Golden Boy Page 6

And we gained more than four free teas from this escapade.

  Leaving the Pen, my mother made her way down Hankow Road, one of a grid of back streets, window-shopping the jewellers’ shops. She paused outside the Hing Loon Curio and Jewellery Company. In the window was something that caught her eye and we entered. Thereupon began a friendship that was to last decades.

  The interior of the shop was like a treasure cave. Heavy Chinese furniture stood piled piece on piece to the ceiling, layers of cardboard protecting them from marking each other. Glass cabinets contained cloisonne trinkets, ebony carvings, ivory figures and beads, trays of gold rings set with multicoloured stones, displays of unmounted gems, gold chains, pendants and brooches. One display case was filled with netsuke, another with jade miniatures and Chinese snuff bottles, Siamese silver and enamel fingernail covers and models of junks.

  The proprietor, Mr Chan, approached my mother, smiling. ‘You like a drink? Very hot today. You like a Coke, Green Spot, San Mig.?’

  My mother, not knowing one from the other and feeling it impolite not to accept such a kind invitation, went for a San Mig. At this, Mr Chan poured her an ice-cold beer. I, being adventurous, asked for a Green Spot and was passed a bottle of sickly orange juice.

  Whilst well intentioned, the drink was of course a means of keeping a would-be customer in the shop. For twenty minutes, we sat on leather-topped stools in front of a glass-topped counter. My mother bought a curio or two to send ‘home’, which meant Britain. When she was done, Mr Chan asked me, ‘What year you born?’

  ‘Nineteen forty-four,’ I replied.

  ‘What mumf?’

  ‘September.’

  ‘You mahlo.’

  From a jam-packed cabinet behind him, he produced a small, crudely carved ivory monkey.

  ‘For you,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘I see you again.’

  Mr Chan was to be my mother’s jeweller for the rest of his life and his two sons thereafter until the end of her life. She never bought a single item of jewellery from any other Hong Kong shop, declaring to all who would listen that Mr Chan was the only man of his trade who had not once attempted to swizzle her. For years, she directed friends, acquaintances, visitors and even tourist strangers who accosted her for directions in the street to his shop – ‘Just mention my name – Joyce Booth – and you’ll not be done,’ she would tell them.

  It was not long before my mother acquired a social life. The wives of my father’s colleagues began to invite her out during the day, and to dinner or cocktail parties in the evenings. When this social whirl began in earnest, she delegated the job of seeing me safely to and from school to one of the hotel room boys. Tall for a Chinese, he was handsome, in his late twenties and spoke English without the usual Cantonese accent or pronunciation. His full name was Leung Chi-ching, but we called him Ching. In a very short time, I came to love this man as if he were a favourite uncle. Every morning, he guided me across the traffic on Waterloo Road, Chinese-style. This meant crossing to the central white line and lingering there as vehicles zipped by on either side, waiting for a gap in the traffic to complete the journey to the far pavement. He insisted on carrying my rattan school case – an oblong sort of picnic hamper-cum-briefcase known as a Hong Kong basket – containing my books and some sandwiches wrapped in translucent greaseproof paper. Some of my fellow pupils were taken to school by an amah; some came by car. I stood out, accompanied by this imposing but obviously gentle man who acted like a bodyguard.

  One day, I asked Ching where he lived. He was reluctant to inform me. However, he embarked upon his life story, which he told me over the next few days, walking back slowly from school with the warm, late-afternoon sun in our faces, little eddies of wind lifting miniature dust tornadoes off the road surface.

  His father had been a wealthy landlord in Kwangtung province, not far from Canton. I asked how he came to speak such good English if he had lived in China. He replied that his father had been rich enough to send him to a Christian missionary school.

  ‘It was a very good school. The brothers were trained teachers, men of learning. I was taught by them, not only English but mathematics, geography, history. One, a Chinese brother, also taught Cantonese and Mandarin. Then, one day when I was eight years old, there was much fighting. People were shot in the street and the paddyfields. It was Japanese fighting Chinese. Then, when I was seventeen years old, there was more fighting. This time, it was Communist Chinese fighting Kuomintang Chinese.’

  ‘What are Kuo—’ I began.

