We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think

by Shirley Hazzard

  On the colony’s social map at that time the principal elevations were Government House, where the governor lived; Flagstaff House, where the general lived; and Admiralty House, which sheltered the admiral. It was at the last-named of these, one evening, that I was fascinated by an arrangement of small, circular board and wooden mallet that the admiral—who sat at the middle rather than the end of his table—kept beside his wineglass. All through dinner I speculated on its function, fearing (for the adult world was already revealing its affinities with school) that it was reserved for the delivery of some humiliating reprimand. Ultimately, the Stilton, fruit, and cabinet pudding having been successively removed by a multitude of servants, a silence fell. The admiral took up the mallet and struck the board a single resounding blow. He then announced, “Gentlemen, you may now smoke.” This was the signal for the ladies to withdraw.

  In those days it was always a toss-up with me whether I would be overawed or have a fit of the giggles. This time I was awed.

  I am told that many of the landmarks I have described no longer exist, that there have been many additions and substitutions, and that I would not recognize the place. In my case, too, there have been many changes, and the place might not recognize me. Maybe our conditions have not so much been altered as intensified.

  Hong Kong in those postwar years was a stepping stone in a quicksand—a safe place from which to go to places less secure. If one wanted a change, one could go to Shanghai, or to Nanking, where the capital then was, or to Peiping (by air, since the civil war had already made the train trip precarious, and the city was in a sense besieged). In my case, so it was said, such a trip made alone would be unthinkable. I did think of it, though, quite often; but for a long time remained planted at the Gloucester with both elbows on the balcony railing.

  Inconclusive attempts were made to place me in the ruined shell of the Hong Kong University or under the wing of the French Jesuit school. At one time I was to be packed off to a school in England, but a terrible winter there intervened to save me. What was needed was an occupation—an occupation being distinguished from a job in that it involves fewer qualifications, a lower salary, and makes no pretensions to career—and this was eventually found for me.

  My occupation was in a place of authority—of high and confidential authority—an office concerned with the colony’s security. Regarding my own task there, however, there need be no secrecy. I was charged with the placing of flagged pins on a map, each pin representing a merchant ship and the map being that of Far Eastern waters. The ships voluntarily gave their positions at regular intervals for this purpose, and the idea was to maintain a convenient daily record of the disposition of merchant shipping in the area. At first I applied myself enthusiastically to the placing of pins. When, after several weeks, it became clear to me that the map was never consulted, my efforts slackened; I began to bring the flags up to date not twice daily, as instructed, but at intervals of one, two, and then three days. There were even certain ships—those going to Macao or Swatow or Amoy—that sailed from Hong Kong and returned within a matter of days; and these, so far as I was concerned, never left port.

  The change in attitude toward the map was the result not of indolence but of common sense. What kind of person, seeing the map not once consulted over a period of many weeks, would have diligently moved the pins twice daily? Through what delusions of self-importance could I have goaded myself to its careful maintenance? I was a reasonable person and had merely adapted my behavior to my observations.

  I was placing the flags at three-day intervals when the episode of the Van Heutz intervened.

  The Van Heutz, a Dutch liner cruising the Orient with war-weary Europeans, was attacked and boarded on the high seas by Chinese pirates, who seized control of the ship, sailed her to a remote bay on the China coast, and ransomed a number of the passengers, having first sifted them for valuables. When news of the drama broke on Hong Kong, a baffled group of officials was found before my map, vainly seeking some news of this ship—which had, alas, not yet qualified for my attention.

  My downfall was not complete. After some days in eclipse I was rehabilitated and also allowed to chalk in red and blue crayon on a different map the daily gains and losses of the civil war.

  It was the most delightful office imaginable. It was staffed largely by very young Englishmen of greatly varying personalities and backgrounds. Lanky and fair, short and swarthy, languid or dynamic, they were alike in my eyes in belonging irrefutably to the real world. They had all seen active service in the war—yet they were still so young that there was discernable in their conversation that (not always negligible) wit of the Fifth Form, which remains with many Englishmen throughout their lives. They were familiar with Homer, quoted Auden, and on their free afternoons would go down to the Dairy Farm Restaurant in Des Voeux Road and eat up platefuls of colored ice cream. Enthusiasm would have been against their principles, but there was an element of optimism in their charm; the war had ended, and I think we were all relieved simply to find ourselves alive.

