Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

We reached the airport. The business of tickets and checking-in began. I shook Shi’s hand warmly and said thank you to Jade Dragon.

  Dreams cannot survive the bustle of airports. Under the departure boards, among the impersonal police uniforms and the businessmen’s Samsonite briefcases, my dream of Shanghai, Past and Present, shivered like a dying reflection in the Huangpu River. At the passport counter, the first, sudden roar of a jet engine. The dream image faltered and grew dim. A loudspeaker rasped, ‘Will all passengers for Hong Kong….’ I moved through the glass doors into the departure lounge. Now it was gone.

  Five

  On the seventh floor of the Swire Building facing Hong Kong’s harbour and its shipping sits a former acquaintance, Tim Bridgeman, of John Swire’s China Navigation Company. I had met him two years earlier after sailing in one of the company’s ships – the Hupeh.

  As I knew, Tim said, Swire’s had no passenger vessels going my way. Most ships of any kind crossed the Pacific from right to left, east to west, far more frequently than from left to right, which was my direction. But still … wait … yes, Swire’s had the Chengtu, a container ship. She would leave in a few days for Papua New Guinea and the Solomons. To be precise, she would call at the little ports of Wewak, Madang and Lae on the north-east coast of Papua New Guinea, then Rabaul in New Britain, then Kieta on Bougainville Island. She would go on to Honiara, the capital and the main port of the Solomons, and return. Nearly two weeks’ outward voyage, all told. Of course, I needn’t go all the way.

  There was no doubt about it. The Chengtu was what I needed – as far as Rabaul, anyway. After Rabaul, I could take my chance.

  ‘Good idea,’ Bridgeman said. ‘Nice place, Rabaul. Volcanoes.’ He himself had seen a number of the Melanesian islands and had even collected a few books about them.

  ‘I don’t know if you’re interested, but I found a remarkable old book in England on my last leave; in a secondhand shop, hidden away, you know. It’s a collection of letters written to a friend in England by an Englishman – an oddball, I suppose – who had run away to the South Sea islands in the early part of this century.’

  ‘He liked the islands?’

  ‘Sometimes hated them, sometimes loved them. An odd bloke, I should think. Educated, literate. You’re going to be just about where he was.’

  He brought the book into his office next day, and so I held in my hand for the first time one of the most interesting books I have ever read – Isles of Illusion, a most vivid and full-blooded account of rough-and-tumble, almost piratical life in the copra plantations of the south-west Pacific between 1912 and 1923.

  ‘The writer of the letters was still alive when they were published,’ Tim Bridgeman said, ‘and he wanted to keep his real name dark. So he called himself Asterisk. Perhaps you will find out who he really was and what happened to him. Anyway, take it. Please don’t lose it, that’s all.’

  As I stood there, I flipped through a few pages. Bits of enlivening sentences sprang to my eye: ‘One sits at table,’ I read, ‘with known murderers.’ And: ‘It’s the slavery business I cannot stand.’ And ‘… shot ’im, of course I shot ’im, and I’d shoot again tomorrow….’ It sounded promising. I thanked Tim, bore the book away and locked it in my metal suitcase as carefully as if it were a second passport.

  ‘See David Walker in his office about details of when and where to board the Chengtu,’ Tim had said. I had a few days to wait, but I wasn’t worried. With my onward berth in my pocket, so to speak, I could relax, and time passed swiftly in a whirl of small events.

  *

  First, Wei Kuen and Ah Po returned by ship from Shanghai. They were in transports of joy because they had both been allowed to bring their wives with them. At the Luk Kwok that evening, Wei Kuen pumped my hand with little excited barks of ‘Yes, yes…. Good news, good news.’ He trotted about the room, his round redcurrant face beaming. From Ah Po I got a hug and a wet kiss on the cheek. They were ecstatic.

  Wei Kuen insisted that I go at once to see his home in a high, dilapidated building in the far, poor side of Kowloon, so high that I was panting by the time we reached his door down a narrow corridor. Shun Ling politely took my hand.

  ‘We sleep here,’ Wei Kuen said. They did everything there, except wash and cook. I saw a metal two-tiered bunk that filled one wall. A table with drawers, one dwarf wardrobe with three or four cheap suitcases on it, a plastic clothes bag and a smaller table with a modest television set on it took care of the remaining space. By way of decoration, a tin of Ovaltine stood on a shelf and a small plastic duck flew up a wall. The room – that is all their home was – was very clean. I can’t even remember a chair; I perched on the lower tier of the bunk.

