On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  ~

  Our flat – there are very few houses in Hong Kong – was on the seventh floor of a building named Vista Panorama, which the military residents had swiftly nicknamed Vista Paranoia. It stood on a slope above the main highway through the Lion Rock Tunnel, and in the path of the aircraft that were heading towards a chequer-board that indicated the flight path to the Kai Tak Airport runway. From our balcony we could see the faces of the passengers on the jumbo jets. During a typhoon those faces would be chalk white with fear and who could blame their owners? Below the balcony was a steeply-sloping dual-carriageway that was the Waterloo Road and on wet days there would be at least two or three crashes. On the first day there we witnessed a glazier’s lorry carrying dozens of panes of glass spinning out of control and smashing into the central barrier. The reader surely has the imagination to envisage the outcome.

  The civilian rent for a flat in Vista Panorama in 1988 was around £3000 per month, but we imagined that the armed services got special discounts or something. The car park underneath the flats was full of Rolls Royces owned by Chinese occupants of the building. Our twelve-year-old Honda sat quietly among them, saying nothing.

  The water system in Hong Kong was interesting. Toilets, and any appliances that did not need fresh water, were flushed with sea water. Thus our bathroom smelled of the ocean briny and the toilet pan was always encrusted with shining crystals of salt. There were no hot water washing machines in Hong Kong. All machines were cold water. Indeed the clothes seemed just as clean there as they do in UK. The washing was hung out of the back windows on long bamboo poles and a fine sight it made, rivalling the hundreds of flags that had fluttered from Lord Nelson’s fleet of ships after the British victory at Trafalgar.

  Annette’s salary was more than adequate and I was earning substantial advances for my books by this time. We soon settled back into military life, with its long round of Officer’s Mess occasions – formal dinners, informal dinners, modest dances, full-blooded balls, films and many other entertainments. If we were not going to our own mess we were going to one on another military base, such as Tamar Naval Base, or the Ghurkha Mess. Civilian restaurants in Hong Kong were, and I imagine still are, the best in the world. Schezwan, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Thai, French, Peking. All were available in their numbers and all were excellent. If one was short of cash for any reason, there were always the ‘clubs’ and ‘messes’ of Chung King Mansions, a huge slum building in the heart of Kowloon, beloved of penny-poor backpackers, which were just as good but because they had no fire exits or adequate kitchens were not allowed to call themselves restaurants. These clubs and messes served mostly Indian food, sometimes Ghurkha curries, very cheaply.

  During the day, while Annette was at work, and sometimes when the two of us were together, there were a multitude of parks and other interesting places to visit. Bonsai parks, grown-up-tree parks, Japanese gardens, rock gardens. The open-air food markets were something else, selling snakes for the pot, frogs, newts and their cousin amphibians, always live fish cut open and laid out so that you could see their hearts pulsing, vegetables of strange shapes and designs, weird fungi, crunchy-looking insects, barrels boiling with eels, ancient black eggs, severed horse’s heads, every kind of mammal – in fact it was said, and I believe it to be true, that the Cantonese eat anything that walks or swims with its back to the sky. Sadly they are not into cannibalism, which is a shame, because that would have rounded off things very nicely.

  We quickly learned that face was very important to our fellow citizens. No Canton man or woman wishes to lose face by saying ‘no’. Early on I went into a record shop and asked if they had a particular jazz number. ‘Yes,’ said the assistant, and disappeared into the back of the shop, never to be seen again. He did not have it, but he wasn’t going to give us the satisfaction of knowing that fact. A woman friend got in a taxi and asked to be taken to a particular school in a remote section of Kowloon Tong. The taxi driver had not understood her, but did not want to lose face by asking for the destination again, so he drove her to where he thought she wanted to go, a pig farm in the New Territories.

