by Mimi Kwa
Mr Chung observes that Tak Lau is a good runner and hard worker. He knows the boy has a keen interest in mechanics, always finding something to pull apart so he can investigate its internal organs. In military lockdown in the middle of wartime occupation, Tak Lau is anything but bored.
‘Today you graduate from boots and errands to weapons.’ Mr Chung gestures for Tak Lau to sit opposite him at a table in the barracks.
Every handheld Japanese military weapon the boy can imagine is laid out: a combat knife bayonet, two different side-arm pistols, a Type 38 bolt-action carbine rifle and even a machine gun. Tak Lau thinks about shooting all the Japanese soldiers like in the last Chinese movie he watched with Elder Brother in the building where he now sits facing the enemy. ‘Collaborate or die,’ Mother can be heard muttering more frequently these days.
Tak Lau keeps staring at the arsenal of weapons. ‘Behind this door, there are many more.’ Mr Chung points at a steel door to his left where the theatre projectionist would have stored large reels of film; the segmented steel shelves are perfect for gun storage. ‘This is our junior armoury. I want you to clean all these. Then start again.’ Mr Chung smiles and proceeds to instruct Tak Lau on how to dismantle the unloaded weapons, his hands caressing each of them in turn as though he knows them inside out and backwards. ‘Once you have tended to a thousand weapons, you will be ready to use one.’
A steady stream of ‘customers’ line up for Tak Lau’s work, from warrant officers – Mr Chung’s equivalents – right down the ranks to privates. They mostly require the boy to clean their weapons, sometimes to polish their boots; they are familiar with him being around and don’t hold back on jobs for him to do. He memorises uniform insignia so he can tell whose jobs to prioritise, but because many of them walk around off-duty wearing only a singlet and trousers, it’s tricky to tell exactly who outranks who. Delivering messages between soldiers makes knowing who’s who much easier with clear titles supplied on the notes or the Japanese reading the names out loud when he can’t decipher the kanji.
After a few months, Mr Chung decides to introduce Tak Lau higher up the chain: a serious spy-game promotion.
The people of Hong Kong no longer receive rations and are left to fend for themselves in alleyway marketplaces where rats have burgeoned in number thanks to the neglect of waste-management systems under the Japanese. Coal supplies are dwindling too; households must restrict lighting to one room after dark, if they have any power at all. But the cross-cultural mahjong summits in the House of Kwa and Tak Lau’s outward enthusiasm for the Japanese not only shield the family from further deprivation, but garner special treatment.
Ng Yuk sends her maid with some food upstairs to Happy Shadow and her Kwa offspring. The two wives barely exchange words these days, and Ying Kam sometimes stays away all night, forced to manage his own factory floor for the Japanese who bank the profits. Eng Lee has still not returned so his wife continues to retain the shop and keeps the columns of the books under Japanese control.
Tak Lau dashes past a heavily scarred, emaciated elderly man who sits crouched with his knees up around his chin. He rattles an empty bowl against a step, hoping for money or food. This stranger would once smile and tousle Tak Lau’s hair when he was a toddler. The boy tosses a Hong Kong coin into the stranger’s bowl; it’s virtually worthless now that yen has taken over, but it’s all he has to give.
Tak Lau keeps running. Mr Chung is taking him to meet a big official today, and he mustn’t be late. He stops to catch his breath when he reaches the gate to the barracks.
Mr Chung takes Tak Lau in a rickshaw up town to Mr Yamagata’s residence, where they are served sugar black tea. Tak Lau sips it slowly, savouring the sweetness on his tongue. His eyes widen at talk of his important part in helping to shape the new Hong Kong – to do the will of ancestors, Buddha and of God by supporting its transition to a fully fledged Japanese state. Mr Chung translates what Japanese Tak Lau cannot understand, and the boy tries to listen intently.
Weighing on his mind is the grandfather clock that stands behind Mr Yamagata. It’s showing the wrong time, the pendulum having frozen, but no one aside from Tak Lau seems the least bit bothered by it.
Mr Yamagata drones on. The house belonged to a British academic and his family, who are now either dead or in an internment camp. Mr Yamagata sits on their settee and uses their possessions as if this all belongs to him. He sips from a Wedgwood cup with a silver rim and elaborate leaf design.
