by Martin Booth
The first Sunday after the delivery of the car, my father announced we were going for a drive around the New Territories. And so, after a hearty breakfast which Wong insisted on cooking although it was his day off, we departed.
My father had decided to take a circular route without deviation, digression or diversion. My mother had been hoping we might have a look at a few places on the way, but my father was adamant and my mother did not drive. I really did not care. For the first time, I was going to find out what lay the other side of the Kowloon hills.
We crossed them by way of a pass on the Tai Po road next to a deep blue reservoir and descended to Sha Tin, a small fishing village on the shores of a large inlet. The tide was out, leaving mudflats upon which sampans lay settled on their hulls. Across on the other shore, on the northern slopes of the Kowloon hills, was a rock outcrop that, if the imagination was stretched, looked in silhouette like a woman with a baby in a carrier on her back.
'Amah Rock,' my mother declared, reading from a notebook she was compiling in the hope that, one day, she might write a Hong Kong guide and history. She went on to relate a story about a fisherman lost at sea, his loyal wife who waited on the outcrop for his junk to return and the gods who changed her into stone so she could wait for ever. The story I had heard was that the stone was a childless baby amah who had stolen her mistress's baby and been frozen in stone by punishing gods, but I said nothing.
We drove along the shore until my mother's eye alighted on a small isolated building ahead between the road and the sea wall, surrounded by paper bark trees. It had an awning and a few car parking spaces, but little else.
'Pull in, Ken,' she said as imperiously as she dared. 'I fancy a coffee.'
'You've only just had breakfast, Joyce,' he replied peevishly, edging his pride and joy into a parking space. He checked there were no boughs likely to become detached from the tree overhead in the next hour and led us inside.
The Sha Tin Dairy Farm Restaurant (aka The Shatin Roadhouse) was a small American-style diner with considerable pretensions. The menu was designed to be mailed to friends and it referred to itself as the magic kiosk by the side of the magic Tidal Cove, which bore reference to the fact that the Sha Tin inlet had four tides a day. At the top of the menu, in small print, were the words Please let us service your car while you eat. ('Fat chance!' my father remarked on reading it.) We sat at a table overlooking the inlet. The mountains were just beginning to shimmer in the day's heat. On the other side of the inlet, a cluster of ancient houses stood between woods and the water's edge. A junk sailed sedately but slowly by, heading for the open sea. My father studied them all with his binoculars.
'The rice grown in Sha Tin was so good it was reserved for the emperor alone,' my mother remarked, reading from her notes.
I studied the menu. All the main dishes – even salads – were served with rice or toast. My parents ordered a coffee each and I requested a Chocolate Soldier, a sickly sweet bottle of thick, cold cocoa made with cow and soya milk. All three were automatically accompanied by toast.
As my parents drank their coffee, I read the blurb on the menu which outlined the attractions of the roadhouse: This is the only place you can watch and feel a roaring train while you eat . . . Occasionally you'll be thrilled by the shooting vampires smacking out of the Blue . . . Your junior folks may enjoy fishing, fording, boating, ferrying, crabbing, clamming or simply playing around in the shallow mangroves. This is the place you'll enjoy most! Please come again and save a trip to Miami or Geneva! I gazed out at the mudflats and tried to envisage my car-proud father's response to a request to go crabbing in the mangroves (whatever they were: all I could see was an expanse of mud). I saw no vampires.
Leaving Sha Tin, the road more or less followed the coast and the railway, grass-covered hills rising on the left with heavily wooded valleys. The next town was another fishing community called Tai Po. My father, having lost time over the enforced coffee stop, drove straight through it. My mother attempted to take some photos from the moving car but had to give up.
Just beyond the town, the road divided. Left went through the Lam Tsuen valley to the market town of Yuen Long, right took a longer route to the same destination. My father signalled left. My mother wanted the scenic route. We drove three hundred yards towards the Lam Tsuen valley, my father swore a lot, reversed into a farm track, muddied one wheel arch, got out, wiped the mud off with a rag and a bottle of water provided for just such an emergency and took the other road. We scowlingly bypassed Fanling and Sheung Shui, not stopping save for petrol. Then we entered old China.
