Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Meanwhile I threw myself onto my bed, piled pillows behind my head, and opened Man’s Fate again. At the top of the first page I read: ‘21 March 1927. 12.30 a.m.’

  Ah, here it was! –

  ‘Should Chen try lifting up the mosquito net? Or should he strike through it? …’

  Two

  At first I thought, with a spasm of premature despair, that the ferry was taking me and what seemed like three hundred Chinese passengers to the wrong ship. Or maybe I had boarded the wrong ferry. A fine start for a journey from China to the West of England.

  On the Tai Kok Tsui Pier in Kowloon a long, dense queue of Chinese men and women and a good many small children and babies had waited from shortly after noon until three o’clock. Under spits of rain, they gathered round a small trolley from which a man served Coca-Cola and cans of Yeo’s chrysanthemum tea, or crouched patiently near small piles of hand baggage and large pyramids of hi-fi and radio equipment in boxes marked Sanyo and Sony. I saw only one other gweilo, a whey-faced young woman who sat on her suitcase and stared expressionlessly at the ground in a manner which certainly didn’t invite conversation.

  Out in the harbour a ship lay at anchor with the sand-yellow funnel of China ringed with a red band and waving hold lines on it. She had a trim white hull, but I couldn’t see her name; she lay not far from Stonecutters’ Island, quite a distance away. A nice-looking ship, I thought, the Shanghai. A knot of anxious passengers ran off to investigate when they saw a ferrry leave our pier and head in the direction of the white hull, thinking we’d all been left behind, and men in uniforms told them to keep calm and go back and wait because the white ship was going to Amoy, not Shanghai.

  Our ferry, once we were finally embarked, headed towards the very part of the shore of Hong Kong Island I had left that morning. There, nearer to Hong Kong than to Kowloon, we found the old Shanghai. I say ‘old’ because when our launch came close to I saw patches of rust on her green side, and the general shape of her showed that it was some time since she had left her builder’s yard. She had a mildly knocked-about look that made her more interesting. Up a narrow metal gangway we slowly edged – slowly, because quite a few of the Chinese were feeble and elderly, and some of the younger ones with trendy helmet haircuts were pushy. Vociferous bottlenecks blocked the steps. The ship’s young stewards and stewardesses in white jackets came down into the melee, took the arms of the old people, lugged up the awkward boxes of stereo and hi-fi equipment, and huge gleaming radios, and electric fans. It seemed that only I had neglected to bring a folding aluminium baggage trolley with little wheels. These were useless on the gangway – the little wheels caught dangerously on protruding bits of metal and looked like tipping several old ladies into the harbour.

  As my foot met the deck, relief flowed through me like electricity. A middle-aged steward politely took my bag and my ticket and led me to a cabin nearby. A bunk, a couch, a desk and a chair, a cupboard, a shower – a good cabin, hospital-clean. I looked for the all-important reading light over the bed, and found one. The steward gave me a smile, showed me how to lock the door, handed me the key and a card. It said: ‘Restaurant sitting. Meal times: breakfast a.m. 7.30. Luncheon 11.30. Dinner p.m. 6.00.’

  *

  Later, I wrote in my notebook:

  The steward evidently speaks no English. He signals to me: ‘More bags?’ ‘No more.’ He points to a piece of paper on the desk: ‘Afternoon tea has been cancelled,’ and slips away. I wash, and find it’s 4 p.m. I’m hungry, suddenly remembering I’ve had nothing to eat since breakfast at the Luk Kwok. A final message from Angel Yip tells me to declare exactly the amount of money I have, and what I change in China, and what I take out. ‘If there’s a discrepancy,’ she warns, ‘they may think you are helping to provide funds for someone to escape from China.’

  The deck shifts slightly under my feet. The skyline moves across my porthole. Hong Kong’s skyscrapers, as lights in them come on, are like romantic castles. Shanghai drops her pilot back into his launch; a man in a blue suit and a tie and brown shoes. A scattering of islands. The water widens. Our bows begin to lift …. The SS Shanghai is alive. The adrenalin stirs ….

  Foraging for food, I meet an old man on the stairs. He has a pleasant, round nut face, grey hair smoothed back, and is carrying a bottle of Tsingtao beer. ‘I take beer to loom. Velly good beer,’ he says. He points upwards. ‘Velly good beer upstairs. Beer, whisky, blandy. Velly good.’ He is right. There is a good, long bar and a pleasant bar-girl.

