Gweilo (14 page)

Just as I drew level with Nagasaki Jim's door, it opened. I was not a yard away from it.

'Hello,' he said pleasantly. It was the first time he had ever spoken to me.

'Hello,' I replied cautiously. If needs be, I was ready to run.

'What's your name?' he went on and, not awaiting an answer, added, 'That's a nice gun you've got. Would you like to see my gun?'

Were I a year older, the innuendo and ambiguity of this question would not have been lost on me, but I was eight and a half and a bit.

'Yes,' I said.

He disappeared into his room. There was the sound of a scuffling about in drawers.

'Come in,' he called amicably.

'I'll wait here,' I answered. My seventh puerile sense was tingling like a high-tension cable.

Nagasaki Jim came to the door and knelt down, his face level with my own.

'Here you are,' he announced and, from behind his back, he produced a British Army .38 service revolver. The gunmetal shone with a parade-ground lustre. The wooden butt was as polished as my grandmother's dining-room table.

All my fears of Nagasaki Jim evaporated at the sight of this wondrous object. It was the first time I had ever been close to a firearm with the exception of the rusting Turkish rifles in my grandfather's garden shed, a heavy brass First World War Verey pistol he let me play with and the guns in the car in Singapore.

'Would you like to hold it?'

He held the revolver out to me by the barrel, took my six-shooter and put it on the floor between us.

The .38 was much heavier than I had expected. I could not hold it up to aim, even with both hands. The metal was warm and smooth and smelt of gun lubricating oil. Whilst my hands were occupied with the revolver, Nagasaki Jim leant forward and, hooking his index finger under the leg of my shorts, said, 'Show me your winkle and I'll buy you a gun like mine.'

Letting the revolver go, I was off like a startled hare. Naive I may have been, stupid I was not. As my mother would have put it, I was not as green as I was cabbage-looking.

With the fluidity of a rat, Nagasaki Jim was up and after me. He threw my six-shooter at me but it missed and hit the wall ahead of me, smashing into pieces. I kept going, to be saved by two hotel guests turning a corner into the corridor. Nagasaki Jim retreated into his room like an earthworm down its burrow.

I did not report this incident to my mother for the same reason that I had kept tight-lipped concerning the whereabouts of the Queen of Kowloon. However, I did tell Ah Kwan. That night, he and three other room boys let themselves into Nagasaki Jim's room on a pass key and lay in wait for him. When he returned from the
dai pai dong
, they gave him a sound working over.

Two months later, under threat of eviction for nonpayment of rent, Nagasaki Jim hanged himself.

IN 1953, CHINESE NEW YEAR FELL OVER THE END OF JANUARY
and the beginning of February. Dependent upon the lunar calendar, the date varied from year to year. All that could be counted upon were the keen northerlies which blew down across China from the steppes of Siberia, the skies blue and more or less cloudless, and the astonishing spectacle of the festival. Friends advised my mother to leave the Fourseas for the duration of the main festivities, and we were invited to the bungalow at Mount Nicholson, but my mother declined. She wanted to be in the thick of it.

Over the weeks leading up to the festival, firecrackers had been on sale in practically every shop. Even the fruit shop owner sold them. Mostly, they came in square cardboard boxes the size of a paperback book, sealed with a label printed with images of laughing children letting them off and crude drawings of demons or dragons. In the boxes, the fuses were plaited together so the individual firecrackers had to be shaken loose from what was otherwise a short string of them. Always coloured red, they varied in size from those not much fatter than a thick pencil lead and about an inch long – and named by us torn thumbers – to others three inches in length and thicker than a cigarette.

I bought a box of fifty cigarette-sized crackers for a dollar and, with several of the other expatriate children who lived in the hotel at the time, went up on to the hill to let them off. We put them in holes in the ground or under rocks, lighting them with a small joss-stick. When they exploded, they made the holes bigger and one rock as big as a football split open. We had also taken an empty Coke bottle with us as a finale. I held the firecracker in the mouth, lit the fuse, dropped it in the bottle and ran. The others stood at a safe distance. There was a muffled sort of
thoomp!
behind me, quickly followed by a searing pain in my upper leg. I looked down. Blood was beginning to ooze out of a cut in my thigh as neat as a surgeon's incision. I staggered back down the hill, my sock becoming glutinous with the stream of blood running down my leg. I was scared but, within a few moments of reaching the hotel lobby, the porter had staunched the flow. My mother arrived, decided I did not need stitches and bandaged me up. In an hour, I was being taught by Halfie how to let off a torn thumber whilst holding it.

