by John Harris
‘Yes, tonight. If that’s the next available flight.’ I pulled out a wad of notes.
‘Cash!’
‘Yep.’
Rick and I followed her into the shop and pulled out all the money from our pockets, counting it out on her desk, while she went to one side to put the kettle on. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said, spooning some coffee granules into a cup, ‘I haven’t even opened the safe yet, and... ’ she turned and saw the money. ‘Umm, OK then.’
It broke my heart to hand over that money. The cost of the ticket left me with a hundred dollars. ‘One hundred dollars,’ I said to Rick as we left the agent, holding up the remaining cash in one hand and a ticket voucher in the other. ‘After five months ofivery hard work that’s all I’ve got to show for it.’
‘But we’re heading to Hong Kong, John; the land of milk and honey.’ Rick spread his arms wide. ‘In a month’s time you and me’ll be millionaires!’
‘You said that in Thailand.’ I quickly stuffed the money back into my pocket, afraid that it might vanish or blow away in the breeze, ‘And look what happened to us there!’
‘This is different.’ He held his plane ticket coupon up to the sky, angling it this way and that to catch the light. ‘Hong Kong’s just waiting for people like us.’
‘Poor people you mean?’
‘Entrepreneurs.’
We both laughed, and I asked, ‘What about Chinese girls, what d’you think they’ll be like?’
‘Huh. Only the most beautiful women in the world, everyone knows that. You’ve seen those Bruce Lee films haven’t you? A bit old now, but the birds are fantastic.’ He put the coupon methodically into his pocket, trying not to fold or dent the edges, and winked. ‘Suzie Wong and all that stuff. All walking about in those long sexy silk dresses.’
‘Ooh, yeah: the harbour full of junks, bamboo houses, rickshaws... I remember the books we had in geography class at school, they always showed pictures of Hong Kong with British policemen and Union Jacks flying every where. It looked pretty good.’
‘You liked India, well Hong Kong is like that, only with a little more law and order. You know: things work properly, buses run on time, but it’s still Asia.’
We continued walking and talking, and went down to the harbour to get a final, lasting impression of Australia. Our flight wasn’t due to depart until midnight so we spent the rest of that day wandering around the Opera House, chatting and dreaming about being seduced by dozens of Chinese girls as soon as we stepped off the plane in Hong Kong. We were so consumed by our thoughts, and the talk of the wonders that awaited us, that when, months later, someone asked me what the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House were like, I couldn’t recall ever having seen them.
TWO
‘Sir. Excuse me sir.’ Rick looked away from the window with a start. ‘Would you put your seat belt on please sir, we’ll be landing shortly.’ The pretty Chinese stewardess smiled and leaned across me, pressing a button on Rick’s armrest, bringing his seat upright and went away.
The plane banked gently on our side and we both fought to get our faces up against the plastic window. ‘Fooking hell.’
‘What can you see?’ I asked eagerly, trying to look over his shoulder.
The back of his head shook. ‘Buildings. Really horrible buildings.’ He turned away from the window and stared at me. ‘Is this a direct flight?’
‘Let me see.’ We changed seats. The early morning sun was shining its dull, polluted rays on to what looked like a ten-storey shanty town. Rust-stained concrete tenement-style blocks of flats stretched as far as I could see, in a wretched mass. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen in school textbooks of Hiroshima after the atom bomb had been dropped, where the buildings on the outskirts of the city had just about remained standing. I couldn’t see any people, but as we descended it was possible to make out the lines of washing, row after row strung like dirty bunting on poles from every window. It looked as though a squadron of aircraft had flown over the city and carpet-bombed it with millions of tons of laundry.
‘This can’t be Hong Kong,’ I said incredulously, still glued to the scene below. ‘Where are all the bamboo houses, the junks?’
Behind me Rick was talking to a stewardess. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘is this a direct flight to Hong Kong, or are we going via somewhere else?’
She seemed a bit taken back by the stupidity of the question. ‘We’re landing in Hong Kong now, sir,’ I heard her say assertively. ‘Please fasten your seat belt.’
