by Gavin Young
I peeped through a skylight at the girl in the lavatory. She looked cold and miserable; standing in a corner, she wrapped her arms around her body and looked close to weeping. The police crew of the Zodiac had dropped on the launch’s deck the waterlogged mattress the five escapers had turned into a makeshift raft by draping it over a ring of small inflated plastic cushions. This had been their magic carpet to a new life. The sergeant noted the men’s ages: fifty, thirty-one, thirty and twenty; the girl was twenty-three.
Jones looked at his watch. ‘Only one hour gone and we’ve bagged five already,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Give them some coffee.’
At two thirty we picked up two more men and two women. For all their desperate paddling, a current had carried them almost up to the mother launch. They floated on a similar sort of raft to the first group, but, before encountering the current, they had made good progress, propelling themselves with home-made wooden paddles like Ping-Pong bats. Dripping and shivering on the launch’s deck, their adventure over, one of them blurted out bitterly that three months of planning and concealment had been wasted. A search of the pockets of their blue peasants’ clothes turned up a piece of paper with the address and telephone number of one man’s relatives in Hong Kong – this would have been ‘home’ in his game of Grandmother’s Footsteps – a small jar of Tiger Balm balsam (rubbed into the skin, it produces a warm glow), two or three boiled sweets and a tiny penknife. One of the men had long delicate hands; the other and the two women were evidently farmers. The men’s cheeks were reddish and weather-worn, with wisps of moustache at the corners of their mouths. They joined the four prisoners in the shower, and the two women were ushered into the toilet. They glanced impassively at the single girl already there, but didn’t speak to her, just as the newly arrived men had said nothing to their countrymen in the shower. They all seemed stunned by their failure.
A policeman said to me, ‘Please be seated, sir,’ and handed me a bowl of cold noodles he had ladled from a saucepan. Other crew members handed bowls and chopsticks to the prisoners, but after gingerly tasting the noodles they shyly poured them back into the saucepan.
‘They don’t like noodle,’ a policeman explained. ‘They like rice. Maybe eat before they start.’ These peasants were relatively plump. The women, I saw, were even smiling, showing a lot of teeth as they poured the noodles back. Later, they drank the hot coffee eagerly. They needed something to warm them. I took a swig from my flask of whisky.
Mark Jones said, ‘Like to come with me in a Zodiac? Just to take a scout round the bay?’
The water was a little choppy by now, but we set off at speed towards a dark shape like a camel’s back on the skyline. ‘That’s China,’ Jones said, opening the throttle. He pointed at a cluster of distant lights high in the sky. ‘That’s Chinese army headquarters there.’
‘Don’t go too near,’ I said, and he laughed.
We circled the bay far from the beacon. The mother launch disappeared in the darkness behind us and, ahead, other lights appeared: ships at anchor, fishing boats, houses on the China shore. Rubbery and light, the Zodiac bounced and slapped on the surface of the water, and our engine’s roar was so loud that it seemed they must hear us in Canton – not that it mattered, because the Chinese knew and approved of these patrols; otherwise they would hardly have been effective. The Chinese had no objection to the repatriation of their escaping compatriots. Still, Jones said, a Royal Navy hovercraft had shot around a headland and collided with a Chinese gunboat, and the Chinese had drawn guns and threatened to shoot the British crew. Apologies had had to be made swiftly and at high level ashore before they returned the hovercraft, its crew unharmed. ‘But that doesn’t happen more than once in a blue moon, if then.’
As Jones was saying this, the Zodiac’s engine died. ‘Soon get it going again,’ he said, wrenching at it. But it refused to start, no matter how hard he tugged at the starting line and blew down the fuelpipes. We bobbed helplessly on the cold water under the eyes and ears of the Chinese army – we were a mile or two from the coast, according to Jones, but it seemed much nearer than that – and the tide and wind, now quite strong from the east, were edging us closer. With his blond head still bent over the useless engine, Jones muttered, ‘Ironic if we have to go ashore on the Chinese mainland and ask them, “Please, can we go back through your territory?” I’m not at all sure they’d do that. They don’t mind us fooling about out here in the bay, but anyone landing….’
