For John Rudell
BECKY CHAN
A NOVEL
JARED MITCHELL
Copyright © Jared Mitchell 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
(except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press.
Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Editor: Barry Jowett
Copy Editor: Julian Walker
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Webcom
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Mitchell, Jared, 1955–
Becky Chan
ISBN 0-88924-300-X
I. Title.
PS8576.I8696B42 2001 C813’.54 C2001-930191-X PR9199.3.M57B42 2001
1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our
publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through
the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, The Association for the Export of Canadian
Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and
the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent
editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on recycled paper.
Although there are speculative references to real people and situations in this novel, this story is strictly
a work of imagination. None of the incidents, as described, ever took place. All main and most secondary
characters and situations in this story are fictitious and similarities with real events and
characters, living or deceased, is coincidental and unintended.
Excerpts from “Long Ago (and Far Away)” by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin, copyright 1944, reprinted
with permission of Universal Music Publishing Group.
The author acknowledges the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council.
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ONE
Feng Hsiao-foon demanded to know what I’d done with his wife, Becky Chan. It was July, hot outside, and the air stank of diesel exhaust and rotting garbage. The back of my shirt was damp with sweat from a trip across the harbour to the Royal Observatory in Kowloon. I’d been reporting a story about atmospheric radioactivity. The beta activity of airborne dust samples had dropped to ninety-six pico-curies, which would come as a relief to those who worried about such things. Fallout over the China coast had been fluctuating following an atmospheric test of a hydrogen bomb in the distant region of Sinkiang. I’d glanced up at the sky over Hong Kong, and while it looked the same as it did every summer, bluish-white, hazy, stunningly bright, I almost wished for a cheery iridescence, something to physically imply the story. Becky Chan was my best friend. Feng said she was missing.
That day was July 2, 1967. I had known Feng, as well as any outsider could know him, for more than fifteen years. He was the chief of production and principal shareholder of the Great World Organisation. His greatest star, Becky Chan, was the Goddess of Mercy, and she presided over those most hallowed of Hong Kong temples, the cinemas of the Great World circuit. The 1958 super-production of The Goddess of Mercy, was her greatest success. It was Great World’s greatest picture and she was its greatest artistic asset. She had played a dual role in that film. The first was that of Koon Yin, the merciful deity draped with snow-white robes and lying on an emerald lotus pad that floated in a purple moonlit sea. She daubed her mystic dew from a willow branch, the dew fell through the purple sea down to our world below, and it brought relief to mankind’s innumerable sufferings. She also played a poor peasant woman, whose family Koon Yin saves from catastrophe. The baroque sets, the brocade costumes, the process photography, The Goddess of Mercy brought great prestige to Feng’s studio. The only thing it failed to do was make a profit.
The rest of Becky Chan’s films, plastic comedies and overheated melodramas, all made profits, and in the jumped-up merchant mind of Feng Hsiao-foon, that made them worthier. Almost always before and after The Goddess of Mercy, Becky’s pictures made money for Great World. Thus, you can understand why Feng Hsiao-foon was deeply concerned about his wife’s disappearance.
My face must have changed when Feng said Becky was missing because Billy Fong, the China Telegraph’s one-eyed copy boy, glanced at me twice. He stared sideways to get a focus and the gesture exaggerated his interest. It unnerved me so I looked down at my desk, fiddled with things on it, shifted a disorganized heap of papers in a wire basket. I pretended to search for something important. I glanced over at Mary Wu, the Chinese switchboard operator, visible at her station through a rectangular cut-out in the cream-coloured wall on the side of the newsroom. She was taking a message from an English-speaking caller and I could hear her bawling into her headset: “How to spell please?” Over by the entrance to the washrooms, prematurely wrinkled from worry, a young Chinese janitor poured water into a zinc bucket from a red rubber hose. A drunken correspondent from the British Press Association had once offered the janitor ten dollars to take him into the loo and beat him with that hose. The janitor had just enough idea of what sexual fetishes were to decline, though in much agony, for he urgently needed the money. Over by the window, Sonny, the Ceylonese copy editor who was apt to daydream, looked out at the weird sight of a double-decker China Motor Bus on the steep grade of Wyndham Street just outside the window, waiting for the traffic light at the bottom of the hill. The diagonal view made it look as if it had just crashed into a pit outside the newsroom and we, lords of the Oriental English-language press, sat ignoring it. Four British reporters sat on the edges of two desks, swinging their feet and talking sports.
I suddenly felt very tired. I dreaded the possibilities, that Becky might have been kidnapped, that she was lost, or dead. Many people suffer through a difficult year some time in their lives; 1967 was my difficult year. Becky’s disappearance was going to exhaust my endurance. An all but overpowering urge to burst into tears crept over me. Becky was the only true friend I’d ever had. The orphan girl from the refugee shack towns that ringed Kowloon. The jade girl, the pretty teenager who had started out performing ingénue roles in Cantonese opera. The local apprentice actress who slaved for cheesy film companies that came to Hong Kong from Shanghai following their closure after 1949