  When I ask for something to eat, she serves me a sort of sweet pastry and eggs hard-boiled in tea from an earthenware bowl. People cluster round to explain with waving hands and even scribble on bits of paper napkin that the eggs are cooked in the tea for two or three hours and the tea turns their whites a darkish colour. They are very hot and taste of – eggs soaked in tea. You eat them cupped in a paper napkin. Stewards wheel crates of Black Label whisky and Martell VSOP into the spotless bar and arrange the black and gold bottles on the shelves under the eager gaze of Chinese passengers who nod to each other in appreciative anticipation of the heavy duty-free drinking to come.

  The lounge next door, like the bar and my cabin, is austere and spotless. It has tall rectangular windows and pink plastic flowers in plastic vases on formica tables. Posters advertise ‘Sprouting Tea Bags’ and ‘Chinese Feather and Down Products’. In a corner stands a Vita juice vending machine. Passengers take turns to fiddle with a television set that, despite them, continues to bellow like a monster in pain.

  A poem is fixed to the wall over the TV set. I sit at a table and copy it – with great difficulty because my view is continually blocked by passengers who stand in front of me discussing what I am doing. It looks like an awkward translation from the Chinese, but I get it all down at last:

  The Red Army fears

  Not the trials of the Long March,

  Holding light ten thousand crags and the torrents,

  The five ridges like gentle ripples.

  And the majestic rivers roll by globules of clay.

  Warm the steep cliffs lapped by the waters of golden sand,

  Cold the iron chains spanning the Tatu River,

  Minshan’s thousand li of snow joyously crossed

  The three armies march on, each face glowing.

  The ship was quite full but certainly not overcrowded. Most passengers were well dressed and cheerful, obviously looking forward to the New Year holiday and the waiting friends and relatives in Shanghai. They grinned at me and nodded their heads. It seemed that white passengers were not a common sight. Two young men, who had watched me copying down the lines in praise of the Red Army, waved and came over smiling – ‘Oh-oh, oh-ho,’ they said. ‘Hell-o!’ We might have been old friends meeting again after a year or two. One was short, round-faced, with hair cut relatively short – short, certainly compared with his companion, a handsome man whose hair fell, long and glossy, almost to his shoulders. Both wore well-scrubbed jeans and basketball shoes. They jerked my hand up and down with enthusiasm. The shorter one spoke English.

  ‘So Wei Kuen,’ he said, introducing himself. ‘And this is my friend, Yeong Su Tse. Better you call him Ah Po. Ah Po means Little Treasure. He cannot speak English.’

  ‘Ah-ha! Hee!’ Ah Po said. When he laughed he showed good teeth and his eyes half disappeared, like gun muzzles in very narrow weapon slits.

  Wei Kuen explained that Ah Po came from Nanking, and couldn’t even speak Cantonese very well. His own family originally came from Canton, but he could cope, he said, with the Shanghainese dialect of Ah Po. He had been a merchant seaman for several years – that explained his English. I offered them a beer or tea, but they wouldn’t hear of it, insisting that they should order and pay for beer; when it came they impatiently waved my money away. They both lived in Kowloon, Wei Kuen said. He himself was an orphan and had a job with Esso, delivering fuel oil to clients in the surrounding areas. Ah Po, whose widowed mother lived in Hong Kong too, worked in the Kowlo
on 7-Up bottling factory. Both were married – and here lay a strange twist in their circumstances. They had both married girls in Shanghai, and both wives were still living there with their parents. Yet the two husbands lived and worked in faraway Hong Kong? Yes, said Wei Kuen, this was not unusual. Every Chinese New Year they were reunited with their wives in Shanghai. They had been married two years. Maybe this year – they hoped so – the Chinese authorities would allow their wives to join them in Hong Kong. Bureaucracy. Permits. It just took a little time.

  ‘You see your wives only once a year?’ I was incredulous.

  ‘Only.’ Wei Kuen found my astonishment amusing. ‘Not so bad. They will come to Hong Kong soon.’

