by Ian Hamilton
The full name of the Fanling Mountain Master was Gao Lok. He was the leader, sometimes also called the Dragon Head, of the Fanling triad. Once in power, a Mountain Master held his position for life, unless he chose to step down or was involuntarily retired. Gao was the only Mountain Master Chow had ever known. He was in his fifties, like everyone in the executive group except for Uncle, and his management style was to tend to traditional businesses in traditional ways within the strict confines of the gang’s turf. This approach maintained the status quo and kept the Fanling triad small enough not to attract the attention of larger gangs eager to expand.
In recent years, though, Chow had proposed a number of changes to the way they ran their gambling businesses; these had generated a lot more money for the gang and made it more difficult to stay below the radar. Now he was proposing changes that would affect their protection business, and Gao was getting enough resistance from other members of the executive that he was reluctant to make the decision by himself — as was his right.
As he walked to the ceremony, Chow mentally reviewed the pitch he was going to make to the committee the following day. He didn’t need prepared notes, although he had written some and had them typed, copied, and sent to every member of the executive committee. He had gone over the proposal and the numbers attached to it so many times that they were ingrained in his mind, but he knew that his delivery was going to be as important as the content. Aside from whatever objections they had to his proposal, Chow sensed that some of his older colleagues were resentful of his quick ascent, and he worried that any display of overconfidence or enthusiasm on his part would rub them the wrong way. He had to remain low-key, calm, and measured, he reminded himself. Listen to their questions without interruption, and then answer them directly and respectfully.
There would be seven people at the meeting. In addition to Gao and Uncle, there would be Ma Shen, the Deputy Mountain Master and Gao’s oldest friend and confidant; Ren Tengfei, the Vanguard, or operations officer; Yu, the Straw Sandal, who was responsible for communications within the gang and liaising with other gangs; Wang, the Red Pole, who ran the men on the street and was the gang’s lead enforcer; and Pang, the Incense Master, who officiated over triad rituals, including initiations.
Although he hadn’t yet committed, Chow thought Gao was leaning towards supporting him. If Fong was to be believed, so was Yu. Uncle could usually count on support from Wang, under whom he’d served as a forty-niner and developed a trust and friendship. On the other side, Ma seemed to dislike him and opposed just about anything he suggested. Ren bounced back and forth, his support normally tied to his own self-interest rather than the best interests of the gang. Pang aligned himself with Ma more often than not, but he had shown a willingness to agree with proposals that would increase the gang’s income. Although Gao wouldn’t put Chow’s proposal to an actual vote, Uncle had no doubt that the Mountain Master would take everyone’s opinions into account, so it was important to win over as many of them as he could.
He arrived at the restaurant ten minutes early and saw Wang standing outside the door. Wang was an imposing man just over six feet tall, with a thick, muscular body. As usual, he was wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt. His naked arms were heavily tattooed and his lean face was scarred on the right side and above his left eye; the scars were his professional badges of honour. Wang was in his fifties but had the body of a younger man, and a temperament that hadn’t matured much over the years. He was intelligent but not particularly thoughtful, preferring action to contemplation.
“Hey, Uncle,” he shouted. “You ready to take in two new members?”
“I’m always ready, especially when they are good men.”
“Well, these two are maybe a bit too eager, but they know how to follow orders and they are respectful. In fact, they remind me a bit of you when you were a Blue Lantern.”
“If you say so.”
“What the hell does that mean? It isn’t like you to be so agreeable.”
Chow took out his cigarettes, offered one to Wang, and then lit them both. “I’m a bit distracted by the meeting tomorrow. I’ve been assuming that I have your support,” he said carefully. “Am I wrong?”
Wang smiled. “You should know by now, Uncle, that you always have my support. But thanks for asking and not taking me completely for granted.”
“You know I’d never do that,” Chow said.
Wang took a deep drag on the cigarette, threw it onto the ground, and stubbed it out with his white running shoe. “We should get going,” he said.
The Emerald Phoenix wasn’t a restaurant that Chow often frequented. It seated more than two hundred customers and was often too noisy for his taste. But late on this June afternoon, when it should have been busy, there wasn’t a customer in sight. The gang had booked it for the initiation ceremony and the celebratory dinner that would follow.
“There’s our boys,” Wang said as he and Chow walked through the front door.
Two young men stood off to one side, each of them holding a strip of bamboo. Chow knew that the strips bore their invitations to the ceremony.
Wang waved at them. “See you soon,” he said.
The restaurant was divided in two by a line of tall screens. On the near side it was all tables and chairs, but past the screens, Pang and his assistant had spent most of the day creating a traditional triad lodge. The lodge had no fixed, permanent address. It was built whenever there was an initiation and could be anywhere, even in a basement or alleyway. Wang and Chow walked around the screens to find Pang, the Incense and Ceremonies Master, and Ren, the Vanguard, standing in front of three archways, the first of which was made with crossed swords. Pang and Ren would lead the initiations.
