Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Political murder in old Shanghai; Stevenson’s Samoa; Cape Horn – my soul warmed a few degrees, and, resisting another look at the drowning harbour, I poured two fingers and a thumb of Black Label into one of the Luk Kwok’s glasses. Feeling only slightly self-conscious, I drank to my immediate future.

  Part One

  A Dream of China Seas

  The mass and majesty of this world, all

  That carries weight and always weighs the same

  Lay in the hands of others; they were small

  And could not hope for help and no help came

  W. H. Auden: ‘The Shield of Achilles’

  One

  The receptionist of the Luk Kwok Hotel had handed me a postcard when I registered, and I looked at it now. The picture showed a Chinese landscape with pagoda-like red-tiled houses, trees and grey hills. It was from Mr Crook in Peking. He said he had just received a note from the Chinese International Travel Service (Peking branch). ‘They express their welcome to you,’ he wrote, ‘and have informed their European section. That looks moderately hopeful.’ Once more he wished me luck.

  Next morning I crossed on the Star Ferry to Kowloon and the office of the China International Travel Service. A Mr Cheung Chi Sing, a youngish, pleasant man, laid on the counter folders, airline schedules and tourist pamphlets. I explained I didn’t want to go by air.

  ‘I want to travel to Shanghai or other Chinese ports in a series of Chinese ships,’ I said slowly and, I think, clearly, repeating what I had already written to Peking from London.

  ‘It is not usual,’ said Mr Cheung, gravely. ‘No, not very usual.’

  I showed Mr Crook’s postcard to Mr Cheung, who looked at the picture of houses, trees and hills for some time before reading the back very carefully, more than once. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said, politely nodding, and once more silence paralysed our dialogue.

  ‘You see, it says here’ – I pointed to the postcard – ‘that my name and the details of what I would like to do have been passed to the European section of your head office in Peking. They have acknowledged receipt. Look, they have even said “Welcome”. Suppose you telephone from here and ask someone there what to do?’

  Mr Cheung looked unhappy. The friendly smile that continued to lurk about his lips was sadly at odds with the helpless expression in his eyes.

  ‘Maybe I will telephone there later.’

  ‘Why not now?’

  ‘All line are busy now.’ I wondered how he could know that and doubted that he did. ‘You leave address and telephone number in Hong Kong,’ he continued. ‘When I call Peking office, I will let you know. Okay?’

  I knew there was nothing more to be done here. By now, I can usually recognize a dead end when I see one. To put it mildly, it was very frustrating. It might mean abandoning the idea of China altogether.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Will you be sure to telephone me? This afternoon? Tomorrow?’

  ‘Very soon.’ Mr Cheung’s smile was warm now; his relief at my imminent departure, polite and without truculence, was easily perceptible. ‘As soon as I hear,’ he said.

  I thought, ‘I’m not going to hear from Mr Cheung again.’ Nor did I.

  Nevertheless, I gave him that afternoon and the next day. After that I couldn’t wait any longer, inactive by the Luk Kwok’s telephone, watching American cops and robbers on TV while the depression that had accompanied me from London grew within me. I had had faith in the CITS. I had thought that tourism would be so important to China’s economy that an organization set up specifically to smooth the way for Westerners seeking to admire the country and spend much-needed hard currency would be an efficient one. Crook’s letter and postcard had been mildly optimistic, but Mr Cheung hadn’t even known how to telephone his head office – or hadn’t he dared to?

  I had already telephoned an old friend, Donald Wise. With his crisply upturning moustache and upright, stalwart figure, Donald looked more like a colonel in the British Raj’s Indian Army than the war correspondent he had been for a quarter of a century. He was an editor now with the Far Eastern Economic Review and had lived in Hong Kong some time; an Old Hand.

  ‘Heaven knows what was in your Mr Cheung’s mind,’ Donald said. ‘And frankly, I’m not sure what your best move is now. Why not do two things, though, for a start. First, contact someone in Jardine’s travel department, and then the one in Swire’s, too. Ask their advice. It’s their world out here in more than one sense. It might get you somewhere.’

