The Yellow Papers

by Dominique Wilson

  Reduced to mere skeletons, suffering from beriberi and dysentery and lacking any strength, many gave in so as to get better food and better treatment. Others, shackled by their own impotence, simply broke under pressure and died within days.

  Few tried to escape, and those that did were soon brought back and punished, and as the Chinese believed in collective responsibility, many that had not tried to escape were punished as well.

  Some time later the men of Camp 5 decided to hold ‘crazy weeks’ to relieve the boredom of the camps. During one such week they rode imaginary bicycles – until the guards ‘confiscated’ these bikes. Another week each man walked around with an imaginary girlfriend on his arm, and approached the guards to politely introduce them to their partner. Many of the guards bowed respectfully to the imaginary women, until a Chinese officer ordered that all of these foreign women were to leave the camp immediately. The men complained, then stood by the gates waving goodbye to their imaginary sweethearts.

  They had to be careful when exactly to holds such weeks – it had to be when the Chinese were emphasising their leniency – for if things were not going well for the Korean or Chinese forces such behaviour resulted in severe punishment. When things were going well, however, the Chinese guards not only tolerated this behaviour, but went along with it.

  But if things were relatively better for most of the men, for Edward nothing changed. He’d been captured in a Chinese uniform. Wore no dog tags, and unlike most of the men, carried no wallet with photos and personal effects. He had befriended no one in the camp, and none would – or could – come forward to identify him or his rank. He had to be a spy. While the peace talks dragged on month after month then stalled, and summer turned to autumn then winter again, Edward’s interrogations continued.

  Edward sat with his feet in the backwater of the Yalu River, mechanically digging out maggots from a wound in his leg and chewing their soft fat bodies. He knew he should leave them to clean out the wound, but they multiplied quickly enough, and getting enough protein into his body to survive just a little longer was more important to him.

  Since getting frostbite all those months ago, his feet remained numb and water running over them felt like pins and needles, but that, at least, was a feeling. And though he walked with a stick and at times lost his balance, he had noticed, these past few weeks, a small but definite improvement.

  It was summer again and around him flies and mosquitoes hovered, drank his blood and sucked up his sweat. The stench of the camp – tolerable in sub-zero temperatures – was nauseating in this heat.

  Occasionally he glanced at the small square of soap on the ground beside him – the first he’d seen in the two-and-a-half years he’d been here – but then looked away, quickly, before it registered and forced him to think of everything it represented. In the water further out, skeletal prisoners laughed and soaped each other and dared to talk of home.

  That morning the prisoners had been told they were going home, then handed the first Red Cross parcels the men had seen since being here. An exchange of POWs, known as Operation Big Switch, would begin the next day.

  Edward didn’t trust this Operation Big Switch – it had to be a trick. Some time ago – was it four, five weeks ago? – they’d been told the war was finally over. Not peace, but an armistice. But what proof did they have? A few men – the ones most ill – had been placed on trucks and driven out of camp. Operation Little Switch, they’d called it. Everyone believed the war really was over then, and that the men of Little Switch were lucky to be going home, but Edward knew otherwise. He knew of the gas chambers in Germany during the last war, where prisoners had been told they were going for a shower, except that gas had replaced water. Couldn’t anyone see this was the same thing? A way of easing pressure on the overcrowded camp? Surely the soaps should have rung alarm bells. This was even more sadistic because here they were allowed to get clean first. Allowed to hope and believe. How very Chinese to want the corpses to be clean!

  But they couldn’t fool him. He didn’t trust anything or anyone anymore. He’d survived so far by becoming an automaton – a shadow – and no little square of soap was going change that. He was close to no man because closeness meant weakness. Closeness opened you up to manipulation. He watched and listened and ate rats and weeds and flies and maggots and watched some more, but he gave nothing away. Nothing. No one knew who or what he was, no letters came from home to betray him, no yellow bastard got into his brain, no matter what they tried. There was nothing but this instant. This minute. This second. One second at the time.

