AFTER SEVENTEEN DAYS OF TERROR, IT’S CHRISTMAS. JAPANESE soldiers set upon a hospital, bayoneting injured Allied military men in their beds, while nurses are raped and murdered.
A few hours later, on the third floor of the Peninsula Hotel at the corner of Nathan and Salisbury roads, British officials surrender to Japanese authority and a new occupation of Hong Kong begins. Today is Black Christmas.
Tak Lau wonders if the deal with the enemy means he and his family will be able to eat a proper meal again, and to see the sky.
From now on, the Japanese will demand identification papers at checkpoints. Enemy civilians – mainly British ex-pat men, women and children – will be forced from their homes, relocated to camps, starved and beaten indiscriminately. Gazes will be lowered. Shoulders hunched. Ordinary native Hong Kong people will be given ration cards and risk life and limb to bring even the most meagre amount of food to the family table. Commerce and industry will grind almost to a halt. Schools will shut. Children will have nowhere to play. And the eldest House of Kwa girls will be hidden. ‘The sky will wait for you, child,’ Father tells Theresa. Then he closes the partition wall to her room with Clara.
Upstairs, many of Happy Shadow’s children have long moved out to start families of their own. She sits silently with her remaining teenage sons and her youngest boy, Patrick. Her two daughters, nineteen and twenty-one, go to their room and lock the door. Happy Shadow places her hands over her ears to block out the Japanese shouting and Cantonese pleas for mercy drifting past the outside of the building.
The two sons of Ng Yuk, six-year-old Tak Lau and thirteen-year-old Elder Brother, step off the porch and survey the carnage. Their mother didn’t want her boys to go out, but there was little choice with the whole family starving. Because the servants were all female, they might be raped or killed and not come back. Food is now only available in rations, which the boys will try to collect from a local bakery.
Fifty paces down the road, the boys pass a man crouching in a doorway with an injured, bleeding child in his arms. A door, half a facade and a few ground-floor rooms are all that’s left of this home. The man rocks silently; the child, listless and still, must be dead. Tak Lau and Elder Brother avert their eyes just as a pair of Japanese soldiers approach on horseback.
From his position in the saddle, one soldier catches Elder Brother’s temple with the butt of his rifle. No provocation is needed for any act of Japanese violence against Hong Kong Chinese. The other soldier says something in Japanese, and the assailant brings his gun to rest against his pommel. The boys fall to the ground, kneeling and covering their heads. Elder Brother’s scalp begins to bleed from the blow. The soldiers jeer and ride off, probably returning to base; a number of Japanese troops have set up residence in the theatre on Bulkeley Street around the corner.
The brothers slip along alleyways, exploring their changed city. A face peers through balcony shutters on a third floor, but when Tak Lau looks up it disappears. Most streets are deserted.
There’s a long line outside the bakery. Everyone in the queue has downcast eyes; no one wishes to stand out. A Japanese soldier barks in a dialect none of the locals understands and marches alongside them. He pulls one man out of the line, flings him to the ground and kicks him in the stomach before taking a document from the writhing man’s jacket, holding it high and shouting again. The Chinese people get the idea now and pull identity papers from their pockets, so the boys do too.
Last night and the night before, a van with a megaphone drove through the streets declaring in Cantonese that the colony had surrendered to Japan. But no one needed to be told the news – they’d known the moment the sounds of gunfire and shelling stopped.
The Allies decide that if they cannot hold Hong Kong, they will at least make life difficult for the Japanese. In October and November 1942, the US conducts four air raids, shelling the city in an attempt to drive out the occupiers. Over the following two years, they will attack more than twenty-four times. Before the end of World War II, the number of Allied air assaults on Hong Kong will be fifty-one.
House of Kwa is deep in among it, watching B-25s and P-40s soaring directly overhead. Mostly the targets are Japanese cargo ships in Victoria Harbour at Whampoa Dock at the end of Wu Hu Street.
The floating targets are obvious, but occasionally bombs go astray. The closer you live to the docks, the higher the risk. The Kwas begin a ritualistic rush back and forth between their bomb shelter and home. They didn’t make it there during the Battle of Hong Kong, but the dugout in the hills near Hung Hom was a good decision after all.
