We made it to Boundary Street by the middle of the day.
Years later, when I told my grandfather the story of how we came across the border, he said, ‘I always did have a soft spot for the Gurkhas.’
Chapter Three
When we first arrived in Hong Kong my mother and I went to stay with her relatives in Mongkok. Their father, a first cousin of my mother, had fled to Hong Kong in 1949. He had been a local official in the Kuomintang. He had a bullet wound to the side of his abdomen where he would sometimes let me put my finger. Later, when I had a scar from a smallpox vaccination, I pretended that too was a bullet wound.
We all lived in one room. The apartment was on the eighth floor of a block. It was very difficult but I was too young to understand. Before long my mother got a job working in a pharmacy and, not long after that, we were given a room of our own. I don’t know how we jumped the queue. But my mother’s cousin was a big man in the electricians’ union and had his old Kuomintang connections and also was on the Residents’ Committee. I began to go to school properly at St Mary’s. I was very good at mathematics because of my great-aunt’s teaching but my Cantonese was not good and people laughed at my accent. So my mother’s cousin began to teach me Wing Chun fighting and I got into some fights, which I won. The Fujianese had a reputation of being very tough. At one point I was loosely attached to a group of other Fujianese and things might have become difficult. My mother did not know. But I got a scholarship to senior school and left them behind. The scholarship made my mother very happy.
Because of the Cultural Revolution, I had had no real experience of school. Once I began to win fights, I found that I liked school very much. The teachers were strict but they were consistent and I found that reassuring. My mother was much happier than she had been in Shen Lo. She told me once that when she got to Hong Kong she realised that she had been frightened every moment of her life for the previous five years. I missed living on the sea. I missed the air and the fishing boats. But in every other respect Hong Kong was better. A big family who had two apartments on our floor, the Yips, most of whom had come from Guangzhou ten years before, adopted us and made us feel part of their big family. Yip Xu was a week older than I was and we played together all the time. I helped him with his schoolwork and he let me ride his bicycle. My mother rose in her work until she was managing a branch of her pharmacy in Tsim Sha Tsui. Once she had learned good Cantonese, she began to take English lessons three nights a week.
Two days after Chinese New Year in 1984, my mother came and interrupted me while I was studying. I remember the moment well because I had just bought a Casio pocket calculator with my laisee money for that Chinese New Year. It was the first calculator I had bought with an LCD display. I would be eighteen that year and was preparing for my examinations. My intention was to study electrical engineering at the Chinese University near Sha Tin.
‘Ah Man, can I speak with you,’ my mother said. I knew this formula: it meant an important subject of general significance rather than a minor discussion or rebuke. I switched the calculator off. ‘Do you remember the stories we used to tell you about your grandfather – your father’s father?’
‘Of course.’
I had grown up hearing about the great love affair, and how he had stayed behind to fight the invading Japanese.
‘There is something I have not told you. When you were a child I did not know it. I became aware of it after we had moved to Hong Kong. I could not decide when to tell you so I decided to wait until you were eighteen. I will not say what you should do. But I think it is time for you to know. It is this: your grandfather is still alive. He still lives in Hong Kong.’
‘I thought he died fighting the Japanese.’
‘That is what the story was, but it is not true.’
She handed me a piece of paper. It said: Tom Stewart, Deep Water Bay Hotel, Deep Water Bay Road, Hong Kong.
‘How … why …?’
‘My cousin knew the story. Someone he knew did repair work at this hotel, and mentioned someone, and he recognised the name. It is the same man. He was in prison during the war with the Japanese.’
I did not know what to do. My first thought was that I could never speak to the man. He was nothing to do with me. I felt anger: as if he were to blame for something. But in a few minutes that passed. He had not done anything to me. Then I thought that if I went to see him he would simply refuse to believe I was who I said I was. Anyone from my grandmother’s village could tell the same story. I could be an impostor. I could be in search of an inheritance. I would go and see him and he would walk away refusing to acknowledge me. I lay in bed and imagined that. When I woke up in the morning there was an envelope propped up beside my bed. I recognised it. It was the letter my grandmother had written to my grandfather during the war, when she was in China and he was in Hong Kong, and neither of them knew if the other was alive.
I went on the bus to Deep Water Bay to look at the hotel. It was a long low building above the road. I walked up the driveway. A Chinese man in a white uniform was polishing a car. I had no plan and did not know what to do so I turned around. I waited at the bus stop while two buses went past. Then I saw a European man come down the drive and head towards me. He was going in the direction of the beach. He was an old man but still straight. He had white hair and a big nose. He walked quickly and swung his arms. We looked at each other as he walked past. I knew it must be him.
