I packed for my trip: sound recorder, tape, batteries, microphones, cables, headphones. I took five cases. Then my mother called and I took six. The sixth was filled with clothes and gifts for relatives in China.
Before I left, my mother also sent me a briefing paper. Hers went like this:Jiou-jiou, your uncle. My first brother. Don’t be like his wife. Don’t talk so loud.
Jiou-gunggung, your great-uncle. My mother’s brother. Very old. Yell at him. His ears are no good, but he can eat. Everything.
Jiou po-po, your great-uncle’s wife. She eats everything, too.
Gugu, your auntie. Your father’s sister. If you are so short of time like you say, don’t bother with her. If she sees you, you will not get away. Believe me.
San Jiou-jiou, your third uncle. Also my brother. But this one is younger than the other. This one is number three out of four. Like I am number one out of three. For girls. All my family, not your father’s. (Your father’s side, you call him Shu-shu, okay?) This one, San Jiou-jiou, I have something special for.
I put these notes away in my bag and went off to China. Thoughts of the film, can Jill make it work; of my family, who should I see; and of the revolution, what will it tell me, going round in my head.
The first leg of my trip took me to Hong Kong. I slept most of the way, but woke as the plane dropped out of the clouds and the harbor appeared below, an expanse of global shipping, a skyline of dominant buildings. I thought of the memorable words from an otherwise un-memorable movie: “Thank you,” the beautiful Chinese mistress said, “Thank you, Taipan. Thank you.”
The plane whined. Skimmed rooftops, laundry, then—whump—it set me down.
Jill was already there. She’d gone on ahead to consult with Peter, our cameraman. Peter was a big guy, Cantonese, who said whatever he liked. His favorite game was insulting Jill. He called Jill “Missy.” She called him “Boy.” They knew each other from their early days in London, when both had been scrounging for film jobs. While Jill went on to become an inappropriate person at the BBC, alienating one executive after another, Peter found his niche shooting documentaries in London. He was able to do this for a number of years until his mother finally faked a heart attack and forced him home to Hong Kong to run the family business.
“Shirts,” he said when I met him.
“Really?” I felt a bit confused, jet-lagged, probably. Jill had told me Peter owned a factory, but I couldn’t recall how she had said making shirts and making films went together. Peter, on first meeting, didn’t offer me a clue. He wasn’t your stereotypical Hong Kong businessman. He didn’t dress his hair, he didn’t wear nice clothes, he wasn’t pale, or neat. He was a slob. Big olive face set off by a frizz of hair, brown, kind of kinky. Maybe he had some Portuguese blood; he said his family came from Macao. When he walked, his pants slid off his hips. He had no waist.
I asked him, “You still making shirts? Is that what you do, mostly?”
“She didn’t tell you?” Peter jerked a thumb at Jill. “I make my wife do it.”
“Oh, it’s not like that,” Jill said. “She loves it. Making money.”
“Of course. That’s why she’s my wife,” Peter laughed a high-pitched laugh.
Later, Jill said, “That’s Peter. When he came home, he kept shooting film, but his family said, is that all you learned in London? Coolie work? They told him, you run the factory. But he said, no, you find me a wife. Isn’t that brilliant?”
Jill had us doing our first interview in Hong Kong. It was with an ancient couple who had worked for the YMCA, running leadership programs for Chinese youth. The Chinese half of the couple was a man from San Francisco Chinatown, and his companion—I calculated they’d been together since the 1960s—was from southern California, from pioneer stock he described as strict and Presbyterian.
They were Johnny and Earl. They looked like owls, short and round. Both stood on the backs of their heels and tilted their heads up to greet us when we arrived. At first, we couldn’t tell them apart, not in the dim confines of their hall, but when they led us to the front of their apartment, where the light diffused from the harbor and sky outside gave everything within a pearly luminance, we could see Earl had the speckled head and Johnny the tufts of white. Though Peter said later, and he had the benefit of seeing them close-up through his camera, they really looked the same, their eyes were indistinguishably old and baggy.
“My father had the ranch and his the grocery,” Earl pointed to Johnny.
“Bank,” Johnny said. “The bank was the real business.”
