by Kin Law
She tried not to think of Albion, all alone up top with the specter of his past.
12: Kowloon Walled City
Deep in the dark, narrow passageways of Kowloon Walled City, the tiny, dripping nook of his home and his faceless family were all a Chinese boy could recall, and everything that mattered. The boy who would become Albion Clemens could hardly argue with his elders, who had contrived for him to live with food taken out of their own mouths. Even if they had to live like cockroaches, scurrying up and down and in between the lawless, continental plates of the Walled City, feeding off the scraps and offal of the outside world, they would survive.
The Kowloon Walled City was located on the mainland, but never did the Republic, Imperial Canton or the Pax Britania ever have the run of the place. The ancient seaside fort had been occupied turn by turn by invaders more numerous than the stars. Refugees, criminals and characters of ill repute had besieged the old fort for centuries. When the last occupation returned to Nippon after the last Great War, syndicates and triads had taken over, instilling their own brand of bloody order. No single plot of land could hold all those Chinese, so the Chinese did what they did best: they improvised, building around the existing structures, filling in the alleys and cracks with their lives. Any space able to hold a living body did, and when those ran out, they simply built on top of one another, until the dwellings fused and became a towering monstrosity, a stinking shantytown like a giant black plateau in sight of the prosperous, fragrant port of Hong Kong.
The boy who would grow to be Albion Clemens had never known a life different from the place where he was born. It had begun in one of the best hospices of the Walled City, namely, a one-room brothel in the northern block, five levels over the Big Fortune meat bun shop.
An old midwife had seen to his mother. The aged herbal healer doubled as Auntie for the five ‘chickens,’ or prostitutes, who worked out of the room.
He was the last of eight children, born to parents who had run from the occupation in Shanghai. To hear his ancestral history, they were the last descendants of Han dynasty royalty, but practically every Chinese could lay claim to something of the like. The boy’s given name had been an auspicious one, made to avoid the ire of celestial bodies loving nothing more than to strike down those with aspirations. It literally meant ‘small, unimportant dog.’
It might seem odd for a child of eleven to recall such things, but being born in a Chinese family, the boy was lectured five times a day. At first, he heard them on the back of his mother, or his sisters, when they could be spared, but as soon as he could waddle the family made him follow at their skirt hems.
They would climb over sheet allum awnings, through rusted, cramped holes, and across narrow bridges hanging with other peoples’ laundry. The bare planks often dangled over twenty stories of dark shafts, stories defined only loosely by windows and ledges.
The multitude of square hovels and shacks became an interminable wall, one atop another like shelves in a cabinet. A misstep would take a person through exposed, rusted beams and the awnings of noodle shops below. The boy had often peered down into them, or up at a square piece of sky, wondering if he fell in them whether there was any ground at the bottom at all.
Sunlight was nigh unknown, deep in the Walled City, but sometimes the family would gather on the prime real estate of rooftops crowded with gardens, and have a simple supper in the smog-tinted sunset.
Albion would later recall those moments fondly, of dangling his legs over the edge of the City and flinging bits of blackened leftovers down to the sparrows and monkeys clinging to its cliff-like walls.
His father worked as a seller of delicacies. They caught and raised quails for eggs, used in glutinous rice wraps, or lo mai gai. The tiny, grape-sized eggs were sweet and delicious, and far too good for the family to eat themselves, or so his father always claimed. With the money from the eggs they bought hardy rice, and mustard greens, and the occasional bit of fish, when there were a few coins left over. Sometimes the triad collectors felt a little generous.
The boy started delivering the eggs alone at five. His scrawny, emaciated form was perfect for wriggling through the narrow passages, the blind crawlspaces between buildings left by feng sui purposes or shoddy construction. Some walls came together in an angle, trapping the odd cat or dog or little boy between their uncaring faces.
After the first time he protested, tears useless in the face of his father’s fists, he dove into those passages willingly.
