We found a camaraderie in physical complaint, Becky and I. It was in Hong Kong, during those early years that I first fell victim to crashing headaches that began with jagged violet lines pulsating before my eyes, followed by crippling pain and finishing up with some good hard retching. I sought out an American physician, who had a practice in Alexandra House. He diagnosed migraines and prescribed cold compresses. But the headaches were still agony. Becky found out about them over coffee one afternoon.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“What’s wrong?”
“A bad headache.”
“I knew it. I knew you were the sickly sort. I will make you better.” She insisted that I be treated by a Chinese herbalist at once. We couldn’t wait until I felt better: we had to take care of it right then and there. In my agony I boarded a bus with her and we trekked out to a Chinese medicine shop on To Kwa Wan Road in Kowloon City. Becky insisted we go there with the fervour of the mixed-train enthusiast at the European Y. No other shop would do. The place was nothing to look at: very dark and open to the street on one side. It had a lot of drawers, painted black and standing in rows right up to the ceiling, each one labelled in gold paint with a single Chinese character. The drawers contained dried roots, leaves, bugs and animal parts. The smell would have been pleasant if I hadn’t been suffering from a migraine, which magnified potent odours. The medicine man declared that my gall bladder was out of whack and prescribed prunella vulgaris to cool my internal fires and restore the flow of vital energy up to my head. I took it for years but with only variable efficacy.
The actual truth was that this young actress was not interested in cures, at least for herself. She was trying to make herself very sick, which sometimes worked and she would succumb to raging headaches and stomach pains. She confessed to such self-loathing, but only rarely. She would become lugubrious at lunar new year or during the Moon Festival. “Don’t forget,” she would explain, “I’m an orphan.” She would let the comment out as if it were a lone soldier banished from a heavily fortified citadel. She would let no more information forth. At first I pressed her but then I learned she was an intensely private young woman who rationed information about her real self. For most of our long friendship she told me little of substance, and never as a response to a direct question.
Becky loved movie-studio costumes and sometimes made little contra deals with the Southern Electric costumer, her faux Givenchy, for whatever they had in stock that month that looked like fun. When she was more confident about her appearance she arrived at a mixed-race evening in dark red lipstick and wearing a monocle and floral hat covered in a coarse veil — Chinese and Europeans alike recognized a spoof of Mildred, and we laughed knowingly. She especially favoured big ball gowns with enormous, fluffy skirts. She turned up in a taxi outside at a party in Kowloon Tong with a skirt so big it poured out the windows of the tiny cab like an enormous pile of rising bread dough. Inside the hostess’s flat, she used the dress to antic effect when the hostess, a tea service on a tray in her hands, looked about bewildered for the coffee table. “You’ve got it under there, haven’t you?” she said. “You’ve got the whole table under your dress.” And Becky would be standing there in that fluffy skirt, her hands behind her back, looking up at the ceiling, trying desperately not to laugh.
FIVE
Even as a child in Canada I invited peril as a kind of thrill, a plea, a punishment, a dare. I had great fun walking across the black steel railway bridges in Winnipeg, hoping a freight or passenger train would catch me at mid-crossing. Once, a livestock train did. I was right over the middle of the Red River when it came and I stood on the tracks and waited until the last possible moment, before skipping to the edge of the bridge, clutching one of the thick diagonal trusses. I must have been eleven years old and after the train had passed I cried violently, and that made it even better. What if my leg had slipped between the creosote-stained timbers of the open bridge deck and become wedged there? I couldn’t have got out of the way. Too horrible. Too wonderful. I possessed a foolishness that I’ve never completely shaken. When I was a teenager I saw Niagara Falls with my family. As I stood at the edge of the water, a few yards above the precipice, that hypnotic current racing past beckoned me, as if to say, jump in, ride down the cataract with me, tumble about at the bottom and swirl among the boulders there. My dad stood there with me, oblivious to my urges, and asked, “What do you think of it?” I replied: “Lead us not into temptation.” He only looked blank and then back at the water. I often wonder if my dad lived out the rest of his life thinking his son was psychotic.
| The China Telegraph |
| Rioting spreads to Central |
| By Paul HauerChina Telegraph |
| Mobs of leftists laid siege to Central District for seven hours yesterday, stoning Hongkong residents, tourists and journalists, and causing extensive property damage. |
| In the morning, left-wing union representatives took to Garden Road with the intention of laying siege to Government House, but found their path blocked by police just outside the Lower Peak Tram station. |
| Using loudhailers, police ordered the group to disperse. They refused and resorted to demonstrating outside the Hongkong Hilton. By early afternoon police took up positions at road junctions around the hotel and forced crowds to retreat to the waterfront. |
| A group of 40 stick-wielding rioters knocked an American journalist to the ground, punched and kicked him and smashed his camera. Members of the Emergency Unit made baton charges and fired four tear-gas cartridges before the crowd dispersed. |
| At the Fire Station in Harcourt Road someone tore down the Union Jack and burned it in front of a cheering, slogan-chanting crowd. |
| Mr. Anthony Benbow of MacDonnell Road was seriously injured by rioters outside Central Market. He was taken to Queen Mary Hospital and is said to be in satisfactory condition. |
| By 7.20 p.m. the mobs had dispersed and the situation was calm. Police arrested 44 people during the disturbances. |
I can still recall quite plainly the sound of the policemen’s paint scrapers shrieking over the surface of the windows on the building that housed the Hongkong and Kowloon Rubber and Plastics Union in July 1967. It was a few days after the riot in Central. I had gone out with a police patrol for a story. They were removing what were called “big-character posters,” inflammatory polemics glued to windows. By early July 1967 the colony had entered a new and hysterical phase of Maoist agitation. One of the posters read as follows: “Plunge yourselves into a struggle against factory management’s devices to step up exploitation! Smash the British imperialists and the Hong Kong capitalist running dogs!” While two policemen, both Chinese, scraped the posters off, a British officer photographed the remaining ones. This was going smoothly enough when suddenly a melee burst upon us. It was very wild and very dangerous. I, of course, was fascinated by the fighting and, just as I had been tempted by the current at Niagara, I instinctively walked toward it.
Rubber and plastics workers rushed out the entrance of the union building and came right for us. All the built-up anger, frustration and want in every Hong Kong man’s heart, the poison of bitterly hard lives, came to the surface, abetted by the rhetoric