  24

  Ming Li paused beside the water’s edge and pulled her coat tighter around her thin body; it didn’t do much to keep her warm, but at least it kept the wind off. Across the waters of Victoria Harbour, nineteenth-century European mansions and new high-rise buildings glowed beneath the stormy skies shrouding Victoria Peak. Tied up at black buoys, American aircraft carriers and British destroyers disgorged their crew for R & R leave. The war in Korea may be over but these ships still patrolled the Yellow Sea, and when finally off duty headed straight for Hong Kong. There, the men would spend in just a few days what had taken them months to earn, unaware that their money eventually filtered through the Communistowned Bank of China, back to the very people they had fought.

  Ming Li watched a young Tanka girl, with a baby asleep in a sling on her back, pole a sampan along a watery laneway. From across the harbour on Hong Kong Island the noonday gun went off. The first time she’d heard the cannon, she’d only been in Hong Kong a couple of days and had panicked, thinking the war had followed them to Kowloon. She didn’t know, then, that this cannon fire was a tradition.

  But Ming Li didn’t care about tradition anymore. Today, she didn’t care about anything; everything that had kept her going, that had helped her endure being a ‘street sleeper’ for more than three years, was gone.

  MeiMei and the child were dead.

  ‘I’m sure!’ the old woman had said. ‘They came for them during the night. Woke me up. Woke up the whole building with their banging and shouting. Dragged them off to be shot. Counter-revolutionaries! Against the Three Antis, they were.’

  For Ming Li, not knowing what was happening to MeiMei, not knowing when the child had been born or whether it was a girl or a boy, had only been made bearable by the thought that one day, somehow, they would be together again. It hadn’t mattered that she’d been reduced to selling cigarettes, one at the time, in the streets of Hong Kong. That she could only afford to rent ‘nail-space’, and the tiny square of pavement beneath it, in a dank alleyway in Hak Nam or, as the Westerners still called it, the Walled City, even though its wall had been demolished during the war.

  And although it hurt terribly at first, in the end it hadn’t even mattered that Edward hadn’t answered her letter telling him of her escape to Hong Kong. She’d always feared he would eventually tire of her; he’d probably found another woman in Australia, someone he could show off without embarrassment. She knew, deep down, that relationships such as theirs never lasted. Yet for a long time she’d pretended it would be different in their case, that their feelings for each other could overcome any obstacles. It had given her hope when there seemed to be no hope anywhere else.

  But even Edward’s rejection had not totally destroyed her because she’d always been able to tell herself that one day, somehow, she and MeiMei and the child would be together again. That they would sleep in proper beds once more, in a proper house. Or if not in a house, then maybe just in one of the new multi-storey apartments the government had been forced to build in the Shek Kip Mei area, after it had burnt down last December.

  When she felt cockroaches crawling over her at night, when she spent yet another day not even eating a small bowl of rice because she had not sold enough cigarettes to pay for both her nail-space and food, then she’d tell herself that MeiMei would eventually leave her husband and come to Hong Kong. That together they would build a new life for themselves and
the child. And with that thought came the strength to endure yet another day.

  And so she questioned every refugee she met in the hope that they’d have news of MeiMei, and last night, the old mother of a new family camped beside her on the pavement provided this news. MeiMei and the child were dead. She had nothing left.

  She gazed at the waters of the harbour. It would be so easy to step off the quay. To allow herself to sink below its oily surface. She’d read somewhere that drowning was a pleasant way to die. That the trick was not to fight it, to allow yourself to fall deeper and deeper into the gloom and when you could no longer hold your breath to inhale a deep lungful of the peace-giving waters …

  ‘Careful there, little lady! You don’t want to fall in.’

  He towered over her, smiling, oozing health and cleanliness. His uniform beneath his regulation coat was spotless. The name of his ship was on the band of his hat, and a few pimples on his chin belied his postured maturity. English? American? But what did it matter …

  ‘Ma’am? Are you all right?’