Tak Lau resists an urge to tinker with the clock. Its detailed golden spandrel and elaborate moon-dial are begging to be touched. The sun is frozen in a partially eclipsed position, almost obscured by a row of marching-band instruments, followed by a moon and clouds etched on a brass plane that would move if only the clock would start ticking again.
The clock is like Hong Kong: stuck in an hour of darkness, in need of repair. Tak Lau sips his delicious tea, nods along with a look of serious concern, and thinks with delight of the grandfather clock, its cogs and spindles, coils and springs.
Mr Chung is pleased with his recruit’s apparent attentiveness. In the rickshaw on the way back, he reminds Tak Lau that he will now be a trusted errand boy between the barracks and officials’ homes. ‘This is a step up from running messages between soldiers on the street, in the field and within the barracks.’ Mr Chung pauses. ‘You will be invited into homes like Mr Yamagata’s and be asked to wait if a response is required to be written. If so, you will return with the reply to the original sender.’ Mr Chung is fond of the Kwas – Tak Lau and Ng Yuk in particular – but he sees his duty to Japan as paramount. ‘If you break this trust, and disrespect this honour,’ he adds, ‘I will kill your family.’
Tak Lau is still for a moment, his eyes fixed on Mr Chung’s. Now the boy is like an ancient hero in his comic books, keeping his adventures secret to protect the lives of his family: a dragon protecting his lair. ‘Thank you, Warrant Officer Chung, sir.’ Tak Lau gets out of the rickshaw and salutes. ‘I won’t disappoint you.’
TRAPDOOR AND TROUSERS
FOR ALMOST TWO YEARS, SINCE THE FAMILY STOPPED TAKING her with them to hide in the bunker, Theresa has stayed indoors, stealing sunlight and sky on the balcony and through windows, and sleeping in the room concealed behind the custom-made partition wall Tak Lau likes to think he helped build. She spends most of her days in the main house when the coast is clear, but the hidden room is only moments away. Clara retreats there with Theresa during military marches down Wu Hu Street, in case of a spontaneous raid; she is getting too big for the cramped spaces in the floor and ceiling.
Theresa and Clara are under family-imposed house arrest for their own safety. At first, isolation from the outside world tormented the girls, but their fear has always outweighed any desire to go outside, and they gather mental strength and maintain their spirits by painting and writing. Theresa also reads everything she can get her hands on and is fast becoming fluent in English, even passable in Japanese.
She sits late at night in her windowless room, studying beneath the glow of a kerosene lamp hanging from a hook on the side of her bedhead. There is only room for a bed and small table, the edge of which overhangs the mattress, so Theresa sleeps curled up with her back against the wall. The benefit of this arrangement is that the bed doubles as a seat when she works at the desk. At night when she lies down to read, she transfers the lamp from her desk to the hook. She isn’t concerned about the restriction on electric lights – no one can see in. An air vent near the base of the partition ensures she won’t suffocate if she is forced to stay hidden for long periods. And there is a trapdoor in the ceiling; she can get onto the roof through there if something happened to the family and she was somehow barricaded in.
Theresa is fourteen; Clara, eighteen months younger. The older Clara gets, the more eager Mother and Father are to shut her away with her sister. ‘I hate my chest growing,’ she complains to Theresa as they huddle together on the bed. ‘Mother has been making the maids bind it lik
e her feet. They’ve wrapped me in bandages – look.’ She lifts her silk shirt to reveal her bound chest.
Theresa glances up from her book. ‘She only wants you to stay looking like a child so you don’t attract unwanted attention. She tried to do that to me too, but it was too late.’
‘Well, I’m not a child anymore. I may as well stay locked up with you all the time. Look at you, you’re allowed to be a woman.’ Clara jabs the side of Theresa’s left breast.
‘Aya! Ouch.’ The thought of spending every day in a room with her beloved sister makes Theresa grimace – every now and then is enough.
‘Maybe,’ Clara giggles, ‘we should make two of the soldiers fall in love with us. Then we could live in an aristocratic house on The Peak and drink tea like the expat ladies used to.’
Theresa sighs. ‘You know it doesn’t work like that. The Japanese are brutal with Hong Kong women.’
Clara crosses her legs and turns her back to Theresa, who picks up her Mason Pearson and brushes her little sister’s hair. ‘Mother married when she was fourteen,’ Clara says defiantly.