The land became a patchwork of rice paddies separated by low dykes, the rice beginning to sprout above the water, bright green and pristine. The villages and farmhouses were ancient and could have changed little in two centuries. Farmers walked slowly along the side of the road wearing wide-brimmed conical hats, their trousers rolled up to the knee, leading docile-looking buffaloes. Man and beast had mud caked on their legs. Hakka women with coolie poles over their shoulders carried heavy loads of fodder or bundles of pak choi. It was my favourite Chinese vegetable, delicious when steamed and served at most dai pai dongs. Dogs ambled along just off the tarmac, moving from the shade of one eucalyptus or paper bark tree to the next.
Every now and then, my mother demanded my father stop for her to take a photo. Inevitably, every time she requested a halt, it was twenty yards before we came to a standstill so my father had to back up. Before long he was seething. When my mother suggested turning into a side road into the countryside, he lost it completely.
'Joyce!' he said through gritted teeth. 'We've come to drive round the New Territories. Not into them. I am not driving into the blithering hills. For all I know, we could wind up in Communist China.'
'That's not likely,' I injudiciously piped up. 'If we take a road on the left we'll stay in Hong Kong. China's to the right. Anyway, you can't drive into China because there's a border and a river to cross and the river's only got one bridge for the train and the police and the army—'
'Shut up!' my father exploded.
Several hundred yards further on, his patience was again tested by a duck farmer moving his gaggle of about two hundred birds from one pond to another, driving them ahead of him by means of two long, thin and very flexible bamboo poles. The ducks and a few geese waddled down the middle of the road. My father tentatively beeped his horn. The duck farmer turned. My father signalled curtly with his hand for the man to get a move on. At this, he turned and walked towards the car. My father unwisely wound his window down.
'Mat yeh?' the farmer said, somewhat belligerently. This translated roughly as: What d'you want? The added sub-text was: Damn your eyes, foreign devil.
My father, who spoke barely a word of Cantonese, looked blank.
'Mat yeh?' the farmer repeated, more antagonistically.
My father, still with a vacant look on his face, then suggested, 'Martin, you're always playing in the street. What's he saying?'
'I don't know,' I lied.
At this juncture, the farmer shrugged and turned. The ducks had meantime broken ranks and were all over the road and grass verge. The farmer picked up his herding poles. Taking his time, he rounded them up and continued to make his steady way ahead of us. We edged forward in a grinding first gear accompanied by my father's grinding teeth.
At the next left junction, we turned up a narrow road towards a steep hill, the road eventually petering out in a grassy bank. We stopped and got out. My mother took photos of the view, my father stood wondering how he was going to do a three-point turn. Whilst he pondered, my mother and I set off up a path.
In a short distance, we came to a semi-circular stone platform with a horseshoe-shaped wall about two feet high running round half its circumference. In the wall was a tiny stone door upon which some characters had been written in red paint. In front of the door were two rice bowls containing a sludge of dead leaves and rainwater and a stone weighing down a wad of faded Hell's Ba
nknotes.
'What is this?' I asked.
'It's a grave,' my mother answered. 'Behind that door is the coffin.'
I looked at it with a feeling of suppressed terror. I had visited my maternal grandfather's grave in a municipal cemetery in Portsmouth but had never really come to terms with his body lying six feet under an oblong of stone chippings. Here, there was a man reclining in death just behind a door.
Higher up the slope we came upon a narrow terrace cut into the hillside. It was overgrown with grass and held a row of very large urns with lids like inverted plates. The view was spectacular, a vista of wetlands over which soared flights of ducks and, beyond, the sea.