The climate of Kowloon left black, viscous grime on everything, a product of factory soot and wetness. It wasn’t unheard of for one of the impromptu dwellings to collapse on themselves, or go tumbling end over end into the cavernous shafts of the Walled City.
Sometimes he would stop and peer through the gaps of bricks, or pasteboard walls rotted by the constant drip from the dwellings overhead. What he saw confused his childish mind, at first, but privacy was as nonexistent as the plumbing, in the Walled City. There was always a partition to peer through, or a ledge to cling to, if one wanted to find out what went on behind closed doors.
An adulterer and adulteress coupling, the rats in the pork buns, or the slick red floor of a syndicate execution, nothing was hidden. After the first few times watching, the boy was convinced his family had the right of it.
Survive.
Keep your head down, do your job. Pay back your debts. Survive.
His horror cemented by the evidence of his own eyes, there was no reason to live any other way. The boy listened, and repeated back the legacy of his elders. After all, the word of an elder was law. There might be a dearth of schooling, there in the dark abysses of the Walled City, but some Confucian values remained. They weren’t complete animals.
When the boy, exhausted by days straight of work running up and down the City, slipped and fell on the quail cage, he never questioned what the consequences would be. His trueborn father commanded him to recover the birds, and the boy hastened to comply, scrabbling after every mouse hole and dog shack the quail flapped their way into. There had been one hundred and eighty-four birds in total, and by the end of the day, the boy’s keen nose had sniffed out one hundred and forty-two of them. His blood had scarcely quelled under the herbal poultice on his leg, where the red wire of the cage scratched him.
“What? You want to sleep? Where are the other forty-two?” His father inquired of him. His mother and sisters looked on, their faces buried in sewing, or hanging up greens for drying. His bed was hardly more than a straw mat on a hard board, but the boy desperately wanted to climb onto it.
The boy who would become Albion, eleven years old, turned and made his way under the dripping eaves of their familial nook.
Its dankness and closeness then reminded an older Albion of the stone graves in the hills not far from the Walled City.
Twenty of the birds had found their way into the grain stores of a big row restaurant, down on the fifth level. Thankfully, the owner was large, and slept like a pig. His chickens were trying to kill the quail, pecking at the trespassers to their territory through a wire cage. The boy was able to gather the small birds into his big woven barrel without waking the owner, but his hands came away dotted with blood.
Another five, he found in a smoky opium den. The quail moved sluggishly there, but the dwellers in the smoke grasped for his hands as if they could drag him into their addled dreams.
Yet another six found their way up, onto the rooftop, where a garden of young white carrots furnished them a rich midnight snack.
Though the Walled City offered little schooling, his father had been diligent in teaching him sums. Their family abacus was well worn, much by Albion’s own fingers. By his count, there were eleven birds left. Albion had no clue where they could be.
Desperate, tired, and stinking of the runoff of a million families living in the Walled City, the boy grew desperate. He started to think about all the places those stupid, ugly birds could have tumbled into. He had covered every accessible r
oute, every crawlspace he could fit into. He knew where the nooks and crannies all went. The obvious place was, of course a place the boy had never been.
Pulling along his basket of fluttering, rollicking quail, he made his way over the thin planks and ledges, to the farthest edge of the Walled City.
The darkness made the journey easier. In the daytime, it was too hard to put his sandals down on the planks over the deep wells between improvised dwellings. In the dark, he could pretend they were sturdy, celestial bridges leading to some saintly grove.
Even before he arrived, he knew he had guessed rightly.
Quail were swift-born, dumb beasts, and did not respect the rules of man. Their droppings heeded rules even less. The path was dripping with them, and just before the entrance he found one of the birds fluffed up and sleeping on a ledge. He put it inside his barrel, and hung the fluttering barrel from a rusted nail, outside.
“Ten,” he counted quietly.
