by Michael Kaan
The driver stopped behind our house. Even while the brakes were squealing, three British soldiers jumped out of the back, followed by the driver and a fifth soldier in the front. They peered over the back wall of our house and gestured and shouted at each other. Three of them ran to the back of the truck and started gathering up guns. They quickly picked up rifles, pistols, even machine guns, and started throwing them into the rubbish yard. The driver shouted at them to hurry. Two soldiers picked up a heavy gun like the one the British had carried up our front step nearly two weeks earlier, and hurled it over the wall, where it struck a steel barrel. Ah-Tseng went running out of the kitchen. She shouted at the soldiers to stop, but Chow brought her back in.
The soldiers ignored Ah-Tseng. Through a hole in the side of the truck I saw a wounded man laid out. His chest and left arm were wound in bloody bandages. He wasn’t moving. One of the soldiers checked on him while the others finished disposing of their guns.
Once they had discarded the larger weapons into the yard, the soldiers climbed back into the truck. The driver started the engine. It struggled and let loose a few bangs like gunfire. Smoke crept out from under the hood and swept into the cab. After another quick effort from the driver, the five soldiers got back out of the truck. One lifted the wounded soldier out and carried him on his back, and then they ran down the alley. The abandoned truck roared with orange flames behind our house.
I wanted a closer look. Leuk and I ran down the stairs, through the front hall, and into the kitchen, hoping to get a glimpse of the piled-up weapons. Tang stopped us and told us not to go out. I asked him if he had seen the guns being thrown into the yard.
“Of course I did. If the Japanese see that, they’ll think we’re storing weapons for the British. We have to get rid of them.”
Chow came back inside. He looked more afraid than I had ever seen him. “There’s no way we can lift all of those, and it’s more dangerous to bring them inside.”
“Get a tarp and cover them,” said Tang, and Chow retrieved a large canvas roll from the cellar while Tang paced nervously around the pantry.
“If the Japanese see the tarp, they’ll wonder what we’re hiding,” said Leuk. So we agreed to cover the tarp with garbage.
“Gather all the garbage you can find into these,” said Chow. He pointed to two large wicker baskets he’d brought up from the cellar, the snake baskets.
Leuk and I ran through the house with the baskets and gathered everything we could — waste paper, dead house plants, broken toys, rags — and hauled them down to the kitchen. Tang and Chow took the baskets from us at the door and went outside and scattered the garbage over the tarp. We took vegetable scraps, bones, and all the other kitchen garbage and added it to the pile. Then Chow took a rake and stirred the refuse around so that the tarp couldn’t be seen. They tore up dead plants in the yard and threw them on top with their soil. Leuk and I helped them, tearing up weeds and clumps of dirt to cover the canvas.
Back in the kitchen, Chow looked anxiously outside at the smoke still climbing from the hood of the truck.
“We can’t do anything about it,” said Tang. “Someone will move it, though, and it won’t be the British coming to reclaim it. From now on, no one goes out this door.” He shut the back door. It was a flimsy, plain wooden door with a simple lock, unlike the heavy, church-like doors at the front. It would have been easy to kick open.
After hauling all that garbage and dirt to cover the weapons, I was filthy. I went up to the bathroom by my room to clean up. I looked at the grime and dirt on my hands and forearms and the dark smears all over my face where I’d wiped off sweat.
I turned the faucet handle. When only a small trickle came out, I turned it again. The thin stream weakened to a drip, the pipes trembled behind the walls, and after the last drop of water a thin hiss came from the tap. I went to my mother’s bathroom and turned the taps there — nothing. In the kitchen I found Ah-Tseng at the sink, frantically trying to wring water from pipes that sent out an airy sigh.
I ran down the hall and found Sheung. We went to my father’s study, where he scanned the radio for a few minutes to confirm the obvious. The Japanese had captured the water reservoirs on the island and were slowly shutting them down.