‘Yes,’ Theresa responds, pulling the bristles through a knot in Clara’s mane. ‘And look how miserable she is. Baby after baby and another on its way. And for what? To hide us? To barely feed us? Her damaged feet can’t walk ten minutes.’
Now it’s Clara’s turn to say ‘Aya!’ as her sister finds more knots. ‘Okay, stupid idea,’ Clara concedes.
‘Yes, Wai Mui’ – Theresa uses Clara’s Chinese name – ‘a very dumb idea.’
The brush glides through Clara’s hair easily now. The strands shine in a pool of lamplight.
‘Sister,’ says Theresa, putting down the brush and wrapping her arms around Clara, ‘you will marry someone much more grand than a Japanese soldier. One day we’ll be free, and you will take your pick of all the men.’ The girls giggle some more.
Even with the immunity Mr Chung provides House of Kwa, two of Ying Kam and Happy Shadow’s daughters, older than Theresa and Clara, and women now, are dragged off the street by Japanese soldiers. When they stagger home, their mother sobs until the unmarried two assure her they have not been sullied. Bloodied blouses can be laundered; bruised faces will heal. Luckily a group of children came around the corner during the assault, they tell their mother, and interrupted the soldiers as they were unbuckling their trousers. Instead of raping the women, the men beat them – ostensibly as punishment for being out without a chaperone.
Ying Kam wants to rage through the streets and tear apart the men who did this to his daughters, but instead he retreats silently to his study, knowing that even dragons must withdraw from battle when they are outmatched. He must protect his entire family from being killed. Our captors cannot be trusted, he thinks, no matter how convincing their smiles or how much rotten fish they give us.
The Kwas have hidden their most precious possessions: paintings, jade, gold, silver, ivory, silk, diamonds, pearls, Tak Lau’s diamond earring and, most precious all, Theresa. Ying Kam admits to himself that she is guarded more jealously than his other girls. He cannot explain his daughter’s gift on the abacus or gracious ability to manage both staff and family from a young age, but she is the only one of his daughters for whom he would consider breaking tradition by allowing a woman to inherit his share of Swatow Lace. Perhaps she really is an old soul. He plans to ask a shaman about this once the war is over.
The Japanese would kill all the Kwas if they learned of the trapdoors and partition walls. Ying Kam thanks his ancestors and the gods that the soldiers never do more than poke their heads into bedrooms for a cursory glance around.
Ng Yuk gives birth to a half-term baby, stillborn into the occupation. She has been pregnant twice since Black Christmas, and neither infant survived. She lights a cigarette and inhales deeply as Dr Huang wraps the tiny body in a blanket, covering its lifeless face. One of the maids, who held Ng Yuk as she screamed and pushed, carries the bundle out. ‘A girl,’ Dr Huang says and turns to leave. Ng Yuk exhales a heartbroken plume of smoke. It coils up and around the corner of her mahogany bedhead, then down to caress the silk pillowslip before it slowly vanishes. ‘Like the last one,’ he adds before disappearing from the room.
Ng Yuk touches the bloodied sheets between her legs with her free hand and brings the cigarette back to her lips. ‘What is in this world for another girl, anyway?’
There will not even be a funeral, and it will be as if the infant never existed. Mr Chung has no idea about the pregnancy; neither does her husband. He is too preoccupied at the factory or upstairs with Second Wife. Ng Yuk exhales. Her wealth and the little freedom she had were stripped away when the Japanese dropped their first bomb on Hong Kong. She waves her hand erratically through the smoky air. A pall of grief forms above her and disperses into the blankets and curtains.
‘Clean this up,’ she shouts to the maids. ‘Before Master returns.’
Days later Ng Yuk has one of her help bind her stomach to rid her body of excess fluid after labour. The idea is that this will quickly return her figure to its youthful glory. She drapes and ties a finishing touch to her outfit then emerges from her room.
It is a mahjong day, and Ng Yuk is late in her preparations. Clara looks up from her writing at the kitchen table. With brush and ink, she is copying Japanese characters from a book. They are a version of writing not far from Chinese, since Japan borrowed and built on them seventeen hundred years ago. ‘This is incredibly difficult to get right, Mama,’ Clara complains. She finds the subtle nuances between the writing systems excruciating and the Japanese pronunciations impossible.
‘Your sister can do it.’
