HOUSE OF KWA IS SMOKE FROM AN OPIUM PIPE, GENTLY coiling around a cherry tree. As the smoke envelops the tree, a baby dragon soars into view. He curls up at the base of the tree and watches vibrant blossoms open. Some thrive while others lose their hue and shape, wilting and floating to the ground. The young dragon falls sound asleep, awaiting his own birth as a blossom on the tree.
That’s my dad, the sleeping dragon. Sometimes the days preceding our time on earth say more about us than the days we are here, and although he is not yet born, his constellation has glowed for centuries.
The baby dragon stirs. His snores gently shake the family tree. A cherry blossom tumbles, leaving space for a fresh bud to appear.
With the help of Great-Grandfather’s money, as promised in his letter to Ying Kam, the Kwas take up residence at 183 Wu Hu Street, Hung Hom, Hong Kong. To expats ‘Wu Hu’ sounds like a party; a lot of Chinese names seem funny to the mainly British foreigners living in the city. The Kwas’ new home is inland at one end of Wu Hu Street. At the tip of the other end, on the west coast of Kowloon Bay, is Whampoa Dock, one of the biggest dockyards in all of Asia. Ying Kam and his brother are in the perfect place to reinvigorate their business in textiles: Swatow Lace. Very soon, their sewing rooms filled with women bent over machines multiply into factory floors that become entire factory buildings. Ying Kam can afford to ride in rickshaws again. He and his brother work hard to rebuild a Kwa Empire, and now as well as a head office in Hong Kong, there are branches in Peiping, Shanghai and Swatow.
Happy Shadow readies her children for life in Hong Kong. She lives on the second floor of the Kwa building, the only concrete two-storey complex on the entire street, in the industrial district near Hung Hom Bay and Whampoa Dock. Relieved by the return to House of Kwa trappings, she returns to competitive wifely traditions and scolds Ng Yuk, who has taken up residence downstairs, with more vigour than before. Then Happy Shadow promotes herself to First Wife status – what Lotus Flower doesn’t know won’t hurt her.
Ng Yuk has grown thinner with worry this past year. She has had a string of miscarriages, and she smokes more and more to cope with each loss. When she becomes pregnant again, Ying Kam calls upon a local fortune-teller to find out if this baby will survive. He is told it will and celebrates the news with long black tea and opium.
Two months too soon, Ng Yuk is rushed to hospital when she begins to contract. Preferring a homebirth, the old way, she protested but was dragged here anyway, into an alien world of linoleum and beeping machines, strange nurses and doctors.
She is giving birth to triplets, a blessing the fortune-teller did not predict. The searing pain of not one but three babies entering the world in close succession is almost too much for her tiny frame. In her terror and delirium, she tries to imagine this is just a bad dream. A milk nurse on hand becomes a blurred apparition that Ng Yuk tries desperately to bring into focus, but she’s struck back down, eyes to the sky, to push again.
As the medical staff fight to keep the three boys alive, a Buddhist and a shaman are called in, along with, for good measure, a Catholic priest. Ying Kam does not care which god saves his sons, but it seems the gods are preoccupied playing mahjong somewhere in the clouds.
Ng Yuk shakes, her blood loss left unattended as the newborns take priority over their mother, being boys after all. They are tiny and thin with distended bellies and amidst the frantic grasps at the infants’ lives, their three small souls leave their tiny bodies to lie lifeless and exposed. The first turns out to be stillborn, the second holds on for an hour, and the third and last hope struggles and is gone by sunrise. ‘The brain damage will be terrible,’ the doctors say, lowering their instruments. ‘It is best not to fight anymore.’ Nurses wrap the brothers in cotton swaddling to hide their yellow skin as it begins to turn grey.
Still neglected and bloodied, Ng Yuk is weeping and smoking when Ying Kam comes to the door. ‘You have cursed the family.’ He lurches towards her. ‘My three sons.’ His eyes are red with the immeasurable pain of lost progeny.
A doctor follows Ying Kam out of the cold, stale room, whispering deliberately loud enough for Ng Yuk to hear. ‘Such shame.’
A proverb springs to Ng Yuk’s mind as she draws deeply on her cigarette: ‘Yige bu hao de gongzuo zhe zhize ta de gongju. A bad workman blames his tools.’ Splinters of bitterness embed in Ng Yuk’s heart. The blood between her thighs has dried, and scorn and grief pour out of her, filling the room.
Back in the House of Kwa, her emotions course over the floors, down corridors and stairs, across beds and tables. For days, despair laps at the concrete walls.
Before long, though, Ng Yuk is with child again, this time, as before, only one heartbeat is detected and she hopes that this time there really is only one baby. Her grit restored, she lights a cigarette and settles in for gestation, even managing a smile that her purpose in life has not ended. She slaps a maid and yells for supper, just like her old self again. A sigh of relief can be heard in rafters and rugs, bone china and ivory, crystal and lace. ‘Third Wife is back,’ mahogany chairs and Persian tapestries cry. However, Ng Yuk latches on to bottomless dissatisfaction, constant complaining and endless criticism, addictive like the cigarettes she is seldom seen without. Her madness deepens as the Kwa children watch on.