  Jardine Mathieson is one of the two giant commercial houses in Hong Kong; John Swire & Sons is the other. Both had had intimate business dealings with China for well over a century, so they should know a thing or two.

  ‘And the second thing?’

  ‘Meet me at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club for lunch.’

  The Jardine’s man was sympathetic when I explained my failure with Mr Cheung of CITS. ‘Don’t take it to heart. I’m sure CITS were not making it hard for you personally.’

  ‘Oh, no. But I didn’t imagine it would be quite like that.’

  ‘They are just incredibly inefficient over there in some ways. Muddlers.’ He gave me the name of a travel agent in Central Hong Kong. ‘They should know the ropes. Try them.’ And thanks to him I came face to face with Miss Angel Yip.

  Dear Miss Yip. There was sunshine in her face, and she communicated it to me. She cut through all doubt as soon as I explained about the plans I had already laid before Mr Cheung and my would-be CITS benefactors in Peking. She considered briefly. Then she said: ‘If you want to be sure to go anywhere by sea in China, you should take one of three Chinese passenger vessels from Hong Kong’ – or, indeed, she added, all of them separately, one after the other. There would be no problem in that? ‘Oh, no,’ said Miss Yip, sweetly and confidently.

  ‘Well …?’

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘There are ships to Amoy, Swatow, Kwangzhou and Shanghai. All from Hong Kong. I can arrange.’

  I thought quickly – and in a moment discarded my ambition to linger in the region. It was a long way to England. I couldn’t spend weeks shuttling back and forth from Hong Kong to the Chinese coast. Shanghai was the port I wished to see above all others – Shanghai with its Bund and its old skyscrapers; the scene of the black dramas Malraux described; the scene of President Nixon’s meeting with Chou En-lai, and of so much else.

  ‘Miss Yip,’ I said urgently across her desk, ‘I’ll take the ship to Shanghai and see what happens.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, businesslike. ‘Perhaps you will be able to ask someone in Shanghai how to find a vessel from there to Dairen and the Yellow Sea.’ I hoped so, I said.

  I handed over my sea-stained passport. ‘Expect the visa in about four days,’ she said, adding that the ship was called the Shanghai, and that many Chinese would be on her going to Shanghai for the Chinese New Year holiday. ‘The ship will be full up,’ she said.

  In the street, I remembered that I hadn’t mentioned Hangchow once. I was going to betray my childhood promise to my poor friend Cheeko. Guilt padded at my heels all the way to lunch with Donald Wise.

  Next day a letter arrived. Miss Yip supplied details of the voyage to Shanghai. It read exactly as follows:

  ss. Shanghai – China Flag

  Tonage: 13,500 tons

  Speed: 18 mph

  Totaly having 7 decks and only three main decks take passenger with air-conditioned which have 115 cabins and she can carry 459 passengers.

  Facilities:-1 dining room, ball room, bar, cinema, swimming pool and hospital etc. Beside taking passenger, she also carries cargo up to 2,500 tons. Sailing time: about 56 hours

  Check in time: 12.30 at Tai Kok Tsui Pier on 10th Jan., the ship will arrive Shanghai on 13th Jan., at 0700.

  I would be met in Shanghai by a CITS guide, Miss Yip said. Mildly elated by that information – anything that confirmed the existence and signalled the sailing of the Shanghai was good for my depression – I went for a stroll through the back streets behind th
e Luk Kwok. In the bars of Wan Chai bare-breasted Chinese girls, most of them remarkably devoid of allure, languidly invited one to buy them Coca-Cola for hefty chunks of coin. My guidebook to Hong Kong said that ‘if nipples could yawn, those here would’, and even the healthily lascivious spirits of some Scots Guardsmen I met drinking in the Pussycat Topless flagged before these lethargic displays of drooping flesh.

  ‘Herpes are forever,’ one of them said morosely into his beer.

