‘Yes, of course, how could I forget?’
‘Well, when you called at lunchtime to ask me to pick up your suit from the cleaners, you told me Dansford had gone to the Town Club for a “settler” and how worried you were. Then you joked about him promising to dye his hair pink. Well, I called the hotel and asked them to move the baby grand to the side of the pool. If Dansford was going to arrive drunk, which seemed highly likely, our only chance was a repeat of what happened at the Goodwood Park Hotel when he entertained the diners at the piano.’ She shrugged. ‘Luckily, it worked.’
‘You said something quietly to him when you ran forward and took his arm, didn’t you?’
Mercy B. Lord laughed. ‘I’m not sure I can tell you.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, I told him, “Dansford, you fuck this up, then Sidney Wing wins and Simon loses and I lose Simon!” ’
I swept her into my arms and, bending her backwards, leaned down and kissed her deeply, then swung her upright and gazed into her dark eyes. ‘Mercy B. Lord, will you marry me?’ I begged.
‘Simon, I’ve never used that word before!’ she exclaimed.
‘Well done! That practically makes you Australian, but that’s not what I asked you,’ I insisted.
‘Darling, I’ve had much too much champagne.’ She giggled then added, ‘But right at this very moment, I’d rather like to go to bed with the man I love and adore!’ She took me by the hand. ‘Come with me, Simon Koo.’
CHAPTER NINE
AFTER WE WON THE Singapore Tourist Promotion Board account, I couldn’t wait to have lunch with Elma Kelly – mostly, I admit, to bask in the glory of winning the account against her own agency and the other big outfits. Of course, I would be modest, call it luck, thank her for her congratulations and point out that these things, as she well knew, are often capricious decisions and that it had been our day, that’s all. But she’d know she’d been beaten fair and square, having expected, with her connections, to win. I admit it was all pretty pumped-up little-boy stuff but the ad business is very competitive and she was a formidable opponent. What with Sidney Wing’s opposition to the panels, I felt I was entitled to bask, although Elma deserved my thanks for recommending Mrs Sidebottom, who’d come up with the idea of the screens in the first place.
It was Elma’s turn to pay and since she was ‘dying for a curry’ and nothing else would do, she elected to go to the Tiffin Room at Raffles. In the taxi on the way, much to her amusement, I told her the story of the Sidebottom free-lunch scam.
Arriving at Raffles it was obvious that Elma was regarded as something akin to visiting royalty, and there was much hurrying and scurrying and best-tabling and napkin-flapping.
‘Champagne, my man!’ she boomed the moment we were seated. ‘The boy has excelled and must be duly rewarded.’
‘Elma, a cold beer will do nicely,’ I protested.
‘Nonsense, a fitting drink for a splendid win. Those government chappies are never easy and the minister is an old fuddy-duddy not known for bold decisions. We went conservative, unaware that they’d appointed Long Me Saw and Molly Ong to the board. Silly, we should have checked. Must remind myself to give someone in the office here a kick in the bottom. Those two certainly add some much needed pep.’
‘Bit of luck, really. We didn’t know either of them. I guess Long Me Saw has sat in on a few presentations in the movie business, but I tell you what, I was impressed with Molly Ong.’
‘Good gal, did a splendid job as Miss Singapore.’ The champagne arrived and Elma lifted her glass. ‘Here’s to the Three Wing Circus and its new creative ringmaster. You’ve certainly got your act together. Well done, Simon.’
We clinked our glasses. ‘Thanks, Elma, but I have to be honest. Sidney and Ronnie, and Johnny of course, tried their best to prevent the pitch we made. Sidney insisting it was all about influence – guanxi, I guess. He kicked up a terrible fuss about the cost of the moving photographic panels, which by the way were Mrs Sidebottom’s idea, so the real credit goes to her and of course to you for recommending her.’
‘Ah, the Baba, they need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new Singapore.’
‘Baba?’
