The Rice Paper Diaries

by Francesca Rhydderch

  One of Mrs Elsa’s pots of face cream had been left with its lid off. I put it back on so the flies wouldn’t get to it.

  Mari started to cry then. It was time for her breakfast porridge and milk. I looked up at the mirror. There was a hole in the middle of it the size of a coin where the bullet must have hit it. I saw a confused face broken up into shards that ran from the centre to the edges of the kidney-shaped glass: an eye here, a cheekbone there. It took me a moment to recognise it as mine.

  Footsteps, light and hesitant, were coming up the stairs from the lobby. Lam and Wang. I picked my way through the piles of clothes and stood in the hall and waited for them. Mari was howling.

  On the wall the clock was still ticking. It was eight o’clock.

  5

  The bombing had stopped, although clouds of black smoke still hung low over the mountains on the other side of Kowloon.

  Wang drove down from the Peak, his head lowered as if he expected sniper fire, with Lam and me in the back. It could have been any other morning, with French doors opened onto terraces and tables set for breakfast, but there were chairs that had been pushed back, fine bone china cups knocked out of their saucers, and shattered windows. And it was so quiet, quieter even than the early mornings on the Delta, with the paddy fields opening out in all directions, when they have been flooded and the mud levelled and all that needs to be done is to plant the spiky young plants and wait for them to push their way out of the earth and turn yellow. Even you, Third Sister, young as you are, know that once a finger of red stains the fields, it is time to harvest the ripened grains.

  ‘It won’t take long to get to the customs office,’ Wang said. ‘The captain will know what to do.’

  Two military vans came round the corner, and drove straight at us on the wrong side of the road. A Japanese soldier up front cocked his bayonet at Wang and gestured that he should pull over. Sweat prickled out of Wang’s skin, running down the back of his neck, but by the time he’d parked, the vans were gone.

  ‘We’d better get out of the car,’ he said.

  We walked the rest of the way to Central. There were other people doing the same thing, not looking at each other, hurrying.

  When we arrived at the customs building, the door was bolted and there were two young men in their shirt sleeves on the pavement outside running lengths of adhesive strip across the windows.

  ‘Please, Sir, where is everyone? Where’ve they gone?’ Wang said.

  One of the young men bit off a strip of tape between his teeth before replying.

  ‘Building’s closed.’

  The other one pointed to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building and some of the big hotels on the other side of the road.

  In the Hong Kong Hotel people were sitting around the lobby in their good coats. Some of them had cases. A tall, thin waiter, his collar greying at the tips, was serving drinks from the bar. Behind him, a small boy was kneeling down, rolling a single pram wheel back and fore across the lobby using a stick. A couple of people looked up as we walked in, but that was all. I had thought I would recognise more of the faces, but the only person I knew was one of the captain’s colleagues, Mr Vernon.

  ‘Please Madam,’ I said, going over to his wife. Her face was like a flat, clean plate, without any expression. She was holding a toddler on her knee, who wriggled about in her lap like a basket of eels. Mrs Elsa called her Lizzie – ‘my good friend, Liz,’ she said when she was talking about her to other people, but she didn’t recognise me, or Mari, who was strapped onto my back, with her head close in to my neck. All you could see were the dark tufts of hair sticking out like paddy seedlings at the back. She could have been any baby.

  ‘Please can you tell me where Captain Jones is?’ I asked, and then, when she didn’t reply, ‘we are looking for Captain Tommy Jones. Japanese soldiers broke into the apartment this morning and took Mrs Jones away.’

  She jumped up and screamed, then started to cry, hysterical.

  Mr Vernon got up and shouted, ‘For God’s sake, she’s terrified enough as it is, can’t you see?’

  Everyone in the lobby stopped talking and stared at us. The little boy’s wheel rolled along the floor, the rubber hum of its tyre cutting through the quiet; then it hit the waxed panelling of the reception desk, and bounced away, back on itself.

