Gweilo

by Martin Booth

  There was a touch on my head. It was the young man.

  'You luckee boy for me,' he said in pidgin English. 'T'ankee you plentee plentee.'

  'Martin,' another voice remonstrated, 'you're filthy.'

  My mother stood before me, arms akimbo. I put the pile of clothes and bedding down at my feet and studied myself. My legs and arms were covered in ash: no doubt my face and hair were, too.

  'What have you been doing?'

  'Dis you littul boy?' the young man asked my mother. 'He plentee good littul boy. Plentee good for me. You no beatee, missee. No beatee.'

  At this point, it came to my mother what I had done. She hugged me, ash and all. The young man touched my hair again, either for luck or in gratitude. His wife did likewise. I was sent in for a bath and my mother offered her assistance to a Red Cross worker.

  Lying in the warm water smelling of my mother's perfumed salts, I realized just how fragile life was, that everything one counted upon could come crashing down in less than the time it took for a double maths class. I also learnt that whilst it was one thing to live in a large box, a shack, a cockloft or between the shafts of a rickshaw, it was quite another to lose everything.

  6

  DENS, DUCKS AND DIVES

  133 BOUNDARY STREET HAD BEEN BUILT IN THE 1920S AS A bijou residence on the edge of the countryside. By the time we moved in, it had gone down in the world. The exterior stonework was blotched with dead lichen and algae, the kitchen was dark and dank, the servants' quarters smelt of mould and the flat roof leaked into the bathroom. The city had reached out to it and the countryside was no more, although the barren foothills of the Kowloon hills did come down to within a hundred yards of the garden of the ground-floor flat.

  Moving to a flat necessitated my mother employing more servants. As it was usual to employ a husband and wife wherever possible, the wash amah who had replaced Ah Fong was let go. She was genuinely sad at leaving us but my mother secured her a good job with an Army major and his wife who preferred to do her own cooking so only required an amah. That they had a blond-haired daughter no doubt helped to sweeten the bitterness of parting.

  After an in-depth culinary interview, my mother took on Wong and his wife, Ah Shun. With them came their four-year-old son, Chan-tuk, to whom my mother took an instant liking and nicknamed Tuppence.

  So far as we knew, Wong – whose references gave his name as Hwong Cheng-kwee – was a Shanghainese who, like so many others, was a refugee from Communism. He and Ah Shun had several other children whom they lodged in the New Territories or had had to leave with relatives in China. A tall, round-faced man, Wong had apparently worked in a top-class hotel in Shanghai as a pastry chef. At least, that was what one of his well-thumbed references stated. My mother gave him a month's probation. This ended after a day when he made his first sponge cake. It did not so much sit on the plate as float over it. We had never tasted anything like it. He had a permanent job from my mother's first mouthful. Ah Shun became the wash and sew-sew amah and the two of them shared the chores of keeping house.

  To say that Wong was a one-in-a-thousand cook-houseboy was not to be guilty of hyperbole. He was utterly superb, with the attentiveness of a high-class butler, the culinary skills if not of Escoffier then certainly of his sous chef, the attention to detail of a water-colourist and the mien of a true gentleman's gentleman. He and Ah Shun wore the customary sam fu white jacket and black, loose-fitting trousers with felt slippers, in which they glided across parquet floors they had so highly polished you could see the reflection of the windows in them. They also served at table, which at first I found most peculiar. I had been served in restaurants, on the Corfu and the like, but in our own home . . . It was like being a member of the aristocracy.

  There were some teething problems. Ah Shun starched my father's white shorts which he wore to the office. The hems chafed his legs raw. Thereafter, she artfully starched only the crease. When the monthly provisions bill came, my mother found Wong had used six dozen eggs, which accounted for the levitatory sponges. My mother asked him to cut down: then she saw he had used nine bottles of Heinz Salad Cream. As Wong did all the basic shopping, only discussing the matter of provisions or menus with my mother if she were holding a drinks or dinner party, this wanton purchase of salad cream seemed not only extravagant but suspicious. Wong was called into my mother's presence. It was not long before I was summoned too.

  'What is this?' my mother muttered, glowering at me as she held out the invoice.

  I was inclined to tell her it was the bill, but kept my peace.

  'This!' she repeated, indicating an item on the bill. 'And this. And this. Wong tells me this is your doing.'