Rick and I turned to each other at exactly the same time and shrugged. ‘This is it!’
Neither of us spoke until we cleared customs and went outside to catch the bus into town, we were so shell shocked by the overwhelming oppressiveness of the drab concrete cityscape. Rick wiped a trickle of sweat onto his T-shirt as we boarded the air conditioned bus. ‘Jesus, it’s fooking hot. And humid. Wow!’
‘Fi’e dollar!’ The bus driver looked angry and stabbed the money slot with his finger. ‘More fi’e dollar.’ I put in another five dollar coin in and he brushed me away aggressively with his hand.
‘Welcome to Hong Kong,’ I mumbled, and put my bag on a rack. We were still in Asia, weren’t we?
The bus doors slid shut with a gasp of hydraulics and we moved off. A woman’s recorded voice immediately welcomed us to Hong Kong in three languages (no doubt designed to dispel any lingering worries tourists may have that they had in fact landed in the wrong place). The English I understood, the second one sounded very aggressive, and the third, Mandarin, sounded like a record playing backwards. Every five minutes along the route the driver pushed a button and the voice started again, and every time we had to stifle our laughter at the Mandarin segment.
The streets were jam-packed with people to the point where there was no longer any space on the pavement and they were two or three abreast on the road. Cars, trucks and buses revved up clouds of black diesel fumes that mixed with the hot sticky air and hung like a dead weight. Young pedestrians dressed immaculately (and inappropriately for the suffocating heat) in Western-style suits held tissues over their mouths to avoid being choked under the blanket, while old men hanging around on street corners coughed up small blobs of yellow phlegm which they projected, like spoonfuls of mayonnaise, onto over-filled rubbish bins.
Nobody, I noticed, walked with a normal gait; everyone shuffled in little pigeon-steps, unable to get into a proper stride. They were like old lags whose legs have been in prison irons for so many years that, even when released they still can’t get used to stretching them. I suppose years of walking along while being sandwiched between two people has much the same effect.
In amongst the boiling hot traffic, a butcher wound his way around the stationary vehicles, pushing a trolley that was loaded high with plucked chickens. The small trolley wheels hit a pothole and one of the wobbling poultry fell off onto the road. As he stooped to pick it up, the truck in front edged forward, unleashing its exhaust right onto the meat. He put the stray bird back on with the others and turned off into a nearby restaurant.
At another butcher-shop, a man was blow-torching a dead pig. The carcass was hung up from a beam while the man circled it with the flame, blasting off the hairs in a blizzard of sparks. All these first impression we witnessed from the comfort of our air-con bus, like watching a film on a giant TV screen.
The two Scottish girls at the orchard had given us the names of a few guest houses, or at least the building that housed them, and half an hour later we jumped from the bus at what looked like the correct stop.
I checked the name of the road on the map against the one on the street sign, and we turned the corner into the busy main street, joining the flow of bodies. To stop meant becoming a boulder in the fast flowing river; thousands of people slammed into us and piled up, or slid either side in the slipstream and carried on out to sea.
‘Should be around here somewhere.’ A droplet of sweat splashed onto the sheet of paper, causing the ink to run. I wiped it off an
d lost half of the word. ‘Chungking Mansions,’ I said as soon as I noticed the decrepit block beside us, and pointed. ‘This looks like it.’
‘Here?’ Rick exclaimed.
I nodded. ‘That’s what the girls wrote: "Chungking Mansions".’
There was a huge crowd on the steps leading up to the entrance, all pushing and shoving to see into the window of the adjacent shop. I pushed through the crowd to see what was so interesting and found that it was displaying the latest mobile phones. The look on the faces of the people in the crowd was one of complete and utter longing; the same way children look into a pet shop window at a cute puppy. We pushed past them into the entrance of the building and found ourselves in an old, mixed-use shopping arcade. We were instantly pounced upon by dozens of Indians, offering everything from tailored suits to ‘the best Punjabi food in town’. Amongst other things we were also offered accommodation.
‘Use stairs,’ said the Indian boy, pulling me by the hand into a dimly lit stairwell, ‘lift no good, wait one hour, many people.’
