by Mimi Kwa
Theresa walks with her father along the factory floor aisle between lines of workers hunched over sewing machines.
Three days later, on 9 August, it’s another warm, humid morning in Hong Kong. Theresa sits by Ying Kam helping him with calculations on the abacus.
The US atomic bomb Fat Man wreaks hell on Nagasaki. Eighty thousand people, including POWs, will be dead by Christmas. There is immeasurable horror on earth, bodies haemorrhaging, skin embedded with glass, and limbs crushed by debris. Unspeakable suffering. That same day, the Russians push back Japanese forces in China.
Ying Kam switches on the wireless to find that there is only a Japanese language station on air today with no update on the situation in Japan at all. That’s strange – most rebel stations were found out and their operators executed months ago, but he still expected to find the Japanese-sanctioned Cantonese station disseminating basic news and propaganda. At least there’s still word of mouth.
At home Ying Kam, his two wives and their children await whatever will come next.
Happy Shadow has had three more children during the occupation, two girls and a boy. Ng Yuk curses her womb and reaches for a slim lacquered box containing three cigarette holders in porcelain, ivory and wood. She selects one and drags on her Double Happiness tobacco. ‘What do I have to show for the war? Two more dead babies, only five alive.’ She exhales and tries not to tune in to the cry of a Second Wife baby upstairs. ‘Younger and more beautiful,’ Ng Yuk mutters bitterly about herself. ‘But not enough to produce more children.’
She shuffles her ivory mahjong pieces, sliding them around on the balcony table. It has been weeks since her last game with the occupiers. The tiles face down, and Ng Yuk flips one over with her left hand: Red Dragon. Then another: North Wind. Next: Plum Blossom.
Theresa has been watching her mother from the balcony door. Ng Yuk stares at the upturned trio of tiles as if they speak to her. She draws in another nicotine hit and watches paper and leaf smoulder. Theresa pulls up a chair next to her mother and places her right hand on Ng Yuk’s left. And, on this rare occasion, Ng Yuk does not pull away.
As a last act of defiance towards the West, the Japanese execute as many remaining British citizens in their camps as they can before the armies of liberation have a chance to take over. They set fire to Hong Kong homes and industrial workplaces. Over their dead bodies will they surrender, with many committing harakiri to avoid the shame of capture.
Fierce dragon flames envelop the second storey of one of the Kwa factories. Ying Kam runs out of his burning building, and workers stream onto the street, coughing and spluttering, blackened by the inferno. Ying Kam faces the carnage, unable to speak, watching fire devour his dreams as the flames flicker in his eyes.
Japanese soldiers retreat in military vessels and cargo ships, chartering whole suicide boats full of soldiers towards Commonwealth aircraft carriers. They take with them Hong Kong’s food supplies, specifically to leave the population to starve. Some of the Japanese will churn the rough waters home to their mother country if they think they can avoid capture, while others choose to sink to a watery grave in communal shame.
Whatever law and order existed under occupation is now out to sea.
Before Britain has a chance to reclaim the colony, Ying Kam steals away from his family for a moment alone. He sits in his den, the many brutalities and sorrows of the occupation whirl through his mind. Heaving a sigh, he is sixty years in the past on his journey from the Kwa compound in Beijing after stealing his father’s concubine; his mighty House of Kwa in Swatow and its fall; and its rise again in Hong Kong. Only – he heaves another sigh – to fall once more. He apologises to his ancestors then shakes his fists at the gods.
Lifting a vial to his lips, he transports himself out of his body and swallows. It is a fast-acting poison. The vial has been hidden beneath a floorboard for years: a parting purchase from the local shaman before he was publicly executed by Japanese officers in the early days of the occupation, when unlucky families and their children were dragged down to the park and forced to watch.
In his last moments, Ying Kam prays for his family. They have a few riches and one another. With three wives he has sired thirty-two children. Of course he knows about Ng Yuk’s two recent stillbirths – Dr Huang could not keep such information from a husband. There has been no word from First Wife in China, given all outside communication has been cut off or intercepted since the occupation began three years and eight months ago. All Ying Kam can hope is that the survivors of his thirty-two children will remain alive as his legacy. He is the twenty-second firstborn son of the firstborn son of Kwa.