‘Old Chinese families, the ruling class here in Singapore. They’re all interconnected and can’t get it into their heads that Lee Kuan Yew, whose family is also Baba, has largely outlawed all the old-school-tie stuff in government, preferring brains to connections. It’s a lesson we’re all learning, and while I enjoy the British equivalent in Hong Kong, as you’ve just demonstrated with the Tourist Board, guanxi doesn’t play the part it formerly did with the Singapore government chappies.’ She paused to take a sip of champagne. ‘Having said that, don’t ever underestimate the power of the Baba. They go back a long way in Singapore’s history and they’re accustomed to getting their own way, as you’ve seen often enough with Sidney.’
‘I’m beginning to learn that,’ I said. ‘Ronnie once told me about his family and how he happens to belong to the Town Club.’
Elma looked at me, her right eyebrow slightly arched, a look I’d come to know heralded disapproval or suspicion. ‘Oh, really? Pray tell?’
‘Well, it seems his great-grandfather, William, the name he eventually gave himself – I can’t remember if Ronnie told me his Chinese name – arrived in Malaya from China penniless and worked as a labourer in a tin mine. He must have saved a few bob – Ronnie didn’t say – but in 1880 he came to Singapore and married a Chinese girl. Then, later – how much later, again I can’t say – he purchased the machinery to make an airtight double-sealed tin can. To cut a long story short, he opened a small canning factory, mainly for vegetables purchased from the Chinese and Malay market gardeners, and made a pretty good living victualling merchant ships. Then the First World War gave him his big break. He bought land, indentured his own coolies as farm labourers to grow vegetables, and added pork ’n’ beans, bully beef and Irish stew to his line of veggies and exported them to Britain for the troops in Europe. Not only did he make a fortune but at the end of the war a grateful colonial administration awarded him an OBE and the local Brits allowed him to join the “whites only” Town Club.’ I laughed. ‘The latter, according to Ronnie, is regarded by the family as the greater of the two honours, with family membership now in its third generation.’
Elma laughed. ‘Ah, selective perception, one of the greatest of human foibles – the ability we all have to tell ourselves only the convenient truth.’
‘You mean that’s not the whole story?’ I asked.
‘Why don’t we get our curry and then I’ll elaborate on the Wings – William and his wife, in particular.’
Seated again with our plates piled high – Elma always had a good appetite and I was a bit of a curry man myself – she started by saying, ‘As you will have gathered, Simon, the Chinese do their homework; they like to know as much about each other as they can, especially if they know something about you that you don’t know they know – they regard this as a powerful weapon to hold in reserve.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, my mother warned me before coming to Singapore to tell as little about myself and my family’s circumstances as possible.’
‘Well, she was right. But as the saying goes, “When in China, do as the Chinese do.” After the war, when we decided to expand from Hong Kong and open an agency here in Singapore, my internment as a prisoner of war and my years of experience before the war had taught me to do due diligence, to know both my man and my opposition.’ She paused and looked at me, smiling. ‘Something I clearly neglected to do with the Tourist Board pitch. Singapore’s a small place and the people have long memories. My British colonial referrals from Hong Kong were good, so getting to view the local records was easy enough. The Wing Brothers agency was one of the bigger outfits, and as it involved a Baba family, I went to work on them first, then eventually the other wealthy Chinese families.’
‘Aha, and what are you saying – that there’s more to it than the tinn
ed veggies?’
‘As I said, Ronnie’s guilty of selective amnesia, though aren’t we all. William Wing married a woman who came to Singapore to work as a prostitute.’
‘Oh, I see!’ I exclaimed.
‘No, no, don’t get me wrong. There isn’t a Baba family in Singapore that doesn’t have a fearful lot to hide. She, William’s wife, was a very enterprising, some may even say, remarkable woman.’ Elma said. ‘She rose from her back, so to speak, and eventually owned several brothels and opium dens – the two things tended to go together at the time. And again, though perhaps not the sort of thing one talked about, both opium smoking and prostitution were perfectly legal. All I’m saying is that drugs and whores are where the money came from to buy the machinery for the cannery.’
‘And so they became respectable.’
