One Bright Moon

by Andrew Kwong

  During his years of unemployment, Baba tried hard not to submit to despair and lethargy. He read and re-read his beloved Chinese classics, like Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin, under the dim light of our regulation fifteen-watt globe. When I came home from school, I often found him sitting at the large rosewood table in the third lounge room, practising calligraphy with a fine bristle brush.

  Mama would be busy collecting laundry from outside, mending our clothes or preparing our evening meal. Still in her mid-thirties, she was thin and seldom smiled. She planned the month’s expenses carefully and would make sure there was enough rice in the big urn in our room to last the month. Before communal dining was introduced, she would bargain hard at the market, and she bought only essentials, such as kerosene (the electricity supply was very unreliable), sugar and peanut oil for cooking. She’d alter clothes to make sure they lasted as long as possible. We seldom had treats and never ate out (there were no cafés or restaurants in town anyway). She saved hard so that we could have a family photograph taken once a year to send to her father in Hawaii and mother in Hong Kong. We might go to a movie once a year, usually in the Lunar New Year, unless it was to see one of the free films shown by the government (though Baba said they were ‘propaganda’, whatever that meant). If for some reason the money from Grandmother was late arriving, Mama would become worried and pace up and down anxiously, waiting for the postman to arrive.

  Baba’s calligraphy helped us too. He’d write out good wishes for neighbours to hang on their walls or front doors during festivities such as the Moon Festival, in mid-autumn in the Eighth Lunar Month, and the Lunar New Year, and in return they might bring him a bunch of vegetables or a freshly caught fish, and usually a few cigarettes. Though he grumbled at times, doing things for people generally made him happy.

  Yes, I thought, he must be working undercover on a secret mission that was extremely important for the Party and China.

  ‘Yiu-hoi, can you keep a secret?’ I asked my cousin one day.

  ‘Whoa, Big Brother,’ Yiu-hoi said, using the traditional term of endearment for close male cousins. ‘I swear on all my toys that I’ll tell no one.’

  ‘My father is a secret agent for the Party.’

  Since the triumph of the Party, there had been one population-cleansing campaign after another. But no matter what happened, the constant activity on the nearby Wonder River offered reassurance that our community would endure. In my infancy there had always been fishing junks and sampans dotting the idyllic waterways, quietly providing their operators with a decent living; now an increasing number of tugboats, barges and riverboats had taken over, busily transporting grains and other produce for export.

  One evening, Baba was sitting in his usual place under the fifteen-watt globe when he commented, ‘Our people have survived many wars and natural disasters in the past hundred years, just as their ancestors survived the many ruthless tyrants in past dynasties. I think we can make it, no matter what.’

  I wasn’t sure whether he was trying to restore his faith in revolutionary China, or if he’d just fallen into another funny mood.

  *

  One late spring afternoon in 1955, the District Head came to our house and told Baba he was a capitalist intellectual with an outdated education. The man then marched off humming his favourite revolutionary song, ‘The East Is Red’.

  Baba was devastated. I gathered he knew then that he would never be needed as an intellectual, despite his times in re-education camps, and that it was unlikely he would ever be offered a job.

  Baba sank into depression. He sat in his cane chair in one corner of the bedroom for hours at a time, not talking to anyone, and ignoring what went on around him. He shrivelled like a garden snail shut in its shell. He smoked more and did not go to bed until late at night, but slept a lot during the day. We could hear his sighs and felt the weighty air in the room. Before long we caught his dejection and gloom, and sighed with him.

  I started to have my doubts about his activities. Was he really a secret agent for the Party? I was no longer sure.

  On one of those humid days towards the end of May that year, I went and sat by Baba in our room as I often did after school. He didn’t respond when I gave him the news that I was the best in the class at the two- and three-times tables; nor did he respond to my plan for my summer holiday in July. So I laid my head on his lap, hugging him around his waist. I felt his gentle strokes on my hair, his warm touch on my scalp and I could smell his crude Red Flag cigarettes. I snuggled close to him and felt good. We cuddled in silence.

