A short distance further on I came across a coffin-maker's workshop, open to the street. A carpenter was at work as I walked by, shaping the side of a coffin from a wide plank, curls of reddish wood peeling off from the blade. Another man was rounding off the clover-leaf end of a coffin, rubbing it with sandpaper. In the gloomy rear of the premises, completed coffins stood on racks. As I watched, the carpenter spied me and suddenly ran at me with a
chisel. I fled to shouts of rage behind me. A wood off-cut bounced on the road at my side. Once in the next street, I stopped to get my breath back and to glance round the corner to check I was not being followed. He was nowhere in sight.
This episode of sudden, wild rage was not only terrifying but also incomprehensible. I had blond hair. I was lucky. I brought good fortune. Apart from the skull-faced gardener at the Fourseas, who was in any case verging on the certifiable, I had never before seen the legendary sudden wrath to which the Chinese were prone. Later, I asked Wong if this had happened because it was considered bad luck for the dead to have their coffins peered at by a
gweilo
.
âNo,' Wong replied. âThis man jus' no like you. Maybe he Communist.'
To gain my composure, I walked down the street to a tea shop. Entering it was akin to stepping back a hundred years. The walls were panelled, the sides lined with cubicles divided from each other by latticed screens, the fretwork cut in patterns of the characters for prosperity and longevity, and containing a dark wood table and benches. The brass tea urns steamed at the rear of the shop, next to a shrine and an elderly man sitting at a table with a cash box, an abacus and a book of receipts. I appeared to be the only customer.
A waiter approached me and jutted his chin at me.
âYum cha
,' I replied.
He looked at me for a moment then signalled me to sit in one of the cubicles. A minute later, he brought me a pot of gunpowder tea and a tea bowl. I filled the bowl and took a sip.
âHo sik!'
I exclaimed, adding in English, âVery good!'
The waiter made no response whatsoever but walked away.
Although at first I was the only customer, over the next half hour, the place began to fill with elderly men, every one of them
carrying a small bird cage containing a finch. They were tiny birds, some striped black, white and red, some yellow, some green, some a nondescript fawn. As they sat down, the men hung the cages from hooks suspended from beams in the ceiling directly over their seats. Tea was served. More arrived until every seat was occupied except the three in my cubicle.
Sipping their tea, the men conversed avidly amongst themselves. Overhead, the birds twittered and sang at each other. There were, it dawned on me, two different sets of conversation going on, human below and avian above. The tea house was like a social club for both species.
The waiter came over to me, signalling that I should leave. He was not antagonistic, but four men had entered with bird cages and wanted my cubicle. I nodded and asked for the bill. He shook his head and waved his hand from side to side, dismissing payment. I placed a fifty-cent coin under the teapot and left. I had not gone ten yards when the waiter came running down the street after me waving it.
âTipsee,'
I said.
âkumshaw.'
He looked at me and smiled broadly. It was then I saw his silence was because he had no tongue. I made an effort to ignore his infirmity. He made a throaty sort of laugh, pocketed the coin and stroked my hair. I wished, as his hand touched my head, that somehow I would not bring him wealth but return to him the power of speech. When I got home, I told Wong about him.
âJapanese cut plentee tongue wartime,' he said stoically.
As I walked along the street, a faint and unidentifiable herbal smell reached me. The further on I walked, the stronger it became until, finally, I arrived at the source. It was a shop unlike any ordinary Chinese store, with a shop-front window and a glass door bearing vermilion Chinese characters. A neon sign of a
six-foot-high snake coiling itself around a bamboo stake hung outside over the street.
The window display was most curious. It included bowls of seeds, what appeared to be bits of dry twig, desiccated bark, dried leaves, dehydrated roots, shrivelled fungi and flowers. Behind them were a dozen or so large ground-glass stoppered bottles containing preserved frogs, lizards, snakes and other less easily recognized pieces of flesh. Other reptiles lay on trays in front, dried out and stretched on frames of bamboo splints. Beside them were trays of what looked like black dried turds.
Going in, I found there was only one other customer, a woman with a florid birthmark on her neck the size of my outstretched hand. Behind the counter a man was busy writing on sheets of plain paper and opening drawers in a cabinet that reached to the ceiling and ran the length of the shop. From each he took a pinch or a handful of the contents, putting them into the sheets of paper. Every so often, he studied an old book. This done, he skilfully folded each sheet into a small, self-sealing parcel and placed it in the woman's rattan basket. When she had paid and left, the man turned his attention to me.
âWha' you wan'?' he asked in pidgin English.
âWhat dis shop?' I replied.
âDis Chilese med'sin shop,' he replied. âCan do for
gweilo,
too. You sick by ân' by, you come. I see you lo more sick.' He looked me up and down. âYou lo sick now?' he enquired optimistically.
âI lo sick.'
âYou wan' see med'sin? Lo all same like
gweilo
med'sin.'
Never one to turn down an opportunity, I said I did and he showed me round the shop. In addition to a vast array of dried plant and fungal material, there were velvet-covered deers' antlers, tiny birds' nests, powdered pearls like grey talc shot through with stardust, the ghostly pale exoskeletons of sea-horses,
dried bears' spleens (the âturds' in the window), an assortment of dried insects, a mummified tiger's penis (' ⦠make you good wif you lady frâen' â¦') and his
pièce de résistance,
a rhino's horn. When I asked for what these were cures, he reeled off a list of ailments, most of which I was ignorant of and hoped to so remain. When he was unable to give the English name, he mimed the symptoms, reminding me of the grotesque tableaux in the Tiger Balm Gardens.
Before I could leave, he mixed up a packet of dried plant matter for me.
