by Andrew Kwong
Learning in Hong Kong wasn’t easy for me. I struggled with English from the first day, and through the first semester failed nearly every weekly dictation test. Comprehension was difficult and I often failed that too. In fact, despite spending all my after-school hours studying, I regularly scored zero in tests. Miss Miu, my Sixth Class teacher – a slim young woman with permed hair who dressed smartly in the Western style – was particularly hard on me. She didn’t think I was up to the standard required for Sixth Class.
‘Mainlanders have been so badly brainwashed that they’ve no capacity left for learning,’ Miss Miu told the class one day as she handed me my dictation result – a big zero in red ink. My enthusiasm for school started to evaporate. It appeared that, like many in Hong Kong, Miss Miu had little time for mainlanders and considered them a threat to the economy and security of the colony.
To some extent it was understandable, given that the numbers of mainlanders swarming into Hong Kong had increased dramatically. In China, the border guards could not stop the exodus and eventually just started showing people the way to leave; some even abandoned their weapons and joined the rush. Kind people in nearby villages and small towns on the Hong Kong mainland fed and assisted the hungry refugees. Many were smuggled to Hong Kong in boats, as I was; some even swam across to the colony. At the height of the flight in 1961 to 1962, over a hundred thousand refugees a month were flocking into Hong Kong. Everywhere you turned there were groups of new arrivals. City residents became deeply worried about whether Hong Kong could cope with this sudden increase in population.
Up to 1962 the Colonial Hong Kong Government had granted residential rights to mainlanders on their arrival if they presented themselves to the Immigration Department, as Baba had done. But it became clear that it was impossible to accept all the refugees, and in 1963 the government began actively sending incomers back to China. Many, driven by desperation, made several attempts to return.
All the talk of refugees made us hopeful that Mama and my sisters might eventually make it out of China and join us. But while the authorities were still watching and punishing Mama, it wasn’t likely to happen in the short term.
*
As I walked up the rise to the school gate on Castle Peak Road one day in early 1963, I had a vision of being snarled at by Miss Miu. I’d been immediately attracted to her beautiful-sounding English, and wished that one day I would be able to speak English like her. She was obviously a keen teacher, diligent at helping students, and maybe she cared about me, but I sensed that her patience was running thinner as the weeks went by and I had shown no improvement.
As usual, Ping was quick to come up with an idea. She asked one of her classmates to help me. Deng was a mainlander but he was also a high achiever, apart from being a handsome young man who made the girls at school blush with admiration.
‘What do you think is the problem with English?’ he asked me when we met on the grassy slope beside the playground. I told him the difficulty I had with dictation and comprehension: I was too slow in writing, and missed most of the paragraph during a dictation.
‘Well, every problem has a solution,’ Deng said. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’
What a smartie, I thought to myself. I was rather displeased with his challenge. But then I reflected further on my situation. The idea of becoming a dim-sum boy if I couldn’t master English drove me to come up with a response: ‘What if I learn the whole paragraph by heart, and write it out at my own speed?’ That was how I had learnt Chairman Mao’s quotations and slogans, and then regurgitated them at political studies classes. Deng said it was a good idea and to give it a go.
Miss Miu was stern-faced when she gave out the dictation results the following week. After I’d spent nearly a whole semester scoring zero in every dictation and comprehension test, she was more than surprised to find only three mistakes in my paper. That meant I should have scored 85 per cent.
But Miss Miu was not convinced. ‘This is not your work,’ she announced without looking at me. ‘It’s impossible for you to achieve these marks. I can only give you 50 per cent, as a warning.’
‘Unfair, but that’s life,’ Deng said to me later. ‘Keep up your diligence and don’t get angry with her. Anger eats away your energy and wears down your fighting spirit. You need both for the long journey.’ He then told me how important it was to pay attention to the ‘bigger picture’.