  Then we heard muffled rumbling from the Wonder River. At first it was almost inaudible; then, one beat at a time, calm and rhythmic, the sound of drums drifted into our consciousness, like incense smoke rising in still air, and lifted the heavy weight that had descended on our room. The unhurried yet constant tempo roused us. I looked up at my father. He raised his head towards the low beats in the distance. His eyes grew bigger and glinted for the first time in many days. ‘Ah.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘They are practising hard for the annual dragon boat race; it’s not long now.’ Originally initiated to honour the patriotic poet Qu Yuan (343–278 BC), southern China’s annual dragon boat races took place on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month (late May to early June), and the event had been declared a public holiday by the new government, with the aim of promoting patriotism.

  Baba nodded to the rhythm from the river, then rose from his chair, taking my hand in his, and we walked outside the house. Together we sat on the levee wall in silence, listening to the distant drumbeats until dark, ignoring the unfair world around us.

  *

  ‘It’s futile to carry on here,’ I heard Baba telling Mama in bed that night. ‘There’s no future for us, no future for our children. We must leave.’

  ‘But there’s nowhere to go except Macau and Hong Kong.’ Mama’s voice was soft and comforting, like her touch on me every day that made life so much more tolerable and pleasant. ‘We need a visa to go, and I don’t think the District Head would approve it. Our family’s classification is too unfavourable.’

  But Baba sounded determined. ‘We have to make a start somewhere, my dear. We must seize every opportunity from now on, by whatever means available to us.’

  I loved my father’s decisiveness. It made me feel secure.

  ‘The family won’t survive here,’ he continued. ‘The wheel of the revolution is spinning fast towards us, and it will spare no one. I can see it coming now. We have to go.’

  Mama thought sending us children to live with my grandmother in Hong Kong was the best way to move ahead. Over the next week or so I listened to their discussions in bed every night until I dropped off to sleep.

  ‘If Ah-ying and Ah-ping apply together they’ll be company for each other,’ Mama whispered in the dark.

  ‘It’s hard enough for one person to be granted a visa – two would be impossible,’ Baba said in a low voice.

  Mama sighed. She turned over in bed, quietly sobbing, as Baba also sighed.

  For a while they couldn’t come up with a good enough reason for the application. They also found it hard to choose which older sister to send first, as Ping and Ying were as close as twins and already attending primary school. And Weng was definitely too young and sickly. So in the end they decided I should go to Hong Kong. At the same time, Mama worried that my sisters would never be allowed a visa if I didn’t return, while Baba was still hoping things might improve enough that none of my sisters would need to go, and that I might even come back to Shiqi.

  There were so many ifs and buts, ideas and dismissals of ideas, sparks of hope here and there, and then the silence of despair, often followed by my mother’s quiet sobs and my father’s sighs.

  ‘Let’s simply apply for Ah-mun to spend a summer holiday with his grandmother,’ Baba said. ‘The District Head wouldn’t think we’d let our only son go, boys being so precious.’

&n
bsp; Mama didn’t reply, but I could sense how she was feeling.

  The problem was, a five-year-old couldn’t travel to Hong Kong alone. This put my parents in a dilemma that soon became a torment when the District Head approved my visa application with a grin.

  To my parents’ great relief, they found out that Mrs Ng, the aunt of my Third Aunt, who we respectfully addressed as Great-Aunt, had just been granted an exit visa to Hong Kong with her step-son Sammy so that she could receive American dollars from her husband, a sojourner, and support her family in Shiqi.

  Sammy and I had been buddies since infancy, often playing at each other’s homes. He lived in town in a big house they called Sojourner’s House – all big homes seemed to be owned by sojourners and their families. Everyone called Sammy ‘Flea’ because he was always running, tumbling and jumping around from dawn till dusk. In fact we were both energetic boys. Every day after kindergarten we raced along the street, climbing trees, kicking pebbles, throwing rocks and constantly jostling each other until we were flushed and soaked in sweat. Mama and Mrs Ng would walk behind us, and our laughter brought smiles to their faces, despite all their worries.

