Fragrant Harbour (12 page)

‘What’s this called?’ I asked. We were standing in the kitchen of the Empire on a Saturday morning, when it was closed for business.

‘
Choy sum
,’ said Ah Wang.

‘Ah’ is the term with which one addresses friends and family in Cantonese. His full name was Ming Wang-Lok. In Chinese, the surname comes first.

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Heart of leaf,’ said Ho-Yan.

‘What do you think?’

‘Bitter,’ said Masterson. ‘But it’s all right.’ For an incessant smoker he took a surprising amount of interest in food.

‘Good!’ said Ah Wang.

Today, it is perfectly obvious that Hong Kong is a society built by refugees. Most of the six million Hong Kongers fled here from somewhere else, or were born to parents who did. After the great influx of 1949, anyone could see this. But then, in the
thirties
, no one knew or could guess that millions of people were going to flood over the border, and that a significant proportion of China, with all its energies and difficulties, was going to decant itself into Hong Kong. I didn’t suspect it at the time, but Ah Wang and Ho-Yan were the first of very many refugees I would come to know.

Not that Wo Ho-Yan was a refugee in the strict sense; he was fleeing different sorts of trouble. Indeed, the idea of him in
trouble
was at first hard to understand. He was a short, bright-eyed, round-faced boy, willing and energetic and friendly. There was something a little weak about him, and his manner was more sidelong than that of most Cantonese, but he always seemed keen to oblige. Or that was what I thought. If ever I’m starting to
congratulate
myself on an understanding of human character, I only have to remind myself of my early view of Ho-Yan. But he was very useful at the Empire.

By contrast Ming Wang-Lok – Ah Wang, as I came to call him – was a proper refugee. In China he had worked for a southern warlord called General Chang, who even by the standards of his
métier
was known for the brutishness of his behaviour and the over-refinement of his tastes. (All Ah Wang ever said on the
latter
subject was – in English – ‘General Chang, he like bound feet very, very much.’) General Chang had some kind of
contretemps
with his theoretical superiors in the Kuomintang, the National Government of China, and in an unfortunate
misunderstanding
was machine-gunned to death, along with five bodyguards, on his way home from dinner with a subordinate. Ah Wang had been due to accompany the general to cook one of his specialities at that meal, and had been prevented only at the last minute by an upset stomach. A naturally timid and pacific man, Ah Wang was extremely shaken by his employer’s murder. He ran away and came to Hong Kong. His behaviour was in accordance with a sound maxim, the first part of which is: ‘Trouble in China, go to Hong Kong.’ I often heard proud
expatriates quote this to each other over the next few years. The saying had a second part: ‘Trouble in Hong Kong, go to China.’ You heard less of that, then.

Masterson and I had been discussing the possibility of putting some Chinese food on the menu. The idea was to have something to offer those of our guests who were willing to give Chinese food a go but were unwilling to venture out into the white-slave
maelstrom
of a real Chinese restaurant. Ho-Yan, in his capacity as my general factotum at the Empire, knew our plan. When he heard about Ah Wang’s arrival in Hong Kong – he was good at hearing about things – he told me.

‘Master, a famous cook has arrived from Canton. He would be perfect for the hotel restaurant.’

Hence this meeting. We picked a Saturday morning when
Jean-Luc
, the combustible Belgian chef, was nowhere near the kitchen.

‘The fish is terrific,’ said Masterson, picking with chopsticks at a large steamed grouper.

‘I’m not so keen on this tripe thing,’ I said. I already knew that the Cantonese loved dishes with a gelatinous texture and, to a European palate, next to no taste. Now I love and can appreciate this kind of cooking. Then, I simply didn’t see the point of it.

‘Yes, it’s a bit on the authentic side,’ said Masterson. ‘But we could tell people that. It would be part of the show.’

‘I like the rice,’ I said. Ah Wang had cooked it wrapped in a lotus leaf. Masterson and I looked at each other.

‘We would like you to come and work for us,’ he said,
extending
a hand to Ah Wang. No translation was needed. I don’t think I had ever seen someone beam the way he did as he wiped his already clean palm on his apron before shaking Masterson’s hand.

