That disposition shocked Hong Kong and distressed Charles, although the stereotypical Chinese woman, the submissive wife whom the traditional idiom described as “the person within the house,” had never existed in fact; for centuries Chinese women had controlled large and small business enterprises, either directly or through their husbands and sons. But Sir Jonathan’s action was unprecedented. Formally investing a husband and wife as co-managing directors of a major hong, a worldwide commercial empire, was something new under the bright Hong Kong sun. Charles felt that he had been publicly humiliated and he stormed at the secret codicil to his father’s will: I depend upon my son Charles’s prudence and solid direction to insure that his wife Mary’s daring is kept within proper limits. I depend upon Mary’s acumen and courage to animate Charles’s caution.
Mary knew that she was still impulsive, and she valued Charles’s restraining counsel. But she wished Sir Jonathan had refrained from striking that posthumous blow to his son’s ego. Though their daily routine of the past five years remained unchanged by their possession of formal as well as actual power, they could no longer appeal to Sir Jonathan’s final adjudication. Mary suspected that Charles complained about their joint-stewardship primarily because he felt compelled to play the role of the dominant Chinese male. He was actually, she consoled herself, little more distressed by his father’s last instructions than by the Hong Kong Club’s ultimate failure to offer him membership.
The Seks’ loud dissatisfaction was, however, unfeigned. Harold and William were the twin sons of the opportunistic Sir Francis. As grandsons of Sydney, Sir Jonathan’s eldest legitimate son, they considered themselves the senior branch of the family. The Seks were, therefore, enraged at “being fobbed off” with bequests of one million dollars each and further infuriated, rather than placated, by the inviolable trust funds totaling two million dollars created for their seven children. Avarice and envy impelled the brothers, who were only moderately well-to-do by Sekloong standards, to assert their primacy by enlarging their fortunes manyfold.
Their scheme was appealingly simple, for, as William said, “It would be mad not to take advantage of the market.” As a dependency of Britain, which had sent troops to Korea, Hong Kong honored the American embargo on providing China with war matériel and banned exports of goods ranging from munitions to shoes. Fighting its first full-scale war against a foreign foe, the People’s Republic was eager to buy all the varied items that are the essentials of modern warfare. Peking, as Harold noted gleefully, could not afford to be too particular about either price or quality.
Moving the contraband to China was almost as easy as first importing into Hong Kong goods “for transshipment” to innocuous, if unlikely, destinations such as Djibouti and Santiago. Appropriate bribes to the appropriate British officials through their Chinese subordinates insured that neither customs nor police patrol-boats examined too closely junks and coasters bound for mainland ports. The Sek brothers concentrated upon those commodities that brought the highest returns: truck tires, gasoline, antibiotics, and insulated rubber boots. Their goods shared another trait: they were all flawed. The tires were third-rate retreads; the gasoline was liberally watered; the antibiotics were heavily adulterated; and the rubber boots leaked.
“After all,” Harold defended his flaunting the embargo, “it’s a blow for free trade, the reason for Hong Kong’s being.”
“Caveat emptor!” William aired his single Latin tag, graciously translating for the less erudite: “Let the buyer beware!”
The Seks had already increased five-fold their original investments of one million dollars each, and it was necessary to display their new wealth. Harold built a compound overlooking Castle Peak in the New Territories, a complex of mansions, summer houses, and courtyards under sweeping green-tiled roofs; William built a similar demi-palace on The Peak crowned with Ming-yellow tiles. Though justifiably gratified by their astuteness, the Seks were not quite complacent. Since the war presumably had to end some day, they explored new enterprises: gold-smuggling, arms running and the drug traffic. Commercial acuity and political impartiality dictated three fundamental decisions: They would import opium in fishing junks and small coasters, buying immunity from confiscation for the bulky black gum. They would smuggle the compact heroin refined from that opium by scheduled air and sea carriers. Their opium would come from areas in Burma, Thailand, and Laos controlled by remnants of the defeated Nationalists’ armies.
“We do not dabble in politics,” Harold declared righteously. “We will sell to whoever has the money, and we buy from whoever has the goods.”