  When not engaged with my maps, I shared a small office with the filing clerk, a Mr. Crackenthorpe, and a Chinese translator whose given name was Tik. The filing clerk, a man of Pickwickian appearance, was known as Mr. C. He had spent his entire adult life abroad in the service of his own country, indefatigably keeping the records of international intrigue. Although he had lived in startling places for staggering stretches of time, he had in no other sense left his native land, its sounder practices and better characteristics being as strong in him as on the day he first set forth. He uttered few words of his own language and knew no word of any other. His maximum effort toward bridging the language gap was made each morning when he gave his hearty greeting in pidgin English to the pair of amahs who cleaned our offices. Astonishing expressions then fell from his lips, such as “Catchem top-side cleanee by and by,” or “Wipem deskee chopchop,” or that wistful and irrelevant pronouncement on the greenness of far fields, “Canton more far.”

  Tik, on the other hand, was fluent in various languages. He worked in both Mandarin and Cantonese, but his mother tongue was Haka, a dialect of the hill people in the coastal areas opposite Hong Kong. He was a man of great courtesy and control, never showing anger or impatience or giving the slightest sign that he was suppressing them. Between assaults on my maps, I learned from him Chinese words and phrases and the composition of certain characters—all of which I have inexcusably forgotten—but he spent most of his day bent over the documents or newspapers he was required to translate. His face struck me as perfectly matched with his name (which was pronounced “teak,” like the wood), being a deep, supple sun color, glossy yet grainy, and richly polished by its encounters with the world.

  I imagined all this to be typical of office life and could not understand what people were complaining about. I yearned to distinguish myself more favorably with this company, and not long after the debacle of the Van Heutz an opportunity presented itself.

  One morning as I was faithfully populating the China Sea with my colored pins, a discussion took place in my presence—a discussion concerned with a mysterious figure and his sinister activities. Sinister acts and mysterious personages are, as is well known, a commonplace in the East, and this office of mine was in one way or another acquainted with many of them, constituting as they did the very commodity in which it dealt. The man discussed that morning—whom I will call Mr. Jarvis, for the excellent reason that that was not his true name—was distinguished from all previous cases only by the fact that I personally knew of him, having met his wife on various occasions at the Cricket Club. I would have been less than human—or older than sixteen—had I divulged this on the spot. The discussion took a gratifying turn. I was detached from the map and within a few minutes had told all I knew of the Jarvises, which was merely that they lived in Canton and frequently made the short trip to Hong Kong. I had never been to Canton, and Mrs. Jarvis, on the latest of our meetings at the Cricket Club, had invi
ted me to stay with them there whenever I wished.

  It should be remembered that my employers were very young. Within the hour I had written to the Jarvises. Within the week I was setting out for Canton. Like most sudden developments, this was less dramatic at the time than it now appears to be, for I was merely doing what I might in any case have done, and the object of my visit, though concealed, was nothing more than to observe the way in which the Jarvises lived—whom they knew and where they went. (I don’t think that at the outset I thought much about this object; the true significance of the journey, as far as I was concerned, lay in being sent at all and was therefore already established.) A weekend at Canton with Cricket Club acquaintances seemed to my family to be a thoroughly acceptable diversion for me, and I myself approached the outing in something of this spirit. I do remember that I was enjoined to a deeper degree of secrecy than I had previously undertaken to observe; this was a wise precaution.

  The short trip to Canton could be made by boat, train, or plane. I chose the plane, for I had never flown before and it seemed an appropriate occasion. The Jarvises undertook to meet me at the other end. I left after lunch on a Saturday, so that I could be back at my maps on Monday morning.

