TODAY IS 6 AUGUST 1945, A MONDAY. WORLD WAR II HAS been raging for six years, and Hong Kong has been under Japanese rule for three and a half. It’s just after 8 am, twenty degrees Celsius and humid as it always is this time of year. Tak Lau runs down to his job at the blacksmith shop. Theresa gets ready to accompany Ying Kam to the factory.
America’s B-29 Bomber the Enola Gay drops an atomic bomb on Japan. Its nickname is Little Boy, and it kills eighty thousand people in Hiroshima; sixty thousand more will die by Christmas from fallout. Ninety thousand buildings will be destroyed, leaving fewer than a third of that number standing.
Theresa walks with her father along the factory floor aisle between lines of workers hunched over sewing machines.
Three days later, on 9 August, it’s another warm, humid morning in Hong Kong. Theresa sits by Ying Kam helping him with calculations on the abacus.
The US atomic bomb Fat Man wreaks hell on Nagasaki. Eighty thousand people, including POWs, will be dead by Christmas. There is immeasurable horror on earth, bodies haemorrhaging, skin embedded with glass, and limbs crushed by debris. Unspeakable suffering. That same day, the Russians push back Japanese forces in China.
Ying Kam switches on the wireless to find that there is only a Japanese language station on air today with no update on the situation in Japan at all. That’s strange – most rebel stations were found out and their operators executed months ago, but he still expected to find the Japanese-sanctioned Cantonese station disseminating basic news and propaganda. At least there’s still word of mouth.
At home Ying Kam, his two wives and their children await whatever will come next.
Happy Shadow has had three more children during the occupation, two girls and a boy. Ng Yuk curses her womb and reaches for a slim lacquered box containing three cigarette holders in porcelain, ivory and wood. She selects one and drags on her Double Happiness tobacco. ‘What do I have to show for the war? Two more dead babies, only five alive.’ She exhales and tries not to tune in to the cry of a Second Wife baby upstairs. ‘Younger and more beautiful,’ Ng Yuk mutters bitterly about herself. ‘But not enough to produce more children.’
She shuffles her ivory mahjong pieces, sliding them around on the balcony table. It has been weeks since her last game with the occupiers. The tiles face down, and Ng Yuk flips one over with her left hand: Red Dragon. Then another: North Wind. Next: Plum Blossom.
Theresa has been watching her mother from the balcony door. Ng Yuk stares at the upturned trio of tiles as if they speak to her. She draws in another nicotine hit and watches paper and leaf smoulder. Theresa pulls up a chair next to her mother and places her right hand on Ng Yuk’s left. And, on this rare occasion, Ng Yuk does not pull away.
As a last act of defiance towards the West, the Japanese execute as many remaining British citizens in their camps as they can before the armies of liberation have a chance to take over. They set fire to Hong Kong homes and industrial workplaces. Over their dead bodies will they surrender, with many committing harakiri to avoid the shame of capture.
Fierce dragon flames envelop the second storey of one of the Kwa factories. Ying Kam runs out of his burning building, and workers stream onto the street, coughing and spluttering, blackened by the inferno. Ying Kam faces the carnage, unable to speak, watching fire devour his dreams as the flames flicker in his eyes.
Japanese soldiers retreat in military vessels and cargo ships, chartering whole suicide boats full of soldiers towards Commonwealth aircraft carriers. They take with them Hong Kong’s food supplies, specifically to leave the population to starve. Some of the Japanese will churn the rough waters home to their mother country if they think they can avoid capture, while others choose to sink to a watery grave in communal shame.
Whatever law and order existed under occupation is now out to sea.
Before Britain has a chance to reclaim the colony, Ying Kam steals away from his family for a moment alone. He sits in his den, the many brutalities and sorrows of the occupation whirl through his mind. Heaving a sigh, he is sixty years in the past on his journey from the Kwa compound in Beijing after stealing his father’s concubine; his mighty House of Kwa in Swatow and its fall; and its rise again in Hong Kong. Only – he heaves another sigh – to fall once more. He apologises to his ancestors then shakes his fists at the gods.
Lifting a vial to his lips, he transports himself out of his body and swallows. It is a fast-acting poison. The vial has been hidden beneath a floorboard for years: a parting purchase from the local shaman before he was publicly executed by Japanese officers in the early days of the occupation, when unlucky families and their children were dragged down to the park and forced to watch.
In his last moments, Ying Kam prays for his family. They have a few riches and one another. With three wives he has sired thirty-two children. Of course he knows about Ng Yuk’s two recent stillbirths – Dr Huang could not keep such information from a husband. There has been no word from First Wife in China, given all outside communication has been cut off or intercepted since the occupation began three years and eight months ago. All Ying Kam can hope is that the survivors of his thirty-two children will remain alive as his legacy. He is the twenty-second firstborn son of the firstborn son of Kwa.
He scrawls lines of characters down a page, convulses and falls to the floor, holding his chest.
A maid finds Ying Kam’s body. It is carried down the hill in a coffin draped in silks and taken directly for cremation to avoid overburdened morgues and mass graves.
Ng Yuk and Happy Shadow tell their children and people they know, ‘He died of a broken heart.’
When Lotus Flower, who is still living in Swatow, receives word her husband is dead, she weeps and remembers when she fled with him from his father’s compound to build a new life. She releases any hope he would one day come back for her and cries into the night.
Theresa goes into her father’s study and sits at his desk, running her hand over the last page he touched. She reads his calligraphy as though he is right there speaking the words.
哀莫大于心死. 活着是更好的出路.
The saddest thing is death of the heart.
The remedy for dying is living.
Theresa places the paper into the pages of a black ledger that Ying Kam saved from the factory fire. ‘The remedy for dying is living,’ she whispers. She smooths her cheongsam against her thighs and traces a finger over an embroidered plum blossom wending its way across her breast to her collar. Then she stands up and walks out.