Gweilo

by Martin Booth

  Although tiny, these firecrackers packed a punch sufficient to blow a five-inch-wide, two-inch-deep crater in the earth of a pot of the chrysanthemums that decorated the hotel front lawn. It was easy once you realized that the gunpowder was concentrated in the middle of the firecrackers. If you held one by the base, gripping it between two fingernails, you could light it and let it explode with no danger – so long as you kept your eyes closed. The first I held as it went off left a tingling feeling in my fingers. The second hurt but machismo demanded I did not show it and lose face. Thereafter, we embarked upon torn thumb fights, hurling them at each other. No-one was hurt. It was good seasonal fun.

  The first day of the fortnight-long, but not continuous, festival was quiet. All the shops in Soares Avenue were shut. The hotel room boys who were my friends gave me lai see and I returned the compliment, having been tipped off to do so. Lai see was a small red paper packet containing a small amount of money. It was not so much a gift as an omen of good luck and prosperity for the year ahead. I was warned by Ching not to swear, not to mention death, illness, bad luck or anything of that ilk, even in passing. Our amah refused to take anything but Chinese New Year's Day off, despite my mother's protestations; yet she did accept a thirteenth month's salary as was common practice.

  On the second day, the celebrations started in earnest.

  Across the road from the rear of the Fourseas was a pro-Communist secondary school which occupied a triangular plot between Emma, Julia and Soares Avenues. Every morning, the pupils gathered in the school yard behind twelve-foot-high stone walls like those of a prison and sang patriotic songs about labouring in the fields, striding ahead for liberty, equality and fraternity under the red flag and in the footsteps of Mao Tse-tung. The accompaniment was provided by a phonograph with a set of well-worn records.

  Shortly after dawn, the school staff had hung strings of firecrackers over the walls. In all, there must have been two hundred of them, the walls looking as if they had suddenly been festooned with vermilion ribbons. And these firecrackers were by no means the little bangers such as might have graced a British Bonfire Night party. These were the size of a grown man's index finger, the fuses woven together around a core of hessian twine. What was more, they were grouped in threes down the twine. The aim was not to provide a display but to create as much noise as possible to drive off devils, demons and the pantheon of other supernatural ne'er-do-wells which every Chinese believed occupied every spiritually inhabitable niche.

  I went into the street to watch. One of the teachers appeared at the corner with Soares Avenue, another at the corner with Julia Avenue. Both held large joss-sticks, the smoke drifting away on a keen breeze: it was cold enough to wear a padded jacket. There was no-one else in the street. A whistle was blown in the school yard. The teachers ignited the end of the first string of firecrackers, moving immediately on to the next. After a brief fizzle, the explosions began in the first string, then the second, then the third . . . In a matter of seconds, my head was filled with the report of the explosions. They echoed off the walls of the buildings as they might have off the sides of a canyon. The air went blue with smoke, and the acrid smell of gunpowder was suddenly inescapable and almost choking. A dense blizzard of paper blew along the street, thicker than snow. The explosions continued uninterrupted for at least twenty minutes.

  I re-entered the hotel with a blinding headache but a feeling of elation. This had been an exhibition of raw power, the elimination of demons, the establishment of good fortune and the cleansing of the underworld.

  Over the next few days, Kowloon sounded as if it were a war zone. In some places the streets were inches deep in fragments of acrid-smelling paper. The traffic stopped to allow fifty-foot strings of firecrackers to explode down the front of the taller buildings. Some of these, every two or three feet, contained an extra large firecracker the size of a tin can which went off with an ear-splitting detonation. Gradually, the firecrackers died down and a semblance of peace returned. On either side of many shops and doorways, new red scrolls with black writing upon them were pasted over the previous year's, presaging good fortune.

  When I visited the temple to Kwun Yum (or Kwan Yin), the goddess of mercy, it was doing brisk business. The temple was always in semi-darkness, even on the sunniest day. At the rear of the altar, mysterious in the half-light of guttering red-wax candle flames and a few bare, low-wattage light bulbs, the deity's effigy sat demurely, with attendant gods to either side, leering through the twilight. The altar was hung with an embroidered cloth in imperial yellow, red and gold. From the tarnished brass incense burner rose a column of smoke.

  In front of the altar was a throng, mostly of women and children, making offerings, praying or casting fortune-telling sticks. Amongst the offerings being made, mostly of fruit and food, was money. I was amazed to see otherwise poor-looking women dropping fistfuls of banknotes into a brass cauldron of hot embers. In a flare of flame, they were incinerated to a drift of ash rising on the hazy heat of the fire below. It was not until a partially scorched note escaped the fire that I came to see the currency. It was not dollars issued by the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank but Hell's Banknotes in vast denominations – $100,000, $1,000,000, $10,000,000. This was celestial, not terrestrial, cash.

  As all this went on, a low-toned bell sounded, striking once every time a worshipper made a donation of real money to the idol. The temple staff hurried between the devotees, removing the burnt-out joss-stick and candle splints, pushing aside the last round of offerings, the food by now inedible as a result of the cascade of ash falling from the incense coils. One man replaced candles on the altar, two others trimmed wicks and cursorily removed ash from the effigy with a duster made of ginger cockerel's feathers fixed to a long bamboo cane.