“Can you look here?” Peter held up a fist next to his camera. He was setting up for Earl’s interview. Earl and Johnny had both gone to China when they were in their twenties. This would have been soon after the First War.
I hung a microphone over Earl. If he was any good, he was going to belong to the part of the film that dealt with Western influence in China. I put on my headphones.
“He’s not sitting too low, is he?” Jill stuck a cushion behind Earl. We started filming. Earl talked about going to college and finding his calling there with the YMCA.
“Why the Y?” he said. He had a big voice and used it with vigor, as if to prove to us what he had been in his youth, a man who never saw a mountain he didn’t want to climb. One wall of the apartment was covered with pictures demonstrating this: there was Earl in the Sierras, Earl in the Alps, Earl in Tibet. Earl with a leg up on every mountain he ever trod. “He got around, didn’t he,” Johnny said.
I turned Earl down on my tape recorder.
“Why the Y?” he said in more moderate tones, “Well, it was the greatest thing. In those days, it was like the Peace Corps. We got the best men, the best ideas and we put them together.”
Earl slapped his hands into a sandwich. He spiked my recording.
“They were so hungry,” he spoke of his Chinese students, “Anything we could get from home. Science books, magazines, why, they just snapped them up.”
He grabbed a chunk of air. Jill, who sat facing him nodded, then smiled. She did this for every word Earl said, her smile the equivalent of a pat on the head, had Earl been a dog.
He lowered his head now and looked her in the eye, “They wanted change, those students, you bet. Change, which is progress, you know, no progress without change. You want something, you go get it. That’s change. That’s what I taught my students. And it’s still the same today—some things don’t change.”
He sat up. Was this a digression coming on? I looked to Jill. She held up her hand. I looked to Peter, he stayed bent over his camera, but his leg moved to where Jill could poke him if she had to.
“Young people,” Earl sounded a new and belligerent note, “young people—for them, change just comes natural. They don’t want to sit still. And why should they?”
Jill dropped her hand. Peter stopped. I turned off. And Earl? He jabbed a finger in our collective eye. “Look,” he said, “look at the students. The kids. That’s who you should be filming today. Not us.”
Earl was far more interested in the present than the past. “I hate old people who talk about the past,” he told us at the end of his interview, “But—sometimes you have to. You’re young, you people, and what you don’t know, you need someone to tell you. I’m glad to do it.” He went around and shook our hands.
When it was Johnny’s turn, he talked about how his father and other Chinatown leaders, Chinese patriots, he called them, conspired to overthrow the foreign Manchu dynasty.
“People forget, but we really played a part. A big part. My father sang hymns. Went to a lot of meetings. And between the church, the Six Companies, which ran all the businesses in Chinatown, and the family associations, my father raised more money than anybody else for the revolutionaries. He was very big on making China strong.
“Also, he started something, and this was very popular in Chinatown, if he knew you were a supporter of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and the Chinese republic—and he would know, because he was the one collected the money
—well, he gave you a discount at his store. Then later at the bank, too, you got loans easier.”
As Johnny talked, it became apparent that his father’s investments to make China strong—a printing business, a cascade of banks—had done very well, even if China itself had not, and we were now enjoying one of the fruits thereof: Johnny’s living room. A room that drew light from all of Victoria Harbor below, a room so big and comfortable Peter said he’d just as soon move in and shoot the rest of our interviews there, if only Jill would let him.
Johnny sat with his room stretching out behind him, a tapestry on the wall, a lamp farther back. He looked solid, seated in a deep armchair, but when he spoke, his voice came out frail and whispery. I had to turn the microphone up as far as I could for him.
“My father was someone you didn’t say no to. He asked you to go to a meeting, you went to a meeting. He asked you to give a banquet, you gave a banquet. He asked you to give money, you gave money. He was tough, my father. Had to be. In his day, in the old country, you got your head chopped off, just for looking around. Or, if you went to the States, you could get run out of town, maybe killed, just for showing up there. Plenty of people were.”
“Now. What else,” Johnny rolled his eyes for a moment. “Oh. Ham-yu. Yes, how about ham-yu? You want to hear about the ham-yu?”
“ ‘Ham you?’ ” Jill asked.