  The Hong Kong airfield of Kai Tak had been formed on a narrow strip of reclaimed land, on the mainland opposite Hong Kong—on the British side of the border, between the harbor and the arid mountains of South China. Of the planes that rose there in confined spirals all day long, only a few were commercial, the remainder belonging at that time to a big RAF base. The office of the airline had been set up in a Quonset hut and consisted of two or three scarred desks beleaguered by passengers and defended by the company’s officials. My fellow-travelers were mostly Chinese—men going to Canton on business or to visit relatives. Some wore light cotton suits, some loose jackets and trousers, some the simple poorer suits of oiled black silk.

  Through some standard injustice, I was led to the front of this crowd. The man behind the desk, a young Eurasian, at once set aside the papers he was marking and consulted another page, handwritten in English. He ticked off my name and told me I would be called. I was sent to sit down on a wooden bench at the far end of the hut, where the single other non-Chinese passenger, a young man with a newspaper, was already waiting alone.

  A glance at this young man revealed him to be an American—his light hair cropped like a convict’s, his loose suit worn without flair, and he was eating something. His young face had, so I complacently thought, the unfinished look of his country. When I reached the bench he looked up from his newspaper, then folded it in the middle and put it down, unaffectedly preparing to talk.

  I had always been warned not to speak to strangers. I had been told, too, that Americans were a precipitate people. I sat down at the other end of the bench. The tin hut was preposterously hot. From beneath the bench came a sound of heavy panting, and a dog materialized—an unattractive dog, an old, tough, and distressingly hairless dog—and collapsed, still puffing, at our feet.

  The young man spoke to me. I looked at him obliquely. He was holding something toward me in his fingers.

  “No, thank you.” I occupied myself with the dog. “Here, doggie.” I extended my hand. The dog paid me no attention.

  “Doesn’t speak English,” suggested the young man on the bench.

  “Possibly not,” I agreed remotely. “But perhaps he understands it.”

  The young man laughed. He brought out his cigarettes. “You smoke?”

  “No,” I said, unaccountably pleased.

  “Going to Canton for a visit?”

  “To stay with friends.”

  “You live in Hong Kong?”

  “With my parents.” (Such questions were unpardonable, but it was gratifying to be asked them.)

  “Well,” he remarked, looking me over, “they certainly got you up to look like Alice in Wonderland.” He plucked at his own sleeve. “Sharkskin,” he said.

  I showed polite interest, and he went on to tell me that the suit had been made in Hong Kong in twenty-four hours. Certainly it showed no sign of prolonged attention.

  The dog heaved itself nearer, and the young man nudged it good-naturedly with his foot. “You travel much on your own?”

  “Oh sometimes,” I replied carelessly.

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” I said, aloof again.

  “Jesus.”

  “What do you do?” I inquired, adapting to the questions game.

  “I survey airfields,” he said, “to see if we can use them.” He brought out his card and gave it to me. “I’ve been in China six months, surveying for the company.”

  I was too polite to ask which company or to look at the card. “Have you liked it?” I asked instead.

  “God,” he said elusively. “What a place.”

  I nodded.

  “This thing is changing so fast.”

  “This thing,” I cautiously agreed.

  “God knows what’s going to happen. A couple of years from now, all this”—his gesture had no reference to the steaming hut—“will be gone. Finished.”

  Unexpectedly, he reminded me of my colleagues at the office. In every way their opposite, he yet conveyed something of their appeal.

  He glanced up. “I guess we can go now.” He picked up my little wicker suitcase.

  “Oh—I can carry that.”

  “No reason to.” In his other hand he had a heavy zipper bag of his own. We crossed the hut, and the dog followed us with incurious eyes, not lifting his head. The Chinese passengers were filing out, and we fell in line.

  The plane was very confused and smelled of fumigation. “These Dakotas,” said my friend. “Terrible.” When he had arranged our luggage precariously in a mesh rack, he added, “This is the most dangerous airfield in the world.” We seated ourselves together at the back of the plane, and he helped me to fasten the seat belt. “If there is a worse airfield than this,” he said, “it’s the one we’re going to at Canton.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” I asked fearlessly.

