Hong Kong Noir

by Jason Y. Ng

  That was what my father really loved: airplanes and rock and roll. When I was in primary school, on some Sunday afternoonsthe only time of the week my father took offmy father and I would take the bus down to Kowloon Tsai Park and sit on the sidelines of the soccer pitch underneath the checkerboard-painted cliff wall, a navigational aide for pilots making their final approach to Kai Tak Airport. My father would take out his portable radio and stretch out the antenna, and he always found at least one station playing a Fab Four hit. He would turn "Here Comes the Sun" or "In My Life" all the way up, so we could hear it over the Rolls-Royce turbofan engines as we watched 747s nearly skim the tops of the Walled City outcroppings before making the checkerboard turn. Sitting beside him, I used to think that was my father at his happiest, but knowing what I know now, I wonder if it was a cruel kind of joy, the covetous kind, if what he really wanted was to be flying those planes or singing those songs, and instead, after all the joss sticks he stuck day after day in the altar pit, he could only watch and listen.

  On the morning of December 9, 1967, my father was thinking of Brother Sang as he dug into the sand of the altar pit with his joss sticks. It had been six months since the pig had been roasted in Brother Sang's honor, and having completed basic training, Brother Sang had returned to Kam Tin the day before to take up his first post walking a beat in Chi Tong, an adjacent, larger village where my father took English lessons for which he paid by cooking on weekends at the local diner. As my father bicycled to school that morning, he wondered if he would see Brother Sang in the evening, while going to or from his lesson.

  He did.

  * * *

  The first time I saw the grave beyond the banyan tree and asked whose it was, my father pretended he was distracted and just walked away. It was only recently that I found the trial transcripts in the law library and read that my father thought it was maroon paint at first, staining Brother Sang's uniform, because my father had never seen so much blood on one person. My father's English lesson that evening had covered words that are the same in both noun and verb form, and he had so recently stepped out of his lesson that he remembered thinking, or even saying, surprise in English before the Chinese word came to mind.

  It was almost dark, but my father, about half a soccer pitch away, could see Brother Sang staggering, lifting himself into one step every few seconds toward the police post, a standalone concrete box the size of a small truck. He was nearly horizontal, his right hand using his too-short nightstick as a crutch, while his left hand clenched at his stomach.

  "Brother Sang!" my father called out, and he was surprised again by the strength of his own voice, amplified by its desperation but also its isolation; no one else was out on the street. As he ran toward Brother Sang, my father looked back for a moment at his English teacher's second-floor window and saw the light go out, along with several others next to it in succession. It was a detail he only remembered later, on the witness stand.

  My father caught up to Brother Sang a few paces short of the police post, and Brother Sang could not stand any longer. He collapsed on the steps of the post, sucking air so violently that each breath seemed to push more of his innards out. My father didn't know what to do or say. He watched Brother Sang's face fade, his eyes lose focus.

  * * *

  Sang was not nervous. Already his second day in Chi Tong felt more comfortable than his first, the village familiar to him and the villagers welcoming of a local boy walking their beat. His partner, Chung, was a few years older and not from the area, but it was his second year on the beat, and all the shopkeepers called out to Chung by name when they walked past. It was Chung who retold, in court, the story of what had happened.

  The first day had been uneventful, apart from a domestic disturbance at one of the Tang homes, a young couple already riven with suspicions. The man was actually one of Sang's distant cousins.

  "That's the most excitement we'll see all week," Chung said later, over lunch at the Chi Tong diner. In between scoops of roast pork and rice, he introduced Sang to the minutiae of the beat, the long stretches of nothing, the dangers of boredom. "Either you lose alertness and respond to nothing," Chung said, "or you get jumpy, trigger happy, at the first sign of action."

  They went to the diner for lunch again on Sang's second day, after their morning patrol of the village perimeter with Chung dispensing more advice, more than it felt like he should have had at his age. The only other patrons were five men sitting on red plastic stools around a round green plastic table at the opposite corner of the diner. Their faded shirts were sweated through, even on this cool autumn day.

  "These laborers," Chung said, as he extracted a bone from his mouth, "they always seem to find trouble these days."

  Sang brought his bowl to his face, shoveling rice into his mouth to avoid what he thought would be a conspicuous silence, too nothing of a response. Ten police officers had been killed in recent months in a series of leftist riots that had spread throughout the city. It was the worst violence since the Second World War, and was threatening to unbuckle police unity. Even at the police academy, Sang had overheard Chinese constables in his dormitory whispering their doubts about the force's actions against the rioters. The kids in the streets were brainwashed, sure, waving their little red books in a frenzy, yelling nonsense slogans. But part of what they were railing against was colonialism, the end of Chinese servitude to Western masters. British officers, in the name of the rule of law, countered by sending Chinese constables to suppress the most virulent protests, those most likely to explode. Some did, and now ten officers were dead. Chinese on Chinese, the constables in Sang's dormitory muttered. Divide and conquer.

  Chung did not indulge these misgivings, though he heard them too. He was concerned mainly with safety; the village's, but also his own.