I thought, My journey ends in Canton, but I hadn’t thought of completing the final stage overland and in chains.
Jones had the radio going, and we could hear his sergeant’s voice, as remote as Mars. The other Zodiacs would have a tough time finding us – we made a very low profile in the choppy sea – unless we could give them a fairly accurate idea of our position. We were about five miles from the beacon, too far to show up on the radar screen.
‘Turn your searchlight and swing it about. When I say “Stop,” that will mean it’s pointing dead at us,’ Jones said into the radio, enunciating every word with the exaggerated care of an elocution teacher. Then he would revert to Cantonese.
It took time for the sergeant to respond to Jones’s cries of ‘Left’ or ‘Right’. ‘No, no, forty degrees right; that’s left. Your army right, for heaven’s sake.’ Finally, when we seemed far too near the shore of Kwangtung province of the People’s Republic of China, the searchlight’s beam pointed directly at us, and two Zodiacs raced down its line while Jones stood up flashing his torch.
There was more coffee and an extra nip of whisky on the launch’s deck, and a considerable feeling of relief. During the hour and a half we had been away the operation had continued, and the total of captured I.I.s had risen to twelve. The constables were satisfied with their night’s work.
When a cold, pale sun came up, I saw the camel’s back from which lights had glowed down in the night like suspicious eyes. Now Chinese army headquarters showed nothing but wireless masts and a few white buildings in a cockscomb of trees. The shore of Kwangtung looked impassive and disdainful.
Casting off from the beacon, we moved westwards towards the higher, denser hills of Hong Kong’s New Territories still veiled in mist. A junk dipped by, and a group of high-sterned Chinese trawlers stood motionless in the shallow, deep-brown water of the bay, awnings over their decks, anchors dangling from their bows and single masts pointing to the grey sky.
I couldn’t resist a last look through the skylight at the drooping figures in the shower. They stood or crouched in silence; two or three leaned together, propping each other up with arms on each other’s shoulders, their eyes closed. Two of the more recent arrivals, young men, were naked except for thin cotton undershorts, and the arched muscles of their bare backs trembled from nerves or the cold.
From the moment the launch reached its pier, these I.I.s would move onto the smooth, impersonal conveyor belt of official routine. Shore-based police would take charge of them; they would be linked to each other by simple plastic slip-catch loops, be taken to a police documentation centre, eat a hot meal and then be allowed a rest.
Soon trucks would carry them to the Man Kam To bridge, the only road crossing-point to China, One by one the trucks would be driven across the bridge, and near a roadside clump of trees the men and women in them would be told to get out. Still linked by the plastic thongs on their wrists, they would clamber awkwardly over the tailboards of the waiting vehicles of the Chinese government; sitting in these, they would stare at the empty trucks driving away back to Hong Kong. Would they be thinking of their ordeal in the cold waters of the bay, of the still unrung telephone number of the relatives in Hong Kong, of the eldorados of America and Europe? And how many under the burden of their despair would already be plotting their next attempt?
*
The assistant commissioner of police in Hong Kong had spoken about the money the Chinese syndicates – and even the Chinese communist officials on the mainland – made out of smugglin
g I.I.s across to Macao and then to Hong Kong.
I travelled to Macao with Donald Wise on the motor vessel Nam Shan, which shuttled daily back and forth through the western islands from the Hong Kong ferry wharf. We sat in a row of comfortable, adjustable seats in a wide cabin full of Chinese families eagerly watching the flickering images on a television set in the wall. Their bundles and baskets were stacked around their feet, and children ran up and down the aisles.
The Nam Shan had a mah-jongg room, as well as a cabin where Chinese youths in cardigans played the one-armed bandits. Further forward, there was a light, glass-sided dining room where polite Chinese waiters in black bow ties dispensed fish chowder and shrimps with oyster sauce under tasselled Chinese lanterns. There was also a bar, and in it I found one of the ship’s engineers sucking up a pint of Guinness through toothless gums. Chinese singing mewed from a radio.