‘Good lord, no! The Chinese don’t give up a profitable business to become respectable. Besides, respectability as we in the West regard it is a fairly recent notion among orientals. William’s wife continued to run her side of the business, and when she died not long after the Great War her younger sister took over. She too married and, as the Chinese say, the bitter rice continued: she had a daughter who took over and ran the show right up to the Japanese invasion. The Japanese banned the use of opium and closed down the brothels, except for the “comfort houses” for their own troops. The Japanese are not fools and they were suspicious of places like brothels, where information could be passed on, particularly to the communists fighting them in the jungles of Malaya.’
‘Elma, are you saying that opium – in other words, heroin in a different form – wasn’t banned until the Japs invaded?’
‘Quite right.’ Elma leaned back in her chair. ‘I say, this bubbly’s lovely. We shall have a second bottle, and with it what say a little more curry tiffin and a history lesson? It’s a subject I’m particularly fond of: South-East Asia, and of course China – you can’t keep China out of anything. Know your history and things become a lot clearer.’ She raised her hand to summon a waiter and then ordered another bottle of Bollinger. We rose to go to the curry table and on the way she asked, ‘Simon, what do you know about the Opium Wars?’
‘I confess, not a lot. A couple of stoushes between Britain and China over the importation of opium, wasn’t it?’
Elma sighed, helping herself to a fresh plate and beginning to add rice and chicken vindaloo. ‘It beats me how you young people can come to a foreign place and think you can operate effectively without knowing any background, any history.’ Selecting a variety of raitas, the tasty accompaniments for curry, she asked, ‘Hong Kong? What do you know about Hong Kong, Simon?’
‘Well, it’s rented from the Chinese, isn’t it?’
‘Well, yes, leased. But why?’
‘I haven’t the foggiest. Ninety-nine years, wasn’t it? Was it because of the war?’ I could tell by the schoolmarm tone of voice she’d adopted that I was in for a long afternoon. Still, Elma Kelly was almost always worth listening to and never tedious. Besides, she was perfectly correct – I knew bugger-all about British colonial history in Asia.
‘Good guess. The first Opium War in 1842 at the Treaty of Nanking.’
We returned to the table where the waiter stood. He popped the cork and poured the champagne. Elma raised her glass. ‘To history and all its abracadabra – all the magic and the mystery it reveals,’ she said.
I grinned rather ashamedly. ‘You’re perfectly right, Elma, I simply haven’t done my homework. You remind me of a saying my dad sometimes used when one of us kids was passing high-minded judgements on someone we didn’t much like: “You only truly know a person when you know the cause of the scars they carry.” Then he’d add, “While you may dress and heal the wounds you can’t eliminate the scars.” I guess it’s the same with countries.’ I looked directly at Elma. ‘I stand suitably reprimanded.”
Just the stuff Elma had told me about the Wing family, the bit Ronnie hadn’t spoken about, brought them into sharper focus. When I came to think of it, Ah Koo and Little Sparrow’s story allowed me to understand, to place myself on the firmament, with a little more certainty.
‘Well then, where was I?’ Elma asked.
‘Hong Kong, and before that the Opium Wars,’ I reminded her.
‘Yes, well, opium, the root of all the evil that was to follow. Opium, as you probably know, is the juice of the poppy.’
‘Papaver somniferum, the sleep-bringing poppy,’ I said quickly.
‘That’s very clever, Simon!’ Elma exclaimed, surprised.
I grinned. ‘Not really. Still life in art school. We had to paint a vase of flowers in the seventeenth-century Dutch baroque style, tulips, peonies, roses, carnations, poppies, all very Maria van Oosterwyck, a famous painter of the time. As a joke I painted a vase of opium poppies to see if anyone would catch on. I remember I had to go to the Mitchell Library to get the botanical reference. I called it “Sleeping Beauties” but no one caught on or questioned the name. Artists often give their works weird names so nobody questions them.’ I laughed. ‘I seem to recall I got a distinction and my mum had the painting framed. It’s probably still hanging in a guest bathroom at home.’
‘Well, then, you’ll be aware that it’s also the source of heroin and codeine. But do you know where it was first grown commercially for export?’
‘India? The British East India Company, wasn’t it?’ I resigned myself to Miss Kelly the schoolmistress.