He scrawls lines of characters down a page, convulses and falls to the floor, holding his chest.
A maid finds Ying Kam’s body. It is carried down the hill in a coffin draped in silks and taken directly for cremation to avoid overburdened morgues and mass graves.
Ng Yuk and Happy Shadow tell their children and people they know, ‘He died of a broken heart.’
When Lotus Flower, who is still living in Swatow, receives word her husband is dead, she weeps and remembers when she fled with him from his father’s compound to build a new life. She releases any hope he would one day come back for her and cries into the night.
Theresa goes into her father’s study and sits at his desk, running her hand over the last page he touched. She reads his calligraphy as though he is right there speaking the words.
哀莫大于心死. 活着是更好的出路.
The saddest thing is death of the heart.
The remedy for dying is living.
Theresa places the paper into the pages of a black ledger that Ying Kam saved from the factory fire. ‘The remedy for dying is living,’ she whispers. She smooths her cheongsam against her thighs and traces a finger over an embroidered plum blossom wending its way across her breast to her collar. Then she stands up and walks out.
SILVER AND ASH
IT’S BEEN TWO WEEKS SINCE THE JAPANESE RETREATED, AND Hong Kong is starving. Tak Lau slips through a wire fence around the old barracks at the theatre complex he knows so well. Scavenging for rice and food scraps here should be easy.
He fills a bag with provisions for his family. There are abandoned pocket knives, belts, ammunition cases, boardgame pieces and even a watch. The ten-year-old feels light and full of adventure. With the conquerors gone, he wanders and explores freely, collecting abandoned objects to examine, restore, swap or sell.
At home, Tak Lau drops off the heavy bag. His sisters call after him to stay and eat, but he shakes his head and runs out again, not looking back. Father is gone, so the boys must now provide for House of Kwa. He runs down Wu Hu Street towards Whampoa Dock.
Structures along the wharves show significant signs of the Allied air raids. Broken cranes and ruined warehouses occupy rearranged chunks of shoreline, while expat homes Tak Lau remembers from before the occupation are damaged, in ruins or no longer there. He slips through a gap in a fence and runs towards the waterfront homes. The sunshine is brilliant in his eyes, making him squint. This is where British dock managers lived with their families. He steps inside the first home he comes to, through a doorway that looks to have been battered by axes. There are bullet holes in the walls and splash marks of dried blood on expensive linen wallpaper. Skulls and other human remains litter the floor. Rugs are stained crimson. These people must have been butchered in the early days of the attack.
Tak Lau steps from room to room, from house to house. Houses of horror with groupings of skeletal remains, sometimes a single skeleton near a back door or curled up in a bloodstained closet, like the preserved bodies of Pompeii, telling a story of failed escapes. An emaciated rat scuttles over a dusty mantel – not even slim pickings are left for it.
After searching through wardrobes for a bag, Tak Lau makes do with a dusty pillowcase. He fills it with silverware and then, satisfied there is nothing else of value to take, he runs onto the beach and vomits up what little is in his s
tomach. He sits up and tries to polish the tarnished silver with sand. The granules damage the fine surfaces. He rubs harder, his shirt abrading the metal, before he realises what he has done and bursts into tears.
Alone on the beach beside scenes of unspeakable atrocities, he doubles over and sobs. He cannot understand what emotion he just experienced but is too filled with shame to take the ruined silver home to his mother. Instead he visits his old boss to sell his find as scrap metal. It fetches a small price, and Tak Lau is crestfallen he has so little to show for his efforts.
Soon Tun rubs his thick steak-and-sausage hands together. He will melt the utensils down and turn the transaction around once the economy picks up again. Banks will pay good ransom for solid silver.
