — repeating the error — as if relinquishing something so personal as a mistake was wrong. Good for you, I thought, and even though the sentence meant nothing, it cheered me and confirmed he was still his old self.
How many of us are still alive who are marked by our worst mistake, the year of our birth? There are few of us left who lived through the war, and fewer still who fought it, and we are all old. Those who came after us have heard us talk a little, but for them it’s a time long past, and they see its images mostly in books and films, sometimes in their thoughts, never in their dreams.
Dear youngest brother:
I hope my letter finds you well. It’s been five weeks since I wrote. I’m better than when I last wrote, as I’m walking more steadily. If it improves I’ll go back to Macau. There’s a new casino there, and the restaurants are said to be excellent. But let’s see how I do first.
Very hot in Hong Kong now, soon it will be as hot as Malaysia. I had the air conditioner replaced in the spring and that was a good decision. When the heat gets bad the malls and restaurants are always full, which is good for business. You’re used to hotter weather, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. I wonder sometimes if you yearn for the cooler air here.
The old gang still meets for lunch even though I missed two in a row while I was in the hospital. Since I’m not the sickest of the bunch I must make an effort to attend. The next lunch is in three days. When I was there yesterday, we tried a new dish of razor clams with chili, caught just off Lamma Island. Not too spicy for me. I hope we can try them together one day.
Shun-Yau also returned at that lunch. He’s very lucky. His children pay for a woman from the Philippines to accompany him, but yesterday his granddaughter came instead. She’s a very nice girl, studying in Australia. He couldn’t eat the halibut. She ordered some rice and steamed eggs for him, and helped him lift the spoon. It made me think of that time long ago when he lived with us. He’ll miss her when she goes back to Sydney.
I’ll try to get back to my old writing habits now that I feel better. I always look forward to your letters. A few letters back you said you were going to see your doctor, so I hope everything is well. Do you still walk in the park across from your flat? I remember the beautiful flower beds there when I came to visit in ’09. That seems like yesterday, but really it was years ago.
I’m going to watch some television now. They still carry the Sunday morning church broadcasts from St. Paul’s, and I like the sermons from the new minister more. He reminds me of our days at school together.
Wishing you good health,
Leuk
TWENTY-NINE
The photograph taken on my twenty-second birthday, which I lost after moving away, was like a reversal of the one taken on my third. I am there at the table and Leuk is beside me again, and the cake is much plainer, as it should be for a young man. This time it’s my brother who’s excited. He’s just finished his first year of teacher’s college — specializing in physics already — and he’s looking enthusiastically at the piled-up cream and strawberries fresh from the reopened bakery. I am next to him, dressed more casually, my hair neatly parted, and the expression on my face, overexposed by either the flash or the light from the windows, is at odds with how I think now any young man should feel on his birthday. Which is to say I should look happier.
The photo also shows Ah-Ming, still standing behind us and much older, though still graceful. Her hands rest on the back of my chair as though to encourage me. Her hair is cut shorter and is brushed back in the manner of old women, which may explain the small freedom in the smile on her face. Among all the photos my older brother took, it is one of the few I kept from the years after the war, while I was still living in Hong Kong.
In some ways I was lucky to have been a child during the war. Time moves so differently at that age that a year seems like forever. By the time of that birthday, it was the summer of 1951 and it seemed to me that the war had ended a lifetime ago. Maybe I felt some distance from it, too, because no one ever talked about it. Once the house was repaired and the family firm had been brought up off its knees by Tang and Sheung, and all of us were accounted for and living under one roof, it seemed again that life could flow uninterrupted.
But outside the house, if we were at church or the Jockey Club or visiting other families, I felt as though a darkness hung over us that only others saw and felt. We were all alive. The last death in our family had been my father’s, and for all our sorrow, we had reunited intact. I had friends whose mothers or fathers were alone or whose brothers and sisters had disappeared, and when they came to visit, or if we saw them in public and started a conversation, it was never long before their losses clouded over us. Once, in the summer of 1948, after he finished high school, I went to visit Shun-Yau and his mother and Shun-Po in their new flat. I brought Mrs. Yee a gift from my mother, and we talked a little. But after I responded to her polite questions about my family, about the summer or Tang’s wedding, she collapsed in tears. The gift, a porcelain cup still wrapped in pale green paper, fell from her hands and shattered, and as it broke, I wished that I too could turn to dust and disappear completely. So many times I walked away from people we knew, feeling as though I were the ambassador of fortune’s cruelty. I felt it everywhere, and it was around that time that I began to see I couldn’t stay in Hong Kong much longer.
The day after my birthday, in late July, I was sitting with my mother in the rooftop garden, and she was doting on her grandson, Tat-Choy, in his pram. Yee-Lin sat on the other side, one finger extended to let her son grasp it while she looked out over the valley.
From across the road, the sound of a crowd cheering at the horse races rang over the houses and apartments, and the announcer’s voice echoed from the speakers like a distant bell. All faded and yet familiar. It was Saturday. I was slouched back in my chair with my right hand shoved in my pocket, worrying the corner of a piece of paper that had been there for two straight days and which I’d been reluctant to take out.
Ah-Tseng came up and set down a tray with tea and fruit and a bowl of rice porridge for my nephew. She took a folding stool out from behind one of the planters and set it beside the pram and then took the bowl of porridge and handed it to Yee-Lin. She dipped the tip of her finger in to check its temperature, even though Ah-Tseng had already let it cool off in the kitchen. Ah-Tseng took it back from her and began to feed the baby. Little threads of egg white wrapped around the porcelain rim and then stuck to his lower lip, and Ah-Tseng brushed them into his mouth with her finger. My mother leaned over and cooed at him every time he too
k a mouthful of the bland pearl-grey mixture. I fingered the paper again and stopped when my nail tore through one of the folds.
A week later, I was cleaning out my room. The letter, now with a few more worried rips in it, lay folded on my dresser, and I avoided looking at it. I went through my room and found books and clothes I would no longer need. Most of what I had still descended from that time before the war, and I told myself my nephew might want some of it one day. I filled a box with things to discard. The old corner of the yard where we had once thrown our trash, and where the British had once dumped all their guns, had been cleared out and turned into a vegetable garden. I put the box in the hall, knowing Chow would take it out later.
At the back of my closet, I found a small cloth bag. I picked it up and it felt very light, so I flipped it over and dumped the contents onto my bed. A polished rock fell out, and with a little extra shaking my old belt landed on the quilt.
My body went numb, and I stared at the belt for several minutes. My right hand drifted ghostlike over my stomach and plucked at my shirt. I hadn’t seen it for years. Against the taut, crisp floral print of the quilt, it was pitifully dirty and old. I picked it up and examined the strap. The leather was cracked and frayed, and when I ran my thumb along its edge, a small shower of dirt sprayed onto my hand and sleeve. I stared at the dirt and tried to imagine where it had come from.