  Pushing through the crowd of worshippers, I purchased a fifty-cent pack of joss-sticks from an elderly man by the door, lit them all from a candle and stuck them in the urn full of sand provided. It was not that I was a devotee of Kwun Yum but that I was bent on doing what everyone else present was – hedging their bets for the coming twelvemonth by getting on the good side of the gods.

  The general stores in Soares Avenue opened on a self-agreed rota throughout the first five days of the festivities. There was a purpose to this: not only did they open for the convenience of their customers but also to collect debts and settle tabs unaddressed before the new moon. By the time the new year started in earnest, all outstanding debts should have been paid. The day before the holiday commenced, Ching and I went into one of the shops to buy a packet of wah mui. The shopkeeper and his family were standing before a shrine positioned in a scarlet-painted box at the rear of their shop. I watched for a while in silence.

  'What are they doing?' I whispered to Ching.

  'This is the shrine of the kitchen god,' he explained.

  The family kow-towed several times to the shrine then the shopkeeper's wife smeared the god's face with something in a bowl.

  'What is that?' I murmured.

  'Sweet food,' Ching replied. 'Soon, the kitchen god will go to heaven and tell the Jade Emperor if this has been a good family for a year. To make sure he says good words, they give him rice and honey. Make him talk sweet.'

  This done, the shopkeeper tore out from the shrine the picture of the god, printed on red paper and faded over the year. He then took it outside on to the pavement and set light to it.

  'Now the god goes to heaven,' Ching said.

  This act smacked to me of writing a wish list to Father Christmas, whose non-existence I no longer questioned, and sending it up the chimney, but I kept my thoughts to myself. When the ashes had drifted down the street to mingle with the firecracker confetti, a new picture was pasted into the shrine and the shopkeeper stepped back behind his counter.

  The lighting of firecrackers was not restricted to Chinese New Year. Whenever a new shop or business opened, the front of the building was decorated with bamboo scaffolding covered in paper flowers and characters propit
iating good fortune. Long strings of firecrackers suspended from roof to pavement would be lit, the street soon filling with choking smoke and the continuous cacophony of explosions. If the building was over five storeys high, they could last an hour.

  At only one event were firecrackers not let off – funerals.

  When I saw my first Chinese funeral procession, I thought the circus had come to town. The initial indications of the approaching funeral procession were the muted sounds of inharmonious music. I went out on to the communal balcony of the hotel to watch.

  Soon, a small truck appeared further down Waterloo Road. A large bamboo frame had been fixed to the front of the truck and adorned with paper flowers, gold and scarlet bunting and, I presumed, the name of the departed in huge characters. In the centre of this was a large monochrome photograph of the deceased. This vehicle was followed by a two-hundred-yard procession containing delivery tricycles similarly decorated. Interspersed between these were men carrying tall poles topped by Chinese fringed umbrellas, a large paper orb with a ladder rising through it and a number of other incomprehensible ceremonial items. At the rear of this came the coffin. I had expected a hearse but it was in fact carried in a sort of palanquin between eight perspiring coolies. The sides were decorated with white and yellow flowers. The coffin itself was highly polished and of a curious shape, in section rather like a four-leafed clover. To the rear of the coffin walked the relatives of the deceased, the foremost being a small boy of about my age wearing a white cloak. Every so often, he wiped his eyes and nose on the sleeve of his coat.

  'Who is he?' I asked a room boy standing beside me.

  'He dead man son. Now he Number One man for him family. Big job for him.'

  The other primary mourners also wore white cloaks whilst everyone else was soberly dressed, with the men sporting black arm bands. It was all most dignified – except for the music.

  Just behind the leading truck walked a small classical Chinese band of about eight musicians. They wore white bandsmen's uniforms with peaked caps and looked like a rather run-down English seaside town band. The music they played was doleful, the woodwind instruments high-pitched and keening, the small gong cracked and discordant. Not far behind them came a band equipped with Western brass instruments. They played 'When the Saints Go Marching In' – badly. Three other bands in the procession played 'Doin' What Comes Naturally' (from Annie, Get Your Gun, a recent cinema hit), 'Green-sleeves' and finally, on the correct instruments, Chinese classical music once again. Each band played in apparent ignorance of the others so the whole musical contribution to the event was a raucous medley of disconnected tunes from three cultures.

  My mother, who watched this procession with me, remarked that she preferred firecrackers to the assassination of music but she had by then forgotten the five-day migraine that marked Chinese New Year.

  My father returned for good from Japan in the early summer of 1953. The Korean War was winding down, truce talks had been held and his job at the Sasebo naval base near Nagasaki was becoming redundant.

  Immediately after my father's return, moves were put underway for us to leave the Fourseas. It was deemed an unsuitable billet for a family. There was, however, a shortage of quarters due to the pull-back from Japan, so we were tabled to move temporarily into a flat on the top floor of a building in Boundary Street, pending a more suitable quarter falling vacant.

