IT’S BEEN TWO WEEKS SINCE THE JAPANESE RETREATED, AND Hong Kong is starving. Tak Lau slips through a wire fence around the old barracks at the theatre complex he knows so well. Scavenging for rice and food scraps here should be easy.
He fills a bag with provisions for his family. There are abandoned pocket knives, belts, ammunition cases, boardgame pieces and even a watch. The ten-year-old feels light and full of adventure. With the conquerors gone, he wanders and explores freely, collecting abandoned objects to examine, restore, swap or sell.
At home, Tak Lau drops off the heavy bag. His sisters call after him to stay and eat, but he shakes his head and runs out again, not looking back. Father is gone, so the boys must now provide for House of Kwa. He runs down Wu Hu Street towards Whampoa Dock.
Structures along the wharves show significant signs of the Allied air raids. Broken cranes and ruined warehouses occupy rearranged chunks of shoreline, while expat homes Tak Lau remembers from before the occupation are damaged, in ruins or no longer there. He slips through a gap in a fence and runs towards the waterfront homes. The sunshine is brilliant in his eyes, making him squint. This is where British dock managers lived with their families. He steps inside the first home he comes to, through a doorway that looks to have been battered by axes. There are bullet holes in the walls and splash marks of dried blood on expensive linen wallpaper. Skulls and other human remains litter the floor. Rugs are stained crimson. These people must have been butchered in the early days of the attack.
Tak Lau steps from room to room, from house to house. Houses of horror with groupings of skeletal remains, sometimes a single skeleton near a back door or curled up in a bloodstained closet, like the preserved bodies of Pompeii, telling a story of failed escapes. An emaciated rat scuttles over a dusty mantel – not even slim pickings are left for it.
After searching through wardrobes for a bag, Tak Lau makes do with a dusty pillowcase. He fills it with silverware and then, satisfied there is nothing else of value to take, he runs onto the beach and vomits up what little is in his stomach. He sits up and tries to polish the tarnished silver with sand. The granules damage the fine surfaces. He rubs harder, his shirt abrading the metal, before he realises what he has done and bursts into tears.
Alone on the beach beside scenes of unspeakable atrocities, he doubles over and sobs. He cannot understand what emotion he just experienced but is too filled with shame to take the ruined silver home to his mother. Instead he visits his old boss to sell his find as scrap metal. It fetches a small price, and Tak Lau is crestfallen he has so little to show for his efforts.
Soon Tun rubs his thick steak-and-sausage hands together. He will melt the utensils down and turn the transaction around once the economy picks up again. Banks will pay good ransom for solid silver.
Ying Kam’s younger brother Eng Lee absorbs any control of the business Ying Kam may have had left. With the registration already in his name and with no known agreement otherwise, Swatow Lace is now entirely his. Most of his own Kwa family and fortune have been preserved thanks to his wife, who kept the shop at 16 Pedder Street going while he was stuck in Shanghai for four years.
Tak Lau watches his uncle’s car pull up outside the Wu Hu Street house and remembers Ng Yuk scolding Ying Kam that his brother was ‘squeezing him out’. Uncle Eng Lee lives in a wealthier part of Hong Kong than Hung Hom; he has driven over to take Theresa to work with him, where she will help manage the books just as she once did for her father.
All the way to the factory, Eng Lee complains to his niece that the road where she lives is too rough for his Mercedes-Benz. Theresa is unsure if he is fully aware of what the family endured in his absence, when his wife and brother were responsible for maintaining the business under extreme duress.
‘You should feel proud to live in the only concrete building on the street,’ Uncle tells her. ‘And proud it is the only one left standing – that you are still standing.’ He presses his car horn to hurry along a shirtless man. ‘But,’ he adds, ‘you must aspire to greater heights. Your father did not die for you to wallow.’
The man on the road wears a rice-paddy hat and loincloth, with a wooden pole across the back of his neck pulling down his skinny shoulders. At either end, ropes hold up baskets filled with mounds of cement dust. The cavity under his ribs gives way to the skinny curve of his stomach, probably bloated with air. Cheap labour rebuilding the city.