  ‘Just quit messing around, will you?’

  I had never heard Mr Vernon sound so angry before.

  The boy stopped short.

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ he whispered.

  He crept towards the pillar where the wheel had come to rest, picked it up, and walked away on tiptoe.

  Wang, who had been looking about the lobby, beckoned for Lam and I to follow him through to the covered walkway that led directly to the Gloucester, but there were hundreds of Chinese jammed in it end to end and there was no way for us to get through. They were sitting on the floor, talking quickly over each other’s heads, passing things to each other – blankets, rice bowls, paper packages of food.

  Wang pressed his way into the crowd and spoke to a man with a beard of fine white hair. After a few minutes he came back to where we were waiting.

  ‘Dragon Arcade has been bombed,’ he said. ‘They’re still taking the bodies away.’

  Dragon Arcade is just off Des Voeux Road, exactly where my letter-writer sits, seven days a week, hoping for passing trade. There hasn’t been a day that I’ve gone looking for him that he hasn’t been there.

  As we made our way back out of the lobby, a young man in a jacket who had been sitting with the Vernons came up to us. He looked like an office boy.

  ‘Captain Jones is at the harbour office. He went to try to get tickets for the next passage out. But we’ve just heard that they’ve stopped the ships.’

  ‘Thank you, Sir,’ Wang said.

  We went back to the car, but someone else had got to it first. One of the wing mirrors had been ripped off and the other one shot at. The windscreen had shattered. The smell of urine hung in the air, and when Wang opened the door on the driver’s side and put his head in, he brought it out again straightaway, his hand covering his nose and mouth. I looked through the window and saw the brown smears that covered the cream leather, the flies that had gathered already.

  You’d imagine that we would have been panicking and scared, wouldn’t you? Not just walking along Jubilee Street, as if we were going to market for Mrs Elsa. But the truth is that we didn’t know where to go or what to do and so we were just following our usual route through Sheung Wan back to the kongsi fong. I knew that Lam would want to collect her things. She had a ring that Ryan had given her, along with a red packet holding money. They really were going to get married, you see; Ryan was going to prove himself. Lam was sobbing as she walked behind me.

  And then, with a rush as sudden as a click of the fingers, the streets were full again. Outside a fishmonger’s, a man was desperately trying to push trolleys of skinned fish back inside, and to draw the metal shutters across, but he was surrounded by people helping themselves without paying. Wang shoved his way through to help. We followed him, but got caught up in the crowd. I felt them all around us, arms, elbows, hands, jostling and grabbing at what they could – white fish, crocodiles’ tails, dried prawns – and making off with their overloaded baskets and panniers. I heard Lam’s voice behind me, but there were people all around us now, moving off in haste once they’d taken what they could, and we were carried with them almost to the intersection with Bonham Road. Then I felt a hand in mine and Lam pulled me back into an empty doorway. The chaos around us continued: feet on pavements, voices close up to us shouting almost in my ear. A thickset man carrying a long stave and a smaller man with an axe in his hand came up to us and demanded our pocket books without delay. They weren’t Japanese. They weren’t soldiers. I knew one of them: the one with the axe owned the spice shop across the road from the kongsi fong. Every time he came out to shake out his shallow spice pan at the end of the day he used to look up at the sky
before shutting up shop. It was him. There was no mistake. I was so shocked that I couldn’t get my fingers to work quickly enough to bring my purse out and they shouted again, and the spice-seller grabbed the front of my tunic and tore it open. I stayed quiet, terrified they would spot Mari’s blue eyes peeping out over my shoulder, although the shame I felt as they looked at my bodice hanging through the ripped tunic felt worse than anything I had ever felt before.

  ‘Hold on to me.’

