The Rice Paper Diaries

by Francesca Rhydderch

  Were any of us ever happy? I can still see myself lying underneath the thick leaves of a longan tree, cracking open the fruit shells and letting the juicy insides burst open in my mouth and feeling something like contentment. But then I left to follow Lam, and on that day when I sailed downriver to Hong Kong I felt myself splitting into two, me then and me now, and I’ve been caught between the two ever since. Wei is the only person who can bridge the gap. He is the person who gives me life.

  That night, when we lay down next to each other on sheets that still smelled of Mrs Elsa, it was me who pulled him towards me, who pressed my fingers into the soft skin on his buttocks that had never seen the sun and squeezed them as he came inside me.

  I got up in the middle of the night because Mari cried out from the nursery. When I came back Wei had fallen asleep on his stomach, with one arm outstretched, his hand fanned out over the empty space where I’d been lying. I moved it gently, lay down again, and fell straight back to sleep.

  7

  It was a clear morning. The streets around the parade ground were empty, apart from a single delivery man with hunched shoulders and bent legs pulling a trailer loaded with fish buckets. The azalea bushes leading up to the entrance greeted us harshly, their petals closed one minute and open the next, like a beggar pushing out cupped hands and refusing to take no for an answer.

  The parade ground was covered with people from end to end. They looked as if they had been bleached of colour overnight. Everything about them seemed unfinished. There were women wearing coats without belts, and men in shirts that didn’t do up. Hair that was normally oiled back sprung away from foreheads, and painted-on lips that usually pouted their way in and out of conversations had faded back into thin, pale lines on their owners’ faces.

  Some people had bags, or blankets that were being used as bags, tied clumsily and held together anyhow. Some were empty-handed, and they were the ones I felt the most pity for. Their hands hung at their sides, making their shoulders stoop and pulling all their features to the ground too. Some of the men had bruises and cuts to the face.

  It was the women who were talking to each other, not the men. Hundreds of female voices rose up into the air with a shrill insistence, like caged canaries at the bird market. Mrs Vernon looked like a parrot chained to its perch, with grey feathers and red eyes. Next to her was Mrs Elsa. I don’t know if she was still wearing her night gown, because she had got hold of a coat from somewhere. It was too big for her, even with the buttons done up and the sleeves rolled back. She turned around again and again, peering up at the Peak behind. I knew what she was doing. She was thinking of Mari, unable to prevent herself from trying to catch a glimpse of our apartment windows, tiny as they were from here. Over the last few days this gesture must have become a nervous tic, because the captain, who was standing next to her, put his hand on her shoulder to stop her.

  Then she looked up and saw me. I was standing with Lam and Wang and Wei on a small rise towards the south side of the parade ground. Even though it was overrun by this time, and she was maybe twenty rows into the crowd, I could make her out clearly. I saw the pain in her face. I wanted to make some kind of gesture to show that Mari was all right, tucked safely away on my back, but there were Japanese soldiers moving through the crowd with clipboards and pens, taking details, then gathering together in little groups out front with their heads together. They wore loose-fitting military jackets, and long boots to the knee. They had canvas peaked hats that sat on top of their heads like one of Mrs Elsa’s china pepper pots. They seemed happy enough for us to stand at the edges of the ground and stare at our captured masters. But when a man close to us stepped out of our line dragging a heavy trunk over to his master, who had positioned himself on the outer edges of the group, one of the soldiers appeared instantly and started hitting the English man over the head with the back of a bayonet, until he fell over. I saw Mrs Elsa glance over again, and she must have caught sight of Mari’s goose-feather hair sticking up over my shoulder, for the expression on her face contracted, then loosened.

  ‘How are we going to get their things to them? And Mari?’ I said to Wei.

