Becky Chan. Jared Mitchell

or richer, they just went back to work. The only time I had ever seen him unnerved was when a young actress hung herself in her dormitory room at the Great World studio. They brought Feng to see her body, gently swaying and swollen. He had the room exorcised.

      As a director, Chen Lo-wen had even less latitude than the performers. He was so beholden to Feng, who had kept him all these years, that his complaints were few and he worked very hard, often at great personal sacrifice. Chen gave himself a serious groin pull loading one of Great World’s heavy old Mitchell cameras into a truck for a location shoot on The Herdsman and the Weaver. Feng told him to keep working or lose pay for every day he was off. Chen was in such pain that he miscalculated in lining up a close-up shot of Becky’s climactic scene because the Mitchell used a range-finder rather than the through-the-lens reflex system. When the film came back from Rank, her face was away off to one side of the frame, one eye obscured. I thought the shot had an appealing quality because it made it look as if the weaver were trying to hide her sorrow over her husband’s long absences. But Feng was furious. He ordered the whole scene reshot and expenses charged against Chen’s pay. Why Chen stayed with Feng was a testimony to not only his loyalty to the studio father but also to the desperate oversupply of Shanghai movie directors.

      I called Chen back. You could hear the upset in his voice and I assumed it was because of Becky’s disappearance. “Have you learned anything?” I asked him in English.

      He made a lengthy and suspicious protest: “I do not want any harm to come to Miss Chan. No one has told me anything about her going away. I had nothing to do with it. I know nothing. No one has informed me of anything.”

      His answer was peculiar so I poked about with a few questions. When had he last seen her? How did she seem at the time? I had no strategy in my questions to cause any direction to emerge so I gave up. I just put my head in my hand and rubbed my eyes. “I don’t want her hurt,” I said.

      “Neither do I!” Chen said. “You must run a story in the China Telegraph saying that I do not know anything about her disappearance! Please telephone Mr. Feng at once and tell him the same. I have told this very same thing to Cloudburst! You must not tell Feng that I spoke to Cloudburst. They get everything wrong in that paper and I want to make sure they understand that I had nothing to do with her disappearance. I am no one. I am just a quiet man who does his job.”