  As Wei Kuen talked, Ah Po’s large, dark eyes widened or narrowed, flashing intermittent warmth and good humour like sunlight moving in and out of light cloud. His skin was unusually white, setting off the blackness of the long hair that fell in a heavy lock over the left side of his forehead, and on both sides framed his high cheekbones. His lips were wide and mobile, always poised on the brink of an uninhibited smile. His lack of English worried him, and he soon fell into a habit of giving me an impulsive thumbs-up sign and nodding vigorously, as if, in default of words, to assure me of his sincere friendship. I found this touching. Ah Po was clearly in the grip of irrepressible goodwill.

  We went to the dining room together for the first meal aboard. The room ran the whole width of the ship. Its furnishings were utilitarian, uninspiring but inoffensive. Friends of Ah Po and Wei Kuen waved from a corner table, and we joined them; two women, a baby, and a skinny man with sagging cheeks and a brandy flush. The baby was blowing bubbles. The red-faced man filled three wineglasses from a bottle of Courvoisier brandy and offered one to me and the other to Wei Kuen. Ah Po pointed to his white cheeks and said something in Chinese. Everyone made tut-tut noises and looked concerned.

  ‘Ah Po’s skin cannot take brandy,’ explained Wei Kuen. ‘The pig – ah–’

  ‘Oh, the pigmentation.’

  ‘Pig-ment-tation, yes. Cannot take brandy, cannot take beer.’

  Ah Po nodded several times and beamed at me. He must have understood something because his finger made a circle before his face and he said earnestly, ‘Blandy, no good.’

  Wei Kuen and I toasted our host and he refilled our glasses. There were several toasts, I remember; I didn’t try to count them. The Courvoisier bottle seemed inexhaustible, like the goblet in the Norse legend. The women smiled encouragingly at me as you do to a small child at an adults’ party. At last an elderly waiter, like a kind uncle, brought a menu. Under the Chinese version I read:

  Choose Two –

  1. Diced Chicken with Tomato Sauce and Mushrooms,

  2. Three-Colour Shrimps,

  3. Shredded Pork with Fish Taste,

  4. Jelly Fish.

  I chose numbers 1 and 3. When the food arrived it was bland and tepid, with no chilli to enliven it. Wei Kuen and Ah Po didn’t seem to care for the food either. They ate slowly, looking around at other tables as if they hoped to see better dishes there.

  After dinner, pandemonium. An ear-shattering sound came from the lounge like that of strong men hammering a marble floor into dust. The evening mah-jong session had started. Old men, old women, with furious faces, slammed their pieces down on the table with what seemed an almost venomous delight. They might, Wei Kuen said, continue to do so till dawn.

  We said goodnight and I went out on deck. To port, there were no lights to be seen. Either we had veered away from China or the coastline here was devoid of habitation. The rain had stopped. The sky now was a dark, starry blue with misty patches of near-white near the horizon – perhaps the moon was coming up. Faint music seemed to come from the sea. In reality it came from a speaker over the deck. A Viennese waltz twirled to an end, and was replaced by a genteel female soprano quavering, ‘Come! Come! I love you o-onlee….’

  I went to my cabin, undressed, and took up Man’s Fate again.

  The Communist workers’ rising against the warlords and the subsequent near-destruction of the Communists by Chiang Kai-shek is the setting of Malraux’s story of man’s inhumanity. The revolutionary Chen was himself messily obliterated as he tried to blow up General Chiang’s car in the Avenue des Deux Républiques. The warlords’ gun dealer he had murdered was awaiting delivery of three hundred imported carbines from a government ship in the river – weapons the Communists needed for the rising in Shanghai they had planned for next day. They could only get their hands on the carbines with the delivery order Chen had found under the dead man’s pillow.

  Shanghai was threatened from without and within. Chiang Kai-shek’s army was around the city; his unnatural allies, the Communists, were a Trojan horse within it – an unseen, organized host of workers waiting in the ‘great tattered flank of the town’.

  The scrabbling of the myriads for their daily bread was giving place to another, a more vital energy. The Concessions, the rich quarters of the town, where the Europeans and Americans lived with their servants and cars and cocktails and guards, no longer existed as a menace; but in these nauseous slums, which provided the largest muster of Shock Troops, throbbed the pulse of a vast and vigilant horde …. Those crumbling walls hid half a million men; hands from the spinning-mills, men who had worked sixteen hours a day from early childhood, ulcerous, twisted, famine-stricken ….