  From a drawer, Wei Kuen took a photograph album of colour pictures of his wedding – he solemn, in a dark suit with a white plastic flower in his buttonhole; Shun Ling smiling, in sugar pink. Family and friends were red-faced from beer.

  Now, Wei Kuen said, we were celebrating another happy gathering. ‘Eat food.’ We walked downstairs to buy a cooked duck at a street stall lit by a pressure lamp, watching the stall-keeper divide the duck into chunks with deft, short chops of a cleaver. Through her big glasses, Shun Ling blinked at the neon street lights like a cat blinking at the moon. ‘The light!’ she exclaimed at intervals. After the semi-blackout of Shanghai the lights of Hong Kong amazed her. She said something, laughing, and Wei Kuen, too, laughed, as he translated it. ‘She says my duty now to help her have baby.’

  Ah Po and Ching Man lived quite far away behind Kai Tak airport, in another peeling urban rabbit warren which, Wei Kuen told me, has the highest crime rate in all Hong Kong. Every door in his building had a heavy metal grille, he said, and every window had bars. Ah Po had to unlock so many padlocks that it took him ten minutes to get into his own house.

  When we had arrived and waited to be let in through Ah Po’s defences, he waved us in, switched on his beautiful smile and announced, ‘We are to have a baby.’

  ‘That is, he wants to have baby,’ Wei Kuen explained. ‘You will be grandfather.’

  ‘Godfather.’

  ‘Godfather, sorry.’

  ‘I should like to be.’

  ‘We want you gran … godfather, too,’ Wei Kuen added.

  ‘I’d be proud.’

  There didn’t seem to be much room for babies here. Their room was just as overcrowded as Wei Kuen’s, with one additional obstruction – Ah Po’s goldfish bowl in which their small fish, more silver than gold, watched us, opening and closing their mouths as if trying to say something. Ah Po and Ching Man shared a tiny toilet and a poky little kitchen with seven neighbours and an army of oversized cockroaches.

  Ching Man would work in a factory: her salary, with Ah Po’s overtime, was needed to pay the rent. Even so, though they very much wanted a baby, they wouldn’t be able to keep it here. A baby would prevent Ching Man’s attendance at the factory. ‘The baby will be sent back to Shanghai, to Ching Man’s mother,’ Wei Kuen explained. Thus disencumbered, Ching Man could return to work. What if Ah Po fell sick? Of course, if Ah Po fell sick … oh … that would be disastrous. ‘Ah Po cannot get sick,’ Wei Kuen said. ‘Not allowed.’

  Everybody laughed. It was best to laugh at so serious a possibility. No work, no money – ha-ha! Ah Po put his arm across Ching Man’s shoulders and laid his head fondly against hers. With his thick, long, black hair, sturdy limbs and big chest he looked like some handsome, exuberant animal. All he had to do was to stay that way. ‘Also need money for roller skating,’ he asked Wei Kuen to tell me.

  When I told them of my imminent departure, Wei Kuen and Ah Po immediately agreed to forego a few days of precious overtime. Should we do some sightseeing, they asked.

  ‘Good idea,’ I said.

  *

  At about that time Thomas Dor returned from Shanghai. We were just setting off for the aquarium at Ocean Park. ‘Oh, great. A nice day out,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘So modern, eh?’ He waved a hand from the taxi wind
ow at Central Hong Kong.

  ‘My wife says Cantonese talk of money all time. Very strange,’ said Wei Kuen. The high-rise flats and offices thrust up round us like imperial dragons’ teeth of gold, silver and ivory – the late twentieth-century equivalent of the ziggurats of the Shanghai Bund. One was like an up-ended gold bar; another was drilled full of holes as if a gangster had tommy-gunned daylight into a marble slab; and there was an emperor’s gravestone of wet obsidian. Somewhere here the chairman of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank was building a house for himself – over a million sterling pounds-worth, they said.

  ‘Quite a change from Shanghai, whaddaya say?’ Dor said.

  ‘You’re glad to be back here?’

  ‘Oh, I guess so. I like it here. Oddly enough, I like it there, too.’ We walked towards the cable cars that carry visitors to the aquarium over a mountain, as skiers on their way to the slopes. ‘Of course, you can do what you like here. I can’t get books in Shanghai. Or see movies. That’s boring. But even here, of course, I can’t afford to go to the movies all the time.’ He was teaching to make ends meet, he said, a few students on a freelance basis, and living in a small rented room.

