HOUSE OF KWA HAS BEEN IN DISARRAY FOR MONTHS NOW, ever since that man in military uniform met with Tak Lau’s father. To the little boy, the low voices of men in the front room sound like how he imagines the rumble of tanks and horses coming over the hills for battle. He’s heard of such things in stories and in snippets of conversations on street corners.
He knows that his family is having an underground bunker constructed in forested land at the base of the hill where Chatham Road meets the end of Wu Hu Street. It’s a source of great fascination for Tak Lau as he watches teams of poorly paid men excavate the plot with shovels. The bunker has been marked out beneath trees among tropical shrubbery, and the itinerant workers, brought in from China, are sworn to secrecy and threatened with the might of Kwa should they disclose details of the project or its location. ‘When we survive this,’ they are told, their mothers, sisters and daughters can come to work at Kwa factories in prize jobs for a poor underclass.
In the house on Wu Hu Street, a builder finally loses his patience with Tak Lau and shoos him away from his tools, so the boy wanders down the hall to his father’s study. ‘Why are we building these things and changing our house?’ Tak Lau asks Ying Kam.
Adjustments have been made to floorboards and ceiling spaces as well. Undetectable trapdoors have appeared under rugs, while a section of the wall, here in his father’s study, has been refashioned to contain a safe. The desk sits slightly out towards the middle of the room to allow the fresh decorative paper to set. Tak Lau remembers how his mother screamed at the design consultants that she didn’t care about the pattern of the new wallpaper, so they rapidly rolled up the samples they had unfurled for her consideration. She had wanted to hit one of them, Tak Lau could see that. He can always read her temper.
Father pauses over his ledger, on which he has been writing long lines of numbers Tak Lau does not understand. ‘Boy, we once called you “girl” to save you from the enemy. Now they truly come.’ When he places a hand on Tak Lau’s shoulder, dust collected on the boy’s clothing – from his adventures fossicking among construction rubbish – forms a small cloud and disappears. ‘Being a boy will be a good thing this time.’
Tak Lau stares at his father, not understanding the logic.
‘If you cannot fight them, then go along with them until you can. If you can’t beat them join them.’ Tak Lau has heard this expression before. ‘When they come, and they will, our small territory cannot defend itself with only three aeroplanes for an air force.’ Father refers to the pitiful defence the British have left Hong Kong with; it’s so underwhelming, the colony may as well give up now. Under the oldest monarchy in the world, ruled from Japan’s Chrysanthemum Throne, the attacking forces have every resource imaginable, while this British outpost is completely underprepared. ‘We must take care of your sisters. The work we’re doing will help them. It will help us all.’
Tak Lau is confused. If we are joining the enemy, he thinks, why must we hide my sisters? He nods anyway.
Ying Kam is tired. The boy is too young for the truth, so he smiles and pats his son on the back before handing him a fistful of bills and coins. ‘Go buy me a small black notebook like this one.’ He points to a leather-bound journal on his desk and sends Tak Lau away.
The boy needn’t be asked twice – he stashes the money in his pocket. The youngest boy of thirty-two siblings tears off down the hall on a mission for the most important man he knows.
A sullen maid emerges from a bedroom off the passage way. ‘Where are you going?’ She can tell he’s headed for the front door, wearing a cap thrown on in his haste to leave on his father’s errand. ‘I’ll get in trouble if you go out without a chaperone,’ she snaps.
Tak Lau sighs. He is often out on his own; the servants don’t seem to care once he’s beyond view. He has never actually witnessed his maids on the rough end of Ng Yuk’s beatings when he goes missing, so he doesn’t understand why this maid would want to stop him. He shrugs and puts his hands in his pockets. Then his eyes light up with an idea.
Tak Lau hands the maid a bill from his trousers; she looks around nervously and it disappears into the folds of her shabby oversized pinafore. He has just learned something about maids: they can be manipulated with beatings and money – except that one maid, Puddle. She was different.
The boy looks past the sullen maid to see his little sister Mary in the arms of a wet nurse. He thinks the nurse looks sour too. ‘Sour milk,’ he mutters, and laughs quietly at his own joke. Mary is almost two, so she will be completely weaned soon. Tak Lau thinks she is the sweetest thing on earth but would never admit it. ‘What a baby.’ He rolls his eyes and races down the hall to the relative freedom of Hong Kong’s streets.
Peril is on its way to engulf the territory, but Tak Lau is full of excitement as he picks up his pace.
The best part of a year has passed since the Kwas went on high alert. They decide to relax, as yet another year may go by before war is officially declared, or perhaps it won’t happen after all.
However, the Kwas and all of Hong Kong are taken by surprise on 8 December 1941. Tak Lau is six, and Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor. As the world scrambles to process that news, Japanese troops storm Hong Kong. Enemy bombs rain down on the British colony while soldiers swarm over the border from mainland China focused first on taking the Kowloon side, where Wu Hu Street is, and then the Island. On the same day, Japan wages coordinated attacks on the Philippines, British Malaya and Thailand.