  What I loved to do most, while Annette was at work, was visit Cat Street on Hong Kong Island, which was lined with antique and junk shops. There I would happily spend our money on bird cages (minus the birds of course), ancient clocks, carpets, Korean tansus, strange boxes, brass ornaments, pieces of jade, Chinese rosewood chairs of antique design, carved figures, masks. When I was not in Cat Street, Bird Street or the Jade Market, I was in Overjoys, who made ceramics. There I purchased beautiful porcelain bowls, lazy susans, Canton Rose vases and lots of lamps with wonderful oriental bases. Annette would come home of an evening and groan. ‘Not another clock? What are we going to do with them all? Where are we going to put them when we go home?’ True, that has been a problem and most of them have had to be given away to relatives and friends, leaving just my favourites to gloat over.

  ~

  Annette spent a week in her army car, an old small Vauxhall with no air conditioning, getting used to the routes which she would have to take around Hong Kong. Twice she went illegally into mainland China by mistake, the border guards waving her through both ways, probably due to the fact that she had a crest on the doors of the car. They surely must have wondered why this pretty blonde lady obviously of Western origin, wanted to drive back and forth into the economic zone of Shenzen?

  The problem with driving in Hong Kong was that there were no roundabouts and if you got into the wrong lane you were doomed. Whenever I did that, and Annette said it was the same for her, I always ended up in the maze of back streets in the most populated area of the planet – Mong Kok. Mong Kok was a densely peopled section of Hong Kong with tall buildings containing thousands of tiny flats and a multitude of small businesses such as pot-and-pan makers, paper makers, furniture makers, boiler makers, bicycle makers, every kind of makers. The noise level, of small strong men beating various metals, was horrendous.

  Mong Kok also had Bird Street, with its wonderful bamboo cages of all shapes and designs. I hate the idea of wild birds in cages, even if they are taken for walks through the park on a Sunday, but the cages were works of art. The Jade Market was there too, with its dozens of stalls selling carved jade objects and simply lumps of the stuff. Some pieces of jade are worth thousands of Hong Kong dollars, others a few cents, and Gweilos like me have no idea what a Chinese person is looking for in a piece of jade. Patterns? Colours? Clarity? Probably all those, but the likelihood of a gweilo guessing right is down below zero somewhere.

  Gweilo (often spelt gwailo).

  The word means something like ghost person. Whether it was meant originally to be derogatory, or was simply a neutral description of the pale invaders from the West, I have no idea. Having lived in more than one colony I can tell you that the expats almost always happily embrace such nicknames. In the case of gweilo, it was used both orally and in print. The English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post, always referred to expats as gweilos, as did books and magazines. We used the word as if we had invented it for ourselves. We may have conquered distant lands without conscience, but no one could accuse expatriate Westerners of being unable to laugh at themselves.

  Annette then, learned to drive around the Crown Colony. It was winter when we arrived, just a week or two before Christmas, so the lack of air conditioning in the car was not important. Hong Kong has a chilly, very very humid winter, which needs light bulbs burning permanently in wardrobes to keep clothes from going mouldy and causes photographs to wrinkle in their frames. However, the summers are stiflingly hot. Not a wonderful climate, but bearable for one who was brought up in Aden and Singapore, both of which are unbelievably hot and humid.

  Annette adjusts herself to extreme climates almost immediately. She has this strange internal thermostat which drives me crazy. Any change in temperature outside a building is coped with without a murmur of complaint. Any small variation within a building has her declaring it
has ‘suddenly’ got extremely hot or insufferably cold.

  Just before Christmas Annette’s boss Robin came to the flat looking very solemn.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you Annette, that your father died early this morning.’

  Annette took the news calmly. Bill Bailey had been ill for about fifteen years with Parkinson’s disease. He had not taken well to the fact that just when he had retired, something he had been looking forward to for many years being stuck in a dull office job that failed to stretch him mentally or otherwise, he had fallen seriously ill. Contrary to his normal fighting nature he lapsed into apathy and quickly deteriorated to a depressed state where he neither wanted to talk to people, nor make any effort to battle the disease. Just before we left England he had fallen out of his wheelchair and broken his hip, requiring a serious operation. I think it was, for him, the last bitter blow from life and he had decided to opt out.

