Golden Boy Read online

  My mother found having servants somewhat disquieting and, if anything, ambiguous. She was a humanist at heart who believed no man should lord it over another. Yet here she was with two people who were there at her beck and call. Indeed, there were to be many times when my parents returned from a party in the early hours to find Wong staggering into the lounge, bleary-eyed and dopey with sleep, to see if they wanted a nightcap or a sandwich. She suffixed every request with please and thank you and made sure I did, too. It was impressed upon me that I should never make unreasonable demands of Wong or Ah Shun and I was never to say Fide! Fide! or Chop! Chop! (Quick! Quick!) at him. (I did once, out of pique, and he clipped my ear, whereby a mutual respect was born.)

  Although not much more than a mile from the Fourseas, the environs of the flat were very different. Close by was La Salle College, a major Roman Catholic school primarily for Chinese. To the north-west was the one-time garden suburb of Kowloon Tong, to the north were the barren lower slopes of the nine Kowloon hills. Indeed, the name Kowloon derived from the Cantonese gau lung, meaning nine dragons. To the south was a residential area and the wooded grounds of the Kowloon hospital. Only the foothills offered the slightest opportunity for exploration and that was soon exhausted, my only find being that of a white plaster-of-paris death mask in a cave and a large chunk of mauve transparent volcanic rock. My mother and I hoped it was beryllium, a piece of which had been found in Hong Kong the month before, making its finder rich. She took it to the geology department of the University. It wasn’t beryllium but silicate – glass.

  Not a mile to the east, however, was the most romantic and allegedly dangerous place in the colony. It was called Kowloon Walled City.

  The name was a misnomer. It was not and never had been a city. It covered not much more than 25,000 square yards and, although it had been surrounded by a crenulated wall, the defences had been demolished by British prisoners-of-war under Japanese command and used as hardcore for an airport runway extension and sea wall.

  According to a history of Hong Kong owned by my mother, it had originally been established in the eighteenth century as a far-flung outpost of the Chinese empire; its subsequent history was convoluted and its sovereignty confused. After the British gained control of Hong Kong and, later, Kowloon at the end of the Opium and Arrow Wars in the early 1840s, the Chinese imperial government insisted on maintaining a local presence so the British turned a blind eye towards Kowloon Walled City. Behind its walls, a nominal Chinese garrison was maintained which primarily kept a watch on the foreign invaders and enforced Chinese law in the area not under colonial control. Pirates being a problem in the region, the mandarin stationed in the settlement was kept busy suppressing and executing them. When the New Territories were ceded to the British, Kowloon Walled City was to find itself twenty-five miles from the border with China, completely surrounded by British territory. The cessation treaty was also ambiguous. Kowloon Walled City was now, in effect, cut off and ruled and possessed by neither – or both – countries.

  It remained a backwater for fifty years, visited at the turn of the twentieth century by Europeans in Hong Kong for vicarious excitement, a fragment of the ‘real’ China on their doorsteps. Ruled by a mandarin from his yamen in the centre, it was quaint and exotic. The salacious aspect of the place lay in the fact that British law did not necessarily apply there, depending upon the interpretation of the treaty. Few Hong Kong policemen patrolled it and no government official collected taxes. The power supply was illegally tapped from the main grid and the water supply from the main. Kowloon Walled City was in effect a minute city state all on its own, arguably the smallest ever to have existed.

  When China fell to the Communists in 1949, many criminal refugees fled to Hong Kong, some of them gravitating to the walled city area where they quickly established fresh enterprises. When the buildings were full, they built more, many little better than substantial squatter shacks. A disastrous fire in 1951 destroyed half the city but gave the new arrivals the opportunity to clear and build: it was said they set the fire in the first place. Thereafter, Kowloon Walled City remained an enclave governed by no-one. It was to Hong Kong what the Casbah was to Algiers, with one exception: it was more or less closed to outsiders. Trippers avoided it. It was said that any European who entered it was never seen again unless floating out of it down the nullah that served as a sewer. If ever the police entered the area, they went in armed patrols of three.

  We had not been in Boundary Street a day when my mother took me aside.

  ‘Martin,’ she started, signifying her seriousness, ‘I know you like to roam and explore, and round here that’s all right. But,’ she continued, unfolding a map of Kowloon, ‘you do not go even near here.’

  She pointed to the map. Kowloon Walled City was left as a blank uneven-sided square.

  ‘What is it?’ I enquired.

  ‘Ask no questions and be told no lies,’ my mother replied evasively, ‘and don’t go to find out.’

  To utter such a dictum to a street-wise eight-year-old was tantamount to buying him an entrance ticket.

  The following afternoon, homework hurriedly completed, I had a quick glance at the map and headed east down Boundary Street. In ten minutes, I was on the outskirts of Kowloon Walled City.

  Nothing indicated to me why this place should be forbidden. A number of new six-storey buildings were being erected, with several already occupied or nearing completion; and a lot of shanties and older two-storey buildings were leaning precariously. It looked like a squatter area but with permanent structures in the middle in ill repair. A hutong lay before me, winding into the buildings and shacks. There being, I reasoned, no way my mother was ever going to find out, I set off down the alleyway, easing my way past a man pushing a bicycle, the pannier laden with cardboard boxes. He paid me not the slightest attention.

  Through the open doors I spied scenes of industrial domesticity. To one side would be a kang or metal-framed bed, piled with neatly folded bedding; to the other several people seated at a table sewing, assembling torches, placing coloured pencils in boxes or painting lacquer boxes. Behind other doors were businesses, pure and simple. In one a baker was placing trays of buns in a wood-fired oven; in another, two men were involved in making noodles, swinging sheets of thin dough in the air around a wooden rolling-pin, the interior of their shack ghost-white under a layer of flour dust.