It was dark, and the plank boards of the window were splintery, yet the suite of rooms occupying a whole level at this corner of the City was unguarded. Who would dare storm the Century Syndicate headquarters at night? Yet the boy had often crossed near, witnessed deeds done and men undone here. He had never set foot in the place, but everyone knew where the society men were.
Silently, carefully, he put a bare foot onto the lush carpet of the Syndicate’s parlor. There was a woman, nude and pale in the moonlight, sweating from the southern Chinese humidity. A man lay beside her, on a sofa wide enough to sleep the boy’s whole family. One of the woman’s feet dangled off the soft cushions, and three of the birds were pecking at something near it.
“Seven,” he whispered, slipping them into his ragged shirt.
The soft sound of snoring could not obscure the scuffle of birds’ claws, and Albion followed them through the rooms, gathering the quail up wherever they were.
“Six.”
“Five. Four.”
He ignored the riches about him, and the cruel men splayed out beside naked ‘chickens,’ with their watermelon knives and jars of vitriol, with ginseng wines for vitality and lines of poison powders. Though the boy had seen them at work, his fear of them was no more than the fear of his father. Trapped between two equally terrifying creatures, the small boy was somehow stripped of fear.
There was a Buddhist monk in one of the many rooms of the Walled City, a bald-headed fellow mostly ignored for his talk of pacifism and vegetarianism in a place where a person’s hard-won meal might very well consist of his ill-fated neighbor. The boy had seen the monk talk once, of something he called ‘present mind,’ where the cares of the world could be seen as if from far away. At that moment, surrounded by knives still browned by old blood, the boy thought he understood a little of what the monk had meant.
“Three. Two.”
His shirt nearly overflowed with feathery warmth, but the seams were good, sewn by his mother. Over the muffled murmur of their calls, he could hear the last of them down a corridor on his left. As he crossed the doorway, something did not seem right to him. Yet, the boy was focused on the last bird, and wasted no time putting his finger on it.
“Come on, stupid bird. Appear, and I can go home and sleep.”
The boards wobbled beneath his feet, then, but the boy did not think it was strange. The Walled City was ill constructed, the floors oft slanted or loose. He simply concentrated on placing each palm and foot down, as if his limbs were padded quiet, like a cat’s.
His last bird was hidden behind some crates, in the back of the wobbly room.
Albion was thin, and scrawny, but even he could not reach between them. Beady eyes taunted him from between splintery planks. He looked, but it seemed the only way was to go around, under some of the smaller crates.
When the hard weight toppled onto him, the boy didn’t even feel it. All he felt was the puff of feathers, as those nine birds in his shirt tumbled free to join the tenth.
Those loosely stacked crates determined the boy’s destiny. When he awoke, it was to those same crates jostling about, crushing him against the walls. Small, and a relatively flexible tumbler, the boy who would be Albion rolled out from under them, trying not to be too disgusted by all the bird leavings stuck to his clothes.
He had no idea what was happening. Had the Kowloon Walled City fallen around him? The mass of illegitimate, illegal dwellings were tumbledown, but the boy could not imagine them falling, not in a million years.
Crawling out from under the crates, the boy found himself in the wobbly room, now more of a shaking, tipping room. He had never been in a place like this before- none of the thick wooden beams made sense to him, and there were no rotten bolt holes for him to hide in. The walls were strong, and thick, and bolted together with metal plates, unlike the thin plaster of the City.
His sandals beat a hasty pace across the room, and through to another, and another. They were filled with crates and barrels, some of which had burst open. There were bottles and paper packages on the floor, bundles of food and pottery jars of water.
All the rooms looked the same, but as he traversed them, he thought he could feel the tilt of them a little more clearly. Later, an older Albion would call this ‘getting his air legs,’ but for the boy who would grow to be the Manchu Marauder, all of this was new.
