Fragrant Harbour (28 page)

‘We are here,’ he said. ‘Now you do what I told you.’

‘I remember,’ said my mother. But she seemed distrustful.

‘This is the place,’ the man insisted. My mother waited for a moment and then reached inside her tunic. She felt around and took out what I thought was a piece of string. Then I realised it was the gold necklace. She put it in the man’s hand. He seemed to relax.

‘No PLA here,’ he said. ‘Guaranteed. Wire cut. Leave the boards where I told you. Easy route. Remember, Boundary Street. But watch out for the monkeys.’ Then he was gone. He did not say goodbye.

‘What are the monkeys?’ I asked.

‘Never mind. He was joking. We must go on now, it will soon be light,’ said my mother. She knelt down and squeezed me. She
was trembling. She stood up and set off in the direction we had been heading.

We crossed many fields. Sometimes the path would go
sideways
a little while before returning to the straight direction we had been heading. Once we walked three sides around the square of a paddy. Then there were marshes. We were already very wet so it made no difference. My mother picked her way more
slowly
. There was a fence, low and made of wire with sharp points all over it, but my mother felt along it and found a place where it had been cut. She held the gap open and I slipped through. I waited as she came after me. She cut herself on the leg but not badly. The water was deeper here but there was a small tree and tied to it my mother found a set of wooden boards nailed together. She helped me climb on to the boards and then walked out into the water. The moon had gone behind the clouds and it was very dark. In a moment she was swimming, kicking hard with her legs as the current took us sideways. She gasped and coughed as some of the water got into her mouth. The river was much colder than I had expected.

‘You’re a good swimmer, mother,’ I said out loud even though she had told me to be quiet. She kicked and coughed. Then she put her feet down for a moment. She could touch the bottom. She rested and then she made a small cry as she began to push again.

‘Weeds. I thought I was stuck,’ she said. We were at the other bank of the river. I walked up to the low reeds on the far side, while my mother pushed the raft of boards into the reeds and
followed
me. She crouched. Her chest was going up and down and she was coughing. When she was able to talk she whispered:

‘Now we must be very very careful. Until we get beyond the paddies. If I stop you must stop still and not move until I do. If I press my head down, you must lie down and not move or make any sound until I tell you.’

‘Is this because of the monkeys?’ I asked. I knew it was.

‘You must do as I tell you,’ she said.

We set out to cross these new fields. There was even less cover than there had been on the other side of the river. Ahead of me there were hills. I felt we could easily be observed from their height. But it was still very dark. Once or twice I lost my footing and my mother put her hand on me to make me lie still as the
sound of splashing died away. It was so loud. I could not believe we would not be heard for miles. Then my mother did the same thing and fell flat on her face. She lay still and I thought she had hurt herself. I wanted to come up to her but she made a gesture with her hands for me to stay where I was. So I knew she was all right. She lay there for minutes. Then she slowly straightened up and began to move forward again. A bird took off from a clump of reeds not far in front of us and she stopped. A man stepped out from behind the reeds. He was only feet away. He was a type of man I had not seen before. His face was broad. His arms were long. He wore a kind of cap on his head and carried a gun. He had a long knife in his belt. Without thinking I reached forward and put my hand in my mother’s. He did not look like a monkey. He looked like a fighting man. He only stood and stared at us. By now the moon had again come out. The man kept staring at us. I did not know that any person could be so immobile. Then he turned and went away. He made no noise.

We made it to Boundary Street by the middle of the day.

Years later, when I told my grandfather the story of how we came across the border, he said, ‘I always did have a soft spot for the Gurkhas.’

When we first arrived in Hong Kong my mother and I went to stay with her relatives in Mongkok. Their father, a first cousin of my mother, had fled to Hong Kong in 1949. He had been a local official in the Kuomintang. He had a bullet wound to the side of his abdomen where he would sometimes let me put my finger. Later, when I had a scar from a smallpox vaccination, I pretended that too was a bullet wound.