  Annette took the next flight back to UK, to attend the funeral and support her mother Betty for a short time. Annette’s brother Colin was on hand, so Betty was not left alone in her grief. Left to my own devices in Hong Kong, I was visited several times by Robin and Glynis, but had not had time to make any other friends. I visited parks, went for long walks, went to the cinema, and wrote stuff. They were at that moment changing all the windows in Vista Panorama, so I had plastic sheeting flapping in the wind back and front of the huge flat, with cold draughts whistling through the bedroom and living room. It was not the best Christmas I’ve spent, but it wasn’t the worst either.

  I was at that time using an Amstrad to write my novels. Those early pseudo-computers created by Alan Sugar were a godsend to writers like me, who like to write at a hundred miles and hour. I have been able to touch-type at eighty words per minute since I was fifteen years-of-age, having been taught in the Boy Entrants to teletype. When Robin saw me struggling with floppy discs, without which the Amstrad would not operate, he said, ‘Come on, my boy, we must get you a real computer!’ and promptly took me to a huge hive of Chinese computer geeks, pirated software and hardware known as the Golden Arcade. This typically Asian den of a thousand stalls and shops, was situated in the Shek Kip Mai district of Hong Kong, on the westward side of Kowloon.

  When I walked in through the door of this place, the size of an aircraft hanger, my senses were attacked from every direction by sound, colour, movement and unbridled energy. Young men were zipping here and there, carrying computer parts or discs with luridly coloured covers. Piles of computer game discs covered the stalls. Intent workers, heads bent over their task, were building or repairing computers. Those computers were everywhere, stacked in corners or on rickety-looking display tables. It really was an Aladdin’s cave of computers and Robin, who had been completely besotted by computers since they became available, sighed deeply in satisfaction, as if he were actually confronted with baskets of rubies and emeralds.

  I bought a state-of-the art desk computer, with a huge 10 meg hard disc, which Robin believed was the equivalent of a war-monger purchasing a fully-armed nuclear submarine.

  ‘You’ll be able to write dozens of novels on that,’ he said, patting my package affectionately, as if it were the computer that was going to do the writing, not me. ‘I expect to see the first one at the end of the week.’

  ~

  Annette eventually came back to her lonely husband and we began life in Hong Kong proper. We joined the Hong Kong long-trekkers and weekends were spent walking the hills of the New Territories and the many islands that belonged to Hong Kong in the China Sea. We also joined the Royal Asiatic Society and met David and Edith Gilkes, who were to become close friends. David was the bursar at the Chinese University. Another society we joined was the Hong Kong History Society, which like the Royal Asiatic Society, had as members and fellows expats who could speak and write Chinese fluently. How I envied those brilliant academics who get a glimpse inside the Asian mind.

  Indeed, I started classes in the local dialect, Cantonese. China has many spoken languages – Cantonese (Gwong dong wa), Shanghai-ese, Hok Yen (spoken in Singapore), Mandarin of course, and several others – which are quite different from each other. A Hok Yen speaker will not understand a Cantonese speaker. However, the written language, memorised characters, is known to all. One could sometimes see a Chinese tracing a character on his hand with his forefinger to communicate with another Chinese who has a different dialect. An everyday reader needed to memorise 4,000 characters to read the newspaper. A scholar needed 10,000. We in the west encode and decode twenty-six letters to make our language work. There is no encoding or decoding to be done with Chinese: it is purely an exercise in memory. Such a written language has its problems with abstract concepts like ‘world peace’.

  Osborne Barracks had a language school, for teaching officers who needed to communicate with Chinese officials. Officers like the Military Attaché to Beijing. The classes often had a space spare and I would fill that space at no cost to me. It was a good arrangement, because they needed classes of ten or twelve to generate discussions and I was happy to join them. However I have never been good at languages and though I attended more than one course I never got beyond ‘getting by’.

  Learning Cantonese is quite different from learning Malay, German or Greek. Or even Arabic. All of which I had a smattering at the time, having lived in those countries. Cantonese has no tenses, no plurals, no articles and no multi-syllabled words. When a Cantonese speaker says in English ‘Me sell many camera yesterday,’ that’s exactly what he would say in his own language. No ‘the’ or ‘a’, no tense, no plurals.

  Simple, eh? What an easy language to learn – not.

