I remained standing amid the leftists, getting jostled and shoved as they passed. I hardly moved. It was later said by another reporter present that I appeared to have achieved some kind of professional rapture. Then, in an instant, something made me snap to. A macabre group of young women came toward me bearing brilliant green plastic toy water pistols. I knew this trick because they’d used it before on others: they’d filled the pistols with highly corrosive industrial acid. They ran toward me squirting the toys madly and I bolted up Canton Road.
I was met by a squad from the Emergency Unit marching south. These were the riot police and they wore coal-black helmets with gas masks on their faces, giving them an impersonal, almost robotic appearance. They carried black hardwood batons, lightweight and flexible circular wicker shields, pistols and Greener guns. To be caught between factory workers with acid-filled squirt guns and charging riot police is a clarifying thing. I finally retreated at a right angle to the confrontation and fetched up beneath a shophouse arcade. Two policemen hoisted a black cloth banner on bamboo poles that warned in English and Chinese: “TEAR SMOKE.”
By now the rubber men had been joined by a larger crowd. Apart from the Communists, much of the rioting in the summer of 1967 was run by what the Chinese called “Ah-feis,” what the British police called “corner boys” and North Americans called hoodlums. They conducted much of the havoc to mask petty crimes such as burglary, extortion or racketeering. Sometimes just for badness. Nevertheless, the Communists lionized them and frequently characterized in the left-wing press some nasty little Ah-fei the police had collared as a “proletarian fighter.”
Some rioters engaged the police with a variety of savage weapons culled from the storehouses of an industrial city. They swung sharpened bicycle chains or lashed out with gloves impregnated with nails or stabbed wildly with copper water pipes filed into sharp spears. Once, when a riot platoon raided a trade union office, they found that the concrete stairs leading to a second-floor arsenal had been washed down with cooking oil then sprayed with water, making them virtually impassable.
I followed the Emergency Unit back down Canton Road. The young man with the fluorescent tube had made contact with another young man, perhaps an enemy of Chairman Mao or perhaps just another aimlessly angry young man. The victim lay on the ground, clutching his bleeding face and screaming about his eyes. He was surrounded by little bits of glass and there was a fine powder all over him.
The EU fired tear-gas canisters, which left a white trail in the air as they arced upward and came back down amid the rioters. Several riot policemen had affixed wooden tubes to their guns and fired them into the crowd. The projectiles were very painful but usually did no serious injury. The crowd began to break apart and run down side streets. It looked like it was almost all over until someone on the roof of the Rubber and Plastic union lobbed a small refrigerator off the roof. Through some ingenuity they managed to set the refrigerator alight. The EU backed away as it slammed to the pavement and popped open as it bounced. Inside, a huge carboy of gasoline smashed and gushed forth fire with a terrific concussion. It blew the fridge door down the street. Despite such fine showmanship, the Maoists lost the day because the fire forced their own ranks to scatter. The riot evaporated.
While plain-clothed investigators sealed off the union building with wooden hobby horses and went inside to make arrests, the EU boys began to relax. The tear gas had blown south, away from us, so the police removed their masks. I found my friend, Sergeant Jack Rudman, among them. There was a large sweat stain on the back of his tunic and sweat poured off his face. Rudman’s dark eyebrows sank in a fierce V toward a beak-like nose, parallel with a widow’s peak, which made him look stern and all-seeing. Few people could see so much of others as Jack could, and yet he saw so little of himself. He was still breathing hard and scanning the windows of buildings above us for trouble.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” I said.
He gave me an examining look but did not respond. He flicked his head to get the sweat off his brow. Drops fell on my hand. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said then looked about at the civilians at the side of Canton Road. “But what about you, mate? You almost got a sting there, pursued by those dollies and their toy guns. Why the hell did you stand there ...” He paused to think of a literate-sounding metaphor, then said: “... like a garden gnome.” He looked back to me for a moment and added, “Trust you.”
I tried to make a joke, knowing that I’d been foolish. Inwardly, I was very unhappy that Jack couldn’t have been a little more sympathetic. He could have murmured a kind word or something, at least expressed the most oblique thanksgiving that I hadn’t been injured. Otherwise, what was the point of standing in harm’s way? He looked about to satisfy himself that none of his fellow coppers had been injured in the fight. They got his tender concern. I envied them for having his loyalty.
Fire engines came down Canton Road to put out the gasoline fire, bumping over rioters’ stones and EU projectiles, so we went and stood over by the harbour side of the street.
“Got your message about your girlfriend,” Rudman said. “Been too busy.”
I told him I understood.
“I feel like a steak,” Rudman said.
“I’ll buy,” I said too quickly. “Tonight.”
Rudman surveyed the wrecked street again then glanced back at me. This time he had a look of warmth. He touched his sweaty hand to my jacket. “Yeah, all right.” He even smiled.
When I returned to the newsroom in Central shortly before noon there was a message from Chen Lo-wen at Great World. Chen was Becky’s favourite director and the creator of Long Ago and Far Away. He had come down with Feng from Shanghai after the Communists took power and had laboured for Great World for little money ever since. The studio directors were grotesquely underpaid relative to their commercial value. Actors frequently planted rumours in the mosquito press about imminent retirement from films; actresses hinted they were getting married to rich businessmen and were leaving the screen. It was the only way to guarantee a meeting with Feng Hsiao-foon to discuss their lousy pay. He kept everyone waiting in strict silence out in Miss Chin’s anteroom, where she gave them hard, disciplinary looks until they were cowed into thinking they were badly spoiled children exploiting the studio’s father. Confucian deference to Feng, as well as highly restrictive contracts, meant that performers rarely had the sort of tantrums and upsets that Hollywood performers indulged in. They almost never complained on the set, issued few protests, and if they did, Feng would punish them with fines and a lecture. A couple of months before Becky vanished, Tina Ti from Cathay Studios disappeared for a few days without explanation. She washed up safe and sound at the studio a couple of days later, citing a curfew surrounding the Maoist riots in Kowloon. She may have just wanted a few days off from her hectic shooting schedule. Most top actresses had a reputation with audiences for inaccessible glamour, but the reputation they had with impecunious and dominating studio lords like Feng Hsiao-foon was something else: they were dispensable goddesses with short shelf lives who wouldn’t have known how to put on lipstick if it hadn’t been for his instruction. Becky hadn’t, before she went into the movies. Many performers had miserable lives — some were actually refused permission to marry. Others were never allowed to travel abroad for fear they wouldn’t come home. They all fought bitterly with Feng and sometimes walked out, paying contract penalties or launching lawsuits to free themselves.
Feng didn’t mind the atmosphere of