My mother busying herself with her camera, I decided to look in one of the urns. It seemed strange that they had been left there, in the middle of nowhere, on a bleak and windswept mountainside. I took hold of one of the lids and lifted it clear. Inside, neatly packed away so that it might all fit in, was a human skeleton, the skull on top. The bones were brown and looked as if they had been lightly varnished. I quickly replaced the lid.
'It's called a kam taap,' my mother said, not taking her eye from the viewfinder. 'I've been told that when a Chinese dies, they bury the body for seven years then they exhume it, clean the bones and put them in an ossuary – that's one of those urns.'
We walked down to the car. My father had turned it round and was buffing off scuff marks – caused by his reversing into a bush – on the rear bumper with a soft cloth.
'The view's wonderful,' my mother said sweetly as we joined him.
'You're a bloody nuisance, Joyce,' my father snarled.
We drove down to the main road and along it as fast as the surface and law would allow and my father's temper could contain. It was not until my mother saw a sign off to the right reading Kadoorie Beach that she spoke.
'Go down there, Ken,' she commanded in a voice that would brook no opposition.
My father did as he was asked and we drove down a narrow lane overhung by Chinese pine trees, the wispy, delicate variety one saw in classical paintings. The lane culminated in a small car park and a sandy beach gently lapped by the sea. Removing her shoes, my mother tripped off down to the water's edge. Beyond her, indistinct under the early-afternoon sky, was the island of Lan Tau, its peaks rising into a sub-tropical sky almost devoid of colour in the hot sun. A request that I might be allowed to join her was bluntly rebuffed by my father, so I sat in the car for fifteen minutes with my mouth shut.
When my mother returned to the car, my father said, 'Make sure there's no sand on your feet. I don't want to be hoovering the bloody carpets for weeks.'
'I do wish you'd shut up, Ken. It's only a bloody car,' she answered and, without removing the sand from her soles or putting her shoes back on, she got in the front and slammed the door.
In a mile or so, we came upon another sign by the road. It pointed to The Dragon Inn. My father, unbidden, turned and parked. Inside the inn, a cross between an English country pub, a Chinese tea house and a French café, we were served a plate of hot buttered toast, which my mother and I now considered must be obligatory once one crossed the Kowloon hills. My mother ordered tea, I asked for a Coke and my father requested a San Miguel beer. Then he had another. At the third, my mother reminded him he was driving. He ordered a fourth to make his point. She commented that the car was brand new, the first he had ever owned, and would it not be a pity if it got dented.
'Already bloody ruined by that benighted bush,' my father grumbled, but he did not order a fifth beer.
The bill settled, we went to look at a tortoise the size of a half barrel that was said to have been hatched in the Ming dynasty. A notice stated rather obviously: A Tortoise Several Hundred Years Old; it occurred to me that it would have to be in a country where eggs could be a century old. The poor creature lived in a concrete-walled enclosure about four times its size, with a trough of stale water and a pile of bedraggled greens. At least it had a roof to protect it from the searing heat of the sun.
Disturbed by these conditions, I suggested to my mother that we either set up a tortoise protection society or come back that night and kidnap it. Her reply was that the car boot could not take the weight, with which I had sadly to concur. However, I was permitted to sit on it to have my photo taken.
At about five o'clock, we arrived back at Boundary Street. My mother strode directly into my parents' bedroom and locked the door. I heard her running herself a bath. My father spent an hour rubbing imaginary scratches off the rear panelling of the Ford Consul. I went to my room and kept a low profile.
Over the coming weeks, I paid repeated clandestine visits to Kowloon Walled City. I did not, however, become acquainted with many people. Whereas the stall-and shopkeepers of Soares Avenue and Mong Kok were open and welcoming, those of the walled city were polite but reticent.