  Although less than a mile or two from the Fourseas, I was, at first, reluctant to go. I had many friends and acquaintances amongst the hotel room boys and in the streets of Mong Kok, with which I was as familiar as a rickshaw coolie or a pedlar. It would seem strange living in a self-contained home once again, without them around.

  As the name implied, Boundary Street marked the periphery between British Kowloon and the hinterland of the New Territories, ceded to the British for ninety-nine years from 1898. As our flat was on the northern side of the street, this worried me. We were being housed in a no man's land that was only provisionally British. For several weeks, I had nightmares of being overrun in my sleep by Communist Chinese troops, bayoneted in my bed or sent to a slave labour camp, nevermore to see my mother.

  In spite of my misgivings, I was beginning to feel excited by the impending move. It meant new horizons, new challenges and, more importantly, a new area to explore. Yet, two weeks before the move, the most dramatic event of the months I lived in the Fourseas occurred on Ho Man Tin hill.

  Late one afternoon, I was walking back from school alone when I saw a thin wisp of smoke rising from over the hill. I gave it no thought and trudged on down Waterloo Road. As I reached the hotel, I saw the wisp was now a column. People were running down the track by the school and spilling out on to the main road, blocking the traffic. In a few minutes, the smoke was denser, rising faster with sparks glimmering in it, despite the sunlight. Then I heard the far-off bells of fire engines.

  I ran into the hotel garage, dumped my Hong Kong basket and headed for the hill. Hordes of squatters were pouring off it, every one carrying something. Even toddlers, one hand held by their mother, clumsily dragged a cooking pot or enamel basin. Adults laden with bedding – men with complete beds – struggled down the track, slipping on the loose gravel. Laden rickshaws wove between them. The exodus was orderly but noisy. Everyone was shouting.

  The police and the fire brigade turned up simultaneously. In minutes, hoses were snaking up the track and the police had instigated a cordon to prevent squatters returning to the fire to rescue more belongings. This, however, was soon considered futile so they took to directing the flow of people and getting the traffic moving again.

  I hurried to the bottom of the track. The smoke was by now hundreds of feet high but, the squatter area being over a ridge, I could not see the seat of the blaze. Consequently, I joined the throng of people returning to save their belongings.

  Cresting the ridge, I was so shocked by the scene before me I just stood still in stunned wonderment. In my naivety, I had assumed a squatter shack had caught fire and those running away with their belongings were simply being cautious. What lay before me was an inferno. At least half the squatters' shacks had been reduced to piles of smouldering ashes with, here and there, uprights burning brightly. The conflagration was moving through the area like a forest fire through a plantation of pines. The noise was terrifying, with tin sheeting cracking as it warped, explosions caused by tinned food and the incessant hiss and spit of burning wood accompanied by the crash of shacks caving in. A strong wind blew towards the fire, sucking in paper and scraps of cloth, feeding it with oxygen and peppering my legs with fine gravel. As the fire progressed, it instantly ignited whole shacks at a time. One moment, a flimsy building looked intact, the next it was alight. Before my eyes a shanty exploded as if an artillery shell had hit it. A fountain of flame rose from it only to die in the rising smoke.

  Ahead of the fire, people were running in and out of their shacks, piling their belongings on the ground, on handcarts, on their children. I circumnavigated the blaze, upon which the fire brigade were preparing to play their hoses, and started to gather up armfuls of clothing from a pile, folding them in on themselves to make a tight bundle. A young Chinese man ran out of a shack to accost me, stopped and went back in. I tumbled the rest of the pile into a sheet, tying the corners together, using them to pad out some rice bowls and other crockery. The young man appeared and added a framed sepia photo to the bundle. It showed a family group seated on upright chairs. In the centre sat an ancient woman with a baby on her knee, her feet tiny where they projected from under an old-fashioned long gown.

  I waited. The fire was moving nearer, and quickly. I could feel its intensity on my bare arms and legs. My eyes began to weep from the heat and smoke.

  'Wei!' I shouted. 'Ché! Ché! Fide! Fide!' (Hey! Go! Go! Quick! Quick!)

  My pronunciation and the grammatical accuracy of this dog-Cantonese were doubtless atrocious but more than sufficient. The man came out of the shack followed by a woman carrying a b
abe-in-arms. He was laden down with a very battered suitcase and a wooden box. I gathered up the pile of linen and crockery and, hugging it to my chest, started down the track. I could not see my feet and frequently stumbled. Once, I fell, but my burden broke my fall. In a crowd of others, I reached the police line and was allowed through by an English inspector.

  'Got a squatter hut, have we?' he enquired with a wry smile.

  'I'm just helping,' I answered.

  He looked at me for a moment and said, 'Where do you live, son?'

  'Down the road, sir,' I replied, jutting my chin in the direction of the Fourseas and hoping my politeness would deflect the ticking off likely to be coming next.

  'Well done, son,' he said and he patted my head. 'Go up that road over there.' He indicated Soares Avenue which, closed to traffic, was now a sort of squatter holding pen.

  Once there, the young man gave his name to an official and we were guided into Emma Avenue where the pavements were filling up with groups of squatters. They sat chattering and tidying their belongings. To my astonishment, no-one was looking miserable or crying or showing any real sign of distress.