âGood gen'ral medâsin for you. Like tonic. You put water, boiloo wung hour. Drink wung cup wung day. Make you st'ong.' He flexed his biceps and felt them. âLo ill for maybe t'ee mumf.'
When I got home, I gave the packet to my mother who was in the kitchen making a light supper, it being Wong's day off. She tipped the contents into a saucepan and boiled it for an hour. The apartment filled with such a noxious odour it woke my father, asleep in the bedroom. It also brought a shine to the interior of the saucepan not seen since it was new.
My mother and I let it cool then poured a cup. It tasted execrable. We left the remainder for Wong. When he returned, he was most grateful for it. As far as he was concerned, this was only a few drops short of being the elixir of life, its cost prohibitive on his wages.
Â
Â
The main mercantile district of Hong Kong, the city of Victoria, referred to by everyone as Central District â or just Central â held little interest for me. Most of the buildings were the offices of
banks, shipping lines, lawyers, insurance companies and import/ export firms. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank towered over the parked cars in what was known as Statue Square. To one side were the law courts, a classical colonnaded building with a dome on top. It could have been transported there from any European city. Yet, for all that, the old China still impinged itself upon the mid-twentieth century.
In rush hour, the chances of a rickshaw jam were greater than one composed of vehicles, for many office workers and businessmen coming from Kowloon took rickshaws from the ferry pier to their offices. Of those who chose to walk, many paused at the shoe-shine âboys'.
I could not understand why grown men were referred to as boys. The Fourseas had had room boys: only the bellboy, Halfie, had actually been a boy. Wong was our house boy; my father employed a Chinese office boy who was at least twice his age.
The shoe-shine boys bucked the trend. Half of them were indeed boys, some of them my age, who squatted on the pavement under the shade of an arcade, a box before them. If a customer halted, tins of polish, brushes and cloths would appear from within the box. Deft fingers rolled up trouser legs and, within minutes, the shoes would appear pristine, scuff marks and dust removed.
On one occasion, my father having withheld my pocket money for some misdemeanour, I toyed with making a shoe-shine box of my own, stocking it with polish and brushes from the kitchen and setting up my pitch. At fifty cents a polish â the going rate â I could earn a week's pocket money thrice over in a morning. I mentioned my plan to my mother.
âYou want to do what!' For a moment she looked at me, then burst out laughing.
âIt's not funny,' I defended myself. âI've got to earn some pocket money.'
âCan you imagine your father coming along the street ⦠?' She grinned broadly at the prospect. âNow that would be “going native” in no small measure. A definite plunge in standards. You'd be in the paper! Photo and all!' She extrapolated further.
âGweilo Boy Sets New Trend. The Shoe-shine Entrepreneur. Son Sets Up Shoe-shine Box: Father Commits Hari-kiri.'
âSo, can I do it?' I asked, sensing the wind blowing my way and wondering what
hari-kiri
was.
âNo,' my mother said. âIt's not because you'd cause a scandal. That would be hilarious. It's that, if you were to set up in business, you would be taking earnings from the other shoe-shine boys and they need all they can get.'
As usual, my mother's common sense prevailed and I put the idea out of my head. She surreptitiously reinstated my weekly allowance.
The shoe-shine boys shared the pavements with a small coterie of beggars. One was a tall, thin man who was totally blind, his face always turned up to the sky, his hand holding a begging cup and a length of bamboo painted as white as his sightless eyes. He was invariably accompanied by a child whose role was not to induce sympathy in passers-by but to act as a guide dog might, seeing him across the road or on to a tram. Another beggar was a woman whose body and limbs were twisted by deformity into a grotesque embryonic crouch. She got about on a small wooden platform to which had been affixed the wheels of an old baby's pram. For her, in her miserable condition, beggary must have been particularly demeaning, for every day she sold newspapers by Blake Pier, cradling her limited stock of copies of the
China Mail
and
Wah Kiu Yat Po
in her arms like the baby she would never have.
Perhaps the most obvious intrusion of ancient Cathay into
modern Hong Kong were the coolies. Throughout the day, swarthy Hakka women from the rural hinterland dressed in black, often wearing dust caps made out of folded newspaper, appeared down the street with bamboo poles over their shoulders from which were suspended anything from baskets of building rubble and bundles of waste paper to discarded wooden filing cabinets and office chairs. If it could be re-used, re-cycled or re-sold, it was.
These women were not restricted to carting debris. I once came to a hillside being blasted with dynamite and watched as the charges were laid by women, the detonator wire run out by women and the warning given by a woman with a gong. When the dust settled, it was women who carried away the dislodged rocks and earth. Not one man seemed to be involved.
Only one place in Central held me in awe and I visited it over and over again, like a rubber-necking tourist. It was the main banking hall of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank headquarters. I had gone there first with my mother. Reluctantly.
On either side of the entrance was a life-size bronze lion. The left-hand one was growling.
âThey're called Stephen and Stitt,' my mother said as we waited to cross the road.
âWhich is which?'
âStephen's growling,' was her reply.
âWhat's a stitt?'
âThey're named after two bank managers, Mr Stephen and Mr Stitt.'
On reaching the lions, I was struck by their size, yet this was not all. They had bullet holes in them from the war and Stephen had a lump of shrapnel embedded in him. Both were covered in a dark brown patina except that Stitt's front paw shone like gold. I soon saw why. People walking by touched it. For luck.
âThis,' my mother announced as we entered the bank and turned to climb a flight of stairs, âis actually the back door. The front door, and the address, are on the other side.'
This seemed nonsensical and I said so.
âIt's to do with the laws of necromancy,' my mother replied.
âThe main door has to face the hills, away from the harbour, to keep the sea dragon out and to stop the money flowing out into the ocean.'