Although tiny, these firecrackers packed a punch sufficient to blow a five-inch-wide, two-inch-deep crater in the earth of a pot of the chrysanthemums that decorated the hotel front lawn. It was easy once you realized that the gunpowder was concentrated in the middle of the firecrackers. If you held one by the base, gripping it between two fingernails, you could light it and let it explode with no danger – so long as you kept your eyes closed. The first I held as it went off left a tingling feeling in my fingers. The second hurt but machismo demanded I did not show it and lose face. Thereafter, we embarked upon torn thumb fights, hurling them at each other. No-one was hurt. It was good seasonal fun.

The first day of the fortnight-long, but not continuous, festival was quiet. All the shops in Soares Avenue were shut. The hotel room boys who were my friends gave me
lai see
and I returned the compliment, having been tipped off to do so.
Lai see
was a small red paper packet containing a small amount of money. It was not so much a gift as an omen of good luck and prosperity for the year ahead. I was warned by Ching not to swear, not to mention death, illness, bad luck or anything of that ilk, even in passing. Our amah refused to take anything but Chinese New Year's Day off, despite my mother's protestations; yet she did accept a thirteenth month's salary as was common practice.

On the second day, the celebrations started in earnest.

Across the road from the rear of the Fourseas was a pro-Communist secondary school which occupied a triangular plot between Emma, Julia and Soares Avenues. Every morning, the pupils gathered in the school yard behind twelve-foot-high stone walls like those of a prison and sang patriotic songs about labouring in the fields, striding ahead for liberty, equality and fraternity under the red flag and in the footsteps of Mao Tse-tung. The accompaniment was provided by a phonograph with a set of well-worn records.

Shortly after dawn, the school staff had hung strings of firecrackers over the walls. In all, there must have been two hundred of them, the walls looking as if they had suddenly been festooned with vermilion ribbons. And these firecrackers were by no means the little bangers such as might have graced a British Bonfire Night party. These were the size of a grown man's index finger, the fuses woven together around a core of hessian twine. What was more, they were grouped in threes down the twine. The aim was not to provide a display but to create as much noise as possible to drive off devils, demons and the pantheon of other supernatural ne'er-do-wells which every Chinese believed occupied every spiritually inhabitable niche.

I went into the street to watch. One of the teachers appeared at the corner with Soares Avenue, another at the corner with Julia Avenue. Both held large joss-sticks, the smoke drifting away on a keen breeze: it was cold enough to wear a padded jacket. There was no-one else in the street. A whistle was blown in the school yard. The teachers ignited the end of the first string of firecrackers, moving immediately on to the next. After a brief fizzle, the explosions began in the first string, then the second, then the third . . . In a matter of seconds, my head was filled with the report of the explosions. They echoed off the walls of the buildings as they might have off the sides of a canyon. The air went blue with smoke, and the acrid smell of gunpowder was suddenly inescapable and almost choking. A dense blizzard of paper blew along the street, thicker than snow. The explosions continued uninterrupted for at least twenty minutes.

I re-entered the hotel with a blinding headache but a feeling of elation. This had been an exhibition of raw power, the elimination of demons, the establishment of good fortune and the cleansing of the underworld.

Over the next few days, Kowloon sounded as if it were a war zone. In some places the streets were inches deep in fragments of acrid-smelling paper. The traffic stopped to allow fifty-foot strings of firecrackers to explode down the front of the taller buildings. Some of these, every two or three feet, contained an extra large firecracker the size of a tin can which went off with an ear-splitting detonation. Gradually, the firecrackers died down and a semblance of peace returned. On either side of many shops and doorways, new red scrolls with black writing upon them were pasted over the previous year's, presaging good fortune.

When I visited the temple to Kwun Yum (or Kwan Yin), the goddess of mercy, it was doing brisk business. The temple was always in semi-darkness, even on the sunniest day. At the rear of the altar, mysterious in the half-light of guttering red-wax candle flames and a few bare, low-wattage light bulbs, the deity's effigy sat demurely, with attendant gods to either side, leering through the twilight. The altar was hung with an embroidered cloth in imperial yellow, red and gold. From the tarnished brass incense burner rose a column of smoke.

In front of the altar was a throng, mostly of women and children, making offerings, praying or casting fortune-telling sticks. Amongst the offerings being made, mostly of fruit and food, was money. I was amazed to see otherwise poor-looking women dropping fistfuls of banknotes into a brass cauldron of hot embers. In a flare of flame, they were incinerated to a drift of ash rising on the hazy heat of the fire below. It was not until a partially scorched note escaped the fire that I came to see the currency. It was not dollars issued by the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank but Hell's Banknotes in vast denominations – $100,000, $1,000,000, $10,000,000. This was celestial, not terrestrial, cash.

