Gweilo (29 page)

Now that I had achieved my aim of finding the temple, I dropped the map in a drain grid. From here on, I was to wander without direction, discovering what I could. It was like being an explorer.

For two hours, I sauntered through the streets where Hong Kong had first begun, at least as far as the
gweilo
population was concerned. Many of the early buildings remained standing, in a dilapidated sort of way, their plaster cracked by the sun and eroded by typhoons.

From the narrow balconies projected the ubiquitous bamboo poles of laundry, small bamboo cages of song birds and, here or there, a larger cage containing a cockerel. Dogs slept out of the way under the arcades, cats slinking cautiously past them to investigate the latest fish bone thrown from an upstairs window. Some of the buildings had sprouted bushes from cracks in the walls. Bougainvillaea or jasmine trailed down from pots on balconies. All this was part and parcel of any Chinese street scene. What made this place different were the shops and businesses.

Whereas Mong Kok had its pavement
dai pai dongs
, Tai Ping Shan (as the Chinese called the area) had little cafés and restaurants inside the shop spaces under the buildings. They mostly sold noodles,
won ton
, soups and
dim sum
, the ingredients of some of which I could not identify, despite having attended and graduated from the Yau Ma Tei School of Street-Eating.

The ladder streets contained stalls balanced on the steps or constructed on platforms. These precarious entrepreneurial adventures sold buttons, thread and zips, cut keys or sharpened knives, repaired
wok
handles and swapped or sold secondhand domestic appliances. One stall sold ancient Imperial Chinese dynastic bronze coins with square holes in the middle. Dating back in some cases several centuries, people bought them to ensure fiscal good fortune. The coins cost only a few cents each and, if one had a spare dollar or three, one could buy a hundred coins tied with red twine into the shape of a short sword, the better for fighting off ill luck and malevolent spirits.

I passed a door guarded by a be-turbaned Sikh armed with a shotgun. Behind him, the shop window was filled with gold, brilliantly illuminated by spotlights. It was all 24k fine gold – as near to pure as one could get it, soft, pliable and unsuitable for jewellery. Its colour was brash and it was not sold in blocks of bullion. Most of it had been fashioned into something – a crouching tiger, a fat Buddha, a Ming warrior or mandarin, a writhing dragon. I even saw intricate, solid gold sampans, junks, cars, pagodas, pandas and phoenixes. I knew the metal was sold by weight with only a nominal charge being added on for the exquisite workmanship. It seemed a waste of effort to me to fashion the metal into something when I knew the Chinese regarded it as merely an investment to be sold when times got tough. And, presumably, melted down. When I mentioned this to my mother, however, she gave me the explanation. To put a gold block on show in your house was in poor taste and arrogant, but to put on display a beautiful object not only indicated the owner's refinement but, at the same time, his wealth.

A short distance further on I came across a coffin-maker's workshop, open to the street. A carpenter was at work as I walked by, shaping the side of a coffin from a wide plank, curls of reddish wood peeling off from the blade. Another man was rounding off the clover-leaf end of a coffin, rubbing it with sandpaper. In the gloomy rear of the premises, completed coffins stood on racks. As I watched, the carpenter spied me and suddenly ran at me with a chisel. I fled to shouts of rage behind me. A wood off-cut bounced on the road at my side. Once in the next street, I stopped to get my breath back and to glance round the corner to check I was not being followed. He was nowhere in sight.

This episode of sudden, wild rage was not only terrifying but also incomprehensible. I had blond hair. I was lucky. I brought good fortune. Apart from the skull-faced gardener at the Fourseas, who was in any case verging on the certifiable, I had never before seen the legendary sudden wrath to which the Chinese were prone. Later, I asked Wong if this had happened because it was considered bad luck for the dead to have their coffins peered at by a
gweilo
.

'No,' Wong replied. 'This man jus' no like you. Maybe he Communist.'