  He grinned. “Just to give you an idea,” he said. “It’s called Flying Cloud.”

  We roared. We rushed over bumpy ground. We tilted and rose into the air. One passenger wailed; another was sick. The eroded hills came alarmingly close, then fell away. Widening valleys, improbably green, spread out from a sluggish river.

  My companion gave me a peppermint for my ears. “When I get back to Hong Kong,” he said, “I might look you up.”

  I wondered if this could be considered picking someone up.

  “If you’d like that.”

  “I would like it,” I said meekly. “Yes.”

  “Of course,” he continued, “it may involve telling me your name.”

  I told him and he wrote it down—with difficulty because of the vibrations—in a small notebook, and printed “Gloucester” underneath. We were silent for some moments. I then turned to him and leaned forward to make myself heard. “As it happens,” I shrieked offhandedly, “I’ve never actually flown before.”

  I never did see him again, although the following week he sent me a postcard from Taipei—which, together with the visiting card, seemed to add up to a substantial tribute. He had what I thought of as an authentic American name, with an Old Testament name and a middle initial. I remembered it for years.

  The Jarvises had sent their driver to Flying Cloud, and this driver’s name was Feng. Feng was small, brisk, and very talkative; he got me quickly through Chinese customs (no mean feat) and into a green Dodge. “Famous airfield,” he observed, with no note of sarcasm, as we drove away from the sheds of Flying Cloud. He then explained that Mrs. Jarvis would meet us in town, and that Mr. Jarvis had been called away to Shanghai on business.

  A bad road lay across flat land before us, and over this we made terrifyingly good time—I digesting the departure of Mr. Jarvis, and Feng talking a great deal. Nothing can make one feel more alien than the contours of Eastern lands, those
landscapes that have never heard of Romanticism or Impressionism, that will not play the game, and that we greet as fantasy when we find them in art. The curiously separate hills with their fronded separate trees filed past us as we raced over the valley floor, in the muddy trough of the road. “Famous burial ground,” said Feng, nodding to a terraced hillside, and “Famous monument,” as we passed a great flight of steps. There followed in quick succession a famous wall, a famous crossroads, and an ill-famed prison before we entered the city by one of its most famous boulevards. There was Mrs. Jarvis, standing at the rim of the sidewalk, her open parasol resting on her shoulder. Feng drew the car recklessly to the gutter, braked, and leapt out to welcome me to the famous soil—which indeed formed part of the ill-paved curb onto which I stepped.

  When Mrs. Jarvis had greeted me, she sent Feng elsewhere. I saw that she was considerate with him, making sure the errand would not keep him late, inquiring where he would get his dinner. When she finally turned to me, she smiled and took hold of my fingers, and we walked a little way along the congested street holding hands.

  It is not possible to hold hands for long in a street such as that. (One of the most pleasant of Chinese customs is for friends, particularly a group of young people, to clasp hands as they walk along, but this is achieved by a chain effect, so that the group walks in linked file.) Mrs. Jarvis and I soon parted, but the contact was her means of making me feel welcome. I now suppose her to have been about forty-five—she was one of the anomalous ages then belonging in my mind to relatives and school-teachers. She was pale, patient, rather frail, with traces of that flat-curled, large-eyed prettiness that in my childhood was associated with Alice Faye. I do not remember her dress, and I suspect that her dresses were not memorable. She had, for an Englishwoman, a low-pitched and indecisive voice, and her general air, though passive, was one of appeal.

  She had thought I might like to see the shops before we went home for tea. I dutifully took an interest in the forest of little shops, the bolts of material, the endless plastic shoes and handbags, the ivory elephants and Madonnas, the jade curios and jewelry mounted in red gold. Out of deference to Mrs. Jarvis I bought a pretty handkerchief in a linen shop; out of deference to Chinese law I paid with a huge bundle of Chinese bills (the currency having lately gotten literally out of hand) instead of with the American dollars I also had in my wicker bag, and in this I was possibly unique among travelers in China at the time.