Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  ‘You’ve heard of Dick’s burglary?’ Donald Wise asked.

  ‘I have been robbed four times in my thirty-five years of happy travail in the Orient as a resident barefoot reporter,’ Hughes declaimed in the rolling tones of an Australian Mr Micawber. ‘Twice in Tokyo between 1948 and 1950 by individual operators, once in Laos by a gang of two and now, with my wife in Hong Kong by a gang of three armed with a meat cleaver and heavy sticks. They were Cantonese thugs, evidently illegal immigrants from Canton, who threatened my dear Chinese wife with the cleaver and struck me with a stick, and then gagged and bound us in our humble Mid-Levels abode at 3.00 a.m.’

  Dick stuck a fork into the boeuf Wellington on his plate. Marsh Clark poured more wine.

  I said, ‘Donald, did anyone whistle “Colonel Bogey” when you were building that railway line over the River Kwai as they did in the film?’

  ‘I never heard it in Thailand. We hadn’t much breath left for whistling. But in Bangkok I was told that David Lean, the film’s director, became mad at the extras who played the prisoners – us – because they couldn’t march in time. Lean shouted at them, “For God’s sake, whistle a march to keep time to.” And a bloke called George Siegatz –’

  ‘George who, your Eminence?’

  ‘George Siegatz – an expert whistler – began to whistle “Colonel Bogey”, and a hit was born.’

  Dick said, ‘Donald’s piece on the River Kwai was right. The past is passed. Think about the past, yes. Talk about it. But never worry about it.’

  A photocopy of an old newspaper dated 19 February 1968, whose front-page headline read ‘US Throws More Troops into Battle’, hung in a frame on the wall opposite me. It was datelined Dong Ha, South Vietnam, the site of a mountain named Hamburger Hill because American generals fed their soldiers into the long battle to capture it as if they were stuffing meat into a sausage machine. Marsh’s eye followed mine to the front page on the wall, and he said, ‘I want to forget the whole goddam thing.’

  ‘You’re not likely to,’ Donald said.

  Marsh had just returned, he explained, from Cambodia, where he had visited the hidden headquarters of what was left of the Khmer Rouge army of Pol Pot and interviewed Khieu Samphan, the Khmer Rouge ‘prime minister’. Marsh was a member of an international committee of journalists who were attempting to trace Western reporters still missing in Cambodia. Over fifty of them had been killed in Vietnam and Cambodia – that was known – but these were missing. Now he took some sheets of paper from a briefcase. ‘Take a look. This is a copy of what I asked Khieu Samphan.’

  I read:

  Q. One final matter I want to bring up. It is a matter which is profoundly disturbing to many people, and that is the disappearance in Kampuchea [Cambodia] of twenty-one Western journalists without trace. I am sure you are aware of them. I have a list of their names here. What happened to these journalists? Are any of them still alive? I would like to set this matter at historic rest. There are worried wives and parents and friends.

  A. I would like to know the exact time this happened.

  Q. Here are the dates.

  Α. Ι don’t need the exact days, but a general idea.

  Q. In 1970 and 1971 in Svay Rieng Province, and on various routes leading out to the countryside from Phnom Penh. Twenty-one journalists disappeared and have never been heard from again.

  A. I can say to you that all the foreign journalists that were captured were released. We gave them all back.

  Q. Is it possible that any journalists were alive in Cambodia during your administration? You would surely have known about them?

  A. I am sure that if there were any foreign journalists in our hands, I would have been aware of that.

  Q. So you are not aware of any journalists alive?

  A. No, none.

  I ran my eye down the pages containing the names and a few details of the missing men:

  Marc Filloux: French citizen working for Associated Press. Last seen April 12, 1974, in Sithandone Province in Laos near the Cambodian border.

  Taizo Ichinosei: Japanese freelance photographer. Last seen November 22, 1972, near Angkor Wat, Cambodia.

  Wells Hangen: American journalist with NBC. Last seen on May 31, 1970, on way from Phnom Penh to Takeo.

  Kitomoharu Ishii: Japanese television photographer….

  Kieter Bellindorf: German television cameraman….