As all this went on, a low-toned bell sounded, striking once every time a worshipper made a donation of real money to the idol. The temple staff hurried between the devotees, removing the burnt-out joss-stick and candle splints, pushing aside the last round of offerings, the food by now inedible as a result of the cascade of ash falling from the incense coils. One man replaced candles on the altar, two others trimmed wicks and cursorily removed ash from the effigy with a duster made of ginger cockerel's feathers fixed to a long bamboo cane.

Pushing through the crowd of worshippers, I purchased a fifty-cent pack of joss-sticks from an elderly man by the door, lit them all from a candle and stuck them in the urn full of sand provided. It was not that I was a devotee of Kwun Yum but that I was bent on doing what everyone else present was – hedging their bets for the coming twelvemonth by getting on the good side of the gods.

The general stores in Soares Avenue opened on a self-agreed rota throughout the first five days of the festivities. There was a purpose to this: not only did they open for the convenience of their customers but also to collect debts and settle tabs unaddressed before the new moon. By the time the new year started in earnest, all outstanding debts should have been paid. The day before the holiday commenced, Ching and I went into one of the shops to buy a packet of
wah mui
. The shopkeeper and his family were standing before a shrine positioned in a scarlet-painted box at the rear of their shop. I watched for a while in silence.

'What are they doing?' I whispered to Ching.

'This is the shrine of the kitchen god,' he explained.

The family kow-towed several times to the shrine then the shopkeeper's wife smeared the god's face with something in a bowl.

'What is that?' I murmured.

'Sweet food,' Ching replied. 'Soon, the kitchen god will go to heaven and tell the Jade Emperor if this has been a good family for a year. To make sure he says good words, they give him rice and honey. Make him talk sweet.'

This done, the shopkeeper tore out from the shrine the picture of the god, printed on red paper and faded over the year. He then took it outside on to the pavement and set light to it.

'Now the god goes to heaven,' Ching said.

This act smacked to me of writing a wish list to Father Christmas, whose non-existence I no longer questioned, and sending it up the chimney, but I kept my thoughts to myself. When the ashes had drifted down the street to mingle with the firecracker confetti, a new picture was pasted into the shrine and the shopkeeper stepped back behind his counter.

The lighting of firecrackers was not restricted to Chinese New Year. Whenever a new shop or business opened, the front of the building was decorated with bamboo scaffolding covered in paper flowers and characters propitiating good fortune. Long strings of firecrackers suspended from roof to pavement would be lit, the street soon filling with choking smoke and the continuous cacophony of explosions. If the building was over five storeys high, they could last an hour.

At only one event were firecrackers not let off – funerals.

When I saw my first Chinese funeral procession, I thought the circus had come to town. The initial indications of the approaching funeral procession were the muted sounds of inharmonious music. I went out on to the communal balcony of the hotel to watch.

Soon, a small truck appeared further down Waterloo Road. A large bamboo frame had been fixed to the front of the truck and adorned with paper flowers, gold and scarlet bunting and, I presumed, the name of the departed in huge characters. In the centre of this was a large monochrome photograph of the deceased. This vehicle was followed by a two-hundred-yard procession containing delivery tricycles similarly decorated. Interspersed between these were men carrying tall poles topped by Chinese fringed umbrellas, a large paper orb with a ladder rising through it and a number of other incomprehensible ceremonial items. At the rear of this came the coffin. I had expected a hearse but it was in fact carried in a sort of palanquin between eight perspiring coolies. The sides were decorated with white and yellow flowers. The coffin itself was highly polished and of a curious shape, in section rather like a four-leafed clover. To the rear of the coffin walked the relatives of the deceased, the foremost being a small boy of about my age wearing a white cloak. Every so often, he wiped his eyes and nose on the sleeve of his coat.

'Who is he?' I asked a room boy standing beside me.

'He dead man son. Now he Number One man for him family. Big job for him.'

The other primary mourners also wore white cloaks whilst everyone else was soberly dressed, with the men sporting black arm bands. It was all most dignified – except for the music.

Just behind the leading truck walked a small classical Chinese band of about eight musicians. They wore white bandsmen's uniforms with peaked caps and looked like a rather run-down English seaside town band. The music they played was doleful, the woodwind instruments high-pitched and keening, the small gong cracked and discordant. Not far behind them came a band equipped with Western brass instruments. They played 'When the Saints Go Marching In' – badly. Three other bands in the procession played 'Doin' What Comes Naturally' (from
Annie, Get Your Gun
, a recent cinema hit), 'Green-sleeves' and finally, on the correct instruments, Chinese classical music once again. Each band played in apparent ignorance of the others so the whole musical contribution to the event was a raucous medley of disconnected tunes from three cultures.

My mother, who watched this procession with me, remarked that she preferred firecrackers to the assassination of music but she had by then forgotten the five-day migraine that marked Chinese New Year.