  Outside our kindergarten at Mother Dragon’s Temple, a huge banyan tree flourished in the subtropical weather, its thick foliage forming a giant canopy that kept the sun away. Its chunky roots were spread out like baby dragons suckling mother earth. On hot summer days, a storyteller would sit under the ancient tree surrounded by a big audience of children, parents, and grandparents minding toddlers and babies. They enjoyed his fascinating renditions of local legends and the classics of literature loved by my parents.

  Flea and I would persuade our mothers to take us there after school. Keen to arrive before everyone else, we’d rush out of the classroom as fast as our little legs could carry us.

  One day, Flea fell and split open his forehead. I wasn’t sure if I’d pushed him or if he’d tripped. It was the first time I saw blood spill, and it covered his face, hands and clothes. For a moment, remembering what Baba had told me about spilling blood, I thought he was about to die. We were so frightened and upset that we couldn’t stop crying. The thought that my best friend was dying, and that I might have caused it, shocked me so badly that more than half a century later I can still remember the event in vivid detail.

  Mrs Ng stopped the bleeding and cleaned up the wound without making a fuss. On the way home she bought some fresh water-buffalo meat. The next day, with a thin slice stuck to the wound on his forehead, Flea was full of beans again. I stopped feeling guilty and started laughing with him. As if by magic, the cut healed in a few days.

  After that I gave up the idea of becoming a high intellectual like my parents, who were sad, had no jobs and had needed to go away to re-education camps. Even though Baba said Mrs Ng wasn’t a doctor, she clearly had special skills to be able to heal people. I decided I wanted to be like her and perhaps even become a doctor one day.

  CHAPTER 3

  On the night before my departure from Shiqi with Flea and Mrs Ng, Mama cried herself into a fitful sleep after holding me tight in her arms and covering my face with kisses and caresses. Baba sighed more and shook his head the next morning when Mama still didn’t stop her tears. I couldn’t tell whether he was crying too.

  I had a white shirt and grey shorts on, and had packed a few clothes into a small bag. After breakfast of rice congee, Mama dipped a comb in water and carefully arranged my hair.

  ‘Hang onto Mrs Ng and don’t get lost in the big city. Macau and Hong Kong are much bigger than Shiqi,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘Be careful crossing roads because there are many cars and buses there.’

  I was more curious about those places than I was sad about leaving home. Cars and buses? I didn’t think I knew what they were, for there were only carts, bicycles and, occasionally, old army trucks in town. Besides I had never been for a ride on a bus or in a car.

  ‘Be polite to the others. Don’t forget to say please and thank you. Be nice to your grandmother, and try your best to behave yourself. Don’t make Mama upset.’ She then hugged me close to her.

  The town’s only bus terminal was an ordinary hut with a large yard at the back for the two or three small buses that serviced the town and the surrounding countryside. Each bus had a large boiler at the back, and the crew of our lime-green bus were already burning coal and heating up the water in the boiler. Steam hissed out every now and then and it fascinated Flea and me. We couldn’t work out how this was going to power the bus that would take us to the border.

  ‘It’s a steam-engine bus,’ Baba said, ‘so don’t sit at the back near the hot tank.’

  Now I could see Mama wiping her tears. Baba turned and pleaded with Mama, ‘If he misses us badly enough and can’t cope, we’ll bring him home. But this is our chance for a new beginning, and we must seize it.’ He then held me in his big arms and reassured me that everything would be fine as long as I was a good boy for my grandmother.

  Baba’s eyes shone in a new way that day. They looked determined, to the point of being stern. My heart fluttered and I didn’t know how to feel.

  My older sisters, rubbing their eyes, huddled against Mama. Weng wouldn’t take her puzzled eyes off me; she even flashed her dimples.

  We hopped onto the bus and waved goodbye. Baba had one arm around Mama and the other around my sisters, hugging the family together. Mama couldn’t stop crying; she lifted her hand but seemed unsure what she should do with it. I began to feel upset as tears kept rolling down her face, and a little confused as to what was really happening. But it was too late to stop the bus now, and I was soon moving off, on my first long trip away from home.