Two weeks later I went back and waited outside the hotel again. I wanted to watch my grandfather and to understand what kind of man he was. But I did not see him. The next day I went back, this time borrowing Xu’s new motorcycle. A taxi pulled up at the hotel. My grandfather came out of the hotel and got into it. I followed him to Central where he went to the post office. Then he walked to the Peak Tram and went up the Peak. I left the motorcycle chained up and followed him. I stood at the back of the tram. When he got out he set off to walk around the road at the top of the hill. I started to follow but realised I was much too conspicuous. There was only one way he could go in any case. So I waited by the terminus for him to appear at the other end of the circular walk. I waited for an hour. He went to get a taxi. There was a queue and some Europeans began to cause trouble. They were going to beat my grandfather. I had a fight with them and went away with him in a taxi. Then I told him who I was. What I remember most is that he did not for a second doubt or suspect me. He knew it was true. He looked very pale. He kept saying:
‘I had no idea.’
*
My grandfather paid for all my education from the time we met. He asked us to move in with him, but my mother and I thought it would be too strange to move from Mongkok to the Deep Water Bay Hotel. Instead he began subsidising our living costs. At first my mother wanted to resist but he was very firm and asked if she could let him do so as a gift to him. He understands face. Then when I got into the university to study electrical engineering, he helped with fees, and when my mother was sick for a year and had a series of operations, he paid for all that too.
I liked university. I liked the fact that it was out in the New Territories. I liked the feeling that people could think and talk about anything they wanted. By now I thought of myself as a Hong Konger, and I was proud of Hong Kong. There was more politics than I had expected. There was a club where I kept up my Wing Chung. There were many girls.
In the first week of the electrical engineering course, I met my future business partner, Lee Wong-Ho. We sat beside each other in a lecture. Afterwards we began to talk. He was more definite than other people our age. He was very confident. His parents had fled from Guangzhou in the fifties. We kept talking after the lecture and on the MTR home. He lived not far away from me in Mongkok. We were excited by the fact that we got on so well. As we parted on the street he said:
‘Let’s go into business together and make a hundred million US dollars.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
Ah Wong had many friends. He had more friends than I did
even though I was more sociable. People were drawn to his certainty. One of them was a girl called Sha Lin-Xu who was studying dentistry. Her English name was Lily. After a few meetings in groups, I asked her to go and see a film with me. She refused and we did not speak properly for almost three years.
‘I thought you were stupid,’ my wife told me later. ‘Always making jokes in your Fujianese accent, so proud of yourself for always being in the top three of your class.’
‘You thought I was stupid because I used to come top in the class?’
She made a dismissive face and a gesture of sweeping something away with both hands. I did not pursue the question.
Wong and I had an understanding that after university we would go into business together. But first we would need to spend time working to make money and to see what opportunities there were. I went for interviews before my final term and got a job as an engineer with a company that made industrial boilers. It was a family firm and chances for promotion were limited but it was an opportunity to learn. This was in summer 1989. Wong got a job working for an architect who specialised in converting and fitting out restaurants.
The day after he told me he had the job we heard the news of the Tiananmen massacre. Everyone was shocked and angry. The atmosphere of Hong Kong changed. We went on a protest. We marched through Central. There were banners accusing the Communist Party leaders of murder. There were rumours about how many hundreds of people had been killed. Most of the victims were students our own age. Some of the people in the square were distantly known as friends of friends or relatives. Sha Lin-Xu came with us. She was crying and chanting slogans at the same time. I was so caught up in the feelings about Tiananmen that I forgot to try to impress her. In the demonstration we were separated from the rest of our group and I went home on the MTR with her. There were other demonstrations in the next few days and we met several more times.
‘She likes you,’ Wong told me one night after the three of us had been to see a film together.
‘She doesn’t seem to,’ I said, though I hoped I was wrong.
‘I’ve known her since she was three years old and I can tell.’
So the next day I called her up and asked her on our first proper date, just the two of us, not even a demonstration to go to. She said yes. We went to see a Jackie Chan film. We were married six months later.
I know that my grandfather read my grandmother’s letter, because I asked him and he told me. But he never told me what it said.
Chapter Four
We bought the house in Mosman and moved to Sydney in 1996, four years ago. I felt that with the handover to China coming I should do something about my family’s security. Australia has a program of accelerated immigration for prospective citizens with sufficiently high net capital. To qualify for Australian citizenship it is necessary to spend two years in the country: seven hundred and thirty days. It is not necessary for these days to be consecutive. My mother, wife, daughter, father-in-law and mother-in-law all qualified within seven hundred and thirty days of their arrival in Sydney and are now all Australian citizens. I had so far accumulated a hundred and eighty-four days towards the necessary total. It was a source of contention with my wife.
‘By the time you have spent two years here you will be three hundred years old,’ she said.
‘My work will not always make these demands on me,’ I said.
‘You are a spaceman. Live on aeroplanes. Always breathing that bad air.’
‘If I travelled by boat and train, I would be away for much longer.’ The argument went on from there.
But my wife was right. I spent too much time travelling. The headquarters of our company were in Hong Kong, where I had an office in Tsim Sha Tsui. There was a small room there, once a cupboard, where I had a bed I sometimes used. When I had more time, and the ferries were convenient, I went to stay with Grandfather on Cheung Chau. I worked on my computer on the ferry, and I had a three-band mobile phone which works everywhere I go. My partner also had one. Sometimes he rang me when I was on the ferry and he was at our factory in Ho Chi Minh City. Sometimes he rang me when he was in the office and I was in Shanghai or Sydney. Once I was on the toilet in a hotel in Chengdu in Szechaun province.