  Ming Li didn’t answer. She didn’t want to talk to this boy, didn’t want to talk to anyone. She turned her back to him but still could feel him there. Hoped he’d go away.

  Seconds passed.

  The sailor stamped his feet and rubbed his arms.

  ‘Sure is cold, standing here …’

  Ming Li didn’t comment.

  ‘Yes Ma’am, real cold …’

  He was like a puppy that refused to be ignored, and Ming Li knew he would not simply leave.

  ‘You know, Ma’am, this sort of weather always makes me hungry. I sure could do with something hot – soup maybe. Yeah, a nice big bowl of soup … Or maybe a glass of whisky; that would warm me up for sure. But maybe not just now. I don’t suppose you’d drink whisky right now, would you Ma’am?… Ma’am? I don’t suppose you know where a man could get a bowl of soup?’

  ‘There are food stalls everywhere.’

  ‘Well yes Ma’am, that’s true enough. But this is my first time here in Hong Kong. So I was kinda hoping you could tell me where the best place to eat was. Maybe even come with me. It gets kinda lonely eating by yourself …’

  Ming Li shook her head, not knowing whether to laugh or cry at the incongruity of it all. Here she was, considering ending it all, and this boy – for surely he was at least half her age – was trying to pick her up.

  ‘Ma’am? What do you say? I sure’d be honoured if you’d join me for a bowl of soup.’

  What did it matter? Would having a bowl of soup change anything? No. But how long had it been since she’d eaten soup? How long since she’d felt full? She couldn’t even remember what it felt like. Dying with a full stomach appealed to her.

  ‘All right,’ she said at last, ‘I’ll come.’

  She wasn’t good company. Barely spoke except to mention that in Shanghai, thin soups were usually drunk at the end of a meal, and were not something you ordered on their own. And when that fresh-faced boy then insisted on ordering a full meal, the rich odours of the food made her feel nauseated. So she watched him eat, and only sipped a couple of spoonfuls of broth from the pork and prawn ball soup he’d ordered, before feeling she could eat no more. But her silence didn’t seem to bother him. He talked of home, of the navy and the people he’d met, and the war that was supposed to be over but still kept them from home. She pretended to listen, knowing he wasn’t interested in her, and that all he wanted was a body – a face – to talk to.

  She went with him to the markets after their meal because he wanted to buy souvenirs for ‘the folks back home’, and when she saw that he was being overcharged still she kept quiet because she knew the value of every coin to people like her. He bought her a thin gold bangle and at first she refused it, but he insisted and she didn’t have the energy to argue, so she accepted it, intending to give it to the old woman who had brought her news of MeiMei.

  Later in the afternoon, when the storm clouds that had been gathering finally burst, he took her to a hotel that only rented rooms ‘short-times’. Ming Li was not surprised. She knew nothing ever came free.

  Oblivious to the sailor’s body hammering into her, Ming Li stared at the bare light globe above the bed. Its weak light cast a jaundiced glow on their skin, and turned the paper blocking the window from the street sulphur-yellow. She’d felt a moment of shame, at first, with her body – with the burn scar, with the lack of total cleanliness that resulted from living on the streets, and she’d had a fleeting memory of the long hot baths she used to take with Edward – those sensual preludes to their lovemaking. But this man was not concerned with such matters, and she forced herself not to think of other times, not to compare this act with the familiarity, the deep-felt comfort of Xueliang’s lovemaking, or the thrill and excitement of Edward’s passion.

  Outside, rain beat a tattoo on the roof. His mouth devoured her breast, hurting her, and though barely begun she knew she couldn’t endure much more. She had to make him come. She moaned as if in passion and grasped the cheeks of his buttocks, and he pounded harder. From the radio in the room next door the Andrews Sisters sang ‘I wanna be loved’, and she squeezed and released her muscles and squeezed again, and the weeks at sea helped her make him come, quickly and violently, and he groaned and shook his head and collapsed on top of her.