We all lived in one room. The apartment was on the eighth floor of a block. It was very difficult but I was too young to
understand
. Before long my mother got a job working in a pharmacy and, not long after that, we were given a room of our own. I don’t know how we jumped the queue. But my mother’s cousin was a big man in the electricians’ union and had his old Kuomintang connections and also was on the Residents’ Committee. I began to go to school properly at St Mary’s. I was very good at
mathematics
because of my great-aunt’s teaching but my Cantonese was not good and people laughed at my accent. So my mother’s cousin began to teach me Wing Chun fighting and I got into some fights, which I won. The Fujianese had a reputation of being very tough. At one point I was loosely attached to a group of other Fujianese and things might have become difficult. My mother did not know. But I got a scholarship to senior school and left them behind. The scholarship made my mother very happy.

Because of the Cultural Revolution, I had had no real
experience
of school. Once I began to win fights, I found that I liked school very much. The teachers were strict but they were
consistent
and I found that reassuring. My mother was much happier than she had been in Shen Lo. She told me once that when she got to Hong Kong she realised that she had been frightened every moment of her life for the previous five years. I missed living on the sea. I missed the air and the fishing boats. But in every other respect Hong Kong was better. A big family who had two
apartments
on our floor, the Yips, most of whom had come from
Guangzhou ten years before, adopted us and made us feel part of their big family. Yip Xu was a week older than I was and we played together all the time. I helped him with his schoolwork and he let me ride his bicycle. My mother rose in her work until she was managing a branch of her pharmacy in Tsim Sha Tsui. Once she had learned good Cantonese, she began to take English lessons three nights a week.

Two days after Chinese New Year in 1984, my mother came and interrupted me while I was studying. I remember the moment well because I had just bought a Casio pocket calculator with my laisee money for that Chinese New Year. It was the first calculator I had bought with an LCD display. I would be eighteen that year and was preparing for my examinations. My intention was to study electrical engineering at the Chinese University near Sha Tin.

‘Ah Man, can I speak with you,’ my mother said. I knew this formula: it meant an important subject of general significance rather than a minor discussion or rebuke. I switched the
calculator
off. ‘Do you remember the stories we used to tell you about your grandfather – your father’s father?’

‘Of course.’

I had grown up hearing about the great love affair, and how he had stayed behind to fight the invading Japanese.

‘There is something I have not told you. When you were a child I did not know it. I became aware of it after we had moved to Hong Kong. I could not decide when to tell you so I decided to wait until you were eighteen. I will not say what you should do. But I think it is time for you to know. It is this: your grandfather is still alive. He still lives in Hong Kong.’

‘I thought he died fighting the Japanese.’

‘That is what the story was, but it is not true.’

She handed me a piece of paper. It said: Tom Stewart, Deep Water Bay Hotel, Deep Water Bay Road, Hong Kong.

‘How … why …?’

‘My cousin knew the story. Someone he knew did repair work at this hotel, and mentioned someone, and he recognised the name. It is the same man. He was in prison during the war with the Japanese.’

I did not know what to do. My first thought was that I could
never speak to the man. He was nothing to do with me. I felt anger: as if he were to blame for something. But in a few minutes that passed. He had not done anything to me. Then I thought that if I went to see him he would simply refuse to believe I was who I said I was. Anyone from my grandmother’s village could tell the same story. I could be an impostor. I could be in search of an inheritance. I would go and see him and he would walk away refusing to acknowledge me. I lay in bed and imagined that. When I woke up in the morning there was an envelope propped up beside my bed. I recognised it. It was the letter my
grandmother
had written to my grandfather during the war, when she was in China and he was in Hong Kong, and neither of them knew if the other was alive.

I went on the bus to Deep Water Bay to look at the hotel. It was a long low building above the road. I walked up the driveway. A Chinese man in a white uniform was polishing a car. I had no plan and did not know what to do so I turned around. I waited at the bus stop while two buses went past. Then I saw a European man come down the drive and head towards me. He was going in the direction of the beach. He was an old man but still straight. He had white hair and a big nose. He walked quickly and swung his arms. We looked at each other as he walked past. I knew it must be him.