  It was Wang. The thugs disappeared back into the mob. We went out onto the street again. I used one hand to hold the front of my tunic together as best I could. There was a high-pitched whine in the air and an explosion somewhere up the hill, and the putter of some kind of gunfire. Wang pushed against the backs and shoulders in front of us. People shouted and tried to push back, but we got through. We saw why this street was clearer than the others: there were bodies all over the road. There was one woman lying on her back with part of her stomach blown away. Her flesh was the violent red colour of ripe tomatoes cut open and turned inside-out. I tried to look away but I couldn’t. Her face was still intact, perfect, apart from a large mole that protruded over her top lip. Lying next to her was a boy, three or four years old, his hand in hers. He was dead too. I don’t know why I thought of Father, then, instead of Mother. It was always Mother who held my hand and showed me things, told me stories when I was a young girl. Not Father. He was always tired and grumpy, telling us we weren’t working hard enough. My stomach was turning over, pushing my breath up into my chest.

  As we turned back up the hill, I saw the letter-writer coming towards us, carrying his leather suitcase.

  ‘Wei!’ I knew his name, just as well as he knew mine.

  ‘Lin,’ he said, but his voice was swallowed up by the sound of an air-raid siren, so loud that it felt it was coming at us through the ground. Dust had settled into his hair and in the creases around his eyes, making him looked old. I put a hand out and held onto his forearm.

  We passed an abandoned tea shop. Tea sets had been shot at, and a crate of bamboo handles had spilled across the pavement. Tins were buckled and peppered with bullet holes.

  Wang came to a halt outside his parents’ shop, and called out, ‘Mother! Father!’

  Someone pulled the shutter with its ornate top back a little way, and a head popped out. His mother.

  ‘Quick, come inside,’ she said to us.

  Two portly English men in suits carrying briefcases were standing in a doorway on the other side of the street.

  ‘Come,’ she called over to them, and they ran across the street.

  We all went down to the tiny cellar. It smelled damp and cold. No one spoke. We sat side by side. Lam had stopped crying. One of the English men had a newspaper folded on his lap. He saw me looking at it and passed it over.

  At first I thought the shapes jogging up and down under the headline’s fuzzy newsprint would disappear when I blinked, but they didn’t. In the photograph men on horseback were riding through Central. Men in uniforms, with moustaches. Another group followed on behind. There was one man out front on his own, wearing white gloves, his right hand raised in a victory salute.

  The soldiers were all Japanese. There was no one in the picture who wasn’t Japanese.

  We sat listening to the sound of each other’s breathing. Wei took the newspaper out of my lap.

  ‘What does it say?’

  He read quickly, translating as he went along:

  Enemy Aliens to Report TO Murray Parade Ground

  The Japanese military have sent out an order for enemy aliens to gather at Murray Parade Ground at 9.00 am on Monday 5th January, 1942. All passports must be presented. Further details will be released shortly.

  ‘Who are the enemy aliens?’ I said.

  ‘Us?’ Lam asked the English men.

  ‘No,’ said the one who had given us the newspaper. ‘It

  means us.’

  6

  We had no nappies for Mari, no powdered milk, and no clean clothes for any of us. Lam said the best thing would be for us all to go to the kongsi fong to shelter, and Wang and Wei could go out after dark to try to find something to eat.

  But as we turned the corner of Wing Lok Street, we saw there were roadblocks barring the way, and a Japanese soldier carrying a bayonet. When he saw us approaching, he took the gun down from his shoulder and held it with both hands, pointing at the ground.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘We need to get through,’ Wei said.

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We are keeping the British here for now.’

  We looked up at the windows above the closed shops. There were no hawkers on the pavement, and the lines that hung over the street from building to building were empty of washing. But there were pale faces at the windows, peering out through the dust and grime that covered the glass.

  There were Japanese flags everywhere, on government buildings, banks and hotels. They were tied to the ferries that were still running, carrying the conquering army and their mules over from Kowloon. All along the waterfront we saw soldiers landing and unloading crates and trunks like any weekday docker, and no one trying to stop them, and on every street corner we saw a red-on-white circle of sun rising into the sky.