Ying Kam’s younger brother Eng Lee absorbs any control of the business Ying Kam may have had left. With the registration already in his name and with no known agreement otherwise, Swatow Lace is now entirely his. Most of his own Kwa family and fortune have been preserved thanks to his wife, who kept the shop at 16 Pedder Street going while he was stuck in Shanghai for four years.
Tak Lau watches his uncle’s car pull up outside the Wu Hu Street house and remembers Ng Yuk scolding Ying Kam that his brother was ‘squeezing him out’. Uncle Eng Lee lives in a wealthier part of Hong Kong than Hung Hom; he has driven over to take Theresa to work with him, where she will help manage the books just as she once did for her father.
All the way to the factory, Eng Lee complains to his niece that the road where she lives is too rough for his Mercedes-Benz. Theresa is unsure if he is fully aware of what the family endured in his absence, when his wife and brother were responsible for maintaining the business under extreme duress.
‘You should feel proud to live in the only concrete building on the street,’ Uncle tells her. ‘And proud it is the only one left standing – that you are still standing.’ He presses his car horn to hurry along a shirtless man. ‘But,’ he adds, ‘you must aspire to greater heights. Your father did not die for you to wallow.’
The man on the road wears a rice-paddy hat and loincloth, with a wooden pole across the back of his neck pulling down his skinny shoulders. At either end, ropes hold up baskets filled with mounds of cement dust. The cavity under his ribs gives way to the skinny curve of his stomach, probably bloated with air. Cheap labour rebuilding the city.
‘You could aim to live at The Peak, perhaps,’ Uncle suggests, referring to the most valuable real estate on the Island side of the city, where he lives. ‘Chinese weren’t allowed to live there before, but now the Brits give us new freedoms.’ He presses his horn again. ‘Have you heard? We can even visit the “whites only” beaches now.’
The skin of the emaciated worker is dark from the sun, and he moves out of the way without looking up.
At the factory, Theresa click-clacks the ivory abacus Ying Kam left behind. He made no will, but it was obvious this should be hers.
The factory bustles with workers, and Eng Lee is pleased with progress: his phoenix from the ashes. The damage from the fire wasn’t as bad as Ying Kam thought. Brother, you leaped to conclusions. Eng Lee opens Ying Kam’s black ledger, the one that belonged to their father, my great-grandfather, and vows eternal thanks to his brother for rescuing it from the inferno. ‘Out of the fire,’ he says. ‘Ashes into the grave.’
Before the Japanese occupation, under British rule the children’s English names were favoured over their Chinese ones, especially outside the house. Under the Japanese, English was officially banned on the streets, and it was a kind of comfort to revert to traditional Asian monikers. Now the terror has ended, Theresa Wai Ching, Clara Wai Mui and Mary Wai Choy go mostly by their English names again to suit their Western clothes. Tak Lau takes the opportunity to reinvent himself too: he uses Francis now.
It’s a new era, a new life. Hong Kong is recovering at an astonishing pace now the free market is open again. But the reprieve from loss is short-lived for the Wu Hu Street Kwas.
Francis is eleven when word finds its way into number 183 from a local market, past the old bunker and rebuilt homes, through the front door and up the stairs; eighteen-year-old Elder Brother is in hospital.
By the time Ng Yuk arrives at his bedside, the doctors tell her there is nothing to be done. Her eyes and heart hollow, she cradles her boy. ‘It will be alright, it will be alright.’ She blankets him in her sorrow and rocks him in her grief. ‘Father waits for you. Brothers and sisters wait for you – the triplets and the sisters you never met. You’ll join Kwa on the other side, my boy. I will see you there too one day.’
Elder Brother dies in her arms, blood dribbling from his mouth. He had been unconscious for hours. His insides were shredded by broken glass in a bowl of noodles, the doctors tell Ng Yuk. Intestinal injuries, terrible suffering, a fever above forty-three.
Francis is at home by a window, holding his knees against his small chest, waiting and pining for Elder Brother, the favourite of all his siblings, his idol and confidant. But their mother returns alone, her cracked voice breaking the news although her tears and bloodied blouse already tell the story.