I heard Peter click his camera off.
“You never heard of it?” Johnny smiled, “It’s what every Cantonese mother cooks and what all the children love—”
Cut, cut, Jill flashed her hands. I kept rolling. Jill signaled again, but I looked away. Where was Johnny going with his ham-yu? I wanted to know. Tape was cheap. Tape was infinitely accommodating.
“It stinks,” Johnny said. “Ground pork with salty fish, ham-yu. And that’s what my mother fed Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Can you imagine? It was like giving George Washington stinky meat loaf.
“It was Father’s fault. He didn’t warn Mother, he just brought the Doctor home one day and that’s all Mother had for supper. Ham-yu. Hahaha,” Johnny started laughing, “Mother felt so cheap.”
“I see,” Jill said.
“No you don’t,” Johnny hiccuped. “Excuse me. You ask me about how we got rid of the emperor and all I can think of is this, ham-yu. Hahaha.”
“Well, then, I guess we’ve got it,” Jill stood up. “Thank you.”
“No, listen, listen.” Johnny held up a hand. “I think it’s like this—you still on?”
He looked at Peter, me.
“It was like this: my father didn’t like how in San Francisco they put you down if you were Chinese. At that time, it didn’t help any to hear how bad China was doing over there. The famines, the country falling apart. People killing each other. Foreigners, too. My father said, ‘Makes it worse for us here.’
“That’s why he decided it was time for a change. That’s why he started supporting Dr. Sun. Because he was fed up. Not on ham-yu, hahaha. But because, you know, it stinks—yes, that’s it—everything stinks, and that’s when you get it. Your revolution. When people are fed up. With the stink. Now, does that help?”
“Yes, yes. Thank you. So much.”
This time Jill jumped at Johnny and hauled him to his feet before he could say more.
“Bull’s-eye.” Peter winked at me and started gathering up his camera gear.
Johnny and Earl first met through the YMCA in Shanghai in the 1920s. Their paths crossed and diverged several times thereafter. But with the communist victory in 1949, they both retreated to Hong Kong and there they eventually met again. “On the ferry,” Earl said, “what a hoot.” They’d been together ever since, served these many years by a skinny old amah who came out now and gave us tea when we were done.
“I was there, too,” she yelled. “I was there.”
The amah wanted to talk about how she had tricked the Japanese during the war, but Jill and Peter were too distracted to listen. They went off to film several boxes of old photos Johnny and Earl had collected during their years in China. This was a rare find, really, a cache of urban images from Shanghai, Chungking and Canton. I realized then that that was what Jill was after, the old photos. The interviews had been merely a chance to squeeze out more. Jill was always after more, a story here, a story there. But with Johnny going off the deep end about his ham-yu, Jill had only Earl’s interview she could use now, what there was of it.
“About a roll and a half,” Peter said.
As often happened, another story was left behind. If it were me—and I have to admit I love the tangential, the ephemeral, the gossip column as much as the main story, maybe more—if it were me, I would have asked Johnny and Earl about love and longevity. Their apartment was filled with mementos of their religious faith and their devotion to each other—photos, poems, hands clasped in worship and love.
Before we left, Peter took a still photo of Johnny and Earl sitting on their sofa. “Closer,” Peter motioned them together.
“Like this?” Earl put an arm around Johnny and bared his teeth. We all laughed, though Johnny, who was proper, raised an eyebrow and shook off Earl’s hand. If it were me, I would have asked them, how did you keep faith and friskiness alive?
After we interviewed Johnny and Earl, we flew to Canton, where we met Alice, our Chinese guide. There, Jill discovered Alice had booked us into the White Swan, the best hotel in Canton at the time.
“Whatever for?” Jill said, when she saw the gleaming white lobby and, below it, a little stream flowing under a bridge, past a tea shop. “I told you we didn’t need a place like this.”
Jill had made two earlier trips to reconnoiter locations and subjects for her film. She had worked with Alice on those, and afterwards returned home to report, “We have the perfect little translator.” Now, however, she felt she had to eat her words. She said slowly and distinctly, “Alice, you understand, we are not Hollywood.”