But what was the bigger picture? My world had expanded so much in Hong Kong, with all its freedoms, that at times it was scary. Where should I begin? How was I to steer my own boat when I didn’t have one? I lay awake in my camp bed for many nights, wondering how to see this bigger picture. Then I realised what Deng was saying, that English might be the key, as my parents and Third Aunt had often said. It could open doors for me, even to a bigger world beyond the colony, so that I would be free to sail even further afield and experience and feel so much more. Aha, I thought, I’ve got it. From now on I will devote all my energy to mastering English. No wonder schoolmates looked up to Deng.
Miss Miu made me sit at the teacher’s desk for my weekly tests for the rest of the semester. When she dictated the paragraphs to us, she stood behind me to watch me write my answers in my slow scrawl. Letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, I reproduced the memorised page at my own speed. Sometimes she would deliberately slow down her dictation so that I could catch up. Soon I was consistently scoring 90 to 100 per cent in the tests. Miss Miu was delighted. I was awarded second place in the class at the end of my first year, and English became my favourite subject.
CHAPTER 25
In early 1964, Baba got a job as a physical education and Chinese literature teacher at a small mission school in Diamond Hill. He was delighted.
‘I know that area well,’ he told us at a celebratory yum-cha lunch. ‘Once upon a time, my oldest brother, with your Grandfather Woon-duk’s financial support, operated a school for the poor in a nearby district. Unfortunately it had to close during World War II. Now’s my chance to do something for those people.’
I always admired Baba’s desire to help the less fortunate.
Baba rented a back room in a bungalow in Diamond Hill. However, his remuneration was meagre at the mission school, so he continued to look after the account books for his cousin on weekends.
Even though I was making good progress at school, which made me happy, I found it hard to recover from the traumatic experience of the trip to Hong Kong. Memories of it intertwined with long night terrors about the revolution, as well as worries about Mama and my sisters. Often I woke with my pyjamas saturated in sweat, feeling suffocated, and couldn’t stop shaking. Everything in my nightmares was so vivid I could sense it on my skin, taste it in my mouth and feel it in my heart. My foldaway bed squeaked like the boat I’d travelled in.
The slightest upset or worry would trigger a feeling of suffocation. Sometimes, even a casual conversation could bring it on. It was hard to believe that I was living in Hong Kong now, and I no longer needed to sit on the levee wall every morning feeling hungry, dreaming of food or trying to shake off the desperation of starvation. Better still, I no longer had to steal food. I pinched myself and pulled my hair from time to time, just to be assured of this new, miraculous reality. Then I thanked my ancestors for their blessings and General Guan Gong for his protection, and all my guardian angels around me.
According to relatives who still visited Shiqi, despite the denouncements and public criticism inflicted on Mama, Ying and even Weng for their failure to report Baba’s escape, they continued to apply to the District Head to leave China, and to look for other ways to free themselves. ‘Your mother lost her wedding ring when she gave it to a trafficker as a deposit,’ the cousin who had met me at the border wrote to us from Macau.
I remember how concerned Baba was when he heard that. He rang the cousin that evening. ‘Just like that?’ he asked over the phone to the cousin as he drew on his cigarette. ‘And Waisyn couldn’t find the
man again after giving him the rest of her remaining jewellery? For a deposit for the three of them?’
The cousin also told us how Mama had given away anything that the Street Committee Member or the District Head fancied, in in the hope that her application to leave would be treated favourably. But this hadn’t worked either. Baba later tried to explain to Ping and me that life was hard and starvation had eroded the spirit of the people, even the comrades. Those in charge needed essential materials and food for themselves and their families. They couldn’t afford to let people like Mama go.
The worst news came in the early summer of 1964, after Mama and the girls made another unsuccessful attempt to escape, this time by boat. Mama and Ying were both sent to re-education camps for three months; Weng was spared because of her young age – she was not even thirteen at the time. After their release Mama and Ying were kept under surveillance by neighbours and tenants like Choi-lin. It was not until after months and many gifts that Mama was allowed to apply again to leave China. She later pinned her hopes on the District Head’s wife, who kept promising favourable consideration in return for food items and goods that my mother could purchase from the Overseas Chinese Friendship Store with her foreign currency vouchers, or from the black market. But this would go on for years.