‘What floor is your guest house on?’
He coughed out a word that sounded suspiciously like fifteen.
‘Fifteen!’ Rick shouted, ‘You’re kidding?’
‘Early, sir, not too hot. Have shared shower in hotel for your washing selves.’
We slogged and panted our way up to the top floor of the building, weaving our way along open corridors piled to the ceiling with rotting rubbish and went into his ‘hotel’. Basically it was a private flat that had been sub-divided into dormitories: one for females and two for males. The one we were shown to was twelve feet by six and had eight beds (four bunks) crammed into it. When the door was opened it banged against the foot of the nearest bunk, waking the occupant, and to get between the two rows of beds I had to turn sideways. I had to hold my nose; the smell of stale sweat and damp socks was so overpowering. Rick looked crestfallen, and dropped his bag onto the floor, nearly crushing a skinny cat that was licking at a stain. We looked at each other in despair before shaking our heads and walking out to find another.
The Indian boy wanted to show us to another hotel that belonged to his brother, so we went along to that one but it was even worse. After that it was the turn of his uncle’s place on the seventh floor. It turned out to be nothing more than a bed in the corner of a rat-infested kitchen, and then we went to his friend’s special rooms (‘Shh, illegal, no tell other people!’), but that was just a large room full of Pakistani refugees and, though they seemed very welcoming, we declined.
Another hour or so went by in which we looked at every other illegal guest house in that building and the building next door, before we swallowed our pride and returned to the first one we had been shown.
‘We’ll get used to it,’ I squeaked through pinched nostrils. ‘We only need to sleep here, we’ll spend the rest of the day out looking for work.’
‘Which one do you want,’ Rick asked, sliding between the metal frames of the bunks, ‘top or bottom?’
‘Don’t mind.’
He threw his bag onto the bottom bed and sat down with a huff. My bed was so close to a pipe that ran across the ceiling that I couldn’t sit up, and to get onto the bed I had to climb up and wriggle sideways.
‘"Quaint bamboo houses. Rickshaws. Junks".’ I slithered to the edge of the bed and hung my head over, ‘I hope you’re right about the girls.’
THREE
To save money, for the first few weeks we lived entirely on McDonald’s hamburgers for breakfast, lunch and dinner; although there are places where one can get inexpensive bowls of noodles, I didn’t discover them until much later. Our days were usually taken up scanning the newspapers for jobs and generally mooching about doing anything to keep us out of the guest house until as late as possible. At night we would walk down to the harbour, look out at the lights of Hong Kong island and dream. ‘Some day,’ Rick would say to me, majestically sweeping his hand over the scene, ‘all this’ll be yours,’ and then burst out laughing.
Two weeks later, we were both almost out of money and, although we knew it was wrong, we decided to cheer ourselves up by going into a pub for a drink. We couldn’t afford it, but so what?
The night was spent under the influence of alcohol, blissfully ignoring our predicament, and at about three o’clock in the morning we staggered back to our hovel. The lift was empty for once and we were soon walking along the rat-infested, concrete walkway back to the room. We were so drunk that neither of us bothered to put our trousers up on the bed with our bags, where we usually kept our belongings for safety reasons, and instead just threw them on the floor.
The next day when we awoke, Rick’s passport had been stolen. Not a big deal really, but we phoned the police nonetheless to report the incident, and to see what could be done to get it back.
‘Please, sirs,’ the India guest house owner pleaded, ‘no need to phone police.’
‘Really,’ I said evenly, standing in the corridor with the phone in one hand, ‘and why not?’
He babbled something in my ear about his own security guard, who was usually asleep on the hallway floor, but I’d already started to speak to the policeman on the other end and brushed him away with my hand. After giving my name and that of the guest house, the inspector said they’d be there in five minutes.
One minute later the front doorbell rang and I opened it to twelve policemen. They came in, all twelve in uniform, and stood in the narrow corridor; twelve pens in twelve hands poised over twelve notepads. The sergeant at the front asked Rick what had happened, putting his hand across the Indian’s mouth to stop him from speaking.
‘My passport’s been stolen,’ Rick replied.