To gain my composure, I walked down the street to a tea shop. Entering it was akin to stepping back a hundred years. The walls were panelled, the sides lined with cubicles divided from each other by latticed screens, the fretwork cut in patterns of the characters for prosperity and longevity, and containing a dark wood table and benches. The brass tea urns steamed at the rear of the shop, next to a shrine and an elderly man sitting at a table with a cash box, an abacus and a book of receipts. I appeared to be the only customer.

A waiter approached me and jutted his chin at me.

'Yum cha,'
I replied.

He looked at me for a moment then signalled me to sit in one of the cubicles. A minute later, he brought me a pot of gunpowder tea and a tea bowl. I filled the bowl and took a sip.

'Ho sik!'
I exclaimed, adding in English, 'Very good!'

The waiter made no response whatsoever but walked away.

Although at first I was the only customer, over the next half hour, the place began to fill with elderly men, every one of them carrying a small bird cage containing a finch. They were tiny birds, some striped black, white and red, some yellow, some green, some a nondescript fawn. As they sat down, the men hung the cages from hooks suspended from beams in the ceiling directly over their seats. Tea was served. More arrived until every seat was occupied except the three in my cubicle.

Sipping their tea, the men conversed avidly amongst themselves. Overhead, the birds twittered and sang at each other. There were, it dawned on me, two different sets of conversation going on, human below and avian above. The tea house was like a social club for both species.

The waiter came over to me, signalling that I should leave. He was not antagonistic, but four men had entered with bird cages and wanted my cubicle. I nodded and asked for the bill. He shook his head and waved his hand from side to side, dismissing payment. I placed a fifty-cent coin under the teapot and left. I had not gone ten yards when the waiter came running down the street after me waving it.

'Tipsee
,' I said.
'Kumshaw.'

He looked at me and smiled broadly. It was then I saw his silence was because he had no tongue. I made an effort to ignore his infirmity. He made a throaty sort of laugh, pocketed the coin and stroked my hair. I wished, as his hand touched my head, that somehow I would not bring him wealth but return to him the power of speech. When I got home, I told Wong about him.

'Japanese cut plentee tongue wartime,' he said stoically.

As I walked along the street, a faint and unidentifiable herbal smell reached me. The further on I walked, the stronger it became until, finally, I arrived at the source. It was a shop unlike any ordinary Chinese store, with a shop-front window and a glass door bearing vermilion Chinese characters. A neon sign of a six-foot-high snake coiling itself around a bamboo stake hung outside over the street.

The window display was most curious. It included bowls of seeds, what appeared to be bits of dry twig, desiccated bark, dried leaves, dehydrated roots, shrivelled fungi and flowers. Behind them were a dozen or so large ground-glass stoppered bottles containing preserved frogs, lizards, snakes and other less easily recognized pieces of flesh. Other reptiles lay on trays in front, dried out and stretched on frames of bamboo splints. Beside them were trays of what looked like black dried turds.

Going in, I found there was only one other customer, a woman with a florid birthmark on her neck the size of my outstretched hand. Behind the counter a man was busy writing on sheets of plain paper and opening drawers in a cabinet that reached to the ceiling and ran the length of the shop. From each he took a pinch or a handful of the contents, putting them into the sheets of paper. Every so often, he studied an old book. This done, he skilfully folded each sheet into a small, self-sealing parcel and placed it in the woman's rattan basket. When she had paid and left, the man turned his attention to me.

'Wha' you wan'?' he asked in pidgin English.

'What dis shop?' I replied.

'Dis Chilese med'sin shop,' he replied. 'Can do for
gweilo
, too. You sick by 'n' by, you come. I see you lo more sick.' He looked me up and down. 'You lo sick now?' he enquired optimistically.

'I lo sick.'

'You wan' see med'sin ? Lo all same like
gweilo
med'sin.'