“Is the entire executive here now?” Gao asked.
“Yu isn’t here yet,” Pang said.
“We’ll give him another five minutes.”
As the men waited, Chow examined the lodge and marvelled at the history it represented. The Heaven and Earth Society — the Hung Society — had been founded in the 1760s. As their symbol they’d adopted a triangle with the character hung, representing the union of heaven, earth, and man. The word triad hadn’t come into use until 1949, when the Hong Kong police, perverting the meaning of the symbol, used it to refer to the society’s members. Now it was common enough for society members to do the same.
Originally the Hung Society had been one of several secret fraternal societies that emerged in the mid-eighteenth century with the goal of overthrowing the Qing Empire and restoring the Ming Dynasty. They were rebels, regarded as traitors by those who supported the Qing. Because of that, early society members were forced to develop secret forms of communication, and they created an initiation ceremony that impressed upon the brothers the need for absolute loyalty and bravery. The two-hundred-year-old basic elements of that ceremony would be practised in just a few minutes, inside the lodge at the Emerald Phoenix.
The secret societies eventually overthrew the Qing Empire, but in the process the Hung members became rebels without a cause and were forced to rethink their reason for existing. Some groups became martial arts associations, others turned into labour unions and trade organizations, and some turned to crime. But, as Chow knew, not everyone who was involved in crime was a willing participant, and some members had been branded as criminals simply because they belonged to a secret society that several governments had made illegal.
Strangely, despite its Chinese roots, the Hung Society no longer had a presence in mainland China. Mao Zedong had set out to eradicate it after he took power in 1949, and the People’s Liberation Army made a good job of it. Thousands of Hung members were forced to resettle in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Manila, and several cities in the United States. Getting pushed out of China wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, Chow thought, since it had helped expand the society’s business reach into much more profitable markets. Still, he beli
eved that one day they would return there.
“Yu is here,” Pang said sharply, bringing Chow back to the present. “I’ll get the men.”
Chow watched Pang walk around the screen and heard him greet the young men, instructing them to remove their shoes, socks, and shirts. When Pang returned, the two men followed with bare feet and bare chests.
Ren stepped forward and pointed to the first arch. “This is the Mountain of Knives,” he said. “Do not take one step through it unless you are loyal.”
Both men walked under the arch without hesitation.
Ren joined them and asked their names, birthdates, hometowns, and how long they had been Red Lanterns, or trainees. Their answers were repeated by Ren but were not written down.
Pang came to stand alongside. “The second arch is called the Loyalty and Righteousness Hall. The sign on it declares that before this gate all men are equal,” he said.
The initiates nodded and once more walked through. Ren met them and held out his hand. The men reached into their pockets and took out red envelopes that contained their initiation fees.
The third gate was called the Heaven and Earth Circle, and on its archway was a sign that read “through the heaven and earth circle are born the hung heroes.” The men walked under the archway, hesitated, and then stepped through a bamboo hoop that Pang held in front of them. The hoop represented the start of their rebirth into the Hung Society. It had been the most emotional part of Chow’s initiation.
The next two hours were anticlimactic as Pang and Ren took turns recounting various events in the society’s history and then led the men to a triad altar at the end of the hall, where they recited poetry. At his initiation the poetry had surprised Chow, but he later learned that many books of triad poetry had been secreted away and carefully guarded for as long as the society had existed.
When the poetry reading ended, the two men were guided to the right of the altar, where Pang stood holding a basin of water. After the men washed their faces and removed their clothes, Ren stepped forward carrying white robes and straw sandals.
“Your old life has been washed away,” Ren said to them. “You are now prepared for rebirth as a triad.”
The men returned to the front of the altar. Pang handed them sheaves of paper. “You will now swear the Thirty-Six Oaths,” he said.
As the men read the oaths, Ren poured what Chow knew was cock’s blood into a bowl. He then added wine. Pang joined him with two strips of yellow paper. The paper was lit and held over the bowl, its ashes falling into the blood and wine. Ren stirred the mixture with a knife. When the last oath was sworn, Ren presented the men with the bowl. Each drank deeply from it, and then they jointly held it for a few seconds before throwing it to the ground, where it smashed. The broken bowl was a symbol of what would happen to anyone who betrayed his brothers. It was the last part of the rite.
“You are now initiated,” Ren said. “You are full-fledged members of our society.”
Wang laughed. “And now we can go into the restaurant to eat like pigs and get drunk.”
( 2 )
Chow Tung was not a man who liked parties, but in the Emerald Phoenix among his peers and the people he thought of as his family, he felt a depth of camaraderie that threatened to overwhelm him. Fortunately he was sitting between Xu and Fong, and their conversation rarely went beyond casual bantering that made him smile.