  ‘Nationalist Chinese,’ Ching explained. ‘The army of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘They lost,’ Ching said candidly. ‘Then the Communist soldiers came, and the officers, and they took away my father’s land and our house. Our belongings were taken, our farm animals killed. My father had a motor car. They burnt it. We had horses to ride. They shot them.’

  ‘Were the horses ill?’ I enquired. I knew sick horses were shot: I had stayed for a holiday on a farm in Devon the year before when a dray horse broke its leg and was put down.

  ‘No.’ Ching shook his head. ‘They just shot them.’

  It seemed incomprehensible that anyone would deliberately set fire to a car and barbaric that they should shoot a perfectly healthy horse.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘We were told to go, so we went. If we had not they would have killed us. They killed our friends who refused to go. I came to Hong Kong.’

  ‘If your father is so rich,’ I ventured as we waited to cross at a busy junction, ‘why do you work as a hotel room boy?’

  ‘I have no money,’ Ching answered. There was no regret in his voice. ‘All I have are my clothes. When the Communists drove us away, we could only take what we could carry.’ We crossed the road and started walking slowly along the pavement towards the hotel. ‘There are many, many people like me in Hong Kong.’ Ahead of us, the Fourseas Hotel transport, a cream-painted, American shooting brake with varnished wooden bars on the side, drove out of the hotel garage and across both lanes. ‘You see Mickey, the hotel driver?’ Ching asked. ‘He is one who escaped from the Communists. At least half the room boys have escaped from China. Some with their families, some, like me, alone.’

  I felt a terrible sadness for Ching and took hold of his hand.

  ‘You’ve got me and my mum,’ I said comfortingly.

  I never discovered where Ching laid his head, but I found where others did. A week or so later, my mother was invited out to a dinner party on Hong Kong-side.

  It was already dark before she left in the Studebaker shooting brake for the Star Ferry to cross the harbour to Hong Kong island. I waited a respectable time, got dressed and walked out of the hotel tradesmen’s door, a steel gate that gave on to a street called Emma Avenue. I turned left and headed for Soares Avenue, a fairly busy thoroughfare used by traffic taking a short cut to the next main road, Argyle Street.

  At the time I was not to know it, but these streets were to be my patch, my playground, and I was to become as well-known in them as any of the shopkeepers.

  The streets were warm, the air heavy with the unfamiliar scents of exotic food cooking in the tenements. Traffic fumes fought to suppress these smells but failed. Above the sound of passing cars was a trill of argumentative birdsong from the trees. Finches in bamboo cages, hung outside the tenement windows for an evening airing, joining in the conference with their free-living brethren.

  Walking along the streets was mildly hazardous. First, one was periodically peppered with bird seed and desiccated droppings as a finch had a scratch-about in the bottom of its cage three floors above. Second, one was dripped on from laundry hanging out to dry over the street on bamboo poles. Third, and less benign, was the fact that one could be hit by a chicken bone or other detritus from a completed meal. This I found curiously incongruous. The Chinese were a fastidious race and yet here they were throwing their garbage out of the window and into the street
. Without looking first. From some way up. When I passed my thoughts on to Ching, he explained that it was habit: in China, one threw waste food into the street and the local pigs or dogs ate it. That there were no pigs wandering the streets of Kowloon seemed immaterial to the residents. At least there were pi-dogs – stray mongrels – although none of them looked porcinely overfed.

  In Soares Avenue, there was a line of shops. I crossed the road and started to inspect them. They did not have front windows, being more like square caves giving directly on to the pavement. One sold everyday kitchen utensils, but even some of these were alien to me. Shallow, cast-iron cooking pots, which I subsequently learnt were called woks, hung from hooks overhead, a shelf bore what I was to discover were rice steamers and there were sets of woven baskets, one inside the other. Packets of chopsticks, rice bowls, serving dishes, quaint porcelain spoons tied together with string, minute bowls, soy sauce dispensers, teapots decorated with red and gold dragons and handle-less tea cups and bowls with lids stood or lay in profusion on a table board balanced on trestles. Near by were displayed wooden cutting blocks bound by steel hoops, meat choppers and knives of medieval ferocity.