  Sean Flynn: American freelance working for Time as a photographer….

  Dana Stone: American photographer….

  The names went on and on. I had known Wells Hangen for years. Sean Flynn was the son of the film star Errol Flynn. Most journalists in Vietnam and Cambodia had known him and his friend, Dana Stone. They had vanished together.

  ‘So they’re all dead,’ I said.

  ‘They’re dead,’ Marsh said. ‘Plus the fifty more who were verified. The wounded are extra.’

  There was a pause. Then Dick swept up his glass. ‘The wine that cheers, your Graces?’ he cried. ‘It’s an evil world, and it’s not going to get any better. Christ in hell, no.’

  *

  I had other, happier, if more trivial, matters to mention to Hughes. Dick was one of the founders in Tokyo in 1948 of the Baritsu Chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars, the worldwide fraternity of readers of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories who staunchly profess to believe that the great detective actually trod this earth. ‘Holmes, of course, is alive and well and still living in Sussex, although by now, I’m afraid, he must be a hundred and twenty-six years old,’ he said after our lunch.

  I broke to him my disconcerting news from the Andamans that Watson had erred in his chronicle of the murder of Bartholomew Sholto at Pondicherry Lodge. Further, he had compounded the slip in his account of the subsequent capture of Jonathan Small and the little Andaman ‘hell-hound’, Tonga, on the Thames between Barking Level and Plumstead Marshes.

  Hughes took the news well, only asking mildly, ‘Are you personally convinced that blowpipes and darts never existed in the Andaman forests? It was always spears, bows and arrows?’

  Reluctantly I told him that I had been able to find no evidence of blowpipes and darts. He shook his head sadly. ‘Watson’s slip-up, I imagine. Certainly not Holmes’s.’

  But what about the presence of the white convict Small in the Andaman penal colony around the time of the Indian Mutiny? I had to inform Dick that there seemed to be no record establishing that a European convict had ever been sent there, much less one with a wooden leg. Again he shook his head dolefully. ‘But the records on that score could be incomplete, don’t you think?’

  I had to admit that they could be. Though they would attract attention today, wooden legs would have been hardly worth mentioning in the aftermath of the Mutiny.

  ‘And breakwaters? Small told Holmes that the convicts spent a lot of their time building breakwaters in the Andamans. Are there any there?’

  I was glad to be able to assure him that there were several.

  *

  Dick Hughes had mentioned that he believed illegal immigrants from Canton had bound and robbed his wife and himself in the middle of the night. From time to time I had read newspaper stories about how Chinese men and women risked their lives in waters full of sharks in trying to swim to Hong Kong from the coast of the communist mainland.

  Understandably, the Hong Kong newspapers were obsessed with the problem; five hundred Chinese were said to be infiltrating into the overcrowded little colony every day. ‘Send Back All the I.I.s’, a front-page headline in the Star said on the day I arrived. A Chinese member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council proposed new laws to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants, to stop their obtaining identity cards, and to crack down on landlords renting any premises to them. ‘News of these tough measures would soon spread across the border and should help reduce this unlawful exodus at its source,’ he said. But clearly the bright lights of Hong Kong, reflecting off the clouds and easily visible from the mainland, would continue t
o tempt people into these dangerous waters.

  Donald Wise knew an assistant commissioner of the Hong Kong police who was directly involved with the problem of illegal Chinese immigrants, and I made an appointment to see him.

  About 178,000 immigrants crossed into Hong Kong every year, he said, and of these 110,000 came illegally. Another 90,000 were caught and promptly sent back to China. It was like the children’s game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, he explained. If an illegal entrant was clever enough to sneak past all the obstacles – sea searches, army and police patrols, barbed-wire fences, dogs, sharks, treacherous currents – and reach the sanctuary of the home of a relative already living in the colony, he was ‘home’; he could apply for and would be granted an identity card, and henceforth could remain in Hong Kong legally. The pavement outside the immigration office was often blocked for a hundred yards or so with men and women who had made it ‘home’ lining up for their identity cards; they were the lucky ones who could smile and be patient now. But an average of 130 unlucky ones were caught every day.

