Gweilo (9 page)

They all fascinated me in their way but one of them held my attention every time. He was employed in the most bizarre occupation I had ever seen. Seated on a stool, his client – man or woman – perched on another before him. He plucked their eyebrows with tweezers, then either pulled out or clipped their nasal and ear hair. The high point of his service came when he produced a tiny steel spatula and assiduously scraped out his customer's ear wax which he put in a tiny bottle. What he did with this disgusting gunge was left to my vivid imagination.

On the western edge of Yau Ma Tei was the sea and a typhoon shelter, a large artificial basin surrounded by a sea wall of massive boulders, behind which fishing junks and other small craft took shelter during storms. It was also where fishermen landed their catch. Some Saturday mornings, I would go to the shelter to watch the night's haul landed – green and blue-backed crabs and azure lobsters, sea bass with electric-blue scales and black lines, gold and black mottled grouper, thin, silver needlefish, octopi that slid their tentacles across the quayside, squid, sea cucumbers, long-spined sea urchins, eels, rays and sharks ranging in length from a few feet to such as it took four men to lift them, their eyes sunken and their mouths bloody. Nothing, it seemed to me, had been thrown back: everything was up for sale as edible and women jostled to buy the entire catch. Even the seaweed snagged in the nets sold for ten cents a bundle.

On one occasion, I squatted down to look closely at a large shark when it spasmed, opened its mouth wide and slammed it shut within inches of my hand. Before I could leap away, a fisherman grabbed me by the armpits and hauled me rapidly backwards.

'He lo dead!' he warned me. 'Sometime liff long time lo wartar.'

He picked up an iron bar, smote the shark on its head, rammed the bar in its mouth, twisted it to and fro and, breaking off some of the shark's teeth, scooped them up and gave them to me. They had a sharp, serrated edge. When the bar struck the fish, it sounded like someone hitting a semi-inflated football with a cricket bat.

Three types of vessels predominated in the typhoon shelter. The smallest and most numerous were sampans, ranging from little more than skiffs to boats about fifteen feet long. Constructed of wood, they were propelled by a single stern oar, although some had a short mast with a square-rigged sail. Most had arched canvas awnings that ran their length, beneath which lived a complete family. There was even a place for a charcoal cooking stove. The majority of sampan dwellers were fishing folk who cast gill nets or fished with sleek, long-necked cormorants.

I was intrigued by cormorant fishing, a typically devious and clever method the Chinese had developed. The cormorants were black sea birds about the size of small geese. When a sampan reached a shoal of fish, the fisherman would let the bird go. It would dive into the sea, catch a fish and swallow it. However, the fish could not reach the bird's stomach because of a ring affixed round its neck. Once the fish was caught, the cormorant returned to the sampan and, unable fully to swallow its prey, spat it out; with its wings clipped, the cormorant could not fly off. When it had caught a few fish, the fisherman would remove the ring, let the bird have a fish as a reward, re-affix the ring and wait for another shoal to pass.

At night, the sampan fishermen caught their quarry with the aid of a bright hurricane lantern. This was hung over the stern, the fish being attracted to it only to be taken in dip nets.

The next boats up in size were the walla-wallas. These were motorboats that operated round the harbour as water taxis. They acquired their name from the puttering sound their exhaust pipes made when a wave momentarily covered them, although I was given an alternative explanation of the name by one of my mother's friends who claimed they were named after the town of Walla Walla in the USA. Curious about this, I looked the place up in an atlas. It seemed improbable to me: the town, little more than a pinprick on the map, was in the state of Washington, at least 170 miles from the Pacific coast.

Third, and most impressive of all, were the huge oceangoing and long-distance coastal fishing or trading junks. Three-masters, they lay alongside the typhoon shelter quay like the remnants of the lost age of sail, prehistoric maritime monsters inexorably creeping towards extinction. Made of seasoned teak, some over eighty feet long and twenty wide, they were not only boats but family enterprises. Infants to grandparents lived upon them, as did cages of chickens and ducks, dogs, cats and even baskets with pigs in them. The poultry and pigs spent much of their lives suspended in mid-air over the stern, their droppings falling to the sea, not the deck.