Mary and Charles laughed contemptuously at that self-justification. The House of Sekloong had forty years earlier withdrawn from the drug traffic—legal or illegal—because Sir Jonathan judged the opium trade immoral and, ultimately, unprofitable. United in antipathy toward the Communists, husband and wife nevertheless agreed that they would trade with the People’s Republic—openly and legally. But they would neither supply Peking with contraband nor cheat Peking on quality.
“It’s bad politics and bad business,” Charles said. “The Communists will be in power for a long time, and we must trade with China.”
Mary concurred that Charles’s dictum made sound commercial sense. Besides, she no longer cared who tried to rule China, since she believed no one could rule China effectively.
She was, however, deeply concerned with the plight of nearly a million refugees from the Draconian reforms of the Communist regime. Hong Kong had always admitted Chinese freely, and Hong Kong continued to do so—at its own peril. Though formally excluded, “illegal immigrants” were turned back only if apprehended while crossing the border. If the police did not catch a refugee dripping wet after he waded the Shumchon River or swam Deep Bay supported by inflated pigs’ bladders, the Colony’s Registration of Persons Offices would issue a Hong Kong Identity Card that transformed him into a legal resident. The influx was therefore overloading all the Colony’s essential services: housing, schools, hospitals, transport, and employment. Even food supplies and sewage disposal were inadequate. Both the refugees and the authorities desperately needed private assistance.
Mary’s contempt for the Chinese nation had never included individuals, and certainly not the victims of that nation’s brutal political struggles. But she was determined to see for herself that her contributions actually provided clothing, food, medicines, and schoolbooks, rather than enriching the sleek police officers, plausible bureaucrats, and Secret Society toughs who preyed on the wretched exiles. Speaking the Shanghai dialect, Sarah Haleevie Sekloong was an invaluable companion on Mary’s tours of inspection of the facilities provided for the refugees from that metropolis.
The two were returning from Diamond Hill in Kowloon on a late February afternoon in 1951. Their Austin A-40 labored through narrow, dirt lanes palisaded by jerry-built huts flying miniature Nationalist flags. The compact Austin was handier than the great Rolls and, Mary felt, less offensive to the recipients of her alms. The old chauffeur swore at the car, the dank cold, and the pedestrians’ stupidity as he turned and backed the Austin to descend the twisting hill lanes. But the ladies were inured to his monologues against the pak-yee, the “northern barbarians” who had invaded his home.
The huts built by earlier arrivals who had found casual employment stood on concrete slabs, and their roofs were corrugated-metal sheets. The newer hovels were tragic fantasies of worm-eaten timbers, splintered packing-crates, and rusty iron-sheets. Fifteen or twenty men, women, and children slept in four-tiered bunks in each minuscule hut. Electric cables snaked menacingly through the muddy lanes, ingeniously poaching on the preserves of the China Light and Power Company.
A one-legged former corporal hobbled on a home-made crutch, while his former colonel, still displaying the badges of his rank on his filthy uniform, trudged under a load of twigs for his cooking-fire. Women in garments donated by foreign charities gathered around the communal pumps, their buckets slopping into the mu
ddy lane. The children at their heels looked like manic dwarves: a three-year-old girl wore a torn Mickey Mouse sweatshirt over a ballet skirt, while a six-year-old boy swaggered in a tattered pony-skin jacket that had once been the pride of a young Scarsdale matron.
A scrofulous sow dragged her pregnant belly across the quagmire. Lean dogs blotched with mange yapped at the long, scabrous-yellow legs of scrawny chickens. The stench of unwashed humanity, moldy bedding, rotting rice, and feces fouled the bleak winter day, and the Hong Kong sky was leaden.
Lady Mary huddled inside her seal coat, a luxury she felt by her age excused, though she had intentionally left her mink at home. The lean brown faces regarding the two foreign women displayed neither rancor nor gratitude. They were the incurious faces of battered survivors who were intent only upon enduring longer. Great chunks of North China’s ancient squalor, Mary reflected resentfully, had been transported entire to Hong Kong.