  *

  An aura of drama hangs about Hong Kong at the most normal of times. This is partly because of its unusual appearance – the grouping of the steep-sided rocky islands round the headlands of China; partly because of the busy ebb and flow of countless vessels in and out of the harbour; and certainly not least because of the natural tension that exists where two of the world’s most enterprising races are crowded together in a small space, the one economically a hundred times better off than the other. In physical terms, the cheek-by-jowl existence of the British and the Hong Kong Chinese is striking: on the one hand, the seedy, high-rise huddles of the Chinese residential areas; on the other, the gold, silver and ivory office blocks that soar, smooth and serene, from the water’s edge and proclaim that that is where the billions or dollars are. Not far from the cosy simplicity of the Luk Kwok and the clamour of Wan Chai, the sun washes over the sleek snouts of Porsches, Mercedes and pink and yellow Rolls Royces in the parking bays of the rich Europeans and Chinese who have created this extraordinary capitalist pimple, and maintained it on the lip of Communist China, and dries out the laundry that hangs like the banners of a rag-tag army from the overcrowded tenements of the poor.

  Now I found an extra element of drama – and might it prove to be the ultimate drama for Hong Kong? The year 1997 was on everyone’s lips – it had become an even more emotive date than George Orwell’s 1984. That year the British lease on Hong Kong would run out and the Communist Chinese would move in. Some in Hong Kong prophesied catastrophe ahead; but there was every chance that it would not change. Mr Deng Xiao-ping had insisted that it was in China’s interest for Hong Kong to remain after 1997 the same successfully commercial concern. Although reincorporated into Mother China, Hong Kong would be allowed to retain its peculiar characteristics – it would become a privileged region where capitalistic business practices and the democratic freedoms of speech, press and justice would be allowed to survive. The difference would be that the Chinese would control Hong Kong and the British would depart. With the British gone, Hong Kong as an international centre of commerce and finance would continue as usual. Mr Deng’s vision of the future was in many ways reassuring.

  Yet doubt and anxiety prevailed. They focused largely on the fact that in 1997 Mr Deng, now in his eighties, would certainly not be able to supervise these very reasonable plans for Hong Kong. New men would be in control in Peking. Who could say if they would honour the undertakings of Mr Deng? Many, possibly most, Chinese in Hong Kong were voluntary refugees from China. Such fugitives were still coming in. On a recent visit to Hong Kong I had spent much of one night with the boat patrols of the Royal Hong Kong Police, watching young Chinese constables fishing from the freezing waters of Deep Bay young men and women swimmers from mainland China, risking sharks and currents to escape. A quarter of all Hong Kong Chinese in their twenties, I was told then, had come over in the past few years. Countless Chinese had found compelling reasons to flee to Hong Kong at various times since the armies of Mao Tse-Tung drove Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists out of China in 1947. How would they feel about 1997, the year in which they might imagine their past lives would catch up with them?

  I suppose many Hong Kong Chinese will accept whatever comes, resigning themselves in fatalism. Many others had come not so much to escape from Communism as to escape to relative freedom and affluence. The loom of Hong Kong’s neon lights must have signalled El Dorado to many yearning Chinese watchers of the night skies, and proved as irresistibly alluring as the lamps of the fishing boats that draw the sea creatures of Deep Bay into the nets. Some of these might not care much who ruled Hong Kong in the future, provided the bright lights kept shining; for many, no doubt, Hong Kong’s affluence had proved cruelly elusive.

  At any rate, I imagined that for every inhabitant of Hong Kong who accepted the inevitable with a gay laugh and a shrug of the shoulders there might be one bowed down by doubt. The trouble was that doubts about the character of Hong Kong after 1997 could not be allayed until 1997 came. For fifteen years everyone could only hope for the best. Yet the best depended above all on the survival of the international financiers’ confidence in Hong Kong as a place for making money. Suppose, for example, that the Chinese officers of the Royal Hong Kong Police, aware of the sharply declining mystique of British authority, got cold feet and decided that to continue to arrest Chinese criminals or political troublemakers in the name of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth was no longer worth the risk of terrible retribution? Who would hold back the subsequent chaos from which foreign businessmen and financiers would flee as from the Black Death?