At the end of the rooms full of crates, there was a stairway, just as tilted as the rest of the rooms. The boy climbed them apprehensively, clinging to the splintery steps with his bare toes. He was deathly afraid of what lay above. What if the Syndicate men were there? Would they accuse him of stealing? They would chop off his hands with cleavers. Yet, there was nothing for him down here, the boy knew instinctively. He had to push forward, or be crushed by heavy shapes in the dark.
When he reached the top of the stair, he simply stood there, in shock. He was on another wooden floor, only there was clear sky around him, unframed by the buildings of the Walled City. Someone had taken down the walls, and ripped the sky open. Maybe the same someone had set fire to everything below, lighting the sky with the blaze of everything the boy had ever known. Before he could comprehend what had happened, the wooden floor was tipping once again, and the boy found himself tipping with it, inexplicably, head over heels into thin air.
An older Albion found out, much later, what had actually happened. The Hong Kong government, ostensibly a part of Imperial Canton but actually on a hundred-year loan to the British Isles, had had enough of the wanton lawlessness of the Kowloon Walled City.
They had mounted an attack on its known crime lords with road engines, flying cogs and armed soldiers, firebombing the worst of the corruption and cutting away the rest with bayonets.
The Britons had little sympathy for those Chinese innocents still trapped inside.
Like a pile of oily rags coming into contact with a lit match, the place erupted into an inferno of violence. What the child had seen was only a small part. The Syndicate men had mustered their forces, wielding cycle chains, watermelon knives, and cleavers, anything at hand to serve as a weapon. Like their ancient predecessors, rebels and remnants of conquered dynasties, they were hardy, revolutionary men- but they were used to subterfuge and scare tactics, not strategic warfare. Even those lieutenants and captains in the Hong Kong militia, who were used to finding parts of their loved ones secreted away as warnings in their desks, had nothing to fear from laying siege to the triad gangsters behind ratcheting gun barrels.
The boy Albion had stumbled onto a small dirigible docked at the Walled City, its hold open connected to the Century Syndicate’s den. When the attack began, the Syndicate leaders crowded aboard and cut the airship loose. Halfway out over the flames, one of the British engines spotted the rats deserting ship. They launched firebombs at the little craft, upending it and tipping the boy overboard.
The boy knew none of this. What he knew was he was falling, and maybe burning. He could certainly feel the heat of the flames washing over him, a vast plateau of heat exactly as large as
the Kowloon Walled City. It smelled, too, of smoke, piss and poverty.
All of a sudden, he was disgusted.
He knew he should care about the little knot of people somewhere in the City, those people he had lived with all his life, those who shared his blood.
Everyone had told him so.
The Chinese were a people who never forgot where they came from. Their holidays were all about remembering those who came before, visiting the graves, keeping old heroes alive, remembering debts generations old. Their future was more of the same: living, breeding, going about their business, heads ducked down.
But now, as he faced his doom, the boy who would be Albion simply did not care. It seemed like all those precious things were worth exactly nothing. All those people in the Kowloon Walled City treasured exactly those things, but there they all were, stuck in a festering hole together, burning. When had his ancestors ever left him anything but pain, hard work and suffering? His own father had refused to forgive him, and sent him to this stupid, meaningless death.
If he had his older voice, he might have screamed at them, something like ‘Fuck you. You can all go to hell. I lived eleven years and not once did any of you precious ancestors help me!’ right before he hit the cold shock of Victoria Harbor.
What they told him, when he woke up shivering and cold on another unfamiliar airship deck, was piecemeal and disjointed. He only remembered the warm touch of a hand at his back, and the taste of hot cocoa. It was the first time he ever had it, and the smell shook his whole world.
Later, Albion would rediscover his birth peoples’ fineries, tea being paramount. But at the moment, with Auntie’s chocolate and Auntie’s bowl of chicken soup, it seemed like the boy had been living in a world completely shut off from reality.
Everything in Kowloon seemed at the bottom of a well, and the little piece of sky he had seen from it was suddenly all around him. He could see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Everything was fresh, new and wonderful, and he wanted more of it.