She nonetheless marveled at the refugees’ tenacity. In order to provide the next generation with the tools of survival and self-improvement, numerous professional men—lawyers, doctors, and engineers—taught in improvised schools. She and Sarah had just visited a middle school supported by Sekloong funds. The ramshackle former distillery also housed the Alliance Research Institute, which was financed largely by the American Central Intelligence Agency. Its staff of university graduates in their twenties maintained a documentary record of the Communist regime and strove to preserve the traditional culture the Communists were destroying to make way for their own modern culture. Those young survivors were determined that their ancient civilization, too, would survive.
The Austin left the squatter camp for the crammed streets of Kowloon, and Lady Mary eagerly pictured the scented, steaming marble bath in the rococo bathroom she had moved to The Castle. Across the broad thoroughfare of Nathan Road, its neon signs just flickering into a cacophony of light, lay the pier of the Jordan Road Ferry that would carry them back to Hong Kong Island. Having done what she had to do, having required herself to look upon the refugees’ misery so that she might better alleviate that misery, she felt herself entitled to relax.
Distant thunder rumbled beneath the constant rattle of handcarts, the honking of horns, the clatter of wooden clogs, the loud voices, and the blaring radios.
“What can that sound be?” Sarah asked. “I’ve never heard anything quite like it.”
“Probably nothing,” Mary answered wearily. “Just the soft-voiced, velvet-footed Cantonese going about their normal business.”
“No, this is different. Like a waterfall. I wonder what it is.”
“Well, my dear, we’ll soon find out.”
The flow of traffic slowed like a stream trapped behind a dam. Their chauffeur swore at the driver of the green Chevrolet in front and inched between two slat-sided trucks, one laden with flayed hog carcasses, the other carrying indignant ducks crammed into globular rattan baskets. The intermittent rumbling became a constant roar. Police whistles shrilled, and sirens screamed.
“Quickly,” Sarah directed, “turn around.”
“Mng-dak, Tai-tai,” the old chauffeur shrugged. “Impossible, Madam.”
All traffic had halted just short of Nathan Road, and the Austin was trapped between the trucks. Greasy black smoke billowed through the side street, and gasoline fumes permeated the Austin. The orange glow of flames flared on Nathan Road, illuminating swirling Nationalist and Communist flags.
Knots of struggling men poured down the narrow side street, engulfing the green Chevrolet. Shouting rhythmically, the rioters rocked the Chevrolet back and forth. A gout of flame sprang from the gasoline tank as the car toppled onto its side. His topcoat ablaze, a gray-haired European scrambled awkwardly from the vehicle. The crowd bore him down, and he vanished beneath its feet. His high shrieking was abruptly choked off.
“My God, what have I brought you into?” Mary cried.
“We were warned, but I never thought …” Sarah’s voice quavered.
“Ai-yah! Ai-yah! Kwok-min-dong … Goong-chan-dong …” the driver shouted. “Nationalists and Communists … fighting.”
“I’m so sorry, Sarah,” Mary exclaimed. “So sorry I brought you here.”
“God will look after us,” Sarah assured her.
“Well,” Mary said tartly, “He’d better look sharp.”
The tide of rioters flowing toward them bore pork and ducks snatched from the trucks. Faces peered through the Austin’s closed windows, the same lean brown faces they had seen in the refugee camp now distorted by mad rage. The small car rocked under the blows of hard brown hands, and the rear window shattered into crazed opacity. A burly Nationalist veteran wearing a service cap with the white sunburst on its peak pried at the chauffeur’s door with a crowbar.
“Mng hai sai-yen! Mng hai sai-yen! Sekloong gyah. Tai-tai hai Ma-li Foo-yen … Sekloong Ma-li Foo-yen.” The white-haired chauffeur shouted desperately. “Not Westerners! Not Westerners! The House of Sekloong. The lady is Lady Mary. Lady Mary Sekloong!”
Mary closed her eyes and began reciting the Lord’s Prayer. She heard Sarah murmur: “Shma Yisroel, Adonai eloheinu … Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord is one.…”
Each praying in her own way, they awaited the cruel, dark hands. But there was only sudden silence. Mary opened her eyes in astonishment. The soldier was bowing deep and waving the mob away.