  "They get tempted, you know," he said. "They haul bricks for next to nothing. They couldn't give a fuck about communism, but they love having those smart-ass university kids shine their shoes. All their lives, they've been taking orders: Move this shit here, throw away someone else's junk. Now these kids tell them, Workers should lead the revolution! What a joke. It's like banging a whore: it's not real, but it feels good, and makes you do crazy . . ."

  Chung abandoned his sentence, anticipating the clatter of the laborers getting up from their stools. They filed past Chung and Sang's table as they exited the diner, none making eye contact except the last, a slim but toned man, not more than twenty-fiveSang thought he resembled the actor Bruce Lee, from that American television showwho looked back at Sang with eyes not of curiosity but recognition, like he knew him. Sang caught the man's gaze then quickly looked away. Too quickly, Sang thought, upset with himself not for being a rookie, but for looking like one. Project confidence, they were told at the academy, from the first day to the last.

  "Makes you do crazy shit," Chung continued. "Watch out for those guys. They get in a mood and gather a couple dozen of the other construction workers in Kam Tin and we're sitting ducks. No real police station for three kilometers; backup will take at least ten minutes. They put a number on us anywhere in this village and our guts will be spilling out before we can make it back to our little shithole of a post."

  "You seem to have managed," Sang said.

  "Complete luck." Chung dug into more roast pork. "Even money, one of us isn't here for lunch tomorrow."

  * * *

  By the time the backup arrived, Sang had been dead for six minutes, by my father's count. As they loaded the body into the back of their police van, one of the constables noticed a small red triangle poking out the front pocket of my father's satchel.

  "What's that in your bag, son?"

  My father appeared confused and then, once again, surprised, when he looked down at his satchel and saw what the constable was eyeing. He pulled out the little red book and handed it to the constable.

  "It's not mine, sir."

  "You put other people's things in your bag?"

  "I didn't put
it there. Someone else must have." My father looked back at his English teacher's window. The light was still out.

  "Get in the van," the constable said.

  My father didn't move. "It's not mine, I swear."

  "Get in the van."

  "He's my cousin, sir."

  "Don't make me ask you again." The constable put his right hand on his nightstick.

  "I'm not a leftist."

  The constable took one backhanded sweep, so quickly that my father didn't see the nightstick make contact before feeling his knees give out, then a crunching pain searing through his legs and up his spine. He fell almost right into the arms of the constable, who dragged him into the van.

  "Tell that to the judge."

  * * *

  The Crown prosecutor's case against my father was entirely circumstantial. He was the only person determined to be within walking distance at the scene. He had made no effort to save Sang; there was not a drop of blood on my father's clothes or hands. His recent essays in school were laden with anticolonial sentiment, a characterization my father found particularly unjust, given that it came from Mrs. Yick, his history teacher whose every lesson seemed to be on the wrongs of empire. And the possession of that little red book, which my father had continuously denied was his.

  Then there were my father's supposed motives, in addition to his allegedly leftist agitation against the colonial police an intense envy of Sang, whose admission to the police force was in contrast to my father's failing grades and what the prosecutor called delusions of grandeur that he would ever make it into a university; the long-running rivalry between my father's grandmother, Wife Number Three, and Sang's grandmother, Wife Number Nine, who were the general's favored concubineshe placed their houses in the village next to his and each other'scompeting for the general's affections during his life and for his estate in his death. Finally, there was the prosecutor's coup de grce: the revelation that the domestic disturbance Sang reported on his first day was between the student leader of a local leftist groupa young woman three years ahead of my father at his schooland my father's older brother, Uncle Number Two, who was newly wed, but to another woman.

  "You had a lot of people to protect, Mr. Lee," the prosecutor said in court. He addressed my father at all times as Mr. Lee, to make him seem older than he was, I assumed. I remember feeling uneasy when my criminal law professor, himself a former prosecutor, told us he used that tactic against minors.

  "The reputation of your dear brother," the prosecutor said to my father, "whose extramarital cavorting with a Communist would not only cause great shame to your family, but could potentially exclude your direct family members from the family inheritance." Police had uncovered a clause in the general's will excluding from his estate any descendants who bring grave disrepute to the family name.

  "And the reputation of Ms. Tang," the prosecutor said, referring to the leftist student leader. "That she was literally in bed with someone from the old landed gentry, an entitled landowner, a vestige of feudalism the type of which she spends her waking hours denouncing; surely this would bring its own disrepute, toppling the local leftist movement from its moral high horse."

  The prosecutor shifted his gaze from my father to the jury. "A movement of which you, Mr. Lee, have become such a devoted adherent, as we have seen from your essays and possessions. A movement which has wreaked havoc on our streets this year. A movement openly challenging the rule of law. A movement that has killed ten brave police officers already this yearand now one more by the hands, the evidence suggests, of the accused Mr. Lee."

  My father had remained stoic throughout the trial, but now he wept.

  "I didn't kill Brother Sang," he said, the words muffled through his sobs. "I didn't do anything."