  Wang said we should go back to the apartment to find what food and drink we could. If the prisoners were to gather on Murray Parade Ground in a few days’ time, our kongsi fong would be vacated soon enough. We should hide in the apartment until the British were herded to the parade ground, he said. Lam gulped back another sob as she listened to us talking. Ryan’s ring and money would be long gone by then.

  There were more roadblocks, with people clustered around them like moths’ eggs. One soldier, instead of answering a man’s halting questions, gave him a jiu-jitsu kick in the face. The rest of the group scattered quickly.

  We doubled back on ourselves and headed back to the Peak. The first British soldier we saw was a dead body hanging out of the window of a car. His face was upside-down but you could still see the surprised look in his pale eyes. The air around him smelled bad.

  Mari was heavy on my back as we walked up the hill. She was awake, and bored, and kept beating against my shoulders with her sticky fists, and pulling my hair. I knew she was hungry, but every time she tugged at my plait it made me want to cry.

  ‘Do you want me to take her?’ Wei said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘We’re nearly there now.’

  We turned round and looked back over the water. A cruiser had been torpedoed and was leaning on its side. The city was pockmarked with gaps where bombs and shells had fallen.

  In the cul-de-sac leading to the apartment block there were reddened footprints on sandstone, broken walls with chunks gouged out of them by grenades, even a bloodied khaki shirt, but the apartment itself was as we’d left it.

  Once we were safe inside Wang boarded up the front door with scraps of wood from the garage. Lam went to the kitchen to look for tinned food and dried milk, taking Mari with her.

  I went to Mrs Elsa’s dressing room. I pulled down three cases from the top of the big wardrobe with the inlaid walnut panels: one for Mrs Elsa, one for the captain, and one for Mari. I put a good quality woollen blanket at the bottom of the cases even though they took up a lot of room, then I packed each bag, rolling up sports dresses, plain coats and jackets, jumpers and slacks. For Mari I packed romper suits and a worsted knit jacket, a crochet sweater and one of her peek-a-boo bonnets.

  I had to call Wei to sit on the cases to get them shut.

  ‘Won’t they be too heavy?’ Wei asked.

  ‘The captain can take some things out if he wants,’ I said. I was trying not to think about the ship we could see down in the harbour – almost under water, with a hole bored through its middle by a Japanese torpedo. I tried not to think about the captain rushing to the ticket office, certain he was doing the right thing, getting a safe passage home for the three o
f them before the fighting got any worse. I knew that once he had decided what he was going to do he wouldn’t have turned back. He would have gone all the way to the harbourmaster’s office, queued up with the others, waited his turn, not given up, not taken no for an answer.

  That night we closed the doors onto the verandah because it was cold. We could have sat in the sitting room to eat but we went into the kitchen, where it was warmer, and sat around the table. Wang said it would be too dangerous even to light a candle, and there was no point in letting people know we were there. As the darkness settled in folds around us, we talked and talked. I sat opposite Wei, listening to him speak about his aunt, how she had taken him in after his mother died, how growing up as a poor child in Hong Kong hadn’t been so bad after all.

  Lam started to tell him about our childhood, our work on the farm, the bare facts of our existence.

  He nodded, listening carefully as if he had heard none of it before. I sensed him glancing over at me. I wondered how much of all the stories I’ve told him since I came to Hong Kong I’ve forgotten myself in the daily rush just to get by. His silhouetted face showed me that he had forgotten nothing. You, Third Sister, and Mother and Father all live even more vividly in his imagination now than you ever have in real life. I don’t remember when you last wrote to me. Is Mother still coughing? Are you even still on the farm, Third Sister, or have you managed at last to run away to Canton after trying so many times? You were always so fixed on going your own way, to meet the world before you were ready. I was so afraid for you, watching as Father dragged you back to the farm by your plait. But maybe working in a sweet shop in Canton wasn’t so dangerous a proposition for a young girl after all. Perhaps the most dangerous place for you was home, always within reach of the back of Father’s hand.