Not infrequently, I was invited aboard one of these wooden leviathans. My blond hair, considered by the Chinese to be the colour of gold and therefore likely to impart wealth or good fortune, was my passport to many a nook and cranny of Chinese life. It was also the reason why, whilst walking down the street, a passer-by would often briefly stroke my head. I was a walking talking talisman.

At the stern of the junk were the living quarters for the captain or owner and his family, low-ceilinged compartments that smelt of snug humanity, soap, sandalwood incense and paraffin. Weighted oil lamps hung from hinged brass mountings; two boarded-off
kangs
– traditional Chinese beds – were made up with thinly padded quilts and hard headrests the size of building bricks but made of lacquered papier mâché and painted with flowers or dragons. In one bulkhead, a cubby-hole contained maps, brass and steel dividers, a navigator's ruler and a sextant. Upon a bulkhead was a small shrine to Tin Hau, the effigy seated demurely behind a tiny offertory bowl of rice wine, four kumquats arranged as a pyramid and a smouldering joss-stick.

Below the main deck was the hold which, according to the usual cargo, smelt of fish or a mixture of cloth, rice and, for a reason I never understood, dry earth. In the fo'c's'le were the crew's quarters: up to thirty men crewed the biggest junks. Every junk occupant was deeply tanned, almost the colour of the vessel's hull, and as sinewy as a rickshaw coolie but with a healthy glow to their skin. The junk children were lithe and sharp-eyed, like maritime gypsies. Even the dogs seemed to have a spring to their step, unlike those on the dock that just slept curled up in a convenient patch of shade. Other than to trade or buy supplies, the junk folk seldom stepped ashore and considered themselves a cut above land-dwellers.

Perhaps because she was lonely, perhaps because she missed our cat Gunner (so-called because he had been born in a cannon on HMS
Victory
) who had been left behind in England with my grandparents, or perhaps simply because her love of animals was getting the better of her, my mother decided she wanted a pet. As we lived in a hotel, a cat or a dog would be impractical and were, in any case, prohibited by the management. This did not, however, deter her.

'What animal would you like?' she asked me.

'A monkey,' I replied. It would, I considered, be like owning a little caveman whom I could teach to be civilized or, like those in Penang, criminal. The possibilities for entertainment were boundless.

'One monkey in this family's quite enough,' she retorted. 'What else?'

'A snake.'

'No!'

'Why not? They're not all poisonous.'

My mother thought and said, 'Because it would be stolen and eaten.'

It seemed a good enough reason.

'A pangolin, then,' I suggested.

I had seen one in a market a few days before, curled in a defensive ball with its scales capable of protecting it against every enemy save the butcher's knife. I had wanted to buy it then, to save it from pride of place on a menu, but the asking price was fifty-five dollars and I only had three.

'No.'

Lee Chun Kee and Company at 646, Nathan Road offered, according to their business card, to 'procure strange animals from all countries', a claim I found highly suspect. What if, I wondered aloud, I had the money and wanted a hippopotamus? An elephant? A tapir? A platypus? Best of all, a panda . . . ?

'They could probably get you one of those,' my mother remarked. 'I don't think you could keep it on the balcony, though. And every day you'd have to get several hundredweight of bamboo shoots for it to eat.'

The walls of the shop were lined with cages containing a multitude of song birds, most of them species of finch. Other cages were occupied by guinea pigs, terrapins, rabbits, white sulphur-crested cockatoos, kittens with their eyes barely open, macaws, love-birds, mynahs, mongrel puppies with eager tails, budgerigars and canaries. My mother drooled longingly over the kittens and puppies with all the emotion of a child peering in the window of a well-stocked confectioner's shop. At last, we were approached by a man we assumed was Mr Lee. He smiled ingratiatingly, displaying a solid gold canine tooth.