  I had no idea why she was cross but I admitted I ate salad cream.

  'Eat it!' my mother replied. 'Wong tells me you put it on your bloody breakfast!'

  Every morning, I ate breakfast alone, after my father had departed for work in HMS Tamar and whilst my mother was still preening herself for a hard day at the canasta table. Wong always provided a fried egg on crisp fried bread, a fried tomato and stiff rashers of brittle, grilled bacon. I ate the bacon first with my fingers then waded into the remainder which I smothered with salad cream. How I first discovered this curious amalgam of tastes I do not know, but I loved it. Indeed, I could go through a bottle in three days, especially if I asked Wong for salad cream instead of Marmite and lettuce sandwiches to take to school. My father being at the office, I was not punished for my abnormal gourmandizing but that avenue of pleasure was promptly closed.

  Wong was paid $300 (approximately £19) a month plus an allowance of $75 for food. He lived with Ah Shun and Tuppence in the servants' quarters beyond the kitchen: a closed-in balcony and laundry sink, two small bedrooms equipped with cast-iron bunks and a shower room with a squat-down toilet which my father referred to (in what he claimed to be submariners' slang) as the shit-shave-shower-shampoo-and-shoeshine. Wong and his family used our kitchen to prepare their food but they ate it squatting on the balcony until my mother found out. Thereafter, they ate at the kitchen table.

  My mother found having servants somewhat disquieting and, if anything, ambiguous. She was a humanist at heart who believed no man should lord it over another. Yet here she was with two people who were there at her beck and call. Indeed, there were to be many times when my parents returned from a party in the early hours to find Wong staggering into the lounge, bleary-eyed and dopey with sleep, to see if they wanted a nightcap or a sandwich. She suffixed every request with please and thank you and made sure I did, too. It was impressed upon me that I should never make unreasonable demands of Wong or Ah Shun and I was never to say Fide! Fide! or Chop! Chop! (Quick! Quick!) at him. (I did once, out of pique, and he clipped my ear, whereby a mutual respect was born.)

  Although not much more than a mile from the Fourseas, the environs of the flat were very different. Close by was La Salle College, a major Roman Catholic school primarily for Chinese. To the north-west was the one-time garden suburb of Kowloon Tong, to the north were the barren lower slopes of the nine Kowloon hills. Indeed, the name Kowloon derived from the Cantonese gau lung, meaning nine dragons. To the south was a residential area and the wooded grounds of the Kowloon hospital. Only the foothills offered the slightest opportunity for exploration and that was soon exhausted, my only find being that of a white plaster-of-paris death mask in a cave and a large chunk of mauve transparent volcanic rock. My mother and I hoped it was beryllium, a piece of which had been found in Hong Kong the month before, making its finder rich. She took it to the geology department of the University. It wasn't beryllium but silicate – glass.

  Not a mile to the east, however, was the most romantic and allegedly dangerous place in the colony. It was called Kowloon Walled City.

  The name was a misnomer. It was not and never had been a city. It covered not much more than 25,000 square yards and, although it had been surrounded by a crenulated wall, the defences had been demolished by British prisoners-of-war un
der Japanese command and used as hardcore for an airport runway extension and sea wall.

  According to a history of Hong Kong owned by my mother, it had originally been established in the eighteenth century as a far-flung outpost of the Chinese empire; its subsequent history was convoluted and its sovereignty confused. After the British gained control of Hong Kong and, later, Kowloon at the end of the Opium and Arrow Wars in the early 1840s, the Chinese imperial government insisted on maintaining a local presence so the British turned a blind eye towards Kowloon Walled City. Behind its walls, a nominal Chinese garrison was maintained which primarily kept a watch on the foreign invaders and enforced Chinese law in the area not under colonial control. Pirates being a problem in the region, the mandarin stationed in the settlement was kept busy suppressing and executing them. When the New Territories were ceded to the British, Kowloon Walled City was to find itself twenty-five miles from the border with China, completely surrounded by British territory. The cessation treaty was also ambiguous. Kowloon Walled City was now, in effect, cut off and ruled and possessed by neither – or both – countries.