The water shutdown affected us as nothing else had. To hear gunfire through the walls and barricaded windows simply confirmed to us that we should stick to our plan: stay indoors and fortify the membrane of our life with flimsy patches of wood, old locks, tarps, and dimmed lights. It was as though the invasion were a typhoon, a force directed by air masses and ocean currents rather than human evil, and would eventually pass over us. We could convince ourselves that our barricades were useful.
The loss of water was different. The pipes lay hidden behind every wall throughout the house, and whenever someone tried a tap or the pressure changed, we heard it. I might be in the kitchen or my room when the ghostly sound of trickling water or air would emerge through the plaster walls. No blast, no roaring engine, just the sigh of life being choked off by a distant hand.
The water still flowed weakly over the next two days. We saved it for drinking and washed very little, and the grime that crept over our skin even in the winter chill also reminded us that things could still grow worse. Soon, it seemed, a messenger would come to announce the next phase of life.
On Christmas Eve, the message was delivered. I was waiting in the kitchen with the other children for a drink of water, after a meal served cold because Ah-Tseng and my mother no longer boiled or steamed our food. I was hungry in the bored way of children, thinking of the seafood dinners we used to eat on Christmas Eve: abalone and fried shrimp, crab, stewed clams with lotus root, and cuttlefish. I wandered upstairs and found my way into my father’s study, where the lights were out and sheets hung over the windows. I pulled the sheets open a crack and the moonlight shone on the mantelpiece and cast a sliver of light over a photograph of King George that the governor had given my father. The room seemed not just still but frozen, a monument to a vanished time and life. Then I looked through the crack in the curtains towards the harbour. I heard planes overhead and took in the widening orange glow of fire spreading across buildings. A cluster of bombs fell from Japanese planes into the shimmering orange light. I thought they looked like goldfish.
It was still dark when I woke early on Christmas morning. I got up to get some water and walked down the hall in bare feet, hearing the raspy breathing of my family through their open bedroom doors. We all slept on the third floor now. Wei-Ming groaned in her sleep as I passed. At Sheung and Yee-Lin’s room, I stopped to listen to their paired breathing until I could tell them apart. Their room had heavy curtains, around which a thin rectangle of faint light glowed. I grasped the small flashlight I had brought with me and turned it on inside my pyjama pocket, to muffle the click. I withdrew it slowly with my hand over the light and then carefully uncovered it on the face of the hall clock. Four thirty, Christmas Day. I covered the light again and prepared to put it back in my pocket, turning to go downstairs.
I nearly screamed when I turned. In front of me was Mrs. Yee, her hair undone over her long white nightgown and her hands clasped over her belly.
“Is that you, Chung-Man?”
“Yes.” My heart pounded so hard it hurt. I started flicking the flashlight switch nervously in my pocket, causing my right pyjama leg to flicker weirdly in the darkness.
“I am often awake,” she continued. “I get up sometimes to check on my children.” She looked down at my leg where the clicking emanated. “Thank you so much for keeping Shun-Yau busy. Without his father he’s lost, I’m afraid. Boys need other boys to play with. Please keep it up, he needs a friend.”
The shock of our meeting in the darkness made me start to hyperventilate. I placed my hands over my stomach in an instinctive imitation of her posture. Behind her, at the end of the hall, a silhouetted figure rose to a seated position. It was Chow, lying on a cot at the top of the stairs.
“Ple
ase don’t cry,” said Mrs. Yee. I wasn’t. It disturbed me that she misunderstood what I was feeling. A low groan sprang from my throat.
A pair of slippers clicked rapidly towards us. My mother took me by the shoulders and looked me quickly in the eye. Chow stood up from his cot. In an angry whisper my mother asked Mrs. Yee what she was doing.
Mrs. Yee looked at me. “I’m sorry…I don’t sleep very well at night — I was up again — when I heard Chung-Man …”
My mother sent me back to my room. I stood inside the doorway and listened.
“Mrs. Yee, don’t wake anyone else up.”
“How can you sleep?” she replied.