I longed for Mama’s letter every month, and I pictured her likewise waiting anxiously at the street entrance for mine. I wrote to her about how I was getting on at school, even describing the challenges with a strict teacher like Miss Miu. I knew Mama would be glad that I had finally got to grips with English, and I hoped that might help ease some of the sorrow of our separation.
In their letters to us, Mama and Ying said nothing about the re-education camp, or the evening political meetings they had to attend after their release. We learnt about these things only through those relatives or friends who visited Shiqi. ‘They inspect all the letters you send to your Mama and sisters,’ said to us, ‘so be careful and don’t say anything political or anti-communist, or your family will suffer.’ One piece of positive news was that Ho-bun was now dropping by our home regularly to help out with household chores. He was frustrated because he hadn’t been allocated a job and his family in Hong Kong had to continue to send him a living allowance.
At our now weekly yum-cha lunch, we passed on news of Mama, Ying and Weng to Baba, and he would give us messages to include in our letters. ‘This way,’ Baba said, ‘we are less likely to aggravate the District Head.’ Baba’s usual message was ‘Seize the day’, which I believed was meant to encourage Mama to continue working hard towards our goal of reuniting the family.
‘It will be hard, but not impossible, for the family to be together again one day,’ Baba would say whenever he noticed that I was ruminating on our situation, ‘though the odds are not good, and no one knows when it will happen.’ All we could do, he said, was to be patient and hopeful. He was also glad that Ho-bun was helping the family.
*
Grandmother Young decided to leave Hong Kong and join her husband in Hawaii. Having left in 1921 when Mama was only six months old, Grandfather had only ever returned to Zhongshan twice: in 1934 after the Great Depression, and in 1948 after World War II, so he and Grandmother had spent little time together. During the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, he was so frightened of being persecuted for having Chinese contacts that he reported his children had been lost during the war. When, in 1961, he had visited Hong Kong to recuperate from illness, he had remarried Grandmother in order to obtain a marriage certificate that would be valid in America and allow them to be reunited in Hawaii one day. In 1964, that day finally arrived.
From my foldaway bed, I could hear her brewing her coffee as she usually did just before dawn every day. The gentle aroma wafted from the hallway through the whole apartment. Ping was already up. She couldn’t stop blowing her nose, and her eyes were red from crying. Three incense sticks were burning in front of General Guan Gong and the other gods. Grandmother was dressed in her silk cheongsam, her hair well lacquered into a bun at the back of her scalp, her face powdered and her brows painted. She looked nearly young enough to be my mother. She was sad too.
‘I worry about the two of you,’ she said to Ping and me at breakfast. ‘I’ll miss you. I hope I can find someone in Hawaii who can write letters for me. I’ll miss my girls too. I just hope the food rationing goes up and they are not going to starve.’ She sighed and continued, ‘Honestly, I don’t want to be so far away from my girls, in the Gold Mountain of Hawaii. But I feel this may be my only chance to be with your grandfather and his family.’
Grandmother looked at Ping and said, ‘You’ve been such lovely company all these years and helped me with so many things here in Hong Kong; for this I thank you. Take good care and no more tears. One day I would like you to come and live with me again. Take good care of Ah-mun too, and make sure he does well at school. I didn’t have the opportunity to go to school and I can’t even write my own name. Now the long trip ahead, and the aeroplane . . .’
A tough woman in many ways, Grandmother softened up that morning. I put my arms around her and promised to be a good student. ‘I love you Grandmother,’ I said. ‘We shall meet again. Please give my best regards to Grandfather, and our uncles and aunties too.’
On hearing that Grandmother was leaving, Mama had written us a letter. We could feel the desperation and sadness in her words: ‘Tell my mother how much I wish I could be there to see her off. And how bad I feel for letting her down over the years, for being such a burden to her and my father.’ In another letter she wrote: ‘I owe your grandparents everything and I feel terrible that I’ve not been able to repay them.’