Hong Kong is in utter chaos, a war zone of mortars and grenades. The deafening sound of high-speed shells sends people running onto the streets. Everyone but the Kwas.
‘It’s too dangerous to attempt to make it to the bomb shelter,’ Ying Kam tells his family. Their house, the most structurally sound on the street, may just be strong enough to withstand the assault. The Kwas stay inside and take their chances.
Buildings crumble nearby. Homes are ransacked. Shops are looted. The shelling of civilian houses goes on for days in a relentless pulverising of Hong Kong, and all that families can do is struggle to hide wives, daughters, sisters and mothers.
Tak Lau and his siblings slip through newly installed trapdoors and hide under floors in their home whenever troops march by, while Ying Kam, Happy Shadow, Ng Yuk and their servants pray, giving the ancestral joss sticks a workout like never before.
They are all Kwas and look out for one another. The competition between Second and Third Wife is still stiff, but since Ying Kam left First Wife in China, they keep their squabbles between themselves, not wishing to be old nags to their husband and bear the consequences.
House of Kwa hangs on for a miracle.
Tak Lau’s sister Theresa, five years his senior, wraps an arm around him. The two of them are hidden in a cavity beneath a trapdoor, while the other Kwa children are concealed elsewhere around the house. Since birth, Theresa has retained her old soul demeanour and avid curiosity, and she has acquired a protective maternal instinct.
The daily Japanese military march along the Kwas’ street towards the docks and back again has finished, but soldiers are known to splinter off suddenly on a spree of killing civilians and taking prisoners. So far, the House of Kwa remains untouched as if cloaked by a force field.
The children have been playing games to distract themselves. Theresa has shown the others how to thread beads onto string to make a necklace, and they do the same jigsaw puzzles over and over again.
A distinctive knock followed by a chair scraping the floorboards signals it is safe for the siblings to come out. Theresa whispers, ‘Are you ready?’ Tak Lau nods. Together they push against the wooden door above them until a crack appears, enough for Father to wrap his fingers around the edge and pull it up.
He reaches down to help Theresa and Tak Lau out, their small hands in his.
‘The Japanese have taken the Island,’ Ying Kam says.
The children stare at their father, knowing from his expression this can’t be good news.
It’s 18 December. The Kwa family has survived ten days since the Battle of Hong Kong began.
As many as ten thousand women and girls have already been raped; their families have been murdered or are powerless to help. Refugees are fleeing. Even disease-ridden, famine-distressed areas of mainland China offer more appealing prospects than here in Hong Kong.
The Kwas are growing hungry, but they don’t know when to risk venturing out for supplies or where to obtain them. At least they still have water, if only for a few unpredictable hours a day. In the beginning their well-stocked pantry was a blessing, but for a large family and staff it only went so far. Western treats such as honey and jam were shared and savoured by the quarter teaspoon as the Kwas huddled around a gas lantern in a boarded-up room. Luckily, one of the maids had purchased a large sack of sugar before the battle; it had been hard to get, with everyone panicking and stocking up. Sweet sugar tea was such a treat, but then they ran out. The maids were too terrified to go out since then and besides could not be trusted with the mission of buying provisions anymore, so by day ten Ying Kam was forced to forage under cover of darkness for anything edible he could find, and tree foliage was better than nothing. Now the family is managing on food scraps mixed with leaves and bark, topped with weeds and berries: strange grey broths of no distinct flavour.
But the whole family has survived so far, along with their house, while most buildings on Wu Hu Street are either unrecognisable or razed to the ground. While any remaining neighbours flee or scramble to rebuild and repair, against the odds, the House of Kwa lives and breathes.
Surprisingly, the family knows of only two places near the Hong Kong shoreline that have been spared any structural damage at all: their home and the central financial district, which the Japanese avoid attacking. The enemy forces are careful not to destroy the commercial centres because they want to take Hong Kong, not obliterate it.
Ying Kam knows it’s no accident that the House of Kwa is untouched. ‘It’s fate and the will of the gods,’ he says to himself, venturing a glimpse outside from a top-floor window. He sees scorched streets and mangled corpses on neighbouring lots, and he knows there will be some way to go before he and his family can come out of this unscathed.
Few neighbours remain on Wu Hu Street. Most have fled to join the hordes of refugees fleeing across the border to China. Those who stay lie low to rake through the rubble of their homes for lost loved ones and clutch at the dust for missing valuables. All the while they keep checking the coast is clear – Japanese soldiers sometimes burst into what’s left of Wu Hu homes, ripping jewellery from ears and necks and chopping off fingers when rings can’t be effortlessly removed. Horror and fear blanket a city under siege.
‘You cannot be too careful,’ whispers Ng Yuk to no one in particular as she crouches and rocks to soothe herself while she listens to screams drift in through her window.