  He put a finger to his lips and pushed his way out of the throng of silent spectators around us. He went straight up to the Japanese soldier at the head of the group of prisoners, and started speaking to him confidently, as if he had arranged to meet him by appointment. Wei had taken a bath that morning in the apartment, and a blue-black line of sunlight reflected off his hair as he spoke to the soldier. He was wearing one of the captain’s shirts open at the collar, and a pair of Wang’s chauffeuring trousers. His pockets were bulging with the money we’d found rolled up in the top drawer of Mrs Elsa’s dressing table.

  There was a woman at my elbow, with wild grey hair that was neither plaited nor in a bun.

  ‘You’re lucky your man is rich,’ she said.

  I thought at first she was talking about the captain, then I realised she was talking about Wei, about the ease with which the soldier accepted the money from him, like a waiter accepting a night’s wages by way of a tip from a generous customer. He gestured for Wei to come over to where I was standing with Wang and Lam, each of us with one of the packed suitcases at our feet.

  Mr Tommy saw Wang, and walked over to us, slowly, so that he wouldn’t attract too much attention from anyone apart from the soldier who’d given permission for this exchange to take place. He put a hand to Mari’s cheek.

  ‘Sir,’ said Wang. ‘I’m sorry.’

  The captain shook his head.

  ‘You couldn’t have stopped them.’

  ‘Where are they taking you, Sir?’ Wang asked. His voice was full of a concern which I suspected was as much for himself as for anyone else.

  ‘No one knows,’ said the captain. He swallowed once or twice in quick succession, as if he needed a drink of water. ‘They’ve had us under lock and key in a bloody slum for the past week.’

  ‘Sir,’ I said, showing him the bags at our feet. ‘We went back to the apartment. We have clothes for you.’

  Mari’s breath on the back of my neck was hotter than the morning air around us.

  ‘God bless you,’ Mr Tommy said. ‘I’ll take the bags and one of you follow a few paces behind with Mari. We don’t want to antagonise the bastards.’

  He picked up all three of the bags.

  I had been trying to imagine how this moment would feel, when I would have to say goodbye to Mari, but I couldn’t feel anything. The air was already filled with the scent of her leaving: her special baby shampoo, her formula milk, and soap flakes – the comforting mixed-up smells that always stuck to the skin under my fingernails after a day spent taking care of her.

  Wei seemed to know all this as if I had been sitting there with him at his stall dictating it to him for a cent. Before I knew it, his swollen, callused fingers had undone the strap and taken her off my back and he was gone, through the crowd after the captain like a pickpocket, light on his feet.

  I held my breath as he made his way with the captain over to Mrs Elsa, but she had moved, shifted by the surge of the crowd all around her. I looked back at Wei, but he had disappeared from sight too, lost among lowered heads and trails of cigarette smoke. Then I caught sight of Mrs Elsa again, picked out from the crowd by a weak ray of winter sun that reminded me of the dusty bands of light in the shuttered bars Ryan used to favour. She stood with her arms held out, her eyes dry, waiting. As Wei came back into view, slipping Mari into her arms, I felt as if my own skin was being unpeeled from my flesh, strip by strip. I thought of the dead woman on the pavement outside the bombed arcade, her hand in her dead son’s.

  Mari was awake, her hands grabbing at Mrs Elsa’s hair, and they were smiling at each other. I could only see them from the side now, half of Mrs Elsa’s smile, and half of Mari’s: two halves of the same smile.

  The soldier Wei had paid off seemed to have lost the goodwill we had paid him for.

  ‘Hurry up,’ he called over. Within se
conds Wei was back at my side. He didn’t even seem short of breath.

  My back was cold.

  Lam and Wang were arguing with Wei, saying that he should have kept some of the money for us, that we needed it too, but all my attention was taken up by Mari. She looked different from a distance. I stared at her, trying to impress upon my memory the dense blue of her eyes, the red patch of eczema on her chin that always bothers her unless I put cream on it, her fingers that open and close constantly, trying to hold all of the life that surrounds her in her hungry, uncertain grasp.

  The soldiers had given up on the task of taking names and papers. A command went out for everyone to dispose of their identification, and to start marching. As the prisoners shuffled off the ground they left behind them a mosaic of navy-blue squares speckled across the lush grass.