  It remained a backwater for fifty years, visited at the turn of the twentieth century by Europeans in Hong Kong for vicarious excitement, a fragment of the 'real' China on their doorsteps. Ruled by a mandarin from his yamen in the centre, it was quaint and exotic. The salacious aspect of the place lay in the fact that British law did not necessarily apply there, depending upon the interpretation of the treaty. Few Hong Kong policemen patrolled it and no government official collected taxes. The power supply was illegally tapped from the main grid and the water supply from the main. Kowloon Walled City was in effect a minute city state all on its own, arguably the smallest ever to have existed.

  When China fell to the Communists in 1949, many criminal refugees fled to Hong Kong, some of them gravitating to the walled city area where they quickly established fresh enterprises. When the buildings were full, they built more, many little better than substantial squatter shacks. A disastrous fire in 1951 destroyed half the city but gave the new arrivals the opportunity to clear and build: it was said they set the fire in the first place. Thereafter, Kowloon Walled City remained an enclave governed by no-one. It was to Hong Kong what the Casbah was to Algiers, with one exception: it was more or less closed to outsiders. Trippers avoided it. It was said that any European who entered it was never seen again unless floating out of it down the nullah that served as a sewer. If ever the police entered the area, they went in armed patrols of three.

  We had not been in Boundary Street a day when my mother took me aside.

  'Martin,' she started, signifying her seriousness, 'I know you like to roam and explore, and round here that's all right. But,' she continued, unfolding a map of Kowloon, 'you do not go even near here.'

  She pointed to the map. Kowloon Walled City was left as a blank uneven-sided square.

  'What is it?' I enquired.

  'Ask no questions and be told no lies,' my mother replied evasively, 'and don't go to find out.'

  To utter such a dictum to a street-wise eight-year-old was tantamount to buying him an entrance ticket.

  The following afternoon, homework hurriedly completed, I had a quick glance at the map and headed east down Boundary Street. In ten minutes, I was on the outskirts of Kowloon Walled City.

  Nothing indicated to me why this place should be forbidden. A number of new six-storey buildings were being erected, with several already occupied or nearing completion; and a lot of shanties and older two-storey buildings were leaning precariously. It looked like a squatter area but with permanent structures in the middle in ill repair. A hutong lay before me, winding into the buildings and shacks. There being, I reasoned, no way my mother was ever going to find out, I set off down the alleyway, easing my way past a man pushing a bicycle, the pannier laden with cardboard boxes. He paid me not the slightest attention.

  Through the open doors I spied scenes of industrial domesticity. To one side would be a hang or metal-framed bed, piled with neatly folded bedding; to the other several people seated at a table sewing, assembling torches, placing coloured pencils in boxes or painting lacquer boxes. Behind other doors were businesses, pure and simple. In one a baker was placing trays of buns in a wood-fired oven; in another, two men were involved in making noodles, swinging sheets of thin dough in the air around a wooden rolling-pin, the interior of their shack ghost-white under a layer of flour dust.

  Wherever I went, the air was redolent with the smells of wood smoke, joss-sticks, boiling rice and human excrement. The effluent from this community, I soon discovered, flowed down open gullies at the side of the hutongs to disappear through holes in the ground lined by stone slabs.

  Arriving at one of the older stone buildings, I was about to peer in through an open door when a Chinese man rushed out and slammed it shut. Stripped to the waist, he bore a coloured tattoo of a dragon on his back. He glowered at me.

  'Wat you wan'?' he asked.

  'Nothing,' I said, fighting to stop myself sounding guilty, although of what I did not know. Then, hoping it might soften him a bit, I added, 'Ngo giu jo Mah Tin.' I held my hand out. 'Net giu mut ye meng?'

  He was much taken aback by my introducing myself – especially in Cantonese – and it was at least thirty pensive seconds before he took my hand and firmly shook it. During that time, he eyed me up and down, much as a butcher might a bull being led to slaughter.

  'Mah Tin,' he said at last. 'Ngo giu jo Ho. Why you come?'

  'Just looking,' I answered, shrugging and adding in pidgin English, 'Come look-see.'

  'You no look-see,' he answered sternly. 'No good look-see for gweilo boy.'

  I smiled, nodded my understanding, said, 'Choi kin,' (goodbye) and turned to go.

  'You look-see,' he declared, changing his mind. He opened the door, indicating I follow him.