  Perhaps such gloomy speculation was unnecessary. Yet the fact remained that there would be no escape from Hong Kong for most of those from among the five or six million Chinese who wished to leave before 1997. Very few of them were entitled to receive a British passport, the sine qua non of a new life in Britain. I telephoned a friend in the police force – Lim, a Chinese sergeant I had met on an earlier visit; I had kept up with him and his wife. I found this brave and honest man in a sorry psychological state. Chinese sergeants like Lim, who was far from rich, are the backbone of this police force, as good warrant officers and sergeants are the backbone of a good army; they are indispensable because they were born here, know Hong Kong life at first hand and at many levels – are Chinese, after all. Yet, although as colonial policemen they are in the service of Queen Elizabeth as much as any bobby on the Piccadilly beat, the Hong Kong Chinese policemen have no right to follow their British officers to London. They do not qualify for a British passport. They aren’t wanted. In London, people had told me: ‘Britain is too full of immigrants’; it was ‘standing room only’ already. Responsibility was shrugged off like that.

  Strolling in his British uniform along the harbour front of Kennedy Town on Hong Kong Island, Lim said, ‘All I have is a Hong Kong passport. I have no United Kingdom right, and no China right either.’ He shrugged morosely. ‘Of course, I don’t want to go to China.’

  ‘I know, Lim. You belong nowhere.’

  What a grotesque situation, I thought. Here we were, walking among Chinese men and women of his race who seethed around speaking his own language. Abrupt Cantonese shouts mixed with the squealing of the fat pink pigs being winched off a junk in long baskets shaped like wicker tunnels. There were many junks here. They had Chinese registration papers from Canton, and their decks were piled with tubs of fish and bulbous jars of vinegar for sale in Hong Kong. They would go home to Canton presently.

  How could people belong nowhere?

  Escaping famine, war or an uncongenial regime is a life’s occupation for hundreds of thousands – no, millions – of Asians. In 1997 – God willing – there would be no famine here, no war either. Yet there might well be violence – bloody settling of scores, perhaps. No one on earth could rule out the possibility of an economic collapse. No wonder a creeping apprehension was already permeating Hong Kong like a bone-chilling fog in anticipation of the end of British rule. It came to me: Supposing I were a Hong Kong Chinese wanting to take my family to the West and had no legal way of escape….

  Lim smiled. ‘Who knows? 1997 will arrive and nothing bad will happen. It could be different from – what we fear.’ I could imagine the familiar mental picture he would not express in words: the panic of Vietnam in 1975, the shocking scenes in Saigon. The photographs had made a deep impression on people in Hong Kong. There was still a camp full of Boat People in Kowloon.

  ‘Of course it will be all right,’ I said. ‘It will be, Lim.’

&nbs
p; ‘It had better be,’ I added – but I added it to myself. By 1997, Hong Kong’s population could be six million or more. If only a fraction of that number tried to escape by boat, there would be a lot of bodies afloat on the indifferent waters of the South China Sea.

  In a day or two, a telephone call from Angel Yip summoned me to collect a ticket and my passport, and I hurried to her office. Shanghai Hai Xing Shipping Company, the green and white ticket said, had given me Berth No.2, Cabin No.10. I handed over 626 Hong Kong dollars, and warmly thanked Miss Yip. ‘My pleasure,’ she said demurely.

  The next day, the day before sailing, I returned to the Luk Kwok to find a note from the telephone operator: ‘Mr Young. Miss Amgel [sic] she tel to you please take warm dresses because Shanghai it is o° very cold.’ What warm ‘dresses’ had I? One sweater, an anorak and a scarf: that seemed enough. I was wrong.

  The weather had not improved; a sulky drizzle still fell with a sort of despairing persistence. But that green and white ticket lay on my bedside table like a light in a dark room. I could hardly wait for the rendezvous at Tai Kok Tsui Pier.