This letter, and more so the ones I wrote to Maria, did not leave me with a clear conscience. There was something that I had not told her. One evening, a few months after Ho-Yan had begun to work for us, I went out of my office to the delivery entrance of the Empire, in order to check through a consignment of spirits which had been delivered that afternoon. I was working by a process of elimination, checking the inventory at every point from the importer’s warehouse to the bar measures. Alcohol continued to go missing, though never at the stage in the supply chain that I was examining at that time. It was a version of the three-cup trick. My current scheme was to leave the supply of spirits locked in the delivery storeroom – to which I was supposed to have the only key – and go back to check the inventory a day later. Part of
me knew that I would find nothing missing, but that the end of the month would bring the usual 10 per cent shortfall.

The storeroom was at the back of the hotel, beside the boiler machinery and the maintenance department. In the corridor on the way there I to my surprise heard two Chinese voices. I turned the corner and found Ho-Yan, looking immensely startled at being walked in on, and a taller, thinner young man of about twenty. He had a scar on his left cheek which at first glance looked like a
laugh-line
. They had been speaking a dialect of Chinese I did not recognise.

‘What’s going on?’ I said.

Ho-Yan, smiling with embarrassment, said:

‘Master, this is my brother Man-Lee. He has just arrived here from our home in Fukien. He does not speak English.’

He said something to Man-Lee, who gave a deep nod that was almost a bow. I extended my hand.

‘Please tell him that I am pleased to meet him,’ I said. This was not strictly speaking true. The reason Ho-Yan had gone to Maria’s mission was something to do with trouble at home; the same trouble had pursued him there and eventually brought him to Hong Kong. Whatever Wo Man-Lee looked like, it was not the opposite of trouble. Once you knew the two were brothers you could see the resemblance, but the older brother was visibly tougher and less accommodating. This is not hindsight.

‘My brother is staying with me until he finds work,’ Ho-Yan added. He was no longer at the mission but now shared a room in Mongkok with one of our waiters. I sensed straight away that the mission was unlikely to know about his brother’s arrival in Hong Kong. ‘He came by on an errand. We will keep out of your way, unless we can be of any assistance.’

‘No, I’m fine. Just doing the bloody inventory, as usual.’

They went away and I unlocked the storeroom, feeling uneasy. I decided that I ought to write to Maria and let her know about this development, since I had at least implicitly taken Ho-Yan into my care. His brother’s arrival struck a wrong note.

In the storeroom, I counted the bottles. Needless to say they were all there. As I was finishing and locking up, George, the maître d’ (a Cantonese whose un-anglicised name was Zhu), burst into the corridor looking more excited than I had ever seen him.

‘Ah Tom, come quickly! Big fight! In kitchen! Ah Luc’ –
Jean-Luc
– ‘and Ah Wang!’

We ran back through the maintenance quarters, along the
passage
that led to the kitchen and through the swing doors. A ring of jostling and enthusiastic waiters and kitchen staff stood against the walls. Jean-Luc was carrying a meat cleaver which he had plunged halfway through a whole duck. He was now
holding
this bizarre object aloft in his right hand. Ah Wang was
standing
five feet away from him with his arms crossed.

‘This is not how you cook a duck! I cannot work in this zoo!’ Jean-Luc screamed at me.

I can’t claim this was unexpected. Jean-Luc had, as predicted, resented Ah Wang’s arrival in ‘his’ kitchen. A blow-up had seemed likely for some time.

‘What seems to be the problem, chef?’ I said.

Jean-Luc had a bad temper even by the standards of his job, the kind of bad temper which becomes worse when people react too calmly.

‘Seems?
Seems
? The problem is that I cannot work in this
fucking
zoo!’ He then switched to French for a little while, before switching back to English with the words: ‘These conditions are impossible. Him or me, you must choose.’ He put down the duck and cleaver and he, too, crossed his arms.

‘Let’s have a word in private.’

‘Him or me! Here, now! Choose.’

‘Very well, Jean-Luc. Ah Wang, you are now Head Chef at the Empire Hotel. Jean-Luc, please feel free to go to Mr Masterson to discuss severance terms.’