As we passed through the crowded western anchorage, hovercraft swished by between the two white fans of their bow waves. Chinese tourist ships lay at anchor. The steep bow of the Hupeh under Stonecutters Island immediately caught my eye – she was easy to recognize and I waved to her. And then we were moving between islands with such a close resemblance to Scotland and Wales that I expected to see sheep grazing on their slopes.
Nearer Macao, trawlers and junks recalled what Mark Jones had told me, ‘The syndicates run I.I.s in by junks, a very good business. Twenty knots to our nine or ten.’
‘What if you catch a sampan full of I.I.s?’
‘There are pretty stiff penalties: fines, confiscation of boats, a seven-year jail sentence.’
Fourteen hundred Hong Kong policemen, twelve hundred British troops, forty-seven vessels supported by two hovercrafts and a squadron of helicopters – a lot of adults could play this game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. Still, over one hundred thousand I.I.s sneaked ‘home’ – ‘home’ being a ramshackle, overcrowded tenement in Kowloon. I watched a sampan bustling by and wondered if her blank sides concealed cowering figures among the bales of dried fish in her hold.
*
Though it is a beautiful old city, with its location on the lip of China adding a pleasant extra touch of glamour, a night and a day in Macao were enough for me. After seven months I was impatient for Canton, the end of the line. Also, the night outing with the marine police and the sight of those bedraggled fugitives had soured my attitude toward pleasure domes like the casino of the Lisboa Hotel.
The Lisboa was a very grand pleasure dome indeed, like a wedding cake baked by a chef with a penchant for kitsch. All that held me there was the sight of old Chinese men and women thrusting piles of banknotes onto the gaming tables. The men scuttled about on bowed legs, coughing angrily at one another, while the women’s button eyes gleamed as they followed the motions of the wheels, the dice and the croupiers’ hands over the green baize.
On the edge of China it was strange to see notices saying, PARQUE DE DIVERSÃO and CAFÉ NOITE Ε DIA and to read on restaurant menus dishes like Loja de Sopa de Pata, which simply means duck soup. A bonus was the Casalinho, a cool white wine with a slightly metallic taste, that we drank on the terrace of the Bela Vista Hotel overlooking the sea. And in a restaurant it was pleasant when I pointed to a fish floating motionless and upside down in a tank to hear a little waitress explain, ‘He rest.’
‘But why upside down?’
‘When rest, cannot move.’
Over the wine on the terrace and afterwards in Henri’s restaurant on the corniche Donald and I talked about the recent past. Over Calvados we recalled the shambles of wartime Saigon, the black market, the grubby urchin thieves who infested every side street and doorway, the bar girls and whorehouses.
‘Were you ever really frightened?’ Donald asked.
‘One night I was so scared that to think about it still makes me sweat with shame to this day.’
‘Let’s hear about it.’
It had been in the time of the 1972 North Vietnamese army offensive into South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese army divisions in the north were in a state of rout, and unit after unit had fled back down the road to Hué, the former imperial capital of Annam. There were no American troops to help restore the situation; Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had disengaged them.
I, too, fled south to Hué down the crowded highway. By then my love affair with the seedy city on the Perfume river was seven years old. I had made close friends with a poor Vietnamese family there, and stayed with them every year since 1965, sometimes several times a year, and had come to see the war through their eyes. Like all Vietnamese families, they had suffered terribly from the war, which by then had lasted thirty years for them. Every time I visited Hué they told me of yet another brother, cousin or nephew killed in action. Sometimes I had attended their weddings; sometimes I was a godfather. Each time a death was reported, the strong mother of the family – I thought of her as Mother Courage – travelled through the war-ravaged countryside to collect the pieces of her relative from the battlefield and bring them back to Hué in a plastic bag for burial in the family plot, among the family spirits.
This time I reached Hué after dark and found a horrifying state of anarchy and violence. Armed deserters milled about the streets, their uniforms discarded, looting shops and abandoned houses. They had broken into the liquor stores; drunken soldiers roamed about firing wildly into the air, and sometimes down streets as well. Their dancing demonic figures were lit by the leaping flames of the market, which had been set on fire.