Francis runs from the house and keeps going into the darkness, flying down Wu Hu Street, not stopping until he reaches the Whampoa Dock and the houses he ransacked at the end of the war. The international port is fully operational again, as though nothing happened. Cranes are lifting cargo from vessels at the wharf, while teams of men dig and build, working around the clock to make Kowloon not only restored but bigger, better and stronger after the great darkness.
Ghosts rise up and chase Francis home.
Despite all the death Francis has witnessed, Ng Yuk tells him that he is too young to attend Elder Brother’s funeral. She needs her servants with her today, so Francis must care for Mary. He knows better than to argue with his mother, particularly at a time of bereavement.
Francis watched the meagre family procession carry his father’s casket past his home and down the hill to a crematorium. Now he will watch his brother’s funeral procession go by.
Before the family leaves to attend Elder Brother’s open casket, Francis crouches on the floor of his room and peers through a keyhole to get a good view of preparations. Theresa brushes Clara’s hair; a maid smooths Ng Yuk’s coat and takes her arm.
An hour later, Mary has fallen asleep and Francis watches alone as the closed coffin, draped in religious silks and embroidered fabric from Swatow Lace, wends its way down the hill on the shoulders of uncles and cousins.
Theresa looks up from the procession and sees Francis’s tiny face at the window. She runs up the road and takes the stairs, two at a time. Her little brother is still fixated on the procession when she slips into the room and places her hand gently on his shoulder, breaking a spell. He turns towards his sister and flings his arms around her neck, sobbing and longing for the sadness, which has stretched out over years, to end. She holds him close.
PEBBLES AND CANE
EACH MORNING, SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD THERESA WAKES UP IN her room in her family home on Wu Hu Street, just as she has done for most of her life. It is bigger now the false wall is gone, and she is no longer sharing with Clara. Theresa has gone through a metamorphosis, and so has Hong Kong – now they are both spreading their wings to fly.
Change happens quickly. There’s already a new metal street sign at the end of Wu Hu, in English letters with Chinese characters below. Local sign factories are inundated with lists of street and building names to reinstate as well as neon and hand-painted signs. This is just one small part of the work to do to start again, but Hong Kong’s survivors are ready.
Theresa and her family are among the 600,000 residents remaining. During the occupation, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled or were forced over the border to China. At least ten thousand Hong Kong locals were arbitrarily executed, while hundreds of expats died in camps. Now, finally, there’s no risk of being shot dead for crossing a road or looking the wrong way, or just for being there. Although with such horrific m
emories comes lingering pain.
On 30 September 1946, General Takashi Sakai is executed in China by a firing squad on charges of war crimes committed when he led the invasion and served as Hong Kong’s governor at the start of the occupation. The man who presided over the beginning of the terror is dead, a clear message that Hong Kong’s dark days are over.
With characteristic determination and industriousness, Chinese citizens resuscitate hospitals, businesses and schools. Expats and refugees trickle back, and some of the freed civilian POWs return to their Hong Kong homes. Optimism resurfaces and, on the face of it, the colony is the picture of post-war resilience as the world dusts itself off from the trauma of conflict.
Theresa is still working at the factory with Uncle Eng Lee. Now that Ying Kam and Elder Brother are dead, the lion’s share of responsibility to provide for Third Wife’s part of the family has fallen to her.
The death of their father has further separated Happy Shadow and Ng Yuk’s broods, along with the women themselves. Their estimation of each other has never been outstanding; now they are widows, there is barely even a sense of obligation between them.
House of Kwa moves into a new phase of survival, splintering again from the top of the tree.
Theresa has become as invaluable to Swatow Lace as she was to Japanese meetings with Hong Kong Brits. She stays in contact with some of the captives who survived, and they are still grateful for her diplomacy in the meetings they were forced to attend during the occupation. She had a knack of making confrontational content gracious in translation. No one can be sure she translated everything accurately, but she kept the peace and may have saved their skin. Gratitude comes from high places and Theresa attends multicultural academic and diplomatic events. Soon Clara is old enough to come as her guest.