Whenever I arrived, Ho appeared before I had gone twenty yards, trotting towards me and smiling expansively. It was as if some unseen sentry had been watching out for me, relaying news of my impending arrival. For as long as I was in the enclave, he would accompany me, talking all the time, improving his English and my Cantonese. Sometimes, we took a bowl of soup together in a shack done out as an eating-place, with tables and chairs and an elderly waiter who limped. On many occasions, I offered to pay but Ho invariably pushed my money aside. On the other hand, he never paid either.
Apart from inviting me into the opium den and to drink tea or broth with him, Ho took me nowhere else. I had hoped he would show me the temple but any attempt to steer the conversation or our feet in its direction were futile.
After a while, Ho told me he was going 'long time Macau-side' and introduced me to his ho pang yau (his good friend).
This man was in his mid-twenties, not tall but immensely handsome, lacking the prominent cheekbones, Adam's apple and slightly flared nostrils of the average Cantonese male. He could, I thought, easily have been a film star. Muscular in a trim way, his hands were small but very strong. To my surprise, he spoke good pidgin English.
'My name is Lau,' he introduced himself when we first met. 'I am Ho's friend.'
'I am Martin,' I replied.
'Mah Tin,' he repeated. 'In Cantonese, this mean horse, electric. You are electric horse.' He grinned at his interpretation and mimicked riding a lively steed. 'Like at Laichikok fun garden.' It was a reasonable translation of fairground.
We shook hands and drank tea to cement our newfound friendship.
'When you come Kowloon Walled City-side,' he went on, slurping at his bowl of tea, 'I be here for you. If I not here, you no come. You unner-stand? If you are good boy, I will show you this place.'
I agreed to these terms. After all, to have a personal guide to this maze of shanties and ancient buildings was more than I could have hoped for.
Our tea finished, I said goodbye to Ho and set off with Lau. He walked with a measured, easy pace. Everyone greeted him and stepped aside to let him pass in the narrow alleys. In his turn, he invariably made way for heavily laden coolies and young women. The former breathlessly grunted their thanks whilst the latter giggled.
'I will show you some thing,' Lau said as we made our way past the building with the balustrade. 'From long time before. When China have emperor.'
We reached a place where the hutong widened. Lying beside the wall of a larger than average shanty were two massive cannons.
'This', Lau began, 'Chinese gun one time on city wall. Fight English like you.' He grinned. 'But no more fight. Now live no trouble, make money.'
Carrying on, we arrived at the temple and entered. At first, my eyes adjusting to the gloom, it looked no different from any other – dim lighting, incense smoke, the occasional wavering candle . . . Yet, as my eyes accepted the twilight, I saw that this one was grander than any I had previously seen. First, it had three larger-than-life-size effigies completely covered in gold except for the carving of their tightly curled, black painted hair: yet even that had a gold finial on top. All th
ree were seated in front of intricately embroidered gold tapestries. The altar table was huge, made of black wood and finely carved with gold-painted designs of leaves, dragons and curlicues. Upon it were not only the customary offerings but also exquisitely painted porcelain vases and two gold-leaf-coated lanterns. To one side, an old man was carefully applying gold leaf to one of the idols with a damp sponge. Second, the temple was spotlessly clean: usually they were dusty places, the floor scattered with the ashes of Hell's Banknotes or the fine powder of burnt joss-sticks. Third, there was a sleeping dog chained to the wall on the left which got to its feet and snarled menacingly at me.
'You like?' Lau enquired.
'Like plenty,' I replied, took a joss-stick and, lighting it, bowed to the effigies with it held between my supplicating hands before sticking it in the sand of the incense bowl.
Lau watched me, bemused.
'You no . . .' he looked for the word in English and failed to find it '. . . Gai duk toh?' He made the sign of the Cross on the palm of his hand.
'Yes,' I answered. 'Church of England.'
'Why you . . . ?' He pointed to the altar and made a cursory bow.
'Respect,' I said, but Lau just smiled in his incomprehension.
We walked on. Suddenly, Lau stopped and said, 'You no like ovver gweilo boy.' For the first time, he touched my hair. 'Now I show you good place.'