Xu and Fong were his closest friends. They had joined the Fanling triads within three months of each other, served as Blue Lanterns together, and were initiated as entry-level forty-niners at the same time. Chow was a few years older, and from the outset Xu and Fong had treated him like their big brother. Ten years later, the three men shared a level of respect and trust that didn’t have to be discussed. But despite the depth of their friendship, the men could not have been more different in the way they lived their lives.
Xu had come to Hong Kong from Shanghai as a boy, with his mother and triad father, in 1949. He was a homebody, and he liked nothing better than spending time with his wife and newborn son, to whom Chow was godfather. Quiet, observant, and clever, Xu was the man who Chow turned to when he needed strategic advice. But despite an apparently mild disposition and his unimposing height and build, Xu was also a good man to have by your side in a fight. Whenever there was a threat, he never hesitated to fully commit himself to take it on.
Fong, from Fanling, was far more outgoing, fun-loving, and irreverent. Tall, lean, and with unfashionably long hair that hung to his shoulders, he was attractive to women but fickle in the way he treated them. Girlfriends came and went almost as regularly as the systems he devised to beat the gaming tables in Macau. Gambling was his weakness. He freely admitted that he was addicted but never gave a thought to stopping. To help protect him, Chow had him barred from the off-track betting shops, mah-jong parlours, and mini casinos operated by the gang in Fanling, but he couldn’t prevent him from getting on the jetfoil to Macau. Fong, though, was a diligent assistant Straw Sandal, and he had the ideal personality to handle the amount of communication it involved. Everyone in the gang knew him and liked him. He was the person Chow turned to when he needed to know what the men were thinking.
Chow was far more solitary than his friends. He lived in a sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment above a restaurant near the centre of town. He had never had a girlfriend that Fong or Xu knew of. His life was regimented to the point that even his social activities — dinner at Xu’s home every second Friday, trips to Happy Valley every Wednesday night and Sunday afternoon during the horse-racing season — were almost scripted. Nearly all his friends were triads, some of them much older men who saw in him qualities that needed to be cultivated.
The empty bowls that had held shark-fin soup were removed from the tables and replaced with platters of sautéed crab, Peking duck with pancakes, whole fish steamed in soy sauce, sizzling sliced steak, and gailan. Fong was explaining to Xu a new system he’d developed for roulette that he was convinced was going to work.
“This is the third or fourth system that I can remember you talking about,” Xu said. “You seem to mention them only once and then they’re never heard of again. I wonder why that is. Is it fair to guess that they all failed?”
“Tell you what, come to Macau with me this weekend and I’ll show you,” Fong said. “I’ll even pay for the jetfoil and buy you dinner.”
“You’d have to buy me dinner before you got to the tables, because after you’re finished you won’t have enough money left to buy instant noodles.”
“Are you saying you would come with me?” Fong said, ignoring the gibe.
“No, I’m not.”
“What, you have to ask your wife for permission?”
“Enough, you two,” Chow said. “Here comes Wang with our newest members.”
The Red Pole had a large bottle of brandy in his right hand and a small glass in his left. He had been taking the young initiates from table to table for toasts. Each of them held a slightly larger glass and already seemed quite drunk. Their glasses were empty, but as soon as they reached Chow’s table, Wang filled both of their glasses to the brim, pouring just a few drops into his own.
“Raise your glasses, please,” Wang said. “Let’s welcome these fine young men into our society.”
The eight men at the round table stood up. Most of them, including Chow and Xu, were drinking San Miguel beer. Fong was indulging in Maotai baijiu, a lethal liquor made from fermented sorghum.
“Ganbei!” Wang shouted, and downed the contents of his glass.
The men at the table followed suit and then watched with amusement as the young men struggled to empty their glasses. “I doubt they’ll make it to the last table,” Xu said as he watched them stagger away.
“We did,” Chow said.
“I know, but it put me off liquor for ages,” Xu said.
“The more you eat, the more
you can drink,” Fong said, flicking his chopsticks towards the gleaming golden slices of duck skin.
The three friends ate almost uninterruptedly for half an hour, savouring the food that the gang had paid a small fortune for. When they finally set down their chopsticks, Chow said, “What a fine meal.”
“About to be ruined, I think,” Fong said. “Ren is coming in this direction, and he looks rather determined. I suspect he wants to talk about night markets.”
“That could be a good thing,” said Xu.
“Not the way he operates. He’ll be looking for weaknesses in Uncle’s position and he’ll be hoping that a couple of beers will have clouded his judgement.”
“Fat chance,” Xu said.
“Still, the man is the Vanguard and needs to be respected,” Fong said.
“Of course,” Chow said, rising to his feet to greet his colleague.
“I hope you are enjoying the evening,” Ren said when he reached the table. “There is nothing I like more than initiating new members into our society.”
“I thought that you and Pang handled the ceremony beautifully,” Chow said.
“Uncle, you are always so silver-tongued.”
“Do you doubt my sincerity?”
“Never,” Ren said with a laugh. “You are nothing if not sincere.”
Chow shrugged. “Are you visiting because you want to talk?”