  The difficulty of Cantonese, and I imagine Mandarin and all the other dialects, is that it is a tonal language. One word means nine different things, depending on the tone used. Jai means God, but it also means pig, and several other things, depending on the tone used. ‘Good morning!’ in Cantonese is ‘Jo san’, but ‘Jo san,’ said slightly differently could mean something quite different. So I sat in class for a week, saying, ‘Wan, wan, wan – wan, wan, wan,’ in several different tones. (Six was all that a newcomer can cope with, the other three being ‘clipped’ tones.) Once the tones have been mastered, one learns ‘classifiers’ which help the listener to understand the context of what is being said. Goh, before a word means that what is being talked about is either ‘round’ (like a ball, or an orange, or the world) or a human being. Tiu means that the following word is long and thin, and flexible, like a tie or a piece of string or a long and winding road. (I know, a road is not ‘flexible’ in the true sense of the word, but it looks as if it should be flexible. Thank Goodness the Beatles came from Liverpool and not the Chinese province of Gwong Dong.)

  So, I learned a little Cantonese, enough to help in the markets and in taxis, two places where English was not spoken. I tried practising on our Amah, the lady who cleaned and occasionally cooked for us, Ah-lai. But she always insisted on speaking China Coast pidgin. Pidgin is not a put-down language, so I was told by a lecturer at the Royal Asiatic Society, but a real go-between language which both parties find easier to communicate in than the languages spoken by each other.

  There are some lovely phrases in China Coast pidgin, though I never heard them used by our cleaning lady, Ah-lai. One is a ‘piano’ which in pidgin is ‘toothy-face, bashy-in, cry.’ And the other is ‘mix-master from sky’ which apparently means ‘helicopter’. Those are pretty elaborate phrases, but more simply Ah-lai’s ‘udder one’ meant anybody else other than the person you were talking about. Thus when I came home one day and Ah-lai said to me, ‘Udder one say missy gone Stanley wid udder one,’ I knew exactly what she meant. The first ‘udder one’ was our neighbour, the second ‘udder one’ was a guest who was staying with us. Thus translated the sentence communicated: ‘Your neighbour says that Annette has gone to Stanley Market with your guest’.

  This leads me nicely on to our relationship with Ah-lai, who is a remarkable woman. We ha
ve been back to Hong Kong several times to see her since leaving in 1992 and she has once come to stay with us for two weeks in England. When she was a young woman she lived in a very poor village north of Shenzen, in Mainland China. She ‘escaped’ over the border into Hong Kong, where she met and married ‘a Hakka man’. (The Hakka are a Chinese tribe, mostly fishermen.) Ah-lai’s new husband was a fireman for the Hong Kong fire service and thus had a good job, but Ah-lai wanted to work too, so she became an Amah for the expats. When we knew her she worked for about three or four families. She eventually gave birth to a son, Kong Wing, and also took in the daughter of her brother, smuggled over the border from China.

  Ah-lai used to invite us to her home on Chinese festival days. There she would treat us to traditional food and drink. Her one-roomed flat in Tai Po measures four metres by eight metres. There is literally only a single room, containing kitchen, bedroom and living-room space. The toilet is out on the narrow balcony and beds are folded down from the walls at night. In the late ’80s two adults and two teenage children lived in that one room. It was not an unusual flat, it was typical.

  In Hong Kong we often saw youngsters sitting on the steps of some public monument, doing their homework, using the space and relative peace. Young married couples still living with their parents would go to a Bridal Hotel for nights when they were trying to start a family. Space in Hong Kong was, and still is, the most valuable of commodities. A man who had purchased two small flats in the early years is now surely as rich as Croesus.

  When the situation in China relaxed after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, Ah-lai took us to the village in which she was born. Her son Kong Wing and her adopted daughter Mai Ling, came with us too. Strangely, the children were not greeted by the villagers we met, who were otherwise most hospitable. If you consider there must have been uncles, aunts and for Fan Ling, even a father, among those villagers, it was peculiar indeed that the two kids were not fussed over as they would be elsewhere, especially since they had not been seen by their relatives since they were infants. Annette was given a baby to hold, a one-year-old with a bare bottom. Annette was wearing white slacks. Luckily the smiling little one did not suddenly erupt.