I heard Chow’s footsteps and then his voice, a low, consoling tone. My mother was losing her patience, and Mrs. Yee began to cry.
Across the hall, Wei-Ming groaned again and called out. My mother said something in a short, angry voice, then I heard Chow intervene and tell Mrs. Yee to return to her room. I climbed back into bed and listened to my pulse pounding in my ears.
This was just the start of my mother’s growing impatience with Mrs. Yee. Later that day we all stuck together in the library, where it was easiest to stay warm and conserve fuel, and the books helped distract us a little from hunger. My mother avoided Mrs. Yee as much as she could. I think Mrs. Yee, having lost her husband, sometimes felt that she had something in common with my mother, and of course she did in that regard. A few times I heard Mrs. Yee say, in a low voice, things like, “You know what it’s like…” before alluding to her husband or my father. But my mother recoiled into silence every time, and in fact I didn’t see them as very alike, either. Over the time they were with us, I sometimes came to resent Mrs. Yee, a feeling I also detected in my mother. I felt she was somehow to blame for her husband’s murder and her homelessness. I felt sorry for her children.
Finally that evening, while my mother was ignoring yet another of Mrs. Yee’s overtures, I went over to the library mantelpiece and took down the photo of my father. I set it on a table and began to read in front of it, as though my father were supervising a school lesson. I looked up once. Mrs. Yee was watching me, and I looked back at her and held her gaze for a moment. I almost felt, in a frightening way, that I had her in my power then. I turned and saw my mother staring at me, uneasy, almost sorrowing like Mrs. Yee, and she hurried over and put the photo back on the mantelpiece.
EIGHT
Two days after Christmas, we met in the library with the Yees to discuss if it was safe to go outside. We were living off the dwindling store of food in the pantry and Ah-Ming guessed we had about a week of it left. The meals were already smaller and I noticed how little my mother and the servants ate. The night before, my mother had sat at the table and taken nothing but water.
After the meeting, Tang and Chow went into the streets to see if any markets were open. It was the first time in two weeks any of us had left the house. I was in the front hall with Shun-Yau when Tang and Chow returned. As they shut the front door, a cold breeze blew in, metallic with stale smoke. Their shoes and the bottoms of their trousers were covered in ash, as though they had been wading through it. They gave a grim report on the city: crumbling apartments, blackened storefronts, bodies. They said nearly all the shops had been raided and there were few farmer’s carts on the streets, but there were signs of people returning to the market. Tang caught me staring at his shoes. He turned and looked at the trail of grey dust behind them, and both of them stood by the door and knocked the ashes off their clothes. Tang took out his handkerchief and wiped the ash off the floor, and then he smiled at me.
“I’m afraid that’s all I brought back.”
Throughout the night, gunfire erupted in the streets. After one episode I heard the tires of a large vehicle screeching over the pavement, and then a crash and a muffled explosion. I thought of the truck that had burned in our back lane, of a hundred such vehicles, of burning buildings, all dusted in ash.
The next day, my older brothers went out again to the market and returned with a small amount of dried vegetables and sweet potatoes.
The following day, my mother said others should take turns going to the market. Ah-Tseng volunteered and I quickly offered to go with her, and we went to the kitchen, where she kept her shopping baskets. As we prepared to leave, she adjusted her sleeve where she hung the basket on her left forearm, and I realized I had seen her make that gesture a thousand times over the years. As soon as she slipped her arm through the handle and held it to her stomach, it was as though we were back in the summer before I’d left for school and the past month had never happened.
Ah-Tseng and I walked down to the market street. We turned the corner onto a larger avenue that was empty and silent. She was very nervous. I’d volunteered to go out with her because I wanted to help and felt badly for her, but when I sensed how close she walked beside me — a twelve-year-old boy — I didn’t want the responsibility.