‘You could aim to live at The Peak, perhaps,’ Uncle suggests, referring to the most valuable real estate on the Island side of the city, where he lives. ‘Chinese weren’t allowed to live there before, but now the Brits give us new freedoms.’ He presses his horn again. ‘Have you heard? We can even visit the “whites only” beaches now.’
The skin of the emaciated worker is dark from the sun, and he moves out of the way without looking up.
At the factory, Theresa click-clacks the ivory abacus Ying Kam left behind. He made no will, but it was obvious this should be hers.
The factory bustles with workers, and Eng Lee is pleased with progress: his phoenix from the ashes. The damage from the fire wasn’t as bad as Ying Kam thought. Brother, you leaped to conclusions. Eng Lee opens Ying Kam’s black ledger, the one that belonged to their father, my great-grandfather, and vows eternal thanks to his brother for rescuing it from the inferno. ‘Out of the fire,’ he says. ‘Ashes into the grave.’
Before the Japanese occupation, under British rule the children’s English names were favoured over their Chinese ones, especially outside the house. Under the Japanese, English was officially banned on the streets, and it was a kind of comfort to revert to traditional Asian monikers. Now the terror has ended, Theresa Wai Ching, Clara Wai Mui and Mary Wai Choy go mostly by their English names again to suit their Western clothes. Tak Lau takes the opportunity to reinvent himself too: he uses Francis now.
It’s a new era, a new life. Hong Kong is recovering at an astonishing pace now the free market is open again. But the reprieve from loss is short-lived for the Wu Hu Street Kwas.
Francis is eleven when word finds its way into number 183 from a local market, past the old bunker and rebuilt homes, through the front door and up the stairs; eighteen-year-old Elder Brother is in hospital.
By the time Ng Yuk arrives at his bedside, the doctors tell her there is nothing to be done. Her eyes and heart hollow, she cradles her boy. ‘It will be alright, it will be alright.’ She blankets him in her sorrow and rocks him in her grief. ‘Father waits for you. Brothers and sisters wait for you – the triplets and the sisters you never met. You’ll join Kwa on the other side, my boy. I will see you there too one day.’
Elder Brother dies in her arms, blood dribbling from his mouth. He had been unconscious for hours. His insides were shredded by broken glass in a bowl of noodles, the doctors tell Ng Yuk. Intestinal injuries, terrible suffering, a fever above forty-three.
Francis is at home by a window, holding his knees against his small chest, waiting and pining for Elder Brother, the favourite of all his siblings, his idol and confidant. But their mother returns alone, her cracked voice breaking the news although her tears and bloodied blouse already tell the story.
Francis runs from the house and keeps going into the darkness, flying down Wu Hu Street, not stopping until he reaches the Whampoa Dock and the houses he ransacked at the end of the war. The international port is fully operational again, as though nothing happened. Cranes are lifting cargo from vessels at the wharf, while teams of men dig and build, working around the clock to make Kowloon not only restored but bigger, better and stronger after the great darkness.
Ghosts rise up and chase Francis home.
Despite all the death Francis has witnessed, Ng Yuk tells him that he is too young to attend Elder Brother’s funeral. She needs her servants with her today, so Francis must care for Mary. He knows better than to argue with his mother, particularly at a time of bereavement.
Francis watched the meagre family procession carry his father’s casket past his home and down the hill to a crematorium. Now he will watch his brother’s funeral procession go by.
Before the family leaves to attend Elder Brother’s open casket, Francis crouches on the floor of his room and peers through a keyhole to get a good view of preparations. Theresa brushes Clara’s hair; a maid smooths Ng Yuk’s coat and takes her arm.
An hour later, Mary has fallen asleep and Francis watches alone as the closed coffin, draped in religious silks and embroidered fabric from Swatow Lace, wends its way down the hill on the shoulders of uncles and cousins.
Theresa looks up from the procession and sees Francis’s tiny face at the window. She runs up the road and takes the stairs, two at a time. Her little brother is still fixated on the procession when she slips into the room and places her hand gently on his shoulder, breaking a spell. He turns towards his sister and flings his arms around her neck, sobbing and longing for the sadness, which has stretched out over years, to end. She holds him close.