  Wherever I went, the air was redolent with the smells of wood smoke, joss-sticks, boiling rice and human excrement. The effluent from this community, I soon discovered, flowed down open gullies at the side of the hutongs to disappear through holes in the ground lined by stone slabs.

  Arriving at one of the older stone buildings, I was about to peer in through an open door when a Chinese man rushed out and slammed it shut. Stripped to the waist, he bore a coloured tattoo of a dragon on his back. He glowered at me.

  ‘W’at you wan’?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, fighting to stop myself sounding guilty, although of what I did not know. Then, hoping it might soften him a bit, I added, ‘Ngo giu jo Mah Tin.’ I held my hand out. ‘Nei giu mut ye meng?’

  He was much taken aback by my introducing myself – especially in Cantonese – and it was at least thirty pensive seconds before he took my hand and firmly shook it. During that time, he eyed me up and down, much as a butcher might a bull being led to slaughter.

  ‘Mah Tin,’ he said at last. ‘Ngo giu jo Ho. Why you come?’

  ‘Just looking,’ I answered, shrugging and adding in pidgin English, ‘Come look-see.’

  ‘You no look-see,’ he answered sternly. ‘No good look-see for gweilo boy.’

  I smiled, nodded my understanding, said, ‘Choi kin,’ (goodbye) and turned to go.

  ‘You look-see,’ he declared, changing his mind. He opened the door, indicating I follow him.

  What until now had seemed a harmless saunter through just another warren of passageways immediately took on a sinister aspect. No-one knew
I was here. What, I considered, if this old stone building with its substantial door was the headquarters of the evil Fu Manchu? I had recently read Sax Rohmer. If I stepped over the high lintel, I could vanish. For ever. On the other hand, not to accept Ho’s invitation would result in a massive loss of face. I would never be able to come here again: and I had seen nothing yet. And so, I threw caution to the wind and followed him into the building.

  The entire ground floor consisted of one vast room, heavy beams holding up the ceiling and second floor. It was furnished with upright rosewood chairs, the wood even darker with age, low tables and several ornately framed mirrors, the silvering missing in places. Halfway down the room stood a wooden screen, the top half pierced by intricate fretwork, the rest a painting depicting sheer-sided hills and lakes. I sensed I was being observed through it but, as I walked by the end, there was no-one there. The wooden floor was devoid of any covering. There was an air of much-faded gentility about the place.

  To the rear was a staircase beneath which a door opened and an old hunched woman entered, walking with the aid of a stick. She took one look at me and grinned toothlessly, hobbled to my side and, inevitably, stroked my hair. This put me at ease. First, Fu Manchu was hardly likely to employ crones (unless, god forbid, this was his mother) and second, my golden hair was a passport to my security. No-one would risk harming such a harbinger of good fortune.

  ‘You come.’ Ho beckoned me up the stairs.

  I followed him into a room along three sides of which were placed wooden kangs. Upon one of these lay a supine man asleep upon a woven bamboo mat, his head on a hard Chinese headrest, his legs drawn up, his hands twitching like a dog’s paws in a dream of chasing rabbits.

  ‘Nga pin,’ Ho announced and beckoned me further towards the fourth wall, the whole length of which was shuttered. I refrained from asking him what nga pin was for fear of seeming ignorant. Again, the last thing I wanted to do was lose face with him. He unlatched one of the shutters and we stepped out on to the balcony, which sloped forwards alarmingly towards a crumbling balustrade.

  From here, I was afforded a panoramic view of the walled city. The shacks were so tightly packed, it was well nigh impossible to see where the hutongs ran between them. Yet the real surprise was the few larger buildings tucked between them. One stood in a wide rectangular courtyard with a number of outbuildings close by; from another rose a faint cloud of bluish smoke which meant it had to be a temple. Three or four were in a row suggesting that, in olden days, they had stood upon a street. In the distance was Kowloon Bay, a cargo ship riding at a quarantine buoy. Over to my left was the bulk of Fei Ngo Shan, the most easterly of the Kowloon hills, the slopes sharp and clear in the late sun. To the south-west, indistinct in the haze, was Hong Kong Island.

  Ho took me back inside. We passed the sleeping man, who was beginning to wake, and descended the stairs which creaked loudly. Once outside, Ho bade me farewell and went back into the house, closing the door. I set off along the way I had come, considering to myself that I had taken a terrible risk. Other than a shop, I had never accepted an invitation into a building. Reaching the edge of the squatter shacks, and stepping out on to a road with traffic going by, I resolved not to be so foolhardy again. Yet, where Kowloon Walled City was concerned, I knew I had to return to investigate the temple and the building in the courtyard.

  When I returned to our apartment, I went into the kitchen where Wong was preparing supper and asked him what nga pin meant. He stopped stirring a pan for a moment, looked quizzically at me and replied, ‘Opium.’

  On his return to Hong Kong, my father had taken delivery of a Ford Consul saloon which he promptly had resprayed two-tone grey with white walled tyres: my mother, with her penchant for Chinese names, called it Ch’ing Yan, which translated as Lover. Ch’ing Yan opened up a wide horizon for all three of us. It also gave my father a pastime. Never a man for a hobby, the car became the centre of his leisure activities. Having never owned a car before, he mollycoddled it as much as he might have done a mistress. The interior was kept pristine: no food or drink might be consumed therein. He checked the oil and tyres at least weekly and spent hours polishing the bodywork, dusting the interior and hoovering the carpets and seats. No-one was allowed to help in this endeavour. He rejected all the approaches of the itinerant car washers-and-waxers who did the rounds of residential areas every Saturday afternoon. When he saw Wong knocking dead leaves off the bonnet with a feather duster, he hurtled downstairs to stop him: the ends of the feathers, he explained, might be scratching the paint.

  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 aro
und 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.