  ‘British passports,’ said Wei.

  We followed, and the soldiers did nothing to stop us. It was as if they wanted us to be in no doubt about who our new masters would be. The pavements outside the parade ground were already full of people like us, newly unemployed and not quite sure what to do with themselves except watch. We managed to find our way through the crowd to a space along Connaught Road where the crush had eased off. We positioned ourselves on the pavement and watched like everyone else. The British were walking ten across with their heads down. One man looked up and a Japanese soldier punched him straight in the face and he looked down again. Blood dripped from his nose onto the pavement. A dog ran over from the crowd and sniffed the blood and the soldier shot it without hesitation. The dog’s corpse fell limply to the ground.

  There were two launches on the quay. The engines were running and smoke throttled out in a cloud over the sampans tied onto them at the back with towing ropes. The prisoners were herded up the gangplanks like goats, so many of them that I couldn’t even see the captain and Mrs Elsa and Mari any more.

  We didn’t wait to watch the boats leave. Instead, we went back to see what was left of our kongsi fong. As we walked I put a hand in my pocket where I’d kept one of Mari’s bonnets, the size of a bird’s nest, and a letter to you, Third Sister, that I’d taken to the post office that morning, only to be told it was closed until further notice.

  III

  Tommy:

  Captain Thomas Owen Jones Logbook

  Stanley Internment Camp Hong Kong Island 1942

  5th January

  Embark Victoria 11.00 am. Set sail 11.30. Hold course due south through Lamma Channel. Arrive Stanley 2.00 pm.

  6th January

  22º 13’ 00” N, 114º 12’ 00” E

  Stanley Peninsula: one fishing village of unknown population, one purpose-built prison for Hong Kong criminals, one preparatory school known as St Stephen’s College, and Stanley Fort. Enemy aliens – British, Dutch and American – to be interned in the college and some of the prison’s outlying buildings. Prison itself to be retained for detention of Chinese miscreants from the city. New barbed wire fences already in place around the denoted areas.

  Thirteen buildings to house over three thousand captured civilians. Assigned with Elsa to former Indian warders’ quarters overlooking Tytam Bay: ten people to a room of 14 x 10 feet, no bedding except our two wool blankets, which must be used as mattresses. Men and women to sleep separately. Shower, toilet and kitchen to be shared between at least six. Mosquitoes.

  Supper: rice stew and cabbage.

  7th January

  Turn to at 6.00 am. First job is to clear up, starting in the science labs, wrecked during fighting. (Soldiers and Red Cross nurses maimed, raped, killed by Japs, then burned. Ash heap with bones sticking out of it still smoking in the exercise yard: our men or theirs, we don’t know.) Broken glass, brown and blue, all over the grass outside. Inside: dried blood on walls and floors, mud and plaster, exploded sandbags, glass, military buttons. Toilets overflowing.

  Bodies – a few British, twenty-odd Canadians. Canadians still chubby with puppy fat, freckled to hell by the sun. We go through their pockets before we bury them. One of them has a letter folded up without an envelope. From your loving Mother. Bury it with him in the cemetery on the hill. Beyond the barbed wire a sea so bright it burns the blue out of the sky. We don’t know if they would do things differently in Canada, so we do things our way. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

  10th January

  Five days in we can still smell death, although the bodies have been buried. We forage through each building in turn, collecting any utensils we can find: knives, forks, tin cups, maybe enough for three hundred people. Oscar Campbell says it’s a start. When I ask him how he thinks it will finish he says that such questions are best avoided. Women and children and all that. I see him keeping a nervous eye on them, wondering if they are going to be more of a hindrance than a help. Elsa sits in the yard below our quarters holding Mari, staring into space. When I ask her what’s wrong, she says, ‘I should have left her with Lin. She would have been better off with Lin.’

  Campbell and I agree at least that there has to be some sort of order here. Organisation from the top down, a plan of action. He says we need to set up a committee, and asks me if I’d like to be on it. His superior attitude gets under my skin. I say yes. Mimi says if anyone should be in charge around here, it’s me.