Through the doorway in the darkness, Tak Lau can just make out the shapes of maids as they scurry up and down a corridor, carrying blankets and bread. Probably stale, he thinks. He hasn’t had fresh bread in weeks.
‘Children,’ says Father, fixing his eyes on Theresa before his gaze bores into Tak Lau. ‘The bombs are coming closer tonight.’ He holds a candle up to his face. The distant sounds of soaring followed by thunderous explosions then earth tremors do seem more powerful than usual. ‘The US and British are bombing the water again to try and save us.’
Tak Lau’s eyes light up. ‘Are they are aiming at Japanese ships on the harbour again, Baba?’
‘Yes, but as I’ve told you, sometimes they miss.’ Ying Kam leads the family to the door. ‘We are not safe tonight.’
The Kwas huddle in pairs or groups of three, taking turns to slip out into an alleyway at the rear of the house. The night air is warm and humid. Three-year-old Mary, the youngest Kwa, lets out a squeal as she trips on a cobblestone. ‘Shh,’ twelve-year-old Theresa says abruptly, scanning the road. Her eyes are adjusting to the moonlight; she can only see the shadows of Father and several men the children call Uncle. The tall figures have positioned themselves at lookout points along a route to the bunker. Ying Kam has invited as many people as the shelter can hold, so other families are headed in the same direction. The Japanese tend to stay away from this area after dark, knowing how vulnerable it is to stray Allied bombs. But nevertheless, as everyone in Hong Kong now knows, you can never be too careful. Theresa picks up Mary, who continues to complain about her grazed knee.
Tak Lau falls into step with two friends – even in darkness he would know his street football playmates anywhere. Sometimes they roam the territory together too. They are older boys by perhaps two or three years, and he feels grown up being around them. Whenever Elder Brother grows tired of playing Tak Lau’s childish games, these are the boys he turns to.
Before the darkness of occupation, the boys even rode the light rail once without paying. They leaped off from the far door as an angry conductor made his way after them through the crowded tram carriage. The bigger boys had jumped first, then they called to Tak Lau to jump too, arms outstretched and shouting, goading him on. Adrenalin coursed through his body and Tak Lau leaped. He stumbled, but one of the boys grabbed his hand to steady him and they ran down an alley without looking back. The face of a beggar, curled up on the corner with an empty bowl, had crinkled with laughter to see such mischief. The boys ran laughing too, all the way home.
The walk to the bunker is supposed to be a sombre one, but a friend of Tak Lau has a twinkle in his eye. Everyone calls him Einstein because of his crazy hair. He is always on the lookout for adventure, and tonight is no exception. ‘C’mon,’ he says, motioning to Tak Lau and their other friend. ‘Look, the Bogies.’
The Bogie Boys is a gang known for its Humphrey Bogart hairstyles and tough image – so far as eight- to twelve-year-olds go. They are never unfriendly to Tak Lau and his friends. He enjoys catching up with them; he’s lucky that there’s always someone to play with in his neighbourhood, and they rarely comment on his upper-class wardrobe.
‘I went to the top of the hill with them last time.’ Einstein sounds excited. ‘To see the lightshow.’
The friends catch up to the three Bogie Boys, and together the six of them walk in moonlight towards the communal bunker the Kwas have funded. Their closest neighbours and friends have priority after the family. Then it’s just whoever else can squeeze in.
As they start the climb, Tak Lau realises he and the boys aren’t headed for the bunker. He sees the silhouettes of his sisters being ushered into the cavernous hole in the ground. Other families crowd in. He knows the drill well. They will be in total darkness until a large barn-like door has been pulled shut by the strongest men. Only then will it be safe to light an oil lamp. They will sit shoulder to shoulder in the damp, cramped room until Father says it’s okay to come out. It isn’t airless in there because builders have installed hollow pipes to various surface points; they are covered in mesh to stop debris falling in and are large enough for a small child to climb through to safety if the door becomes blocked. An outsider in the know could even roll down food and provisions if things got really dire. It’s not airless in there, Tak Lau thinks. But it does feel like you’ll suffocate.