Our company was called AP Enterprises. My Chinese name is Ho Man-Wei; my English name is Matthew. My partner, Lee Wong-Ho, has the English name John. Our company manufactures and sells air conditioners. We specialise in industrial-sized solutions for buildings and industrial plants. This is a big growth area in China, which is the principal focus of our business. We own a franchise of a German company called Weigen AG. Our business plan in the medium term is to concentrate on the industrial aspects of air conditioning. Then as China becomes more prosperous, we aim to move into the market for personal and domestic air conditioning. This is an undeveloped area of enormous potential. At the time I am describing, our head office was in Kowloon, and we had subsidiary factories where the machines were constructed in Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Ho Chi Minh City. Hong Kong was extremely important to our business as the legally incorporated basis for our company. There is no company law in mainland China so it can be a difficult place to transact business.
Unfortunately there was a problem with our plan and with our company. We were running out of money. In the aftermath of the Asian crash in 1997 we took the opportunity to expand aggressively, confident that the downturn was a temporary one. We borrowed heavily from banks. We bet the company on rapid expansion. But expansion was not rapid. The region recovered more slowly than we expected. In addition, we had problems at our factories in Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City. I was facing the prospect of losing everything which I had worked to build up since arriving in Hong Kong as a refugee. It was the most difficult time in my life. At night I would have dreams about being back in Shen Lo during the Cultural Revolution, with my mother and wife and daughter, in front of a crowd shouting slogans at us.
Chapter Five
‘I have to be honest, I don’t think Ah Li’s lobster is as good as it used to be,’ Grandfather said as we walked up the hill to his house on Cheung Chau. We had met in the village and had dinner at the tea house.
‘Sometimes it’s good, sometimes less good,’ I said. ‘That was always true.’
‘The noodles were good.’
‘His noodles are always good.’
Food is one of the interests we have in common.
Grandfather was a little out of breath by the time we got to his house, but he walked up the hill without stopping. His walking has been very good for his health. Also he drinks a lot of tea and coffee, which helps keep him thin. He insists on living by himself even though he is now eighty-seven. He has a girl from the village who helps with the cleaning and cooking.
Grandfather was the first person I ever knew who had money. His way of living influenced me a great deal. His front garden has raked pebbles and a Japanese stone lantern. He keeps it in order himself. Inside the hall there is an umbrella stand. We have a similar one in Sydney and I also have one in the hall of our apartment in London. It rains more in Sydney than it does in London, but the weather in London is less predictable so I use the umbrella more when I am there.
The living space of Grandfather’s house is a big room with a dining table at one end and comfortable chairs at the other. When he is on his own my grandfather uses the dining table as his desk. It was covered in a big pile of papers, which I recognised as the book written by a dead friend which he had been trying to have published for many years. One wall of the room is dominated by a window which looks out over the South China Sea. French windows open to a patch of garden at the back. The side wall is given to bookcases. The other two walls are covered in photographs of me and my wife and Mei-Lin and my mother and my wife’s parents. A small door leads to the kitchen.
I ask about the manuscript approximately once a year. Any less would show I have no interest. Any more would be to touch too often on a painful subject.
‘Any news?’ I said.
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My grandfather’s face changed. He looked away from me as he put his wallet and keys down on a side table. There was a twist to his expression.
‘Well, something a bit different. I’ve had an unsolicited expression of interest and a request to look at the book.’
‘But Grandfather! This is excellent news!’
‘There’s a catch. I can’t accept it.’
He was reluctant to talk more.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘It’s a new outfit called Hong Kong Heritage. A press. It’s part of the Wo empire. I won’t have anything to do with it. An editor there heard of the book. It’s not so surprising, everyone with half a mind in publishing has been sent the damn thing at least once. So I’ve been drafting a polite letter telling her to piss off.’
Grandfather will not have any contact with any part of the Wo family’s business enterprises. He will not watch their TV station, listen to their radio station, go to films made by the studios they partly own, eat in any of the hotels or restaurants they own, visit shops situated on any of their properties, buy or read anything published by any of the book companies in which they have a stake, or travel on the airline in which they have a share. If the ferries were sold off and the Wos bought them, he would swim to Cheung Chau. Like many other Hong Kong tycoons the Wos gave enormous amounts of money to the British Conservative Party to fight the 1992 general election. I once asked my grandfather, as a joke, if that meant that the British government was another thing that the Wos owned, so that he wouldn’t be able to go to Britain until a different government was in office. I thought that was not a bad joke. He walked out of the room. I have a business contact at the Wo company whom I have never been able to use for fear of upsetting my grandfather. The irony is that I don’t even know what the source of his grievance with the Wos is, since he refuses to tell me.
Fragrant Harbour Page 28