Jean-Luc did not open the swing doors, he exploded through them, in the process nearly killing a waiter who was returning from serving beef tea to a guest with bronchitis. Ah Wang looked pleased, but, it has to be said, not surprised. I knew something which Jean-Luc didn’t: the late General Chang had loved European food. In all the excitement, I forgot about my letter to Maria.

‘This is the only interesting thing I’ve seen since we left London,’ announced Wilfred Austen. We were standing in the doorway of the Kuan Ti temple in Kennedy Town. Immediately above us was a frieze depicting a battle between Taoist gods. In the middle of the frieze a martial-looking god with four purple arms held two of his opponents’ severed heads and brandished two large pikes.

Encouraged by Masterson, I had developed a sideline in tours and talks. English visitors to Hong Kong often wanted to know more about Chinese culture. I constructed a tour: I would take people to the Kuan Ti and Tin Hau temples; to a graveyard near Fanling (which unfortunately was also near a tanning plant, whose smell I can still to this day recall without effort); and to the Luk Yu tea house, where I would supervise all the ordering, and nervous but undaunted visitors would tackle dishes like half-cooked chicken and thousand-year-old egg. (These taste like Brie, which did not stop people recoiling in happy dread when confronted with them. One woman even fainted. In truth they are only about a month old – not so very different from the pickled eggs we used to sell back at the Plough.) The thing visitors liked most was dim sum, which like many Chinese food names is a metaphor,
meaning
‘touch the heart’ – a highly poetic name for dumplings.

On this day in February 1938 I was giving the tour to two English writers, on their way to China to cover the civil war. They were going by boat, because the Japanese, who now occupied the greater part of China, had begun strafing the Kowloon to Canton train. The Japanese fighters took off from an aircraft carrier stationed in
extraterritorial
waters near Hong Kong. They had been known to strafe the boat, too, but in a more desultory and occasional way.

The poet, Austen, was the taller and paler of the two men. He had a permanent short-sighted scowl and was a smoker in the Masterson class. He was in his early thirties, the type of Englishman who never entirely sheds the sense that he is an
overgrown
schoolboy. His sidekick, the playwright Charles Ingleby,
was shorter, more tanned, friendlier, untrustworthy, and impish. They gave the feeling of being a two-man gang. They also made less secret of their homosexuality than anybody I had ever met.

Austen and Ingleby had been in the colony for a week and were due to sail for Canton the next day. As writers from England, they both exploited and mocked their semi-celebrity status. They had undergone a round of formal dinners about which they expressed, to me, open derision. Austen in particular was not impressed. ‘The intellectual level here is that of a Surrey golf club,’ he said. His favourite conversational modes were the monologue and the apophthegm. The two tended to overlap. Sex was a favourite topic.

‘All colonial life is essentially comic.’

‘Laughter is the first sign of sexual attraction.’

‘The Chinese are so much more intelligent and dignified than the expatriates, it’s positively embarrassing to be white.’

‘If it weren’t for gin and adultery, the Empire would have
collapsed
decades ago.’ (I passed this one on to Masterson, who immediately said, ‘I don’t know if that’s true about the British Empire, but it certainly goes for our hotel.’)

‘All Chinese art is quietistic.’

‘Red-headed men only come to the tropics if they want to die.’

‘I’ve never met an Englishwoman who didn’t want to be fucked by a Chinese.’

Here at the temple, however, he seemed, albeit momentarily, almost subdued. He had looked at the statues and altarpieces with close attention. I have to admit that I was pleased. The
penetrating
, heady perfume of joss sticks was thick in the air. A woman with a bamboo broom was making a whisking noise as she swept the floor. A Chinese goddess in jade and a fat Buddha sat companionably in the same niche.

In one corner of the temple, a fortune teller was touting for business. He was swinging a circular cylinder. When he found a customer he would invert the cylinder to drop a written slip on the ground. He would then interpret what was written on it. I am not superstitious, or perhaps I am – in any case, I have never had my fortune told.

‘It’s a bit chaotic though, isn’t it?’ Ingleby said. ‘Taoism sounds so pure and simple and above board, all about the Way and being
like a stream of water and all that, but then you see their temples and it’s all this superstitious mishmash, everything thrown in all together. This god and that god and Buddhas and you name it.’