  24th January

  Mari needs clean water to drink. I turn to at 5.00 am to start boiling it up so it will cool by the time she wakes. I watch as she sits on Elsa’s lap, sipping it off a spoon, crying for milk. There isn’t any. Elsa gives her more water. I walk around the camp with a few of my good clothes that Lin packed for me. I find a Dutch woman who managed to bring five tins of powdered milk with her for her toddler. She lets me have two of them in exchange for a pair of golfing trousers and a Norfolk jacket.

  First meeting of the Temporary Committee at 10.00 am. Officers elected by a show of hands, and blackboard and chalk used to note names and votes. A full and proper election to be put on once we are settled. Top of the list will be a housing committee, canteen committee and medical committee, plus entertainment (Campbell is of the opinion that distractions are necessary). We attach names to groups, start to establish boundaries.

  The Japs do likewise. They distribute a copy of regulations. We are informed that their treatment of us will be dependent on the treatment of Nipponese prisoners-of-war at the hands of the American, British and Dutch governments. We are to form self-cooperative unions in our quarters, each with its own department head. We are ordered not to leave the camp, look down over the prison grounds below, use the football ground, or pick flowers. If any internist should break these regulations, they will be punished according to military law.

  I ask Elsa if she wants to head up the entertainment committee, maybe get a theatre troupe going, raise people’s spirits, but she shakes her head.

  ‘Oscar Campbell said I could help set up a sanatorium,’ she says.

  ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea? What about the risk of infection for Mari?’

  ‘Nobody’s infected with anything, are they?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘It’s what I want to do.’

  ‘Fine, then. Go ahead and do it.’

  I’ll bet these niggles are going on all over the camp – couples arguing over inconsequential matters so we don’t have to face up to everything else. The future is a blank, and no number of committees is going to change that.

  17th February

  I walk around the inside perimeter of the fence every day, getting my bearings. Mimi likes to come with me most days. Safety in numbers, she says. The camp takes up the heel of the peninsula, separated from the rest of Hong Kong Island by the village. The pump house and fort lie on the other side, looking over the South China Sea. Our quarters are grouped around the prison proper, but separated from it by the wire. The only buildings that overlook the prison directly are the Japanese headquarters, which have been set up in the former superintendent’s house. I manage to get a surreptitious glimpse of the yard below one day,
when no one’s looking, and see a few Chinese cons walking aimlessly around the exercise yard.

  I’m starting to understand the lie of the land. Inside the wire are five bungalows with roofs shaped like coolie hats, designated A to E, occupied by high-up civil servants, doctors and the like who seem to have brought their hierarchy with them. Oscar Campbell is among their number; I can tell he feels slightly ashamed of this self-imposed privilege. Grouped around the Jap headquarters are several large stucco-and-tile accommodation blocks, which have been split into American, British and Dutch billets. Each nationality organises its own kitchens. The land is surrounded by Tytam Bay to the east, Tweed Bay to the south, and Stanley Bay to the west.

  On the western side of the peninsula, behind the old school buildings, are the school tennis courts, already overgrown. There must be something in my blood that makes my fingers tingle when I see the long grass on the courts, and the row of young lemon trees around one of its edges. The farmer in me. It’s what my father does. It’s what everyone does where I come from, once they get too old for their captain’s uniform. And it’s what I’ll do too, when I get out of this bastard place.

  The grass doesn’t have the drenched smell of the grass at home, but it’s good to stand in the feeble winter sun and feel it beneath my feet. I’m at the northern limit of the camp, so close to the village I can see the police station. Between the wire and Tytam Bay there are large warehouses – or godowns, as they call them over here – set close to the water at regular intervals. This is where the Japs keep their own supplies, impossible to break in without getting shot at. They are full to the brim with tins of spam, oatmeal, sugar tablets, meat broth. You can practically read the bloody labels through the windows from here.