Much of what little happiness I had in those days was anchored to the hope that something might take root between Becky and me, or me and Jack Rudman. But after nineteen years in Hong Kong, I found my hope was nearly depleted. Like lonely people around the world who were approaching middle age without settlement, I got along with chance encounters and called it my life. Encounters with tourists, co-workers, armed-forces personnel, the oblique relations with people you brushed past in everyday life. I went to a restaurant in Stanley Street for breakfast every morning. There was a very young Chinese waiter who showed me great affection and, lonely me, I reciprocated. After a few weeks of serving me bacon and two eggs six days a week, this tender-hearted young man brought me three eggs, but only charged me for two. I must have shown encouragement through my gratitude, because the next week he brought me four. A week later there were five fried eggs and I had to tell him to stop. He seemed hurt, so now it was my turn, and I showed my escalating warmth with increasing tips until I was leaving one hundred per cent of the bill as a gratuity. One morning I came by and the restaurant had gone out of business and I never saw the young waiter again. That was all, that was it, that was one of my finer relationships.
Once, when I confessed to having a bad migraine, Becky nodded knowingly, removed a bottle of aspirin from her purse and swallowed two. She met my incredulous look with this explanation: “I think I have a headache coming on too.” I could have kissed her for that. In recent years she’d become a vegetarian. She lectured me on the unhealthy nature of meat. “The human intestine,” she’d say, “is like that of herbivorous monkeys: very long. Real meat eaters, such as tigers or lions, have short intestinal tracts.” It could get a bit tiresome and transparent. But if I teased her about eating too many beans by making a lot of crude noises that the scatological people of Hong Kong would find hysterically funny, she would grow huffy. “I see that you’re trying to upset me,” she’d say with a lot of shrugs and glances out the window. “Perhaps you don’t care about my health.” There was an awkward moment in which I tried to ratchet down her indignation but I usually had to apologize before she would warm up again, to give some personal sacrifice of humility before she felt that I had paid enough. A few nights later we went out for dinner and she would choose a vegetarian restaurant. “I need to be with my people,” she said with pretend grandiosity. “My fellow monkeys.”
The way I preferred to think of Becky, the way everyone preferred to think of Becky, was as Koon Yin in The Goddess of Mercy. Great World shot the exteriors in Taiwan because it had unspoiled mountain vistas. The hills of Kowloon that so inspired the police pipes and drums were scabby with squatter shacks and Royal Air Force antennae that snooped the skies of southern China. The police also worshipped the Goddess of Mercy, the one they called “She Who Looks Down and Hears the Cries of the World.” I attended the movie’s premiere with Jack Rudman, who unconsciously leaned against my shoulder in the Ambassador Cinema, perhaps to huddle against the ferocity of the air conditioning. Or perhaps, for once, he was just being nice to me.
Koon Yin is one of the most popular celestial inhabitants among the Chinese because of her compassion. She is destined to fall short of achieving nirvana until every last mortal achieves it, so it is in her interest to end the suffering of ordinary men and women. Becky struck a memorable tableau at the denouement when a married couple, whom the story has followed, rise up and meet her in heaven. The man had been a mariner once and his ship had thrice been saved from destruction when he saw her on a rock in the middle of a stormy sea, like a supernatural lighthouse. Now, in heaven, Becky stood in her white robes surrounded by carbon dioxide clouds. In one arm she held a horsetail duster. With the fingers of her free hand, she touched the rising couple and gave them eternal happiness. In the last shot the camera dollied back irregularly, so Becky appeared to float and bob away into infinity. The picture turned up at the Edinburgh Festival, where programmers praised Becky as “a restrained performer trapped inside an over-pretty chocolate box.” For a few months The Goddess of Mercy became the darling of European film buffs. It still didn’t recoup its costs.
Feng Hsiao-foon had his secretary hold my line while he took a second call, from Great World’s publicity director, whose job it was occasionally to hunt down missing performers. Becky was not the only actress to go missing. Others sometimes fled to escape their killing workloads or simply to escape Feng. They’d turn up in Singapore hotels, flat on their backs in the embrace of mundane exhaustion. Others eloped with amorous plastic-pail manufacturers who spirited them off to secluded villas in rural Hong Kong. These new husbands bought out their contracts and freed them from Feng’s exhausting grind forever. Being married to Feng, though, meant that Becky would never be free until the very last movie goers had found such happiness that they no longer needed the diversion of cinema.
Today, Hong Kong movies are known in the West for their wild and violent but improbable action. They have become newly popular, even chic among irony-loving Westerners who think that Chinese movies were invented around the time of Bruce Lee’s ascendancy. But there has been a movie business in Hong Kong for three quarters of a century although, like Hong Kong itself, it has re-invented itself many times. The movie business in Hong Kong in the late 1960s was a small, diverse, vigorous but not always profitable industry. It could make employees feel like family but then treat them with all the cruelty that families trade in. Dollar-a-day actresses lived in dormitories, barracked in tinsel harems, strictly regimented in their feeding, grooming, acting and public appearances.
The business churned out three hundred pictures a year. Big studios such as Great World operated twenty-four hours a day, with three shifts, sometimes renting out studio space to small independent film companies. Feng would only rent to them if they paid up before shooting began, because he knew they were constantly on the edge of insolvency.
The Kwong Yi Film Company concentrated on white-collar melodramas in which ambitious characters toiling in offices escaped their dull lives with overblown adventure and romance. Another studio devoted its output to a single starlet, Ting Ying. Nicknamed Transistor Girl, she had just one character and one costume — a radio factory employee in a grey smock. When not on the assembly line she was dating the owner’s handsome and agreeably knuckle-headed son. With her irrepressible charm, Ting Ying eventually overcame the boy’s family’s disdain for her low origins. Other studios were openly funded by mainland China and they turned out “socially progressive” pictures about how society cruelly treats the working class. These pictures really bored audiences silly. To carry the snoozers, the socialists also mixed in gangster, nightclub or musical pictures. And there were plenty of tiny Cantonese-dialect studios that eked out pathetic livings with shabby pictures Hong Kong people called “seven-day fresh,” reflecting the factory-farm pace of taking a script to finished print in just one week. One studio was so poor it had to illuminate its movie sets with discarded automobile lights wired to car batteries.
Three big studios dominated the Hong Kong industry: Cathay, Shaw Brothers and Great World. The Big Three produced the whole range of pictures: contemporary musicals, classical Chinese dramas, sword-play epics, gentle, weepy domestic tragedies and even, once, a western featuring all Oriental cowboys. The Big Three prospered. Cathay, Shaws and Great World had sound stages, distributors, theatre circuits, and they had talent. Cathay’s great star was a slightly plump beauty known as Laam Toi. She made Cathay a great deal of money but she was deeply miserable and she committed suicide by overdosing on phenobarbitone in 1964. Hysterical fans at the funeral overturned the hearse. Shaws had Peter Chen Ho, Betty Loh Tih, Chen Ping and Wong Yu. But the biggest star of them all, the greatest box office draw wherever Chinese movies played, five times voted Empress of Stars at the annual All-Asia Film Week, the queen of the Hong Kong cinema: Great World’s Becky Chan.
Feng almost failed to put Becky under contract when I brought her to his attention back in 1951. She was out of work and afraid of starving to death in a town packed with talented artists who had fled the Communist revolution. Feng wasn’t interested in Becky: she was Cantonese and he was a Northerner. He