Never one to turn down an opportunity, I said I did and he showed me round the shop. In addition to a vast array of dried plant and fungal material, there were velvet-covered deers' antlers, tiny birds' nests, powdered pearls like grey talc shot through with stardust, the ghostly pale exoskeletons of sea-horses, dried bears' spleens (the 'turds' in the window), an assortment of dried insects, a mummified tiger's penis ('. . . make you good wif you lady fr'en' . . .') and
his
pièce de résistance
, a rhino's horn. When I asked for what these were cures, he reeled off a list of ailments, most of which I was ignorant of and hoped to so remain. When he was unable to give the English name, he mimed the symptoms, reminding me of the grotesque tableaux in the Tiger Balm Gardens.

Before I could leave, he mixed up a packet of dried plant matter for me.

'Good gen'ral med'sin for you. Like tonic. You put water, boiloo wung hour. Drink wung cup wung day. Make you st'ong.' He flexed his biceps and felt them. 'Lo ill for maybe t'ee mumf.'

When I got home, I gave the packet to my mother who was in the kitchen making a light supper, it being Wong's day off. She tipped the contents into a saucepan and boiled it for an hour. The apartment filled with such a noxious odour it woke my father, asleep in the bedroom. It also brought a shine to the interior of the saucepan not seen since it was new.

My mother and I let it cool then poured a cup. It tasted execrable. We left the remainder for Wong. When he returned, he was most grateful for it. As far as he was concerned, this was only a few drops short of being the elixir of life, its cost prohibitive on his wages.

The main mercantile district of Hong Kong, the city of Victoria, referred to by everyone as Central District – or just Central – held little interest for me. Most of the buildings were the offices of banks, shipping lines, lawyers, insurance companies and import/export firms. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank towered over the parked cars in what was known as Statue Square. To one side were the law courts, a classical colonnaded building with a dome on top. It could have been transported there from any European city. Yet, for all that, the old China still impinged itself upon the mid-twentieth century.

In rush hour, the chances of a rickshaw jam were greater than one composed of vehicles, for many office workers and businessmen coming from Kowloon took rickshaws from the ferry pier to their offices. Of those who chose to walk, many paused at the shoe-shine 'boys'.

I could not understand why grown men were referred to as boys. The Fourseas had had room boys: only the bellboy, Halfie, had actually been a boy. Wong was our house boy; my father employed a Chinese office boy who was at least twice his age.

The shoe-shine boys bucked the trend. Half of them were indeed boys, some of them my age, who squatted on the pavement under the shade of an arcade, a box before them. If a customer halted, tins of polish, brushes and cloths would appear from within the box. Deft fingers rolled up trouser legs and, within minutes, the shoes would appear pristine, scuff marks and dust removed.

On one occasion, my father having withheld my pocket money for some misdemeanour, I toyed with making a shoe-shine box of my own, stocking it with polish and brushes from the kitchen and setting up my pitch. At fifty cents a polish – the going rate – I could earn a week's pocket money thrice over in a morning. I mentioned my plan to my mother.

'You want to do what!' For a moment she looked at me, then burst out laughing.

'It's not funny,' I defended myself. 'I've got to earn some pocket money.'

'Can you imagine your father coming along the street . . . ?' She grinned broadly at the prospect. 'Now that would be "going native" in no small measure. A definite plunge in standards. You'd be in the paper! Photo and all!' She extrapolated further.
'Gweilo Boy Sets New Trend. The Shoe-shine Entrepreneur. Son Sets Up Shoe-shine Box: Father Commits Hari-kiri.'

'So, can I do it?' I asked, sensing the wind blowing my way and wondering what
hari-kiri
was.

'No,' my mother said. 'It's not because you'd cause a scandal. That would be hilarious. It's that, if you were to set up in business, you would be taking earnings from the other shoe-shine boys and they need all they can get.'

As usual, my mother's common sense prevailed and I put the idea out of my head. She surreptitiously reinstated my weekly allowance.