Some relatives and friends came to Kai Tak Airport to see Grandmother off. She broke into her Shenmingting dialect to hide her trepidation. She was going on her first ever plane trip by herself, not knowing a word of English. I sensed her quiet courage, which I knew she had passed on to Mama and Aunt Wai-hung, perhaps even to me.
*
After Grandmother left, we could not afford to stay in Sham-shui-po, so we moved into Baba’s place in Diamond Hill. It was an audacious name for what was well known in Hong Kong as a slum area. And, I soon realised, little more than wishful thinking. Essentially a shantytown, Diamond Hill was situated on the far slope of Lion’s Rock in Kowloon, where the poorest of the colony, including hordes of new arrivals from the mainland, flocked for the cheap rent. Sanitation was almost non-existent. Heaps of rotting rubbish lay at the sides of the streets, smelly liquid oozing, trickling and seeping out onto the pavement, making it wet and slippery everywhere most of the time. It was even worse on humid days. Sanitation workers wore thick masks when collecting garbage in Diamond Hill.
Illegally erected shacks and shelters housed the growing number of residents, making the already narrow and convoluted streets and alleys hard to pass through. Fires often broke out from the portable kerosene stoves people cooked on. The fire engines found it difficult to navigate their way through the chaotic streets, and many homes could be lost in a single blaze. The homeless were then given priority for public housing in the new residential estates nearby, such as the Rainbow Estate. Baba suspected some of the fires were set deliberately.
We didn’t have visitors. We were embarrassed to tell friends and acquaintances where we lived. Instead, we told people we lived near the Rainbow Estate. Ping disliked the area with a passion. For her, it was too rough and dirty a neighbourhood, much worse than Sham-shui-po. She had just begun to work at Cathay Pacific Airways. In her smart red uniform, she really stood out in Diamond Hill, but she hated the stares.
‘We mustn’t complain,’ Baba often said. ‘At least we’ve a place to call home, away from starvation and persecution, and the unpredictable typhoons and seasonal floods that the family back home still have to endure.’
Things improved further when Baba took on an extra job teaching in the afternoons at a private school in Kowloon City, a suburb close to Kai Tak Airport. This helped with our
expenses and ensured adequate funds could be transferred to Mama and my sisters in Shiqi. But the challenge remained: how to get them out of China?
With Baba and Ping both at work, I was responsible for cooking the evening meals. On the way home from school I stopped by the fishmonger’s to check out the good variety of freshwater fish, eels, crabs and different types of shellfish displayed in wooden buckets. Some fish had already been filleted and parts were sold as requested by customers – some liked the tail, others the stomach, and even the head of the fish was favoured by a few shoppers. The fishmonger always left the beating heart on the cut-up fish to show how fresh it was. From time to time he splashed water on it to keep it moist. Helpless, the fish opened its mouth to take in irregular gasps of air and savoured the water that fell on its motionless body. Then it slowly succumbed to its fate, its eyes clear to the end.
Sometimes I bought half a freshwater trout. It was the same kind of fish the commune kept in the fishponds near our home in Shiqi. It reminded me of how Ah-dong thought he was a trout when he was delirious from hunger. He’d mumbled something about jumping out of the fisherman’s tank on the way to the market and swimming to Hong Kong to free himself from starvation. He’d never have wanted to be a fish if he’d known what happened at the fishmonger’s in Diamond Hill. Since leaving Shiqi, I’d had no news of my good friends like Ah-dong and Big Eye, and I often thought of our times together, sitting on the levee wall dreaming about food, or planning the next fishing trip or just how to find something to eat.
CHAPTER 26
In September 1965 I began Form III, or Year 9. Despite my position as a top student at Tsung Tsin Grammar School, I felt the need for bigger challenges. The influx of a million or more refugees from China had inflated the population by more than a quarter over a short span of time. Every schoolboy in the colony aspired to study at exclusive schools like La Salle College in Kowloon and the King’s College in Hong Kong. These schools were well known for both their academic excellence and sporting prowess, and the old school tie guaranteed good job prospects and career advancement. Competition was intense at all levels of society, entry to schools of excellence included. The pressure to succeed academically now gnawed at me with increasing urgency.