‘No no, quite wrong,’ Austen said. ‘Much too Protestant. There’s no contradiction between mysticism and superstition. It’s like Mediterranean Catholicism, full of local gods and beliefs and rituals and intercessors. Doesn’t at all contradict the true faith underneath. We must not fear encrustation.’

Austen noticed the fortune teller give up swinging his cylinder and light a cigarette. The poet took out a packet of Sweet Afton and lit one without offering them to anyone else.

Austen and Ingleby were harbingers. The war between China and Japan meant that the stream of tourists heading to Canton dried up, as did a great deal of business with, and travel to, Shanghai. But the war itself began to bring people. There was a growing traffic of journalists, profiteers, diplomats, businessmen of varying degrees of credibility and probity, war tourists, spies. They tended to drink more and spend more than peacetime
visitors
. Trade was not as good as it had been but was nonetheless, all things duly considered, surprisingly robust; the Depression meant that we were working from a fairly low base. People from other hotels were now starting to come to the Empire for Ah Wang’s Chinese banquets. Masterson talked about dropping prices but then decided that we didn’t need to. He was now,
following
the death of his German sleeping partner Munster earlier in the year, the sole owner of the Empire.

‘Nobody minds too much about the war as long as they aren’t killing white people,’ he said.

The civil war showed signs of bringing me, at least, one piece of good news. Maria’s letters had begun mentioning the possibility of her mission having to pack up and relocate – and if they did that, the likeliest place to move to would be Hong Kong. (‘Trouble in China …’)

‘We are torn between wanting to serve the Lord in China by helping His children here and the reality that our work is being made close to impossible by the war,’ she wrote. ‘If we are, for practical purposes, unable to fulfil our mission, and at the same time are putting all of our lives in danger, we should not be here.
But the decision would be a very big one and I am glad that it is not mine to take.’

Our letters were more intimate than we had been in
conversation
. I often wondered what it would be like to meet again.

My conscience over Ho-Yan was now clear. Whatever I had been expecting to go wrong seemed not to have happened. He had left the Empire, saying that he wanted to work with his brother Man-Lee. He took a job first as a delivery boy and then as something more important in a food and drink distribution company. Before very long, he came to me with an offer: if we switched delivery contracts to him he could guarantee –
guarantee
– that our problem with missing inventory would go away. Our losses were still running at about a tenth of our purchasing. Although I remained irritated by this I was coming to see it as a fact of life, one more or less accepted by expatriates as an
unofficial
servants’ perk. Ho-Yan’s offer was to match our contractor’s price; by personally supervising the inventory, whatever that meant, he said he would make good the 10 per cent shortfall. This would translate into more than 10 per cent increased profit, since we would sell the missing alcohol at hotel prices; so the offer was too good to resist. I gave his company the contract for three months, and the inventories began to tally. I was delighted.

Many more people had come to Hong Kong in the way that Wo Ho-Yan, Wo Man-Lee and Ah Wang had done. There was also an influx from Shanghai. The Shanghai arrivals tended to be in some way exotic. I was particularly keen on the occasional White Russian, a type one quickly learnt to spot. There was
something
elegant and conceited and desperate about them. The arrival of these people, who were not in the strict sense refugees, but who also were not the opposite of refugees, brought the war closer to us. It became a constant topic.

‘The war’, however, meant several different things. There was the existing war in China, or rather the two wars, the civil war between the Communist and the Kuomintang – the received
wisdom
was that the Communists had been, for practical purposes, defeated – and the war between the Chinese and the Japanese invaders. There was also the war that everyone now seemed
certain
would come to Europe, a war whose name was spoken of with a physical sensation of dread in the stomach and which to
many, myself included, seemed nearer than what was actually happening over the border in China. And then again there was our own war-to-be, loitering at the back of people’s minds. This was only spoken of openly by men in the company of other men. The Japs are going to take us on; the Japs won’t start on us till after they finish the Chinese; the Nips are jealous of Hong Kong; the Nips breed like mice, they won’t be happy until they’ve
conquered
Australia. The Navy will save us; the Americans will save us; no one can save us. Hong Kong is impregnable; Hong Kong is indefensible. We’ll all have to flee to Singapore; if it happens, we won’t have time to get to Singapore. The Japs can’t bomb. The Japs can’t fly. The evacuation boats will be sunk in the harbour; the Japs will let us go and will take the harbour for themselves. It’s not a well-known fact, old boy, but the simple truth is Japs can’t see in the dark. The word ‘war’ came to be one you picked out in conversations across the room.