  Moving on, I came to a fruit seller whose stock, spread out under bright lights, was even more unusual. He sold oranges, lemons, bananas and apples, but the remainder of his offerings might well have been picked on another planet – waxy-looking star-shaped fruit reminiscent in texture of my grandmother’s hat flowers only not as dusty; huge grapefruit-like fruits, split open to show pale citrus-like segments within; knobbly custard apples; deep sea-green watermelons bigger than footballs; spiky ovals I discovered to be durians; and what appeared to me to be short lengths of leafless tree branch.

  The shopkeeper, seeing me standing admiring his stock, came round the front and spoke to me, picking up the grapefruit-like pomelo and holding it out. By now, I had picked up more than a smattering of Cantonese and said, ‘M’ho cheen.’ To emphasize my impecuniosity, I patted my pockets. He laughed, stroked my blond hair, took out a sharp knife, sliced open the pomelo and offered me a segment. It was time to keep my promise.

  I accepted it, said, ‘Dor jei,’ and put it in my mouth. It was sweet and tart at the same time, the cells of the segment erupting upon my tongue. ‘Ho!’ I said and I meant it. It was very good.

  The fruit seller smiled and picked up one of the lengths of branch. It was pale silvery-green and about an inch thick. He shaved the bark from all of its length but a few inches at one end, with which he handed it to me like a truncheon. I had no idea what to do with it. Seeing this he prepared another length, bit some off the end and chewed it. I followed suit. It was sugar cane, saturated with syrupy sap. When he had sucked the stringy cane dry, he spat it out on the pavement. I copied him. Then a fish head hit me on the shoulder. I was, I considered, now at one with the streets, duly initiated and baptized.

  I made friends at school but rarely visited my friends’ homes or spent time with them away from the classroom or playground. My life was centred on the Fourseas and the adjacent streets and alleyways.

  In one fetid passageway, I came across a family of four who lived in a large crate that had been used to ship a Heidelberg printing press from Germany. They had improved their abode by nailing a sheet of tin to it to protect against the elements, putting a plank across the entrance to stop any rubbish drifting in and standing the crate on four short blocks to keep it clear of the ground and rainwater that cascaded down the alley. Inside, some planks had been erected to pass as shelving. Otherwise it was still a packing crate. My Cantonese was insufficient for me to converse with the family, but they smiled at me when I passed and greeted them. When the hotel started to redecorate some of the public rooms, replacing the venetian blinds with curtains, the manager agreed to give me one. I gave the blind to the family to hang over the crate entrance. They were delighted with it but, a week or so later, they had vanished. It was not just that the family had gone. So had the crate. Their departure left a hole in my life, even though I had only known them for a fortnight. I never saw them again.

  My primary circle of acquaintances consisted of the shopkeepers to whom I was introduced by the fruit seller. His name, I came to discover, was Mr Tsang. It was from him that I picked up a knowledge of pidgin Cantonese – it was commonly referred to as kitchen Cantonese, because it was what the European lady of the house spoke with her domestic servants. In exchange, Mr Tsang learnt pidgin English from me.

  Next door but two or three to Mr Tsang was a tiny shop squeezed into the sloping space under a staircase. It consisted of a single display counter with a pigeon-hole arrangement of shelves behind it made out of fruit boxes courtesy of Mr Tsang. Owned and operated by an elderly man and his teenage son, it sold plastic biros, ten-cent notebooks, rubbers, plastic rulers, toy guns that spat sparks, tin rocket ships with the same sparkling mechanism in them, playing cards, glass marbles, combs, nail clippers and files … It was Soares Avenue’s equivalent of a department store. It also sold something that at first bemused me. Packed into small cardboard boxes and surrounded by fine sawdust were what appeared to be clay marbles. I picked one up and put it between my thumb and forefinger as if to flick it marble fashion. The store owner quickly cupped my hand in both of his and shook his head vigorously. Then, taking the clay ball, he waited for a break in the traffic and tossed it into the road. It exploded loudly with a drift of clay dust. He gave me another and gestured for me to throw it into the road. I did so. It too went off with a loud report. A flock of birds rose from one of the trees and a passing rickshaw coolie volubly cursed me. I returned in minutes with a dollar and bought a boxful. They were confiscated the following morning by the teacher on playground duty, who informed me they were called cherry bombs, they were illegal and if I ever brought one into school again I would be expelled. A letter was sent home to my mother and I was roundly chastised and stripped of that week’s pocket money. Yet, at the same time, I felt with that innate seventh sense of childhood that my mother did not entirely disapprove. From that moment, I knew she was not unduly averse to my wandering the streets and I began ranging more widely.