  ‘They swim over?’

  ‘The swimmers are the young ones – fifteen to twenty-nine years old. Farmers or fishermen. The family groups come by sea in boats – men, women, small children. It’s the swimmers, of course, who are taken by sharks, but that doesn’t stop them trying. I don’t think our job of trying to keep them out will be redundant for some time – perhaps not until conditions in China are the same as they are here.’

  The assistant commissioner’s walls displayed a rash of maps and charts. ‘It’s a three-hundred-sixty-degree problem. A hundred and twenty miles of sea and twenty miles of land to patrol.’

  I pointed to the pimple labelled Macao, the Portuguese smaller Hong Kong a little further down the coast.

  ‘Oh, Macao,’ the policeman said sadly. ‘Smuggling illegal immigrants from China to Macao to Hong Kong is big money there. The syndicates [the Chinese tongs] actually sell tickets for places in their launches, “snake boats” and speedboats. They are difficult to catch – faster than ours, sometimes.’

  Last year the Hong Kong marine police had picked up 451 bodies out of Deep Bay at the mouth of the Pearl river, which runs up to the port of Canton. ‘The Chinese are born gamblers,’ the assistant commissioner said sadly.

  Forty

  A few nights later, when I reached the marine police’s illegal immigrant patrol depot, the Chinese crew of the Special Boat Unit (SBU) I had been permitted to accompany were taking their evening meal of pork, fish, rice and beer. After eating, they pulled on camouflage jackets and army-style boots, and looped lanyards with whistles over their shaven necks and into their breast pockets.

  Mark Jones, their commander, a blond British officer hardly more than a boy, said, ‘Since we have Mr Young with us tonight, we want to catch as many I.I.s as possible, so he can see how active SBU is. Also, he’s writing a book, so you may become famous as well.’ At this the crew clapped and cheered.

  ‘Another thing, there are more sampans around now carrying hidden I.I.s, so we want to look out for them, too.’

  Near Queen Elizabeth’s portrait, a notice on the wall stated: ‘From 3rd Nov. 1979 to 26th Nov. 1979, 1,000 I.I.s Arrested. Best total for a night – 80 I.I.s.’

  A young Chinese sergeant tugged on a cap with a long peak, and called, ‘Ready?’

  I asked Jones, ‘Do many journalists come out with you?’

  ‘No, very few. Maybe they don’t like the wet.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think journalists are scared of water.’

  The crew gathered up Sterling sub-machine-guns and gas grenades (‘We don’t use those,’ said Jones) and riot batons (‘They’re handy sometimes’).

  Down at the pier a grey launch with ‘Police 31’ on her side was ready to put to sea, her radar arm already turning, the blue police light glowing at her masthead. The crew carried aboard chopsticks, rice, tea, a boathook, a Verey pistol, blankets, plastic pillows, and a spare Zodiac outboard engine. The big launch acted as the mother ship for four Zodiac motor dinghies, and their crews revved their engines, testing them.

  Finally Mark Jones said, ‘Cast off.’ It was a dismal evening with a grey sea and sky. The islands of Lantau and Ma Wan were outlines of warship-grey in a deep haze. ‘Not a bad night for I.I.s,’ said Jones. ‘They like a bit of mist.’ He might have been talking of migrating geese or a rare species of owl.

  *

  Our little convoy began to make its way west. At the point of the New Territories we would swing north and head for the white beacon in Hau Hoi Wan, or Deep Bay, whose long northern Chinese shore swept around like the wing of a predatory bird. The mother launch would tie up at the beacon, and the little Zodiacs would start beating about in the darkness of the bay as eagerly as beagles casting for a scent.

  Our armament, I noticed, included a .50 calibre Browning on the bows and at least two twelve-bore pump guns. I asked Mark Jones about the rules of the game on this sensitive edge of China. ‘We have pistols galore,’ he said. ‘.38s. We also have hand flares. You can tell a sampan, “Stop or we fire,” but in no circumstances can you really fire – not unless they open fire first. We throw a flare or two at them, and they either stop or move faster to try to reach shore. Then it becomes a race.’

