THE COLLEGE FRANCIS IS TO ATTEND, THE GORDON INSTITUTE, is about two hours from Melbourne by road, in the portside town of Geelong. He can’t buy a train or bus fare, and there are no rickshaws here; he may need to resort to hitchhiking. Although he’s never done such a thing before, he has seen it in the movies. How he misses Hong Kong, where he could simply run after a moving tram, grab the rail, fling himself inside and travel for free. Melbourne is already beginning to feel inhospitable.
Francis makes his way to an information booth. Fortunately, Australia is less foreign to him than it would be to a mainland Chinese person, given that for most of his upbringing Hong Kong has been part of the British Empire. In both places, cars drive on the left, police have batons not guns, street signs are in English and civic order appears intact. But Melbourne seems awfully quiet, less bustling than Hong Kong, with a lack of urgency and purpose.
The woman at the information desk is chatting to a scruffy dustman or other menial worker, or so it seems to Francis. He puffs out his chest – still, he receives no attention. The woman keeps chatting, and Francis looks down at the information sign on the front of the booth. It’s on its last screw, so he bends to examine it. He looks behind and around it, assessing the situation, then takes a toothpick from his pocket. He considers the thin wire that he used to fix his suitcase handle when it became loose on the ship, and unwinds some of it, bending it back and forth until it snaps. He twists the wire around the toothpick, coiling it tightly, and lines up the newly fashioned screw with the hole in the sign and the hole in the booth. He twists, and the thread of the wire-toothpick-screw grips perfectly. Voila! (A term he has heard Theresa use.) The sign sits straight again.
Francis is pleased and stands up. ‘Your sign.’
‘YES, DEAR?’ the information woman shouts. Does she think he is deaf? ‘DO YOU KNOW ENGLISH? LITTLE BITTY THE ENGLISH.’
‘Gee-long,’ he says, more as a statement than a question. He hasn’t mastered English, despite Theresa’s insistence.
‘GEE-LONG,’ the woman mimics at triple the decibels. ‘BUS NUMBER FORTY-SIX. OVER THERE.’ She points to a bus stand. ‘That takes you to the city and then you need BUS NUMBER NINETY. They go twice a day. You’ve missed the early ninety-nine so you’ll have a TWO-HOUR wait in the city. TWO-HOUR WAITY. OKAY?’
Francis doesn’t understand a thing she is saying. ‘Map,’ he says. ‘Please,’ he adds, remembering his sister’s instruction to be polite.
‘OKAY. A MAP OF MELBOURNE OR A MAP OF VICTORIA, DEAR?’
‘Gee-long.’
‘OKAY. HERE YOU ARE. I’LL GIVE YOU BOTH.’ She hands him a parcel of folded green paper and turns back to her conversation with the dishevelled dustbin man. ‘Those Chinese,’ she says, rolling her eyes, ‘don’t any of them have a word of English? They all come here to take our jobs, and they don’t even know where Geelong is.’
The White Australia Policy laws are slowly being chipped away. Until recently, migrants other than Europeans have been mostly barred from coming into the country in order to eliminate the threat of ‘cheap Chinese labour’. Francis doesn’t yet know what an oddity he is.
He gently tugs at the sign to test his handiwork before walking towards the number forty-six bus stop.
‘Sorry, matey, no money, no ticket. No ticket, no comey on the bussy, see.’ A conductor speaks to Francis in a slightly quieter tone than the information lady.
‘Money, stolen, thief,’ Francis offers, pulling his pockets inside out to illustrate.
The conductor steps into the bus and speaks to the driver, who looks down from behind the wheel at Francis. He shakes his head. ‘Sorry, mate,’ says the conductor, a little less condescendingly this time. ‘We’re not a charity, mate, and we can’t just let people on without paying even if they have no money.’ Then, in a dramatically ironic statement, ‘There’s a phone booth over there. Go and call someone to pick you up.’
Francis watches the bus pull away.
Hitchhiking isn’t all that bad. It’s free and adventurous. Francis deciphers the map – which is easy for him to do, being such a visual person – and works out a direct route to Geelong. Cars speed past, and people lean out windows with advice like ‘Go home, chink.’
Eventually a middle-aged couple approach in their Ford. They can tell from the man’s clothes and the awkward way he stands by the road – arm rigid and thumb out in a Hollywood imitation of hitchhiking – that he is probably educated and definitely harmless. They slow down to rest beside him and ask where he is headed. The couple are well travelled, one a lecturer in antipodean history and the other a schoolteacher. It’s Francis’s lucky day.
Three hitched rides and five hours later, Francis arrives in Geelong. He steps down from a truck cab, his ‘thank you, sir’ barely audible over the engine’s roar. He swings shut the door, using all his might, and watches the truck pull away from the kerb. It’s late and all the shops are shut. Alone in the centre of Geelong, Francis surveys the deserted country town.
Francis completed a semester at Hong Kong Technical College before he left, and summer holiday bridging classes will commence at the Gordon Institute in a week, so he has little time to find suitable accommodation, let alone settle into the ‘Australian way of life’. Acclimatising to this environment is an overwhelming proposition – language and cultural differences will surely take years to manage – but Francis is practical. As he stands in the middle of sleepy Geelong, he prioritises his basic needs just as he once did under the Japanese: food and shelter.
