ON HER WAY HOME NG YUK RUNS INTO MR CHUNG, THE Japanese warrant officer in charge of the Kwas’ borough. He picked up some Cantonese during his time as a Japanese spy in Hong Kong pre-occupation, and Ng Yuk has been helping him to improve his fluency. Knowledge of Cantonese is an advantage when communicating with the Chinese population, though few occupiers will admit it; the political line is to use English and Japanese only.
‘I will see you upon the hour for mahjong,’ Mr Chung says, nodding respectfully as Ng Yuk bows as low as her balance will allow.
‘I very much look forward to seeing you and any other warrant officers or sergeants who wish to play today.’ She smiles, taking her leave.
Mr Chung is most respectful and bows his head again, rather taken with Ng Yuk and her graceful ways. She gestures like a Chinese opera singer, her silks making every movement more dramatic. He watches her disappear around a corner.
Once she’s out of sight, Ng Yuk leans against a wall – her feet are killing her. She looks up at the clear blue sky and hopes her good mahjong skills will help save her family.
Her Hanfu silks conceal a swelling belly. Another baby grows inside her: a child to be born into the occupation.
That afternoon, Tak Lau is at the kitchen table nursing his stitches when three soldiers enter without knocking. Mr Chung greets the boy in Cantonese, and the other two nod before all three make their way out onto the large tiled balcony. A round table has been set up for mahjong with branch chairs at its north, east, south and west. The officers remove pistols from their holsters and place them on spare branch chairs at the balcony’s edge, then lean their rifles against a wall. A maid pours Chinese tea.
Ng Yuk emerges looking every bit the lady of the house, having changed her outfit since that morning. She and Mr Chung conduct a serious mahjong conversation in Cantonese, while the two other officers find it difficult to keep up.
‘Our army is on a recruitment drive,’ Mr Chung mentions just as, at Ng Yuk’s behest, all four pairs of hands reach in to shuffle the 144 tiles in the middle of the table. ‘Will you be dealer?’ he asks her.
She nods. ‘Help me build the walls.’ She gently raises the sleeve of her garment to reveal her dainty wrist, a tantalising gesture of Japanese geishas. As they stack the tiles into four walls, Ng Yuk continues in Cantonese, ‘Now choose thirteen tiles.’ Mr Chung has played many times with Ng Yuk; her explanation is for the benefit of the other officers, who are here to learn the language as they play the game.
To begin, she turns over an extra tile. She starts to explain the chow, pung and kong suits to the bewildered men when Mr Chung interrupts. ‘Might your son be interested in joining our ranks? He can begin by helping out in the army barracks.’
Ng Yuk looks over at the kitchen table, but Tak Lau is no longer there. Mr Chung gestures with his head to the corner of the balcony behind her; the boy is crouched over a rifle, running his hand across the cool metal barrel. ‘You’ll be able to have one of those when we’re finished with you, boy.’ Mr Chung directs this at Tak Lau but smiles at Ng Yuk.
Collaborate or die, she thinks as she returns the smile with a nod.
On Tak Lau’s first day there are none of the formalities one might expect of a military induction. He simply fronts up to the old cinema building as Mr Chung has instructed. The boy waits on his own for only a few minutes before the warrant officer arrives and appraises him, nodding with approval. The boy is turned out in the miniature uniform delivered to the House of Kwa last night, and to Mr Chung’s great satisfaction, Tak Lau remembers to bow low. The boy learns fast, Mr Chung thinks.
Tak Lau follows the warrant officer into the barracks. What strikes the boy at first is the almost convivial atmosphere: calm, relaxed and so very unlike the chaos wreaked by these soldiers in the streets and homes of Hong Kong – beatings, executions, rapes and humiliations. It’s not always like that, of course, but when it’s all that people speak of, it feels as though the terror never rests. Here, the soldiers smile and give almost imperceptible nods, acknowledging Tak Lau as Mr Chung leads him down a corridor. The boy has seen what these men are capable of, but despite the horror they have visited upon his life, he puts his fear aside. He is a spy on a mission: a child in a classified domain with access to all areas. Fascinated by how the new ruling class lives, he is thrilled to be taken under its wing.