  High on the promontory, seagulls shrieked over our heads. Islands far below lay like dozing dragons soaking up the unusual sunshine. A public toilet disgorged a chain of Japanese men; a middle-aged couple, arm in arm, licked pink ice creams; Chinese children ran about with a terrier straining at the end of a lead. The year 1997 and the Communist takeover seemed far away.

  Ching Man felt that Hong Kong people ate too much food; and so much traffic, she said, made her feel nervous. Dor sighed: ‘Shanghai could be really fine, but the Communists always must interfere, that’s the trouble.’ Again, he laughed. ‘If only they would get lost, how beautiful and calm Shanghai would be.’

  Suddenly he said, ‘Watch me.’ In mime he snatched something from his breast, clasped it in both hands, seemed to knead it as if it were a snowball. Then he tossed it – an invisible gobbet – to a seal that had leared up in the water begging to be fed. ‘Ha!’ Tom Dor laughed. ‘There goes all my care and woe.’ His hand patted my wrist. ‘Now we’ll have a real nice day out.’

  We stared at the beautiful world of the underwater Atoll Reef, at wavering sea anemones, at seahorses arching their spiny necks, at the bitter mouth of a shark. We squeezed into a bus to the Botanical Gardens. White-headed sparrow-finches busied themselves among the peeling paper bark trees and the long pods of the purple camel’s foot. The black earth of the flowerbeds was sheeted with camellias and leaves from dark copper bushes; fallen frangipani blooms lay like white stars on the grass. Tom Dor and Wei Kuen fed peanuts from a bag to an irritable macaw. Ah Po gazed at passing girls. ‘Weee-eee-eee,’ he cried as two European girls bounced chestily by. Ching Man was amused. She gurgled happily and rocked him back and forth by the arm. She was proud of him.

  *

  Ah Po took me on other adventures.

  In the cold and damp, arthritic pains had moved into my neck and shoulders and settled there. When I turned my neck, I heard a sound like sand grinding around at the base of my skull. I asked Ah Po and Wei Kuen if they knew of a good massage place. Kipling’s account of the massage Kim received at the hands of the Sahiba – a massage that brought him back from an exhaustion close to death – was an Asian luxury I had hoped some day to experience.

  Laying him east and west, that all the earth-currents which thrill the clay of our bodies might help and not hinder, they took him to pieces all one long afternoon – bone by bone, muscle by muscle, ligament by ligament, and lastly, nerve by nerve. Kneaded to irresponsible pulp … Kim slid ten thousand miles into slumber.

  That was what I needed now.

  ‘Not for games,’ I told Ah Po firmly – he had winked at Wei Kuen and made lewd gestures. ‘Proper massage. Not playing.’

  ‘No play-ing,’ Ah Po agreed, violently shaking his head and assuming a severe expression. ‘Ah Po wants to cure your aches in his way, as a personal present,’ Wei Kuen said. ‘Go with Ah Po.’ So I meekly followed.

  He didn’t seem too sure where to go at first. At the top of a dingy stairway in Wan Chai he talked quickly in Cantonese to a surly young man with a squashed-in face standing behind a desk. Money passed. As instructed, I lay down naked on a hard couch in a gloomy cubicle, none too clean. I had stuffed my socks with my money, and my shoes with my socks. A tiny puce towel was no defence against the cold draught that blew in under the curtain, and I shivered alone until a plump girl in an inadequate skirt ambled in, said ‘Hi’, and began to pinch my stomach in a perfunctory way, as if to convey that she didn’t think much of that. Was this massage? I wondered. Five minutes passed, then small black eyes peered querulously into mine. ‘Masturbate?’ she inquired.

  I smiled at her politely. ‘Only massage,’ I said, and added, in what I hoped were commanding tones: ‘On back.’

  A few mild pats to the midriff later she snapped, ‘Masturbate?’ rhetorically, and this time she snatched impatiently for my groin with the attitude of a hard-bitten hospital nurse instructed by matron to administer an enema and no shilly-shallying.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. I wriggled deftly out of her clutch, and sat up. ‘Want only massage,’ I told her, defensive and prim.

  Ah Po soon appeared looking smug, and I assumed he had accepted the full bill of goods. Why not? Ah Po would go through life happily incapable of refusing anything like this.