  Swimmers who drowned imposed a grisly problem I hadn’t considered, for the bodies had to be picked up. Mark Jones said, ‘One in every hundred drowns, and the corpses lie around for months. They sink, you see, and surface again after two or three days. The stink is terrific. Of course, they attract sharks. But they might float around to the Hong Kong beaches, and people wouldn’t want to see these hideous, bloated bodies, would they? So we have to haul them into our launch. It’s not really our work, and the stink can take three or four days to get rid of, but someone has to do it. Unfortunately, we can’t stuff them into plastic bags. Our police constables hate to touch a dead body. They’re a very superstitious lot, you know – spirits and all that – so I have to disentangle the corpses or arrange them for their photographs to be taken. We get them out of the water by putting a sack and two slings under them and hauling them up, but sometimes an arm or leg slips out. It’s really very hard on our boys because, whatever we do, sometimes it’s impossible to get the bodies out of the water without touching them. Our crews are all volunteers, by the way.’

  ‘I should think they must be.’

  The night crept by. The mist cleared, but it became increasingly cold after midnight, and the policemen began rubbing their hands together. I went below and pulled on my anorak, the one Ali had demanded in very different circumstances. I hadn’t worn it since, and when I put my hand in a pocket I found a piece of paper with crazy Jan’s address on it. A Chinese corporal brought biscuits and a mug of coffee, and the shift drank it on deck as the generator thudded away. When the shifts changed, the men going off duty went below to the forward cabin, discarded their outer clothing and, in T-shirts and underpants, swung short, white, muscular legs into sleeping bags, zipped up the flaps and fell asleep at once.

  I imagined the illegal immigrants paddling slowly across the bay, their hearts racing, chilled from head to foot, led on, like men in a dream, by the lights of Hong Kong reflected on the clouds and the hope of a better life. They had whispered their plans to each other night after night for months, waiting for the high tide, the low moon, the favourable horoscope; now they inched towards us where we waited under the flashing beacon and the crews in the Zodiacs raked the water with their night glasses.

  A few minutes later one of the rubber Zodiacs put-putted up, and by the beacon’s light I could see its crew of three policemen and five illegal immigrants crouching in the bottom of the Zodiac like the wise monkeys, their hands on their heads.

  Hauled on board the gently rolling launch, the four men and one young woman squatted again, staring at the deck between their knees as if they’d lost something there. Expressionless and unresisting, one by one they were made to stand, and the water of Deep Bay dripped fro
m their dark-blue overall jackets and pants. A policeman removed their belts and handed them blankets; then they were guided below, the men to a shower room the size of a big cupboard, the girl to the toilet.

  There was no rough stuff; no one even pushed them. When the questioning started, it was informal, a murmured conversation more than an interrogation. The oldest of the men became spokesman; the youngest listened and tried to smile; the other two, more rustic than their comrades, hung their heads. The single bulb shone on their spiky cropped hair, their high russet cheekbones and wide peasant hands.

  Jones said to his Chinese sergeant, ‘Okay, ask them,’ then translated the Cantonese for me.

  ‘Why do you want to come to Hong Kong?’

  ‘To earn some money.’

  ‘What are your jobs in China?’

  ‘Small farmers. We are very poor.’

  ‘How long have you been in the water?’

  ‘Two hours. Since sunset.’

  ‘Why did you come at this time?’

  ‘It’s high tide and there’s a little mist.’

  ‘Did they live in Po On district (the border district of Kwangtung, or Guandong, province)?’

  No; they came from far away, from outside Kwangtung province even. A month’s walk away.

  How had they avoided arrest by Chinese soldiers on the way?

  Many soldiers had gone to fight the Vietnamese, so there were far fewer to patrol this border now.

  ‘Is this the first time you’ve tried to escape?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you try again?’

  ‘No.’ But the sergeant grinned at me and said, ‘I don’t believe. I see one man come back seven times. Try and try again.’

  I asked what would happen to them when they were sent back over the border to China the next morning. The sergeant translated this and their answer: ‘A fine of two hundred Hong Kong dollars [twenty pounds] and, if we cannot pay, three months in detention.’