‘You can begin by polishing the boots,’ Mr Chung says.
Tak Lau takes in a huge hall containing rows of stretcher beds and tatami mats, some with sleeping bodies in them, presumably the night shift. Hoarded items of furniture and art are stacked along the walls, and stolen personal items such as coats and scarves are stuffed into crevices. This is the theatre complex Tak Lau used to sneak into with Elder Brother to watch national defence films about China resisting Japan’s invasion, and now he is joining that very enemy. Rows of chairs are piled against a long wall to the right of the cavernous hall, the decorative vaulted ceiling making the barrack beds seem diminutive.
Mr Chung asks a subordinate to help Tak Lau set up a place to shine shoes. Once word circulates, the boy is polishing boots all day.
‘The barracks even have a sauna, Mama,’ he tells Ng Yuk excitedly as he walks in the door. He dumps a parcel of fish on the kitchen table, puffing out his chest.
Mother acts disinterested. ‘Go clean yourself, you make the whole house smell like boot polish.’
When Tak Lau is gone, she unwraps the fish. It stinks. She is about to shout something about rotten fish, but a maid slides the package to the other side of the table. ‘Shall I cook it now?’ she asks, and Ng Yuk gives a brusque nod.
After dark the family gathers round to hear about Tak Lau’s adventure. There is an ongoing curfew for the Hong Kong Chinese. White bankers are still locked up in a hotel, while civilian expats who haven’t been killed remain in the internment camp at St Stephen’s College in Stanley, at the southern end of the Island: 2800 men, women and children.
Theresa and Clara join the others around the table. Mother puts a bowl of grey broth under Theresa’s nose, and she crinkles it up at the smell – something unfamiliar is floating in it. ‘Fish,’ says Mother. Like the rest of the family, Theresa hasn’t eaten meat, let alone fish, in months. She scoops up the rancid morsel cautiously in an embellished green ceramic spoon, then brings it to her lips.
‘And Mr Chung says he’ll have other jobs for me tomorrow,’ Tak Lau says, chewing enthusiastically.
Soon enough, Tak Lau is a trusted messenger for the Japanese officers as well as their shoe-shiner. He returns to his position at the blacksmith shop as well. With no school to attend, he works hard juggling his two jobs. Each day he slaps a parcel of rotten fish and an extra cup of rice on the kitchen table. He watches his mother’s face glow with pride, then almost instantly she appears disinterested again. He has seen her vote of confidence, though, and it makes him feel like a man of the house. Father is gone long hours at the factories, which he says are no longer his, and Tak Lau daydreams about rising through the ranks of the Japanese Army, taking back Swatow Lace and bringing the enemy to its knees.
Mr Chung observes that Tak Lau is a good runner and hard worker. He knows the boy has a keen interest in mechanics, always finding something to pull apart so he can investigate its internal organs. In military lockdown in the middle of wartime occupation, Tak Lau is anything but bored.
‘Today you graduate from boots and errands to weapons.’ Mr Chung gestures for Tak Lau to sit opposite him at a table in the barracks.
Every handheld Japanese military weapon the boy can imagine is laid out: a combat knife bayonet, two different side-arm pistols, a Type 38 bolt-action carbine rifle and even a machine gun. Tak Lau thinks about shooting all the Japanese soldiers like in the last Chinese movie he watched with Elder Brother in the building where he now sits facing the enemy. ‘Collaborate or die,’ Mother can be heard muttering more frequently these days.
Tak Lau keeps staring at the arsenal of weapons. ‘Behind this door, there are many more.’ Mr Chung points at a steel door to his left where the theatre projectionist would have stored large reels of film; the segmented steel shelves are perfect for gun storage. ‘This is our junior armoury. I want you to clean all these. Then start again.’ Mr Chung smiles and proceeds to instruct Tak Lau on how to dismantle the unloaded weapons, his hands caressing each of them in turn as though he knows them inside out and backwards. ‘Once you have tended to a thousand weapons, you will be ready to use one.’
