EACH MORNING, SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD THERESA WAKES UP IN her room in her family home on Wu Hu Street, just as she has done for most of her life. It is bigger now the false wall is gone, and she is no longer sharing with Clara. Theresa has gone through a metamorphosis, and so has Hong Kong – now they are both spreading their wings to fly.
Change happens quickly. There’s already a new metal street sign at the end of Wu Hu, in English letters with Chinese characters below. Local sign factories are inundated with lists of street and building names to reinstate as well as neon and hand-painted signs. This is just one small part of the work to do to start again, but Hong Kong’s survivors are ready.
Theresa and her family are among the 600,000 residents remaining. During the occupation, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled or were forced over the border to China. At least ten thousand Hong Kong locals were arbitrarily executed, while hundreds of expats died in camps. Now, finally, there’s no risk of being shot dead for crossing a road or looking the wrong way, or just for being there. Although with such horrific memories comes lingering pain.
On 30 September 1946, General Takashi Sakai is executed in China by a firing squad on charges of war crimes committed when he led the invasion and served as Hong Kong’s governor at the start of the occupation. The man who presided over the beginning of the terror is dead, a clear message that Hong Kong’s dark days are over.
With characteristic determination and industriousness, Chinese citizens resuscitate hospitals, businesses and schools. Expats and refugees trickle back, and some of the freed civilian POWs return to their Hong Kong homes. Optimism resurfaces and, on the face of it, the colony is the picture of post-war resilience as the world dusts itself off from the trauma of conflict.
Theresa is still working at the factory with Uncle Eng Lee. Now that Ying Kam and Elder Brother are dead, the lion’s share of responsibility to provide for Third Wife’s part of the family has fallen to her.
The death of their father has further separated Happy Shadow and Ng Yuk’s broods, along with the women themselves. Their estimation of each other has never been outstanding; now they are widows, there is barely even a sense of obligation between them.
House of Kwa moves into a new phase of survival, splintering again from the top of the tree.
Theresa has become as invaluable to Swatow Lace as she was to Japanese meetings with Hong Kong Brits. She stays in contact with some of the captives who survived, and they are still grateful for her diplomacy in the meetings they were forced to attend during the occupation. She had a knack of making confrontational content gracious in translation. No one can be sure she translated everything accurately, but she kept the peace and may have saved their skin. Gratitude comes from high places and Theresa attends multicultural academic and diplomatic events. Soon Clara is old enough to come as her guest.
‘You can’t dress like that!’ Ng Yuk shrieks. ‘What will people think of us?’ She watches her two oldest girls brazenly head out the door in high heels and Western outfits, stunning young women turning heads wherever they go.
Although Ng Yuk is cross, she knows that Theresa always holds Clara tightly under her wing. No harm will ever come to her siblings – she’ll see to that.
Theresa’s unwavering loyalty to House of Kwa gives Ng Yuk a silvery glimmer of hope to line the cloud of smoke that hangs above her. She rests her cigarette at the edge of a speckled brown ashtray and exhales, a mother dragon releasing her fledglings.
Today, Clara is on a date with a British policeman, so at Government House, Theresa swans through the gates alone. It’s a strictly guest-list only affair and she shows her identification to two guards at a sentry box. They check it against their list even though they remember her from last time – no one forgets Theresa.
Her participation as a junior interlocutor under the Japanese has won her an invitation to tea from the reinstated administration. Three hundred or so guests congregate in the ballroom, all of them invited here as an acknowledgement of their various civilian efforts during the dark days of occupation. The building was significantly renovated by the Japanese into a hybrid of oriental and neoclassical design: one of many marks left by the enemy that will never be erased.
There are speeches from dignitaries about the honour and valour of resistance but also of the need to collaborate when there is no other option.
While the crowd applauds, Theresa turns and locks eyes with a young Englishman. He’s about twenty-five and quite handsome.
After the formalities he walks over to greet her. ‘How do you do? Jolly terrible business you lot have been through. What brings you to Government House?’
Theresa curtsies, and they have an animated conversation during which she mentions, ‘I am most keen to improve my English pronunciation.’
He replies that her good looks and command of three languages should already be enough to ingratiate her to princes and paupers, but he agrees to introduce her to a man in the crowd who may be able to help: a professor of linguistics and self-proclaimed master of elocution.
Theresa begins weekly visits to the professor’s home in the affluent Mid-Levels, located between the coveted Peak and central business district. ‘How n-ow said the br-ow-n c-ow.’ She is a good student, making steady progress.