Clara rolls her eyes, scrunches up her nose and purses her lips at the comparison to her sibling. She intensifies her focus on her brushstroke.
‘You call this finished?’ Ng Yuk shouts at the servants. ‘This is not clean!’
A maid moves quickly to attend to an imaginary mess, and Ng Yuk pulls violently on her hair. In the old days, before the occupation, Ng Yuk would have smashed a dish by this stage – but these are harder times, and she is careful to spare the crockery.
Clara retreats to her room, where a doll on her bed has hardly any hair from all the pulling when she flies into a rage.
Mary cries out from the nursery. Because there is no baby to take her place, the girl has occupied that room since she was born four and a half years ago. ‘Aya! Aya! Aya!’ She has slipped and fallen from a windowsill that she climbed up to watch a nest of tailorbirds wedged into the pipes running down the building. She has been trying to imitate their trills like Snow White. Before the occupation she watched the cartoon at the cinema with her brothers and sisters, and although she was only two she still remembers the girl and the birds.
Mary is doted on by her older siblings and the household help. Theresa, especially, finds her rosy, chubby cheeks a joy to squeeze.
Mary’s cries sail down to Theresa’s room. The partition is open, and no one else goes to check on the youngest child, so Theresa slides out from behind her desk, walks down the passage and picks her baby sister up off the ground. ‘It’s just a bruise. There, there, Mary.’
The little girl wails as Theresa feels her arm to test if it’s broken. It doesn’t seem to be. Mary throws her limbs around her big sister’s neck and waist, and Theresa carries her to the kitchen where she can inspect the injured arm under a better light.
In the commotion caused by the harsh words of Ng Yuk and the howls of Mary, no one notices as Mr Chung knocks and walks through the door.
That is when he sees Theresa for the first time, consoling Mary in the middle of a chaotic kitchen scene. He is taken aback by the teenager’s radiant youthful beauty. She looks up in alarm. Ng Yuk shoos her away, but it’s too late – such a girl cannot be unseen.
‘You have another daughter,’ Mr Chung says as a statement rather than a question. Ng Yuk nods, and he continues, ‘She is very beautiful. It is understandable that you try to protect her from those who m
ay wish her harm.’ His expression is difficult to read.
Theresa takes Mary’s hand to lead her back to her room. The little girl looks over her shoulder at the tall man and beams at him, her tear-stained face suddenly like the sun.
Ng Yuk calls Theresa back, and she obediently steps into the room with her head bowed. ‘This,’ Ng Yuk tells her, ‘is Mr Chung,’
Theresa smiles disarmingly.
‘Mr Chung, please meet my daughter, Wai Ching.’
‘I am Theresa.’ She curtsies. ‘How do you do?’
Once Mr Chung recognises Theresa’s language and bookkeeping skills, she is recruited to assist the occupiers. She is unassuming and sweet, canny and sharp, and her skills on the abacus are well honed from years sitting beside Ying Kam at Swatow Lace and nights at his ledger clacking the ivory beads.
Four is not a lucky number for the Chinese because the word for four, si in Mandarin or sei in Cantonese, sounds similar to the word for death, in both languages. They are only one tone apart, but Number Four Daughter doesn’t care about that. Theresa Wai Ching Kwa is about to prove how lucky she is.
Food far tastier than rotten fish and standard rice rations appears – fruit and dried meat from official quarters. For the first time in years, House of Kwa feasts.
Theresa is asked to tag along to meetings with dignitaries, academics, deposed lawyers and judges. Her Japanese and English are proficient enough, while her looks and charm are what truly get her by. She translates high-level cultural exchanges at only fourteen. In China she would be eligible to marry.
POISON AND FIRE
TODAY IS 6 AUGUST 1945, A MONDAY. WORLD WAR II HAS been raging for six years, and Hong Kong has been under Japanese rule for three and a half. It’s just after 8 am, twenty degrees Celsius and humid as it always is this time of year. Tak Lau runs down to his job at the blacksmith shop. Theresa gets ready to accompany Ying Kam to the factory.
America’s B-29 Bomber the Enola Gay drops an atomic bomb on Japan. Its nickname is Little Boy, and it kills eighty thousand people in Hiroshima; sixty thousand more will die by Christmas from fallout. Ninety thousand buildings will be destroyed, leaving fewer than a third of that number standing.