A steady stream of ‘customers’ line up for Tak Lau’s work, from warrant officers – Mr Chung’s equivalents – right down the ranks to privates. They mostly require the boy to clean their weapons, sometimes to polish their boots; they are familiar with him being around and don’t hold back on jobs for him to do. He memorises uniform insignia so he can tell whose jobs to prioritise, but because many of them walk around off-duty wearing only a singlet and trousers, it’s tricky to tell exactly who outranks who. Delivering messages between soldiers makes knowing who’s who much easier with clear titles supplied on the notes or the Japanese reading the names out loud when he can’t decipher the kanji.
After a few months, Mr Chung decides to introduce Tak Lau higher up the chain: a serious spy-game promotion.
The people of Hong Kong no longer receive rations and are left to fend for themselves in alleyway marketplaces where rats have burgeoned in number thanks to the neglect of waste-management systems under the Japanese. Coal supplies are dwindling too; households must restrict lighting to one room after dark, if they have any power at all. But the cross-cultural mahjong summits in the House of Kwa and Tak Lau’s outward enthusiasm for the Japanese not only shield the family from further deprivation, but garner special treatment.
Ng Yuk sends her maid with some food upstairs to Happy Shadow and her Kwa offspring. The two wives barely exchange words these days, and Ying Kam sometimes stays away all night, forced to manage his own factory floor for the Japanese who bank the profits. Eng Lee has still not returned so his wife continues to retain the shop and keeps the columns of the books under Japanese control.
Tak Lau dashes past a heavily scarred, emaciated elderly man who sits crouched with his knees up around his chin. He rattles an empty bowl against a step, hoping for money or food. This stranger would once smile and tousle Tak Lau’s hair when he was a toddler. The boy tosses a Hong Kong coin into the stranger’s bowl; it’s virtually worthless now that yen has taken over, but it’s all he has to give.
Tak Lau keeps running. Mr Chung is taking him to meet a big official today, and he mustn’t be late. He stops to catch his breath when he reaches the gate to the barracks.
Mr Chung takes Tak Lau in a rickshaw up town to Mr Yamagata’s residence, where they are served sugar black tea. Tak Lau sips it slowly, savouring the sweetness on his tongue. His eyes widen at talk of his important part in helping to shape the new Hong Kong – to do the will of ancestors, Buddha and of God by supporting its transition to a fully fledged Japanese state. Mr Chung translates what Japanese Tak Lau cannot understand, and the boy tries to listen intently.
Weighing on his mind is the grandfather clock that stands behind Mr Yamagata. It’s showing the wrong time, the pendulum having frozen, but no one aside from Tak Lau seems the least bit bothered by it.
Mr Yamagata drones on. The house belonged to a British academic and his family, who are now either dead or in an internment camp. Mr Yamagata sits on their settee and uses their possessions as if this all belongs to him. He sips from a Wedgwood cup with a silver rim and elaborate leaf design.
Tak Lau resists an urge to tinker with the clock. Its detailed golden spandrel and elaborate moon-dial are begging to be touched. The sun is frozen in a partially eclipsed position, almost obscured by a row of marching-band instruments, followed by a moon and clouds etched on a brass plane that would move if only the clock would start ticking again.
The clock is like Hong Kong: stuck in an hour of darkness, in need of repair. Tak Lau sips his delicious tea, nods along with a look of serious concern, and thinks with delight of the grandfather clock, its cogs and spindles, coils and springs.
Mr Chung is pleased with his recruit’s apparent attentiveness. In the rickshaw on the way back, he reminds Tak Lau that he will now be a trusted errand boy between the barracks and officials’ homes. ‘This is a step up from running messages between soldiers on the street, in the field and within the barracks.’ Mr Chung pauses. ‘You will be invited into homes like Mr Yamagata’s and be asked to wait if a response is required to be written. If so, you will return with the reply to the original sender.’ Mr Chung is fond of the Kwas – Tak Lau and Ng Yuk in particular – but he sees his duty to Japan as paramount. ‘If you break this trust, and disrespect this honour,’ he adds, ‘I will kill your family.’
Tak Lau is still for a moment, his eyes fixed on Mr Chung’s. Now the boy is like an ancient hero in his comic books, keeping his adventures secret to protect the lives of his family: a dragon protecting his lair. ‘Thank you, Warrant Officer Chung, sir.’ Tak Lau gets out of the rickshaw and salutes. ‘I won’t disappoint you.’