“Ching yüan-liang wo-men, Ma-li Fu-jen. Pao-chien! Pao-chien!” He spoke clear Mandarin. “Please forgive us, Lady Mary. Deepest apologies! Profound apologies! We did not know you. We thought you were foreigners.”
“The ladies are of the House of Sekloong,” he shouted to the crowd. “One is Lady Mary herself. They are not foreigners. They are Sekloongs. They are our people. Our people.”
Mary and Sarah sat in a copse of silence. The crowd parted to let them through.
On the frozen Korean Peninsula, 1,500 miles to the northeast, men were dying under shells and bombs in the same conflict between the Communists and their foes that had imperiled the Sekloong ladies and enriched the Sek brothers. The North Korean invasion of South Korea in late June 1950 had been countered by American troops, fighting under the banner of the United Nations Organization. Driven into the Pusan Perimeter around the South’s largest port by August 1950, the U.N. Command had riposted with an audacious landing at Inchon on the peninsula’s western coast in mid-September. When the North Koreans crumbled, the U.N. Forces streamed toward the Yalu River, the border between Manchuria and Korea. To counter the apparent threat to Manchuria, the “Chinese People’s Volunteers” had entered the war in force in November 1950, and the overwhelmed United Nations’ armies fell back.
Neither gallantry nor superior arms could immediately stem the Communist tide. Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea, changed hands for the third time in six months when it fell again to the Communists on January 4, 1951. But the multinational United Nations Forces rallied, and troops contributed by twenty-five nations halted the offensive of the numerically superior Chinese and North Koreans. On January 25, 1951, those forces broke out of their defensive positions in the last major offensive mounted by allied Western and Asian armies against Chinese armies. Much more effective against much stronger opposition than the Boxer Relief Expedition had been in 1900, the allies retook Seoul on March 5, 1951. The Chinese People’s Volunteers and the North Koreans abandoned their desperate counteroffensive on May 22. The Communists were back at the Thirty-eighth Parallel, the original boundary between North Korea and South Korea.
The war became a stalemate because the United States declined to commit the additional divisions necessary to clear the Communists from North Korea. Nonetheless, China’s defensive intervention created protracted enmity between the new People’s Republic of China and the United States of America. Washington canceled its plans to break with Taiwan and offer formal diplomatic recognition to Peking. The U.S. Seventh Fleet patroled the Straits of Taiwan to forestall a Communist attack against the Nationalist-held islan
d. Peking and Washington had become embittered foes.
The United Nations’ Forces were, however, still pushing slowly northward, and the Communists were reeling. But the Chinese veterans did not break as had the North Koreans. The XXXIX Army Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General Shih Ai-kuo of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, doggedly contested each pass and village as it retreated over sharp-ridged mountains still sparkling treacherously with snow and ice. The three divisions of Chinese People’s Volunteers were James Sekloong’s own troops, the units he had commanded from Manchuria to final victory over the Nationalists in South China. He pitched his command post in a hamlet twelve miles north of Chorwon on the central front in mid-June and dispatched his orders to his battered units by radio, telephone, and runners. The XXXIX Army Corps would retreat no further from its strong defensive position in the rock-ribbed mountains.
James Sekloong’s exhausted infantrymen awaited the next assault in deep-dug bunkers and great natural caves that protected them from American artillery, American tanks, and American fighter-bombers, which were immune to air attack. The MIG-15s of the Communist Air Forces had already been beaten into submission by American F-86 Sabrejets.
One of the junior political commissars who exhorted the infantrymen of the 382nd Division was Shih Cheng-wu, the nineteen-year-old son of the Army Corps Commander. The Americans, he told his men, lacked the iron will necessary to attack their natural fortifications since they were accustomed to artillery, tanks, and bombers clearing the way for them. Neither shells nor bombs could penetrate the two-hundred-foot-thick rock-and-earth roofs of the caves in which the Division had taken its stand. Neither shells nor bombs could find the narrow, camouflaged entrances. Cheng-wu contemptuously dismissed the nine silver F-84 Thunderjets circling among the sun-lanced clouds.
Dynasty Page 70