  ‘Good,’ he explained.

  ‘Ching Man will hear of this.’ He pretended to look alarmed, repeating his wife’s name fondly and making little soothing Chinese noises at me. It was all very well for him, but I had paid too much money for a few pokes in the stomach, my shoulders still ached, and when I twisted my head I heard the familiar sound of grating sand at the base of my skull. It seemed to have grown louder.

  Ah Po was mortified. He was determined to do me some good. ‘He wants to make you happy,’ Wei Kuen said, encouragingly, on our return. ‘He will take you to another place.’

  Next day Ah Po came to the hotel bearing a surprising present – a stuffed woodcock on a wooden stand. It had a long beak and a crafty, though generally benevolent, expression. I thanked Ah Po profusely, stood the woodcock on the table, and followed him this time to an all-male sauna. I didn’t mind that. Masseurs, I am inclined to think, are often better at massage than masseuses – a simple question of strength.

  The sauna Ah Po chose was a bright, clean, crowded establishment in Kowloon – no doubt about its respectability – where brisk young Chinese led us to comfortable chairs in a darkened room. We were swaddled in towels and given pale tea with large green leaves floating on it. There were goldfish in bowls, racks of Chinese movie magazines, and a colour television set quietly gabbling Cantonese. People talked in low voices – unlike Westerners, Asians do not feel lack of noise to be a threat. I was the only foreigner. A nude Gulliver in a nudist Lilliput, I attracted discreet attention.

  The social diversity of a sauna – or its lack of it – can be observed in its changing room. Here T-shirts, frayed jeans, suits and ties hung side by side. Pale clerks, businessmen wearing gold chains and spectacle frames, sun-darkened men straight from the nearest building site – ‘a bath-house is a democracy,’ a Hammam owner in Baghdad once said to me. He had that very day handled (literally) two ministers, the Iraqi national football team, several well-known singers, radio announcers, office and factory workers….

  In this bath-house naked Chinese, ivory-skinned, almost hairless but for black, spiky tufts at armpit and groin, wandered languidly about, plunged gasping into the near-freezing pool or lay floating in the hot one from which steam rose like marsh gas. The echoes of the waterfalls that fed them whispered round walls of white and blue fish-patterned tiles.

  In the small, wood-lined sauna, I thought of the locomotive executions in Shanghai in 1927: twenty minutes of this heat and my own skull would snap. I watched the sweat spurt obscenely off a man who had spent a fortun
e on tattoos: red and blue dragons writhed over his chest, across his back and shoulders, and along his arms; their tails and wingtips disappeared up his neck into his long hair and down his legs to his calves, so vividly alive that you wanted to beat them off him. One serpent dived between his buttocks and seemed to disappear up his rectum. A crew-cut man nearby read a newspaper, uttering guttural gasps and groans of … anger, pain, amusement? His nose had a serious kink in it and his eye sockets had the puffy look of a habitual fighter. A secret society boss, a television wrestler? Over his shoulder, I saw on the damp printed page a photograph of a football match – sports news, not crime. Below me, a young man lay supine: a gold-coloured neck chain gleamed on an alabaster chest and a clump of pubic hair stuck stiffly up like black pampas grass.

  As for Ah Po, he refused the hot-box, explaining with gestures that it brought his skin out in a rash, and crouched, hull-down in the warm pool, like an albino water buffalo. Around him, the sauna’s clients abandoned themselves to the hot water and to the abstracted contemplation of the no longer private parts that floated before them like pale lotus buds in a painted pond on a Chinese scroll.

  Only three massage room couches out of a dozen were occupied by dim, white cocoons. Kim could have expected no more of the Sahiba: the hands of my masseur were small precision instruments, expert crackers of joints and poppers of vertebrae. The half-moon Oriental eyes looked down, reassuring. Crack … crack … crack-crack! A clock ticked; someone snored. Soon, lips to my ear – ‘Walk on back?’ Careful feet began a promenade from pelvis to sand-filled neck, as if a tightrope walker was feeling his way along a dangerously frayed high wire. Vertebrae gave out sounds of roasting chestnuts, and aching muscles shrieked most satisfactorily. Kim’s massage had brought him back from the exhaustion of death but, in its less drastic way, this was the most expert massage I have ever had. ‘Finish,’ the young acrobat murmured at last and sprang down to earth. Fingers moved diplomatically under the towels, and in my ear, faint as a breath – ‘You like? …’