Two weeks later I went back and waited outside the hotel again. I wanted to watch my grandfather and to understand what kind of man he was. But I did not see him. The next day I went back, this time borrowing Xu’s new motorcycle. A taxi pulled up at the hotel. My grandfather came out of the hotel and got into it. I followed him to Central where he went to the post office. Then he walked to the Peak Tram and went up the Peak. I left the motorcycle chained up and followed him. I stood at the back of the tram. When he got out he set off to walk around the road at the top of the hill. I started to follow but realised I was much too conspicuous. There was only one way he could go in any case. So I waited by the terminus for him to appear at the other end of the circular walk. I waited for an hour. He went to get a taxi. There was a queue and some Europeans began to cause trouble. They were going to beat my grandfather. I had a fight with them and went away with him in a taxi. Then I told him who I was. What I
remember most is that he did not for a second doubt or suspect me. He knew it was true. He looked very pale. He kept saying:

‘I had no idea.’

My grandfather paid for all my education from the time we met. He asked us to move in with him, but my mother and I thought it would be too strange to move from Mongkok to the Deep Water Bay Hotel. Instead he began subsidising our living costs. At first my mother wanted to resist but he was very firm and asked if she could let him do so as a gift to him. He understands face. Then when I got into the university to study electrical engineering, he helped with fees, and when my mother was sick for a year and had a series of operations, he paid for all that too.

I liked university. I liked the fact that it was out in the New Territories. I liked the feeling that people could think and talk about anything they wanted. By now I thought of myself as a Hong Konger, and I was proud of Hong Kong. There was more politics than I had expected. There was a club where I kept up my Wing Chung. There were many girls.

In the first week of the electrical engineering course, I met my future business partner, Lee Wong-Ho. We sat beside each other in a lecture. Afterwards we began to talk. He was more definite than other people our age. He was very confident. His parents had fled from Guangzhou in the fifties. We kept talking after the lecture and on the MTR home. He lived not far away from me in Mongkok. We were excited by the fact that we got on so well. As we parted on the street he said:

‘Let’s go into business together and make a hundred million US dollars.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

Ah Wong had many friends. He had more friends than I did even though I was more sociable. People were drawn to his
certainty
. One of them was a girl called Sha Lin-Xu who was
studying
dentistry. Her English name was Lily. After a few meetings in groups, I asked her to go and see a film with me. She refused and we did not speak properly for almost three years.

‘I thought you were stupid,’ my wife told me later. ‘Always making jokes in your Fujianese accent, so proud of yourself for always being in the top three of your class.’

‘You thought I was stupid because I used to come top in the class?’

She made a dismissive face and a gesture of sweeping
something
away with both hands. I did not pursue the question.

Wong and I had an understanding that after university we would go into business together. But first we would need to spend time working to make money and to see what
opportunities
there were. I went for interviews before my final term and got a job as an engineer with a company that made industrial boilers. It was a family firm and chances for promotion were limited but it was an opportunity to learn. This was in summer 1989. Wong got a job working for an architect who specialised in converting and fitting out restaurants.

The day after he told me he had the job we heard the news of the Tiananmen massacre. Everyone was shocked and angry. The atmosphere of Hong Kong changed. We went on a protest. We marched through Central. There were banners accusing the Communist Party leaders of murder. There were rumours about how many hundreds of people had been killed. Most of the
victims
were students our own age. Some of the people in the square were distantly known as friends of friends or relatives. Sha
Lin-Xu
came with us. She was crying and chanting slogans at the same time. I was so caught up in the feelings about Tiananmen that I forgot to try to impress her. In the demonstration we were separated from the rest of our group and I went home on the MTR with her. There were other demonstrations in the next few days and we met several more times.

‘She likes you,’ Wong told me one night after the three of us had been to see a film together.

‘She doesn’t seem to,’ I said, though I hoped I was wrong.

‘I’ve known her since she was three years old and I can tell.’

So the next day I called her up and asked her on our first
proper
date, just the two of us, not even a demonstration to go to. She said yes. We went to see a Jackie Chan film. We were married six months later.

I know that my grandfather read my grandmother’s letter, because I asked him and he told me. But he never told me what it said.