My family’s house was empty. I was stunned. It was the first time they had ever deserted it – even in 1968, when it had been occupied by the Vietcong, they had stayed on – so I knew that something truly horrible was in the offing. As I stood outside their barred door, a terrible disquiet flooding through me, a tangle of hostile cycle-rickshaw (cyclo) drivers seized my arm, shouting obscenities and smelling of cheap liquor.
I crossed the Perfume river in a daze and found the only hotel. It was empty of guests, and the lobby floor was littered with broken glass. The surly young men in charge gave me a key, and one of them said, ‘Tonight VC come to Hué. Maybe VC think you American.’ He drew his finger across his throat and leered. I felt he would enjoy seeing me disembowelled in the lobby.
I sat up all night, unable to sleep. It seemed endless. Scattered shots crackled frequently across the river, and long stammering bursts of fire under the hotel walls shattered my nerves. Once a woman’s scream arched into the night and was suddenly cut off. Explosions that seemed to creep nearer all the time rattled the windows and door; they sounded like heavy mortars. Now and again, people ran down the corridor outside my room, and once someone stopped to rain thunderous blows and kicks on my flimsy door. I sat in breathless silence until whoever it was went away; I had thought it was the Vietcong.
I had a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label with me. There was not even a plastic cup in the room and the tap water looked poisonous, so I drank the whisky from the bottle, sitting in the dark fully clothed, listening to the terrifying sounds outside. With time to waste, I tried to decide what to do if the Vietcong did come. In Hué in 1968 they had forced some German doctors into the jungle at gunpoint; their bones were found some time later. I examined the cupboard; it was an impossible hiding place, and the room had no concealing corners. The only spot where I could possibly hide myself was on the top of the cupboard, right back against the angle of the wall. I put a couple of pillows up there to represent myself, and then bent my knees to lower my head to the height of a Vietcong soldier’s head; a Vietnamese would probably be about nine inches shorter than I. At that level my eyes couldn’t see the pillows, so there was at least a possibility of concealing myself, although I had a feeling that my ankles and feet would be visible.
But all the time – and time seemed infinite – I thought of my isolation; of my Vietnamese family’s instinctive wisdom in fleeing (later they told me they’d been convinced the city would fall that night); of the imminence of torture and death (my
imagination suppressed any hope that the Vietcong would simply take me prisoner). Altogether it was not my finest hour.
When dawn broke, I swayed down to the lobby exhausted, unshaven and quite drunk. The Vietnamese youth at the reception desk winked and said, ‘VC no come?’
‘Maybe you VC,’ I said. He grinned. ‘Yeah, maybe.’
On the peaceful hotel terrace in Macao eight years later, Donald Wise said, ‘Why be ashamed? I’d have been scared to death too.’
‘Let’s have a lot more of that Calvados,’ I said.
The next morning we took the ferry back to Hong Kong, but I still had traces of my Macao hangover a day later when, in mist and rain, I took the hydrofoil – my last vessel – from the Tai Kok Tsui pier in Kowloon up the Pearl river to Canton.
*
Mist and rain. August to April: the contrast could hardly have been greater. Seven months before, I had bathed in the sun and warmth of the Mediterranean at Piraeus, the blue of the sea and sky and the white of whitecaps and white ships. The colours of the Greek flag, I had thought then; now I was immersed in an all-pervading greyness of sea, sky, island and mainland, the pearl greyness of the Pearl river delta.
I was the only non-Chinese on a hydrofoil manufactured, according to the metal plaque, by Hovermarine Transport, Southampton. We sat as if in a small theatre in ten rows, seven seats to a row, arranged two, three and two, with two aisles. From time to time the people nearest the windows rubbed them with their sleeves in a vain affort to de-mist them or clear them of the rain and spray that almost totally obscured our view of the river, passing ships and the shore. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of the pale yellow funnel, with its golden stars and stylized waves on a red band, of a Chinese freighter coming down from Canton (or Guangzhou, as it was written on the blue and white baggage label presented to me by kind Mr Phelim Lo of the China Travel Agency’s branch in Hong Kong).