  * * *

  My father was acquitted. His youth alone probably gave the jury reasonable enough doubt that he could have executed such a well-thought-out plan to kill his own cousin. The murder weapon was never found, nor any other suspects, at least not by the police. But what was revealed during the trial shook our family into a frenzy of recriminations, including lingering suspicions of my father's guilt, and the unshakable impression that he was indeed a Communist. Even today, I hear some of his cousins address him as Comrade. I had always thought it was in jest, an inside joke, until that day in the law library.

  I hadn't been looking for the trial transcripts. I'd barely thought of the grave beyond the banyan tree after my father didn't bother to answer me. I was simply procrastinating. I was studying for my first law school exampropertyand sealed myself off from the outside world, including the Internet, for three whole days. I could no longer stay awake reviewing the many easements attaching to Blackacre, so I unlocked the Wi-Fi on my laptop and in an aimless Internet fix googled myself and each of my family members. My father's name yielded two pages of results, mostly related to his tenure on the board of his vocational institute.

  But there were a couple entries that came up in the sidebar showing results from the law library's own database. The transcripts were not online, but the court digests in which they were reported were not hard to find in the library stacks, down an aisle with sliding shelves. I sat in that aisle for the next three hours, reading every word spoken during the trial, every document presented as evidence. At one point I thought about photocopying the transcripts, but somehow felt it would be a betrayal of my father to reprint this part of his past, to bring it back to life on fresh pieces of A4 paper.

  I didn't make copies, and I didn't ask my father about it, either. I didn't ask him because as I read about the cold-blooded murder of Lee Koon Sang, police constable 3810, who died at twenty-one, the same age I am now, I remembered there was one Chinese New Year when I was seven or eight, when we came home from the family village with our share of roast pork and my father reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out all the red envelopes I had collected during the day.

  "Big haul today," he said, as he handed me the envelopes. "Go to the study and put these with the others you've collected this week. We'll add them all up after dinner."

  I smiled and carried my fresh batch of red envelopes into the study. We performed this ritual every Chinese New Year: My father sat behind his desk and I sat opposite, like a client. The radio would be on, softly, more Beatles. My father would hand me a red envelope, on which he had written the bearer's name, and I would open it and extract the crisp bills. I would announce the amount, and he would write it down on a line in a green ledger book half the size of the desk. "One hundred dollars from Uncle Number Two," he would say, and I would hand the money over. Once I had emptied all the envelopes, my father would add up each line on his solar-powered Casio pocket calculator and declare the grand total. He would use half to buy stock in my name, he said, and the other half was the amount I could spend on G.I. Joes and Transformers at Wing Wah, my local toy heaven.

  As my father heated up the roast pork and I heard the hiss of washed choi sum falling into the wok, I went to the study and opened what I thought was the drawer where my father kept all my red envelopes. I saw a bright red corner peeking out from under a pile of manila envelopes, then reached under to pull out my red envelope stash. But the red rectangle now in my hand was not that. It was a small book bound with a bright red vinyl cover, on which the year of publication1967and five characters were embossed in gold print.

  Quotations from Chairman Mao, the characters read. I put it back in the drawer.

  FOURTEEN

  by Carmen Suen

  Wah Fu

  The elevator door opened on the fourteenth floor. Siu Wan shuffled out and headed toward her apartment, number 1424, where her family had been living since she was a baby. When they first moved in, Wah Ming House was the newest building in Wah Fu Estate. It was a hopeful time.

  But today had not been a good day for Siu Wan, and it had nothing to do with the number fourteen, as one might suspect. Fourteen, sup sei, is not the most auspicious number in Cantonese culture, es
pecially in Hong Kong. It sounds like sut sei—must die. Some developers would skip the fourteenth floor on their buildings, choosing instead to have the fifteenth floor immediately above the thirteenth. Not the case for government housing like Wah Fu Estate. The government most certainly didn’t give a damn whether residents in housing projects lived or died based on superstitious beliefs.

  For Siu Wan, fourteen or not did not make any difference. It was the same tiny apartment with no privacy no matter the number. Every unit in the building was the same 300-square-foot cube with a kitchen, a bathroom, a balcony, and an open space in the middle with barely enough room for a dresser, a double bed, a bunk bed—or two, depending on how many kids and in-laws lived there—and the all-important round folding table that served as a dining table–cum–homework desk. In most cases, the table had to be folded up when not in use, so as to make room for TV viewing. To save space, some families would forgo chairs and sat on their beds when they were eating or working at the table. The only separation between the living space and the “bedroom,” if you could call it that, would be some curtains hanging from the ceilings to block one or two sides of the beds to create some sort of private space. That is, if the parents cared about privacy at all. Privacy was a luxury not everyone in Hong Kong understood, especially when one was poor.

  It could have been much worse for the poor. The government did try to improve social welfare after the 1967 leftist riots and Wah Fu was an ambitious attempt to improve the standards of public housing in the territory. It was the first to have a kitchen and a bathroom in each unit. Dubbed “New Town,” Wah Fu was also the first public housing estate to have its own wet market, shopping mall, schools, public library, parking garage, and bus terminal. It was no exaggeration to call it a town. When the eighteen buildings were completed in 1978, about fifty thousand people moved into the development.