One day the professor holds out his hand to reveal a rather extraordinary elocution tool. In his palm are half a dozen small stones. ‘The pebbles of Demosthenes, the greatest orator in all of ancient Greece.’
Theresa is puzzled. What is she to do with these stones? And what does the greatest orator in all of ancient Greece have to do with her?
‘Put them in your mouth and they will help you to prrrrrronounce yourrrr Rrrrrrs.’ The professor makes a flourish with his hand.
Theresa is dubious. Surely he doesn’t actually expect me to put them in my mouth.
The professor embarks on a tale. He often tells stories to illustrate a point; they are usually too long for Theresa’s liking, but she is always too polite to say so. This one is about a young man in Athens with a speech impediment who used stones to make him force out the sounds. ‘It improved his speech,’ the professor concludes.
Theresa acquiesces and does as told. ‘Around the rugged rocks the ragged rascal rrrrrran,’ she repeats after her tutor. The stones rattle around uncomfortably against her teeth and tongue, and she has to be careful not to swallow one or choke.
She wonders if this is such a good idea after all. The professor tells her that as well as using the pebbles, Demosthenes ran along a beach, shouting over the roar of the waves in order to improve his projection. Theresa would much prefer a beach to these stones. For all the practice she does, as soon as she removes the pebbles her Rs – or lack thereof – are back to normal. I can hardly walk about with stones in my mouth all day, she thinks. How silly.
Theresa is determined not to allow shortcomings in the elocution department to hold her back. Grace, charm and diplomacy are her strongest personal attributes, so she embraces her beauty and hones her social smarts; she learns how to use her best qualities to ‘really go places’, as she likes to put it. The curse that relegated her to hiding for much of the occupation is fast becoming a guiding gift. The pageant of Theresa’s life is about to begin.
For Francis, the next few years are a combination of study and part-time work. He is trying to catch up on missing four years of formal education. The post-war population has more than tripled, and school places are in hot demand. Francis was expelled from St Mary’s due to poor grades; because of his age and size they made him skip the years he missed, as if war was no excuse for having fallen behind.
‘What is this?’ Mother waves a report card at Francis, who is now in his teens. ‘Ds and Fs. Are you trying to ruin us?!’ La Salle College only took him on after First Brother from First Mother Lotus Flower moved to Hong Kong and condensed years of academics into a few intense months of private tutoring. Theresa also wrote to the school with glowing accounts of Francis’s war effort, working for extra rations, and the family pedigree. Ng Yuk slaps his face. ‘Where’s my cane?’ she screams at a maid. ‘Get me my cane.’
Since Ying Kam died, Ng Yuk has had to take on dishing out discipline. Francis shakes but doesn’t cry as the wooden cane cuts the palm of his hand.
A dragon stirs within him. He has learned foreign languages, collaborated with an enemy, worked and supported his family, lived through war and deprivation – all to be humiliated with another caning from his mother for bad grades. His class is crammed with new migrants, and they sit in the seats of the dead or deported, and study in halls where atrocities occurred.
Francis does something he has never done before. He hits his mother back, swift and sharp. It happens so fast that she topples over, her tiny feet sliding out from under her slight frame. She holds her red face in her hand, looking up at her son from the kitchen floor. In an instant he is gone, running to Whampoa Dock, to the sea, wishing himself far away.
Back home, Francis packs his bags. Kai Tak Airport is only a few kilometres from Wu Hu Street, and he has money saved, enough for a ticket somewhere, anywhere. He doesn’t really have a plan, but he catches a rickshaw to the airport regardless.
Clara witnessed the whole commotion – Mother at it again. But Fifth Sister has never seen Francis so upset. She follows him at a distance and takes a rickshaw of her own. Dark skin and sweat; the spin of bicycle and carriage wheels; skinny legs, sinew and muscle.
Two siblings sit side by side on a bench, the sign ‘Kai Tak International’ behind them. They are silent for a while and, when Clara finally speaks, Francis is brought round to the impracticality of his mission. She persuades him to come home.
The two share a rickshaw back to 183 Wu Hu Street. The driver has to get off his bicycle to push the weight of his passengers up the hills.
Ng Yuk has been waiting anxiously and is relieved when Francis walks past her, without acknowledgement, as she sits smoking in the kitchen. They never speak of what happened, and she never hits him again.