“Oh, yes,” Alice replied. She was new to the business of guiding film groups around China, but she had worked on a big foreign picture before. “I understand,” she widened her eyes, “but they have no room. At the other place.”
“The other place—didn’t we book them? Months ago?”
“Yes,” Alice nodded.
“Well?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe they think we’re coming last month. Not this.” Alice turned her palms up.
Jill stared at Alice’s palms. They were pale and soft. “Oh,” she said. Alice probably had done all she could. It was Jill who had negated her efforts, Jill who had decided at the last minute to delay filming by a month, and now with Peter, me, and two bellboys waiting on twenty cases of luggage, she, Jill, was hardly in a position to argue about what might have fallen through the cracks.
“Give me your passports,” she said and held out her hand.
The next day, Jill sent Alice to deliver a packet of Sudafed to General Li, the weeping general. The rest of us took the morning off. Swam in a warm pool. Napped. Mid-afternoon, we set out for our interview with an intelligence officer Peter nicknamed “The Assassin.”
Whenever possible, Jill interviewed in English, though sometimes the English got in the way, as it did on this occasion:ASSASSIN: I did not kill myself.
JILL: You didn’t commit suicide?
ASSASSIN: No. I did not.
JILL: What?
ASSASSIN: I did not kill. Myself.
JILL: No.
ASSASSIN: No.
JILL: I see. (pause) What did you do?
ASSASSIN: I was in charge. I did not kill.
JILL: But your unit, it was responsible for many deaths. You say so yourself. In your own book. See, “Confessions—”
ASSASSIN: No, no. That is revolutionary situation. Many people die in the revolution. I, I cannot save them.
JILL: But you were in charge.
ASSASSIN: Of course. I am intelligence officer.
JILL: So, if you were in charg
e, you could have stopped it. The deaths. You did not have to execute people.
ASSASSIN: That’s what I tell you I never did!
Mr. Wu, our intelligence officer, had been the scourge of students during the 1930s and ’40s, prisoner of the State after liberation, then a volunteer to settle a frontier region, then a sanatorium patient, then a forgotten man, then, finally and most recently, author of a Hong Kong bestseller, translated into English as White Terror: Spymaster in Shanghai. Mr. Wu, now shriveled as a mummy, but still sucking hard on a cigarette held at attention upright between thumb and forefinger. Mr. Wu sat under Peter’s lights and tried to tell Jill that there was a genuine distinction between a man in charge and a man who killed. It was a distinction that mattered, for Mr. Wu was saying, hey, I’m not a thug. And he wasn’t. As Alice told me later, though she didn’t use these words, Mr. Wu didn’t get to the top by killing people. He was already there. Where he came from, his family had called the shots, run the show. It had been that way for generations. What did he need to kill for? With his own hands? Mr. Wu was insulted by Jill’s questions.
“How can he say what he said?” I asked Alice, “Isn’t he afraid of—”
“What? At his age? Nobody listens to him,” Alice wrinkled her nose.
She was disappointed, not with Mr. Wu, but with us. Disappointed that Peter was fat. And married. That Jill and I were women. Alice wasn’t interested in what Mr. Wu or any of the old people we interviewed had to say, though she did become quite attentive, later on, when we filmed old generals in Beijing who arrived in their shiny Mercedes sedans.
Alice was twenty-six. She wanted to meet someone attractive. She had studied English with great discipline. Learned to speak it with hardly an accent. And not unreasonably, she expected her beautiful English to deliver more to her than it did when she got us, Jill, Peter, and me. Three not-so-up-to-date people in crumpled cottons.
At the airport while we were waiting for our luggage to come through, I caught Alice biting her lip and staring at our shoes. Peter’s dirty tennies. My black Nikes and Jill’s high-tops. Green, a Robin Hood green. These shoes dashed about and jiggled before the customs officials. I had never thought before what they said about us. How klunky they made us look. How low-powered. Our shoes squished and bulged where our feet bulged. Alice, however, wore neat patent-leather flats with pointy toes. They squeaked when she walked. They also squeaked when she wasn’t walking. A mere shift in weight seemed to be enough to set them off. I had to tell Alice later not to wear these shoes while we were filming. They added an unwelcome commentary to my recordings.
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