‘Who by?’ His English was reasonable but the idiocy of the question made Rick ask for a repeat. ‘Who stole it?’ the policeman said again.
‘How should I know who stole it? We went out last night, and when I woke up this morning it was gone.’
The officer dropped his hand from the Indian’s mouth to take a note but immediately replaced it when he started babbling again. ‘When you first notice it was missing?’
‘This morning, at about ten o’clock.’
There was moment’s silence as the policemen thought of his next question. If his head had been made of glass I could have seen the cogs slowly turning as his brain tried to engage his voicebox. ‘So, you have no passport?’
‘Yep, that’s about the size of it. Been stolen.’ Rick shifted his weight, hands on hips. ‘The passport, nothing else.’
‘Can you show me your ID card please, sir?’
‘ID card? I don’t have one, I’m only a tourist.’
The policeman straightened, as though suddenly having been stuck with a great idea, and took a step forward. ‘So, you have no passport and no ID?’ His chin rose, having finally got to the bottom of the crime, and he said, ‘Do you know it is an offence to enter Hong Kong without valid passport or ID, sir?’
Rick shrugged. ‘I dare say it is, but my passport has been stolen, I had it last night, and this morning when I woke up it was gone. Stolen.’
The sergeant cleared his throat. ‘It is an offence under the basic law of this territory to enter without valid travel documents,’ he repeated and nodded self-satisfactorily to his men.
Rick’s mouth opened. I could see that he was about to explode so I stepped in. The officer immediately put his hand in front of me. ‘Do you have a passport, sir?’
‘Of course I have,’ I said, looking down at his hand on my chest. ‘How d’you think I managed to get into the country?’
‘Please show it to me.’ He dropped his arm and turned back to Rick. ‘You must come with us to the police station. Anything you say–’
‘Now hold on,’ I said, putting both hands up as though surrendering, ‘this is going too–’
‘Your friend is in Hong Kong without any form of ID and is therefore committing a crime.’
‘How can he be? I phoned you, remember? If we wanted to
break the law I wouldn’t tell the police would I?’
He was unfazed. ‘Can I see your passport please, sir?’
And so it went on like this for nearly an hour; all of us packed into that tiny corridor. They demanded to inspect the scene of the crime, so all of us tried to go for the world record for the number of human beings in a dormitory. It was like a scene from the Keystone Cops. Rick was eventually taken away to the police station for being an illegal immigrant, but returned three hours later without being charged. He had told them that his father was a friend of the governor, and that a distant relative, whose name he couldn’t recall but who was only a phone call away, was an ex-commissioner of the Hong Kong police. The news had shaken them by the boots.
‘They actually believed you?’ I asked as he sat down on the bunk, exhausted. ‘They’re more stupid than I took them for.’
‘I had to say something, otherwise those thick bastards would’ve charged me.’ He stretched out on the bed with a sigh. ‘Even I can’t believe they fell for it, but they let me out.’
‘Let you out? They shouldn’t have taken you in there to begin with.’
‘I’ll tell you what, though, John, I’m glad I did go in. I met this Scottish guy in there... ’ he trailed off as though thinking back, and began to laugh. ‘What day is it today?’
I leaned across to the other bed and picked up the copy of the South China Morning Post that was lying there, and checked the date. ‘Thursday,’ I said, throwing it back, ‘why?’
‘Brilliant.’
‘What is?’
He sat up. ‘Saturday night there’s a party and you and me are invited.’
‘Party?’
‘Not too busy are you?’
I shrugged.
‘Believe me, you want to go to this party. The guy I’ve just been speaking to in the police station has organised some security for a party on Saturday night. But this is no ordinary party, John, this one’s in the governor’s residence.’
My mind went back to an article in the previous week’s newspaper, in which there’d been complaints about the disuse of such a large property since the hand over of Hong Kong to China. The Chinese were apparently unwilling to use the colonial residence, supposedly because of bad feng shui, but it still didn’t quite follow why there would be a party in the house. ‘What’s the party for?’ I said with renewed interest, swinging my legs over the side of the bed.