  When his breathing slowed and she thought him asleep she eased her body from beneath him. He mumbled something and turned over. She knew she should leave but for a while she wanted to feel a proper bed beneath her, sheets and blankets and the safety of four walls keeping out the rain and the cold. She closed her eyes and pretended, just for a moment, that she was back in her house in Shanghai, that the body beside hers was Xueliang’s and that MeiMei was asleep in the room next door, and in the kitchen Cook was just returning from the market, her baskets overflowing. On the radio in the next room the Andrews Sisters finished their song and Eddie Fisher crooned ‘I wish you were here’.

  She woke to the sound of the hotel room door closing. The radio next door was silent, the rain had stopped, the sailor gone – probably heading for the neon-lit streets of the Wan Chai district where the girls were sure to be better company.

  Curled foetal-like at the edge of the bed, she stared at the wall. She felt numb, listless, as if whatever spark that had allowed her to take a breath, to put one foot in front of the other, was gone. Sucked out of her by this boy – he hadn’t even told her his name – leaving nothing but an empty cocoon.

  ‘Time finish. You go now!’ The concierge hammered on the door of her room. ‘Go! Now!’

  ‘All right, I’m going,’ she answered, anxious he not come into the room. ‘Let me get dressed.’

  ‘You go now!’

  ‘Yes, yes, I go. Just one minute …’

  The banging on the door ceased and she heard his footsteps retreating. She sat on the edge of the bed, picked up her clothes from the floor and put them on, shivering. Slipped on her shoes. A mouse scurried across the floor, disappearing beneath the bed. Her coat was on the only chair in the room, above which hung a small mirror, its foil oxidised.

  She saw them then, on top of her coat – a handful of American dollars. What little colour she had left drained from her face and the shivering grew to tremors. So now she knew. Now she could no longer kid herself that this boy had seen her as a companion, albeit a temporary one. Someone to share a bowl of soup with, someone with whom to seek a little company when far away from home. The notes thrown so casually on top of her coat allowed no illusion.

  ‘Minute gone. You go now!’ The hammering on the door resumed. She rose, forced herself to pick up the money. Put on her coat. Open the door. The concierge on the other side pushed into the room and began remaking the bed, not bothering to change the sheets. She climbed down the stairs and walked out into the night.

  She trudged the alleyways of the Walled City, this black hole that neither China nor Britain dare enter, heading automatically for her nail-space. From open doo
rways weak light bulbs burnt electricity stolen from the mains outside the city, allowing whole families to work into the night painting lacquer boxes for exportation, or assembling toys no child from this city would ever play with. Since the UN embargoed trade with China, it seemed every family in Hong Kong had become a minute manufacturing centre.

  The air was rancid with the smell of wood smoke, hot oil, joss sticks and urine. The clack of mah-jong tiles drowned the cry of an infant, and on the pavement a rickshaw driver lay on a bamboo mat, his head resting on a wooden headrest, and as he slept the sleep of utter exhaustion his feet still ran, dodging the traffic of his dreams.

  Near her nail-space the old woman and her family had set up a brazier, and coals glowed within it, providing a semblance of warmth. The old woman was already asleep on a mat on the pavement, covered with a cotton quilt. Above her their few possessions hung on a nail in the wall. The old man, his son, and a girl maybe five years old huddled around the brazier, the old man sitting on a low stool. They saw Ming Li and made room for her, and she nodded her thanks but didn’t join them. She sat on the wet ground instead, her back to the wall, her hands deep in the pockets of her coat where one fist still clutched the American dollars.

  ‘You’ll be warmer with us,’ the son said, squatting beside her.

  She shook her head, wishing him to leave. ‘I’m all right.’

  He nodded, picked at his teeth with a match then spat into the street.

  ‘We have rice. You can have a little, if you’re hungry.’

  His offer shamed her and she knew she should at least accept the warmth of the brazier, if only for a while.

  ‘I’ve eaten already,’ she said, standing up. ‘But you’re right, I’ll be warmer there.’