'You wan' baby dog, missee?' he enquired, swiftly opening a cage door and depositing a puppy in my mother's arms, from where it immediately proceeded to furiously lick her face. I could almost see her heart melting.

'Fifty dollar,' Mr Lee said, 'but for you, firs' customer today, speshul p'ice forty-fi'e dollar.'

As it was mid-afternoon, I found his salesman's pitch to be dubious in the extreme, but said nothing. Reluctantly, my mother returned the dog and, after much soul-searching, she purchased a budgerigar, a bamboo cage, a porcelain water bowl, a tin seed bowl, a mirror, a bell and two pieces of cuttlefish. These accoutrements cost over three times as much as the bird despite my mother beating Mr Lee down by fifteen dollars.

'What shall we call him?' my mother suggested as we retraced our steps through the back streets. 'How about
Sat Juk
?'

As this translated as Little Bird, I was not impressed. My mother's desire, which lasted the rest of her life, to give everything – dogs, cats, cars – a Cantonese name did not always show imagination or an extensive vocabulary.

In the end, we settled for Joey. He was happy in his cage, trilling to the wild birds outside, kissing his image in the mirror, ringing his bell, hopping from perch to perch and nibbling at his cuttlefish to keep his beak sharp. This, my mother deemed, was insufficient exercise, so every afternoon she switched off the fan, closed all the windows, locked the doors and gave Joey the freedom of her hotel room. With a flutter of wings, he darted about the room depositing birdshit wherever he went. This continued for two months until the day my mother omitted to close the fanlight window. Joey hopped out of his cage, chirped once and was out the window like a ballistic missile. My mother was devastated and we returned to Mr Lee bereft of a budgie but the proud owners of a miniature aviary with all mod. cons, except running water.

Despite being fully equipped, my mother decided not to get another bird because, she declared, 'You can't cuddle a bird or talk to it like you can a cat or dog. And it's cruel to keep them in cages.'

So she bought a terrapin, a glass tank to keep it in and a stone for it to sit on out of the water.

About two inches in diameter, its carapace was grey on top with a yellowish-green underside. Its head was yellow and black striped with bright red flashes by the ears. My mother, being new to terrapin ownership, asked Mr Lee what it ate.

'He eat w'ice, missee.'

'Rice?'

'Yes, missee. Plenty w'ice. An' dis one.' He reached under the counter to bring out a container of writhing bloodworms.

My mother recoiled but it was too late. She had paid for the terrapin.

On the walk back, we determined to call it Timmy, my mother not knowing the Cantonese for terrapin.

'It's a shame we couldn't have a puppy,' she mused. 'I don't like to dwell on their fate . . .'

'They'll be all right,' I said to placate her. 'The Chinese only eat black dogs.'

My mother stared at me. 'How do you know that?'

'I just heard it. One of the room boys . . .' I replied innocently. 'Besides, it's against the law in Hong Kong to eat dogs.'

My mother looked relieved. I did not admit to having seen the black chow.

Timmy and his tank were delivered an hour later. Convinced that terrapins did not exist on a diet of rice and bloodworms, my mother telephoned the University of Hong Kong Biology Department to get the truth, which was that red-eared terrapins were carnivorous and ate fish. They could also grow to twelve inches in length. Our tank was about fifteen inches by ten. My mother hung up with a thoughtful look on her face. Luckily for us, but unluckily for Timmy, he was dead in three months despite a diet of fresh boiled fish which stank out my mother's room, even when the tank was placed on the balcony so, as my mother put it, he could feel the warmth of the sun on his back. Her reptilian consideration may have been what put paid to him. In the wild, terrapins avoided the sun and took to deep water. Timmy's tank water was barely an inch deep and contained pieces of uneaten fish and terrapin droppings.

Timmy's death did not, however, occur before my father's first return from Japan and his presence, when discovered, caused ructions.