The market was gone. The stalls and carts had been smashed and were strewn across the street like kindling. On the posts of the buildings where the hawkers and farmers used to stand there were posters in Japanese and Chinese saying the markets were disbanded and rationing was being imposed. They bore yesterday’s date. I read the sign out to Ah-Tseng. She was fairly literate, but I think her eye first hit on the Japanese characters and she was so frightened that the rest of it confused her.
“Chung-Man, we should go home.”
“Maybe we should walk around a little more and see what we can find. There might be some shops on the side streets.”
She took my arm and hurriedly turned back homeward.
We turned onto a street where more people had ventured out, mostly women with empty shopping bags in hand. A few took note of us walking away from the market street with nothing to show for it; the rest stared anxiously ahead as they hurried through the chill.
Then I heard shouts, formal and rhythmic, almost like dogs barking, and what first sounded like applause. A troop of about fifty Japanese soldiers marched around a corner towards us. They held their rifles tightly over their shoulders and their boots struck the pavement in unison. In an open car at the front of the troop, two officers rode in the back seat. They had identical thin moustaches over which they stared past the black-helmeted driver, a man whose sunglasses, white gloves, and grip on the steering wheel seemed crafted to project an image of supreme impersonality.
Everyone on the street backed into the doorways of the buildings behind us. But this was pointless. The Japanese knew we were there and that there were others on the streets ahead of and behind them and people hiding inside buildings asleep or sick. We were all of us, every resident of the city, under watch and swept into a single glance as quick and sharp as the snapping of a flag.
At first their perfect marching and the barking of the sergeant over the engine were unsettling. But it was the flag that awoke my fear. The white banner with the radiant red disc sailed from the car and from poles carried by the soldiers in the lead. I had never seen it before. It looked like the Union Jack, its cool naval blue torn off to make a banner of pure heat and searching fire.
A quartet of soldiers brought up the rear in another car with a long rope tied to its back fender. In contrast to the timed marching of the soldiers, the rope swung awkwardly over the pavement. Tied to the rope, around the corner a man in a bloody shirt appeared, and then behind him walked a line of prisoners, bound at the wrists and necks by cords. I guessed there were forty men and women of all ages. To those of us pressed into the doorways and crevices, their bodies offered up the promise of the coming days: heads lurid with bruises and dried blood, hair torn out in fist-sized gaps, arms enlarged and loose from broken bones, mouths gaping. In their eyes was the vacancy of those who understand they are about to be forgotten.
About a third of the prisoners were women, and they were clustered in the middle. Like the men, they stumbled quickly over the pavement in shoes or bare feet, and the sharp pull of the vehicle rippled through their sh
oulders. Most of the women were young like Yee-Lin. Their faces and limbs were badly bruised, and some looked as though they’d had their teeth knocked out.
The prisoner at the front stumbled when the car lurched, and he nearly pulled the men behind him to the ground. In the back of the car, one Japanese soldier sat with an arm craned over his seat as he looked back, the only one in a casual pose. He laughed when the man stumbled and at the disarray it caused in those behind him. When the prisoners regained their step and quickly caught up with the car, restoring the slack, he shouted and shook his rifle at them. Then he leaned over the back of the car and hooked the rope up with his bayonet. He stood quickly and gave the rope a violent pull. The man in front fell down onto the road and was dragged forward on his side. The others staggered, bound wrists brought down as though in supplication, and they bent their knees to stop from falling, so that they had to waddle like ducks. Two men near the front tried to help the fallen man back up, until they stumbled against the force of the rope and the captives bumping into them from behind.
The soldier watched. In particular he watched the first man, whose face and torso left a long brushstroke of blood across the road, which the prisoners behind stepped over. Maybe that man cried out as he was dragged over the pavement, but I was spared the sound of it where I stood because of the noise of the vehicles and boots. I felt a cold pain bite into my side. Ah-Tseng gripped my upper arm, her other hand pressed over her mouth. Airplanes soared above us with the red disc on the underside of their wings, birds of prey surrendering to the lordly sun. Like the soldiers’ boots, they moved across the world as though it were rusted metal for them to crush.