‘Yes indeed, the most powerful trading organisation at that time in the world and the surrogate British government in this part of Asia. They owned the land, grew the opium poppy, bled it, packaged it and shipped it to the port of Canton. That is until China banned it, which left us in a bit of a pickle. The British couldn’t be seen to be exporting opium to a sovereign state without permission.’
‘Hence the Opium Wars?’
‘Yes, eventually, but not quite then. We simply found another way: we auctioned the annual opium crop to foreign shipping merchants, mostly sea scum, including Chinese traders. They smuggled it through Canton, bribing corrupt officials. In this way we Brits appeared to keep our hands clean. Ha ha. In reality we were up to our ears in the business of drug trafficking.’
‘But why – I mean, what was the big deal? A few opium addicts in China, so what?’
Elma looked directly at me. ‘A few opium addicts, you say? By the time the Qing empire in China banned it, twelve million Chinese had become hopelessly addicted to opium. And the big deal was that by the mid-nineteenth century, opium profits largely greased the wheels of trade, or played some important part in the commerce of the entire Western world. By 1840 Britain was the major drug-trafficking criminal organisation in the world.’
‘Hang on a mo! That’s the equivalent of the whole Australian population. You did say twelve million addicts? I had no idea! Twelve million,’ I repeated, shaking my head in disbelief.
‘Well, it’s the reason Singapore came to be created. The East India Company – read British Colonial Office – needed a port both where opium could be traded and where trading vessels leaving Calcutta for Canton could find safe harbour from pirates and other adventurers looking for opium hauls. They created an entrepot port with no taxes and soon they had most of the seagoing traffic passing through the Straits of Malacca. Protection and a free port, a halfway house for the drug trade – it made an irresistible combination. Singapore even started growing the opium poppy on the island. In fact the largest portion of Singapore’s colonial government’s income for most of the nineteenth century, almost half, came from locally grown and sold opium.’
‘Sold to whom, the foreign trading vessels?’
‘No, dear boy, you misunderstand – to the local population. Many of the wealthy Chinese merchants and even sea captains settled in the new port. They were the first of the Baba. They brought in Chinese coolies from China – the piglets, as the British called them – to do the labouring work in the thriving port, then build the roads for the g
rowing port town and the tin mines, plantations and forests of Malaya, promising them they’d make their fortunes and return to their families and villages rich men after just a few years.’
‘Ah, just like the gold rushes in California and Australia. That’s how my great-great-grandfather Ah Koo came to Australia.’ I could give a history lesson, too. ‘He expected to make his fortune in the New Yellow Gold Mountain, but instead only made enough to buy a few scrubby acres in the bush and turn them into a market garden, from which he supplied fresh vegetables to the timber-getters who were cutting cedar in the forests. Eventually he sent back to China for a wife, Little Sparrow, my great-great-grandmother.’
‘No such luck for most of the Singapore piglets,’ Elma snorted. ‘The Baba’s indentured labourers had to pay them from their pitiful salaries for their boat fare, clothes, tools, rations and bug- and flea-infested accommodation, a process that took almost three years. The Baba bought the opium from the local colonial government and brought in whores and got their labourers hooked on local opium, garnisheeing their wages for the cost of both these activities and turning them into drug-addicted slave labour. This was the beginning of the profitable combination brothel and opium dens that at one stage kept almost the entire local population in thrall.’
‘It makes William Wing’s success sound commendable, almost heroic,’ I remarked.
‘Well, yes, there were a few who instead of succumbing saw opportunity. In William Wing’s case, in whores and drugs, the two things Chinese men weren’t prepared to do without.’
I grinned. ‘Not only Chinese men, I dare say.’
‘A great many died or wasted away from opium use but the Baba didn’t care. After all, there was China with its endless supply of willing muscle and bone. Certainly very few ever returned home.’ Elma paused. ‘The local death rate from opium addiction was soon higher than in China, and by the mid-nineteenth century, with 20 000 Chinese coolies in Singapore, it was estimated that three-quarters were addicts, the highest addiction rate in the world.’
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