The shame of the curse of lost male triplets plagues Ying Kam’s thoughts for some time, but he finds solace enough in prayer – since converting to Christianity, another layer to the family’s history of Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian beliefs – and work, providing for his family through Swatow Lace, and getting life back on track. Second Wife Happy Shadow immerses herself in embroidery work and painting, and unlike Ng Yuk, she doesn’t smoke to pass the time, nor does she have pregnancy or babies to occupy her these days. Ying Kam bursts through the door of the upstairs apartment to call her to the latest birth below, to sit by Ng Yuk while the girl servants and midwives attend to her. It’s an Earth Dragon Boy, destined, predicts the fortune-teller, to be lucky, warm-hearted and full of blazing energy.
Two years on, in the spring of 1930, a new blossom falls from the Kwa family tree and a fresh bud appears. Ng Yuk gives birth to a baby girl. Number Four Daughter Wai Ching Kwa is hoisted high. She has plump cherry cheeks and a permanently inquisitive look about her, an old soul in taut rosy skin. Eighteen months later, in the mild November heat, Ng Yuk has another baby girl, this one with bright eyes and a shock of lustrous black hair; Wai Mui Kwa has a beguiling smile.
In line with Chinese naming custom, each Kwa child is bestowed with the same first character of their two-character names – Wai for the girls and Tak for the boys, although Ying Kam takes the liberty of deviating from this tradition, in accordance with modern thinking, or simply when he feels like it.
Great-Grandfather writes, Japan has invaded North-East China. I’ve heard that Hong Kong is swamped by a hundred thousand refugees. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria is so far north-east, Ying Kam pays little attention to rumours spilling over his factory floor, or in smoking dens, about Emperor Hirohito’s militaristic ambitions for China, let alone Hong Kong.
His household is once more filled with the joy of healthy dumpling babies, and while Ying Kam would prefer a small army of boys to swell the family ranks, these girls will help in the home and perhaps fetch fine dowries one day. In truth, the girls of Ng Yuk have an enchanting way of capturing his heart. Perhaps he is softening with age. They are Kwa and the youngest of his blossoms.
News travels to Hong Kong about the Japanese invaders still on the long march from China’s north, swallowing up villages as they head south. Rumour falls on the marketplace and stumbles over oranges and melons, rearing up between rice bags and carrot barrels.
‘They commit heinous acts of depravity,’ a fishmonger says.
‘They are under orders to kill boy children,’ a flower seller cries.
‘They kick in doors, terrorise families and do unthinkable things,’ a herbalist whispers.
Ng Yuk will take no chances. Her triplets are dead and, if rumour is to be believed, Japanese soldiers are killing newborn boys. Fortune-tellers and midwives confirm Ng Yuk is carrying a boy this time, and when she calls on a shaman to look at her palms, and he frowns, nods and frowns again, she knows she’ll need to play a clever tile in order to outwit fate.
‘Trick both the gods and the invaders,’ the wise man says. ‘It is the only way your son will live.’
In the depths of night on 30 May 1935, the auspicious Year of the Wood Pig, a cry from the healthy lungs of a fat baby boy heralds a new heir. My dad, Wing Nin, is born into the House of Kwa. The hospital birth was disastrous luck for the triplets, so Ng Yuk’s insistence on a homebirth held sway this time.
Exclamations of ‘Lang Loi!’ ring out to fool gods in the sky and demons on earth. Lang Loi means ‘beautiful girl’. Ying Kam forces a diamond earring with a solid gold stem through Wing Nin’s earlobe; it bleeds, and the baby suckles his wet nurse harder. ‘This will protect him. It will confuse immortal gods and human defilers.’ Ying Kam takes Wing Nin from the nurse and brings his son to his shoulder. He looks to the heavens and then to his son and whispers, ‘You are Kwa.’
The Buddhist, shaman and priest are back with their palms open for silver before a procession through the house to deliver blessings from every god.
Neighbours are told: ‘It’s a girl! No name yet. “Lang Loi” for now.’
Ng Yuk imagines that if Japanese soldiers tear through the house and happen upon Wing Nin swaddled in the arms of a nursemaid, Ng Yuk will stay calm and ask them, ‘This beautiful girl, Lang Loi, is she not truly just like a Japanese blossom?’ The soldiers will then turn to leave without checking if the baby is a girl or not. Ng Yuk lies awake at night and frequently rises to ensure the nurse never takes her eyes off Wing Nin.
When the child turns one in 1936, the Kwas feel it is safe to stop calling him a girl in public, although Lang Loi remains his nickname at home. The shaman is again summoned and paid handsomely for his wisdom. ‘This boy must have a new name so the gods will never know they have been tricked,’ the shaman advises with a stern flourish. ‘So they cannot trace him.’ He taps a metal bowl with a small wooden stump, and a mesmerising chime rings throughout the house.
Ying Kam and Ng Yuk visit Hong Kong’s Births, Deaths and Marriages Office and change Wing Nin’s name to Tak Lau. An earnest young man sits very straight and still behind the service desk. Proficient in English and Cantonese, he moves his mouth without expression, encouraging Ying Kam and Ng Yuk to give their son and other children Western names as well. ‘After all, the British are here to stay.’
My grandparents sign the paperwork for ‘Theresa’ Wai Ching and ‘Clara’ Wai Mui. They settle on two new names for Wing Nin in English and Cantonese. The boy’s name is Francis Tak Lau Kwa. The girls will go by their English names, while Wing Nin will now go by Tak Lau.
Treachery cannot reach Francis now; curses cannot touch him. Dad’s flower bud blooms on the cherry tree that was always waiting for him to arrive. The baby dragon grows fat and full of adventure.