  I read on and on. The staccato clatter of the mah-jong pieces in the Shanghai”s lounge, harsh and faint like distant gunfire, made an appropriate accompaniment to Malraux’s account of how the revolutionaries slaughtered the occupants of Shanghai’s main police station.

  *

  Sunlight. Too late for the 7.30 breakfast. I dressed and went down to look for more tea-boiled eggs in the earthenware bowl in the bar. The barman suggested a Black Label but I stuck to the eggs and green tea. A young Chinese couple were already at the whisky: newly-weds, by the look of their smart new clothes. The musak had changed from Strauss to a Chinese girl singer accompanied by harps. Behind the funnel a small, nut-brown man sat in a deckchair. When I said, ‘Good morning,’ he replied, ‘Hi! Is this your first time in China?’ Indicating a second chair, he held out his hand. ‘My name is Thomas Dor. Tom.’ He was small, bespectacled, with a creased, good-natured face, in his late fifties. ‘That’s my English name, of course. I won’t bother you with my Chinese one, unless you’re particularly anxious to know it.’ He had an honest, friendly laugh.

  Tom Dor taught engineering in Hong Kong, but he still had a room, a toehold, in the house he had once owned in Shanghai and he went back to it every Chinese New Year. The house had been confiscated by the Communists and eventually he had fled Shanghai for Hong Kong to escape from the terrible hardships between 1966 and 1972 during the Cultural Revolution in China.

  ‘It’s a good two-storey Shanghai house. The Communists left me two rooms for myself and my mother. They ransacked all my things, and took away eight cartloads of my beloved books. Books! None of them were political. That was the worst thing to take.’ He shook his head, still smiling. ‘They hated intellectuals. They just hated a mere sign of intellect. Books were a sign.’ He had graduated in mechanical engineering and had had a high post in the maintenance department of a textile factory. ‘The Communists have the factory now, of course.’

  The sun came round the funnel and warmed us.

  ‘You had a bad time, then, in the Cultural Revolution?’

  Thomas Dor smiled in a self-deprecating way. ‘I was horsewhipped. They horsewhipped me in front of the whole factory. They pushed a microphone into my hand and shouted, “Confess!”’ He shrugged in his deckchair. ‘“Confess!” I said. “Confess what? I haven’t killed anyone.” What I didn’t do, I didn’t tell them to go to hell, and shout at them, “You’re the killers. You’re the guilty ones!”’ He looked at me vaguely, reliving the scene in his mind’s eye. ‘I’m not a goddam hero. One thousand and two hundred men with one yelling ringleader on one side – and on the other – me!�
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  ‘Might they have killed you?’

  ‘No, I guess not. That would have spoiled their fun. Well, they did kill people. Old men with high blood pressure died. They died instantly.’ Dor didn’t look very strong now, and he couldn’t have been strong then.

  ‘After the whipping what happened to you?’

  ‘After the whipping, they just made a slave of me for six years. All the dirtiest jobs. Cleaning the toilets, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Did you ever meet any of your persecutors when it was all over?’

  Dor beamed at me over his spectacle rims. ‘I met them, you bet! I got back some of the things they had ransacked, although, as we say in China, they took a cow and gave me back a mouse. I gave a dinner and invited them. One of the worst, one who had horsewhipped me, was my guest of honour. Oh, yes, indeed! I stood him a dinner!’

  ‘Did he apologise?’

  ‘No. He never said sorry. He wanted to, but he couldn’t face it. He was a young man, twenty-five, twenty-six.’

  This surprised me. But I know now that Thomas Dor is not a man who needs apologies or cherishes resentment. The dinner had been a sort of pardon.

  ‘You may not like talking about it?’

  ‘No, I don’t mind.’

  ‘Let me get you a drink.’

  ‘It’s quite hot here in the sun, isn’t it?’

  In the bar, Thomas Dor insisted on ordering: a beer for me, tea for himself. The clash of mah-jong pieces drifted from the lounge. ‘Chinese people absolutely cannot live without mah-jong, I guess,’ said Dor.

  When the drinks came, he said, ‘In those bad days, a lot of people in Shanghai preferred to be in jail. They felt safer there. Outside you could be beaten up, whipped in the street. I used to go home and lock myself in my room. With the two books left me, I’d found paradise in my own little nest.’ He began to sing ‘… and let the rest of the world go by!’ He laughed loudly. ‘Know the song? My accent. How is it? Good?’