  What until now had seemed a harmless saunter through just another warren of passageways immediately took on a sinister aspect. No-one knew I was here. What, I considered, if this old stone building with its substantial door was the headquarters of the evil Fu Manchu? I had recently read Sax Rohmer. If I stepped over the high lintel, I could vanish. For ever. On the other hand, not to accept Ho's invitation would result in a massive loss of face. I would never be able to come here again: and I had seen nothing yet. And so, I threw caution to the wind and followed him into the building.

  The entire ground floor consisted of one vast room, heavy beams holding up the ceiling and second floor. It was furnished with upright rosewood chairs, the wood even darker with age, low tables and several ornately framed mirrors, the silvering missing in places. Halfway down the room stood a wooden screen, the top half pierced by intricate fretwork, the rest a painting depicting sheer-sided hills and lakes. I sensed I was being observed through it but, as I walked by the end, there was no-one there. The wooden floor was devoid of any covering. There was an air of much-faded gentility about the place.

  To the rear was a staircase beneath which a door opened and an old hunched woman entered, walking with the aid of a stick. She took one look at me and grinned toothlessly, hobbled to my side and, inevitably, stroked my hair. This put me at ease. First, Fu Manchu was hardly likely to employ crones (unless, god forbid, this was his mother) and second, my golden hair was a passport to my security. No-one would risk harming such a harbinger of good fortune.

  'You come.' Ho beckoned me up the stairs.

  I followed him into a room along three sides of which were placed wooden kangs. Upon one of these lay a supine man asleep upon a woven bamboo mat, his head on a hard Chinese headrest, his legs drawn up, his hands twitching like a dog's paws in a dream of chasing rabbits.

  'Nga pin,' Ho announced and beckoned me further towards the fourth wall, the whole length of which was shuttered. I refrained from asking him what nga pin was for fear of seeming ignorant. Again, the last thing I wanted to do was lose face with him. He unlatched one of the shutters and we stepped out on to the balcony
, which sloped forwards alarmingly towards a crumbling balustrade.

  From here, I was afforded a panoramic view of the walled city. The shacks were so tightly packed, it was well nigh impossible to see where the hutongs ran between them. Yet the real surprise was the few larger buildings tucked between them. One stood in a wide rectangular courtyard with a number of outbuildings close by; from another rose a faint cloud of bluish smoke which meant it had to be a temple. Three or four were in a row suggesting that, in olden days, they had stood upon a street. In the distance was Kowloon Bay, a cargo ship riding at a quarantine buoy. Over to my left was the bulk of Fei Ngo Shan, the most easterly of the Kowloon hills, the slopes sharp and clear in the late sun. To the south-west, indistinct in the haze, was Hong Kong Island.

  Ho took me back inside. We passed the sleeping man, who was beginning to wake, and descended the stairs which creaked loudly. Once outside, Ho bade me farewell and went back into the house, closing the door. I set off along the way I had come, considering to myself that I had taken a terrible risk. Other than a shop, I had never accepted an invitation into a building. Reaching the edge of the squatter shacks, and stepping out on to a road with traffic going by, I resolved not to be so foolhardy again. Yet, where Kowloon Walled City was concerned, I knew I had to return to investigate the temple and the building in the courtyard.

  When I returned to our apartment, I went into the kitchen where Wong was preparing supper and asked him what nga pin meant. He stopped stirring a pan for a moment, looked quizzically at me and replied, 'Opium.'

  On his return to Hong Kong, my father had taken delivery of a Ford Consul saloon which he promptly had resprayed two-tone grey with white walled tyres: my mother, with her penchant for Chinese names, called it Ch'ing Yan, which translated as Lover. Ch'ing Yan opened up a wide horizon for all three of us. It also gave my father a pastime. Never a man for a hobby, the car became the centre of his leisure activities. Having never owned a car before, he mollycoddled it as much as he might have done a mistress. The interior was kept pristine: no food or drink might be consumed therein. He checked the oil and tyres at least weekly and spent hours polishing the bodywork, dusting the interior and hoovering the carpets and seats. No-one was allowed to help in this endeavour. He rejected all the approaches of the itinerant car washers-and-waxers who did the rounds of residential areas every Saturday afternoon. When he saw Wong knocking dead leaves off the bonnet with a feather duster, he hurtled downstairs to stop him: the ends of the feathers, he explained, might be scratching the paint.