It was in the summer of 1939, just before war with Germany was declared, that this became real for me. My great passion by now was walking, a solitary but energetic pastime I had taken to by way of counteracting the gregarious but sedentary life of the hotel. I spent more or less every weekend out on Lantau or in the New Territories. My friends the Higginses, a couple who ran a shop selling Chinese furniture on Des Voeux Road, had a stone house on the south shore of Lantau; Cooper and Porter, my friends at the Hong Kong Bank, let me come and stay with them when they had their alloted time-share in the Bank bungalow out near Fanling. I did as much hill walking as I could; I was fitter than I had believed possible – much more so than I had been back in flat Kent. I liked the heat, and although no one could like the humidity, I seemed to mind it less than most.

That day, I had packed a bottle of beer along with my usual two canteens of water. My leather rucksack, bought from a
cobbler
in Wanchai, had in it some sandwiches, an orange, a
compass
, and a map. The plan was to catch a lift from Fanling and spend the day walking in the Tai Mo mountains.

It was the beer that undid me. The night before, I stayed with Cooper and his friends in Fanling. We had too much to drink. I woke up late and a trifle hung over. The young bankers were heading off for a lunch party. I got a lift to the foothills. It usually
took the first hour’s walking to begin to feel ready for the rest of the day – to get the week’s crampedness out of my limbs, and to have my lungs and legs start working properly together. I stopped at the top of a small rise, looking back down and north towards the border. It was a clear day for summer, with a trace of heat haze but none of the cloud cover which could be so humid and oppressive. Although it was only about noon, and I had a fair deal of walking ahead of me, I felt I deserved a treat. I sat down on a rock and drank the beer. The warmth and exertion gave me the feeling, pleasant at the time, that the alcohol was rushing straight to my head. Not to worry, I thought, the exercise will burn it off. I started out again for the top of Tai Mo Shan, taking a path marked with more confidence on my old map than it was on the actual ground.

It was early afternoon before I began to feel sleepy. I had climbed most of the way up the three-thousand-foot mountain and could see well into China in the north, past the paddies and villages of the New Territories. (The same view today would encompass several large new towns, very many high-rise
buildings
, and, over the border, one entirely new skyscraper-crowded city, Shenzen.) Going higher usually made one feel cooler and helped one to catch any breezes there might be, but on that still day I was only getting more and more hot. I hadn’t had a break since the beer, and decided now to have a rest. I leant against an Indian pod tree and ate my two ham sandwiches. The butter had half melted in the heat and its paper wrapper was hot and smeary. I tipped my hat down over my eyes. The stillness meant that it was eerily quiet. I thought I would rest for a moment and then take a drink of water to perk myself up.

When I woke the sun had gone far beyond the hills and Tai Mo Shan was in deep shadow. There could be very little time until sunset. I felt a jolt of apprehension at the thought of losing the track home and spending a night out on the mountain. No one would miss me until late Monday morning at the earliest. Swearing never to touch beer again, I swung my rucksack on my back and set out down the skimpy path.

Almost immediately, I was lost. I came to a fork in the track, one I had not noticed on the way up. One path seemed to curl back on itself before turning, presumably, downwards; the other
was fainter and steeper but more direct. Neither looked at all familiar. After hemming and hawing, I took the steeper track. It soon became clear that was a mistake. The bushes on either side were denser than anything I had passed through on the way up, and by the time darkness fell I was badly scratched and had lost my bearings. The only idea was to keep plunging downwards. At many points I was holding onto bushes and trees and scrambling over the crumbly rock. No path was visible. There were moments when the hill was frighteningly steep.