The bucolic farmland of the Hong Kong Colony’s New Territories we drove through was only a more prosperous version of the Chinese side of the border. But the new arrivals went into shock when, suddenly rounding a corner in the mountain pass, they got their first sight of bustling downtown Kowloon and the glittering island of Victoria across Hong Kong’s great teeming harbor. Foreign visitors getting their first look at the instant mega-skyscrapers of the Pudong development zone in Shanghai have much the same reaction today. When I asked the former POWs why they had left China, all responded that their families would have a better future in the United States. Their decade plus in the PRC had convinced them that children of “mixed blood” would have little chance in Chinese society. Seamier considerations drove the departure of some, White and Adams in particular. The Beijing authorities had cracked down on black market activities and implicated both.
All three had something to tell. White, who was African American, in particular, was a brilliant linguist, who had spent years as a top government translator. We learned from him, for the first time, how carefully the Chinese Communist Party kept up with developments at home and abroad. White described a layered system of confidential party publications containing the latest news and articles about China in the foreign press.
The most closely held and voluminous of these, Mei Ri Bao, literally translated as the Every Daily, printed every item on China that appeared each day. Only the top leaders were allowed access, and probably only one of them, Mao himself, had time to read it. It was in this publication, we learned later from Zhou Enlai, that Mao read Richard Nixon’s 1967 Foreign Affairs article calling for rapprochement with China.
The next level of publication, called Reference Materials (Can Kao Ziliao), contained important foreign articles and internal party documents for distribution to senior officials throughout the government and the provinces. The lowest-level periodical was the better-known Reference News (Can Kao Xiaoxi), which was circulated to all party members.
Morris Wills, also known for his mastery of the Chinese language, had studied at Beijing University and ended up working on the publication China Pictorial. He gave us a sense of the strange cocoon in which foreigners lived in Beijing, as well as the pleasant but guarded existence of intellectuals in the most prestigious university in the capital. The Sino-Soviet rupture in 1960, not surprisingly, created a much stricter and more suspicious attitude toward foreigners. The inner workings of the leadership were as mysterious to Wills as they were to other observers, both native and foreign. He had great difficulty arranging to marry his wife, which soured him on Mao’s China and the prospects for his children there.
Adams (also an African American) had spent the last several years translating children’s books from Chinese into English. He had reportedly made broadcasts for Radio Hanoi in 1965. Clearly a hustler, Adams described widespread demand in Beijing for foreign black market items. He took pleasure in pricing watches in Hong Kong and lamenting the profit he would have made.
With the exception of Wills, who wrote an article for Look Magazine and spent a year at Harvard on a fellowship, these men returned home without fanfare and blended quietly back into Middle America.
”These Are The Good Old Days”
As a family, we loved living in Hong Kong in the mid-sixties. The work was compelling and the surroundings exotic. Sheila and I took an ample apartment at 2 Old Peak Road overlooking the botanical gardens and the harbor and located across the street from Canossa Hospital. Adam and Oliver, Tiger Number One (Dahu) and Tiger Number Two (Erhu), were soon to be joined by Nicholas Jr., Tiger Number Three (Sanhu), and we wanted good medical facilities close by. (As it turned out, I found myself assisting at the delivery of Sanhu, when the anesthetist was unavailable for his midnight arrival).
The children settled in at British schools nearby. Oliver was the fastest infant at Victoria Barracks Infant School, down the hill. Adam went to Glenealy, a Hong Kong government school up Old Peak Road. The Wang family of Anhui Province, immigrants from Shanghai who fled the Mainland in the 1950s, moved in to work for us, providing expert household service and the lively company of three young children roughly the age of ours, who gave them a feel for Chinese friendship, the language, and local life. The Wang family had suffered every horror early twentieth-century China could inflict: famine, war, dislocation, even a tiger eating an older daughter alive. They taught us that hardship could produce sympathetic, accessible human beings. Years later, the Wangs immigrated to the United States and prospered in the employment of Joe Alsop’s sister, Corinne Chubb.
Social life for transient foreigners in Hong Kong was organized around occupations and activities. The more different things one did, the more circles of people gave you access. In addition to watching China, we played guitar and sang folksongs and choral music, went to church at the Cathedral, and rowed and played squash competitively for the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. Sheila began her social work career as a volunteer, doing house calls in her fluent Chinese for a nonprofit agency that cared for refugees from Mandarin-speaking parts of China. Our continued language study with the painter Tang Hung gave us a look at Hong Kong’s artistic community.
Tang was a student of the world famous painter (some say forger) Zhang Daqian. He took us one day to meet Zhang at his “studio” in a rundown apartment building in Kowloon. The place was jammed. Students, concubines, clients, and critics all milled about, watching Zhang paint. There was not an easel in sight. The Master had a painting of a different style or period under way in each room, on whatever surface was handy. A trademark horse scroll was working on the bed, a lotus and bamboo in the Chan (Zen) Buddhist style on the top of a dresser, a Ming landscape taking shape on the dining room table, a delicate circular Qing bird forming on the sofa in the living room. Zhang went from room to room, surrounded by a cloud of observers, adding brush strokes and colors, a bird beak here, a flower there, a flying horse’s hoof on another. The audience marveled at the rapid, flawless work, the seamless transitions from one style and century to another.
Hong Kong was less crowded and polluted in the sixties than it is now. The population was under four million, as against seven million plus today. But it was a confining place, particularly since the Mainland was closed tight. To get away, we bought a sailing junk and hired a boatman. The boat was a converted fishing smack, painted blue, with bulging eyes set into the bow, almost thirty feet long and ten feet wide, carrying three sails and a one-lung diesel engine. It cost US$900. We named it Star Elephant, and shared it with Inger McCabe (now Elliott), whose then husband Bob was the Newsweek correspondent.
The boatman was from a fishing family in Aberdeen. He and his colleagues used a big tree beside the road on Middle Bay as their office, with awnings stretched between branches and a telephone nailed to the trunk. On an hour ’s notice, he would be ready after work when the family and a picnic arrived to set sail into a sunset on the South China Sea. Regulations required that boat owners pass elementary navigation and engineering exams. The reward was a certificate describing the bearer as a “licensed junk master.”
Sheila and I told each other from the first day of our years in Hong Kong that “these are the good old days.” That said, the history of the territory from 1964 to 1968 was dotted with crises of different kinds. We arrived in the midst of the massive drought of
1964, when water supplies to apartment houses were limited to three hours every four days. CEOs and Taipans would leave board meetings abruptly when the water came on in their zone. A frequent topic of analysis at gatherings of China experts during the dry days was the best way to flush a toilet.
The year 1965 saw the drought broken by nine consecutive typhoons, which frightened us all with torrents of water dashed against the picture windows by ferocious, quirky winds that played strange tricks. One tore open the closet doors of a friend and hurled his entire wardrobe out into the night.
In 1966, Hong Kong’s financial bubble burst. The boom/bust cycle in the years before the territory’s economy became the vestibule for Mainland growth in the 1980s was between three and five years. Stocks tumbled, real estate prices plummeted.