  Five hundred yards down Waterloo Road from the Fourseas was a railway bridge beyond which were the streets of Mong Kok. This was almost another land, the railway a national border. The streets contained few shops. Instead, there was a large hospital and a good number of factory units that turned out belt lengths, sandal parts, brightly fluorescent coloured plastic twine, plastic flowers and metal-framed hand trolleys. Other workshops manufactured metal buckles, cheap tin padlocks, trouser waist catches, metal buttons and washers. Most of these items were pressed out of sheets of metal. The air reverberated with the hiss of hydraulics, the ring of hammering and the whine of the cutting or sharpening of metal. Brilliant oxy-acetylene torches lit up the interiors and the sparks of welding guns spattered on to the pavements. On one occasion, I found a fifty cent coin on the pavement outside one of these metal workshops and, no-one looking, pocketed it. Later, Mr Tsang refused it in payment for a pomelo and showed me why. When he dropped it on the pavement it made a dull clunk: the coin was made of aluminium. There were, additionally, several car repair shops, their concrete floors thick with black oily grime, the pavements scattered with discarded ball-bearings and wadges of multicoloured cotton waste. I was addicted to the smell of these garages, of warm oil, rubber, leather and newly sprayed paint: it was like none other I had ever encountered.

  As the weeks passed, I grew bolder and – more confident in facing traffic – I traversed Nathan Road, the main artery running up the spine of Kowloon, to enter the district of Yau Ma Tei, an area that was more residential than Mong Kok. Many of the three-or four-storey buildings were old, with arcades, their balconies lined with green-glazed railings patterned to look like bamboo. The roofs of some were covered in green-glazed tiles and curved upwards at the eaves. A few bore ceramic ridge tiles of dragons and lions in faded blue, red or gold. I felt an added excitement coming upon old rusty
signs at the entrance to some side streets declaring Out of Bounds to Troops. It was as if I was the first explorer of my race to tread these urban jungle paths. Even soldiers had not come this way before.

  The shops here were more traditional than those in Soares Avenue. A bakery sold soft bread buns with red writing stamped on them. Dried fish shops displayed desiccated shrimps, squid, cuttlefish, scallops, mussels, sharks’ fins (hanging from the ceiling like triangles of light grey leather) and other unidentifiable seafood. Butchers offered raw meat hanging from hooks under 100-watt bulbs beneath red plastic shades. Poultry shops sold chickens, ducks, quail, exquisitely plumaged pheasants and geese but, whereas the butchers’ fare was slaughtered, the live poultry was crammed into bamboo cages. No self-esteeming Chinese housewife bought fowl that was not still breathing and it was commonplace to see someone walking down a street with two trussed hens clucking with avian irritation.

  One afternoon I wandered into a back-street butchery thinking that I might watch the meat being portioned. Unlike British butchers who carefully shaped specific cuts, Chinese butchers merely chopped the carcass up with razor-sharp cleavers. Turning a corner in the shop, out of sight of the street, I was suddenly confronted by the corpse of a black chow dog hanging by a hook that had been thrust through the tendons of a hind leg. Its black tongue hung down from its mouth. There was a massive wound on the back of its head.

  No sooner had I seen it than the butcher arrived, grabbed me by the neck and, swearing volubly, turfed me out into the street. Subsequent questioning of Ching ascertained that the Chinese ate dogs – black ones, preferably – and they killed them by pole-axing them. However, he added, dog-eating was illegal in Hong Kong because the gweilos liked dogs as pets and that was why I had been given the bum’s rush out of the shop.

  Rice vendors were also prevalent in Yau Ma Tei, displaying different types of rice in open sacks or, if they were of especial quality, in dark polished barrels with brass hoops. The variety and price were displayed on a tablet of dark wood with the information painted on them in red calligraphy. To me, one rice grain looked much like the next but there were several dozen strains, types and grades available. The tops of the unopened rice sacks were invariably the resting place of sleeping cats which doubtless earned their place keeping vermin down in the early hours.