  The journey seemed to take nearly the whole day, but was broken from time to time when the driver stopped to pick up passengers or collect coal and water for the steam engine. I was most impressed by the driver, whose old PLA cap exuded revolutionary authority. Passengers obeyed his orders as they got on and off, behaving like chicks with a mother hen.

  As for Flea and me, soon we became fascinated by everything, even the shaking and rattling of the bus, the dust it kicked up and the regular blasts of the horn to warn cyclists and pedestrians to get out of the way. We sang revolutionary jingles and marvelled at the green fields outside the window that stretched as far as the eye could see. It all helped make the trip less bothersome – until our stomachs began to rumble. The small buns Mrs Ng had brought along had not been enough and we didn’t like her strong lychee tea. We couldn’t wait to reach our destination and have some proper food.

  At last, we passed through the border checkpoints on both sides and arrived in Macau. Swarms of rickshaw men rushed to offer to take us to our destination. Mrs Ng bargained the fees down to her satisfaction then occupied one rickshaw by herself while Flea and I shared another. Our rickshaws manoeuvred their way among the crowds, big buses, trucks and motorbikes that packed the streets. Flea and I were in awe of the many cars and other vehicles we didn’t have in China, and delighted in the many narrow streets and alleyways, with their numerous bakeries and cake shops, from where mouth-watering aromas drifted out and tormented us – by then it was nearly late afternoon and we were starving. Eventually we arrived at Third Aunt’s home. I remembered her very fondly, as before she had left Shiqi she had often fed me in her room at our house. Her fine cotton cheongsam was pretty like her face. She gave us a big smile and a warm welcome, and thanked the Goddess of Mercy and Buddha for our safe arrival. Then we had some yummy dim-sums and went for a rest while she chatted to her aunt and caught up on family matters.

  After staying the night with Third Aunt, we caught a ferry to Hong Kong the next day. On arrival, we marvelled at the city and its majestic harbour, where countless boats and ocean-going ships of all shapes and sizes, many bearing colourful flags, bobbed up and down in the water. I quietly wondered which big ship had taken my grandfather overseas, and where exactly were the five dragons that lived in the South China Sea. Flea and I were bewildered. It was extraord
inary that everything was so different just across the border – and chaotic. No wonder Shiqi people, my parents included, said it was a decadent world in the colonies, something I didn’t understand until I was much older.

  Mrs Ng delivered me to Grandmother Young, who was living in Sham-shui-po in Kowloon. A poor suburb, it was popular with Chinese transferring money from abroad, as the relatively low living costs there enabled them to pass on more to their Motherland.

  I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to Flea and Mrs Ng, and I never saw them again during my childhood, as they soon moved to another part of the colony. But Grandmother Young welcomed me warmly, offering a cup of hot chocolate and a bread roll with delicious golden butter, and as many biscuits as I liked. The oval-shaped ones she called ‘Gold Mountain biscuits’ were my favourite. She rented a room in a third-floor apartment at 44 Fook-wing Street, which she shared with her son Chong’s mother-in-law, whom I called Grandmother Lee. They rented the room from Mrs Ho and her family, who had the whole apartment on a long-term contract and were able to sublet three rooms to supplement their income. It was already acknowledged, even in those days, that Hong Kong accommodation was exceptionally expensive.

  Like Grandmother Lee, Grandmother Young had her well-lacquered hair fashioned into a bun behind her head. My grandmother was in her fifties, but she walked fast and held an upright posture, and even though she wore the plain, loose clothing typically favoured by older Chinese ladies, she looked young for her age. Her voice was loud and strong, especially when she bargained at the market, but always soft and gentle with me. I remember how she told me the rules of living in a flat in the big city: ‘Be polite to the adults, keep your voice down, don’t go into other tenants’ rooms without letting me know, and don’t ever go down to the street by yourself. And definitely no running indoors.’