In the dark clamber to safety, it’s no wonder Tak Lau’s family haven’t noticed he’s missing. He is already well away, hiking up the hill. The six boys wade through tropical shrubbery, pushing swathes of long wet leaves aside. The only way is up, but just as they near a small plateau, Tak Lau stumbles; he feels blood trickling down his shin and touches his wounded knee. ‘Don’t look down. Don’t look down.’ He thinks of Mary’s grazed knee and how Theresa kept her quiet.
The boys emerge beneath the stars at the top of their ascent. From this vantage point, they see Hong Kong Island and Victoria Harbour, moonlight striking the water and rooftops. There are no lights on in the buildings or any bustling of people in the Jade Market in Jordan. No streetlights illuminate the footpaths leading to unsavoury haunts down alleyways towards Kowloon, and there’s no one shopping on Tsim Sha Tsui’s main streets. Hong Kong has been quiet for an hour now. It is as if the Allies drop warning bombs to give civilians a chance to get away before unleashing the full force of their friendly fire.
Hong Kong is silent and dark. She waits.
Tak Lau sits shoulder to shoulder with his friends, hoping the Bogie Boy who is chewing gum will break up his packet into small pieces and share it around. When he does, Tak Lau chews enthusiastically and alternates between looking up at the sky and down at the magnificent harbour. It is difficult to know which is the better view. His eyes rest on the bottom of the hill where the bunker must be – where his family is huddled in the dark.
And then it happens. Planes soar and cut through the inky cloth of the sky, blades of steel that are blacker than the rich thick night. They are black as death, these US bombers sent by Roosevelt to help Churchill eject the Japanese. Every time they appear, it seems they come from outer space then disappear into a black hole until they are summoned again.
Tak Lau watches as each fuselage releases its bombs, birthing them into the humid air, raining them onto the water. Three, four, five, six, seven. Falling, whistling. The vibrations are accompanied by violent explosions. Some shells hit their targets, smashing Japanese vessels to smithereens. Some miss and fall to the depths of the harbour or connect with buildings near the shore. An untouched Japanese vessel rocks violently in the storm of its life. Another target explodes, and the boys cheer. The lightshow continues.
‘We know about the bombs before London does,’ one boy says. He is wearing horn-rimmed glasses and still chewing gum even though it must have lost its flavour by now.
‘We know about the bombs before the world,’ another boy shouts over the next explosion.
At the edge of Tak Lau’s peripheral vision, a row of houses is taken out on Wu Hu Street. Before he has time to think about it, a bomb pounds the area near to where the family bunker must be.
‘I’m so clever.’ Tak Lau nudges his friend with boyish bravado. ‘My whole family might be dead down there. Up here I am alive.’
Bombs keep coming, and six boys cheer and holler on top of a hill. At one stage, to the group’s delight, Tak Lau does a little dance mimicking a Japanese soldier looking up in terror at a descending bomb before it pulverises him. Tak Lau flounders on the uneven earth, flailing his arms and legs.
The boys take a break from clowning around to see if there is a better viewing platform. The previous air raid lasted around two hours, so they have plenty of time to gad about. After Tak Lau points to a good spot, the boys congregate there on a broad rock that fits them all. Tak Lau has prime position. His eyes widen, the reflection of the fires making his pupils glow.
Japanese aircraft fly onto the scene, ducking and weaving, intercepting the US B-25s and P-40 Warhawks.
‘We must be pretty special,’ Tak Lau says, almost drowned out by the rumble. ‘Everyone is fighting over us!’ he shouts louder as the other boys laugh.
Tak Lau turns his back on the airshow and holds up a piece of paper so that it catches light from below. It’s a diagram clipped from the newspaper of six warplanes, including the three in the sky right now. Whenever he can, he tears out pictures of mechanical things he fancies. The paper is crumpled from being incessantly studied, and for the hundredth time Tak Lau traces the printed shapes on it with his fingers. He can barely make out any labelled parts anymore, but that doesn’t matter, he’s memorised them; he keeps the news clipping for reassurance.
Now the news is right here in front of him. Planes fire and fly at one another, spitting, twisting and diving. As a vessel tacks towards shore, an Australian naval mine explodes beneath it. Above, US bullets tear the wing from a Japanese aircraft, and its fuselage dips, the relentless shots a jagged burst of fire against the oily backdrop. There’s a lull, then a splash. Tak Lau watches the burning Japanese fighter spin into the water. It sinks slowly until it disappears.