He wanders the quiet streets looking for a sign. Not a sign to mend, by the way, although if one was broken, no doubt he’d fix it. He examines the buildings he passes, muttering to himself that they would be far more structurally sound had he project-managed their creation. Years of watching Hong Kong rebuild have given him a high degree of confidence in his limited skill set. He runs a palm along walls and up posts, tapping and examining, exploring the town’s constitutional integrity like a doctor listening to a pulse.
Geelong’s population is in the tens of thousands compared to Hong Kong’s two and a half million. However, Theresa thought Francis might feel at home in Geelong because they are both textile and manufacturing hubs by the sea. The Australian town, just like Hong Kong, has experienced a depression-driven economic slowdown followed by strong post-war growth. But Francis finds it hard to believe he has arrived at a prosperous time – to him, there is no hint of it. Unlike in Hong Kong, where everything stays open until late into the night, in Geelong almost everything is shut by six. Francis imagines a tumbleweed blowing along the centre of the street like in the American Western movies he enjoys so much.
Distant talking and laughing grows louder as Francis turns a corner to see a neat row of restaurants and a cinema: exciting signs of life. One dining venue is called a ‘Chinese’ restaurant, which is perfect because he is hungry. He expects he can wash dishes in return for dinner, like in the movies. Perhaps the owners even speak Cantonese.
Half a dozen men and women walk past. ‘Go back to your own country,’ one man says, spitting on the ground.
‘Bloody chink,’ says another, and they disappear around a corner.
Francis swings the restaurant door open, letting the warmth and appetising scents envelop him. A laughing-eyed Chinese woman greets him in Cantonese and introduces herself as Mrs Chew, the restaurant owner. The kindly woman takes him in and feeds him on this first night. The spicy noodles are hot and delicious. Careful not to spill anything on the white tablecloth, he watches the steam from his bowl rise up against a red wallpaper backdrop patterned with roses.
It turns out that as well as a restaurant, Mrs Chew owns a Chinese laundromat. He can start there in the morning.
‘Why should we pay for you to go to school? Go back where you came from, bloody chogie.’
It is a daily obstacle course of torment. Francis must circumnavigate ignorance, outrun resentment, skirt spite, hurdle hatred, shot-put cynicism, scale scourge, bounce belligerence. He likes to think of it in these terms taken from the English dictionary he studies every night – a word Olympics. Somehow the sport references make him feel as though he’s ‘going for gold’. Each time he gets over the finish line unscathed, unbruised and unaffected, he can chalk up one more day of survival in this foreign promised land.
Kwa tenacity and resilience help keep his spirits high. And he hasn’t forgotten his vow not to be taken advantage of again, which makes some Geelong attitudes all the more challenging.
Mahjong-playing ancestors and gods watch over Francis, pleased that things are beginning to work out for him. He increases his workload to a double degree, with Mechanical and Electrical Engineering the perfect streams for his interests. Over the next two years he studies hard, and he supports himself by working at Mrs Chew’s laundry; he delivers clean, pressed linen and towels on a pushbike to local hotels and elite private houses.
He still can’t admit to Theresa that he lost her money in a YMCA shower and writes to her irregularly, omitting key facts. He never mentions supporting himself or the racist remarks directed at him whenever he leaves his dormitory – he writes only of study and scenery.
Francis has had a string of girlfriends and, to the fury of the local white men, they have all been young local white women. He has assimilated by behaving like a white man courting their own, and the girls appreciate his handsome face and charming, funny demeanour. They like the way he shrugs off cynical and racist remarks by retaliating with self-deprecating humour, and that he is never afraid to dance. He’s a refreshing alternative to the macho jocks, but his popularity with the ladies comes at a cost: the white men are out for blood.
‘You slope heads come and take our jobs and steal our women, you bastard Chinaman.’
Francis is escorting his girlfriend Anne towards the Geelong Town Hall for a biannual dance. He ignores the angry man shouting at him.
‘I said, you bloody chinks come in and take our jobs and our girls. Go back to where you came from, bastard.’ Angry Man is with two other men who don’t look quite so sure, but they jeer their support anyway.
‘Now, now,’ says Francis. ‘Look, I do not come to take your job or your women.’ He straightens his posture to prepare for his next comment. ‘If you’re not smart enough to keep your job or your women, then that’s your problem.’
Angry Man runs up the steps and pushes Francis against the stone wall.
Francis can tell the man has been drinking alcohol. ‘Mate, mate, mate.’ Francis uses his best Australian English.
But it’s too late – Angry Man is punching him in the stomach. Anne screams.
Other couples on their way into the dance appear reluctant to intervene, until finally a few men step in and break up the one-sided brawl. As they pull the aggressor away, Francis brushes himself down and straightens his bow tie, taking Anne’s hand to lead her up the remainder of the stairs.
Angry Man stands with his companions and glares up at the couple. Francis shakes with humiliation and rage. Adrenalin courses through his body. He raises his fist and wags a finger violently at the men. ‘And don’t you come back,’ he manages to say before disappearing inside with Anne on his arm.
Francis and Anne are smitten with one another. Anne is, Francis writes to Theresa, my first true love.
Anne leaves Geelong to further her studies in Melbourne, and Francis follows her to find a job as an apprentice electrical engineer. He joins a choir in the gentrified, leafy south-eastern suburb of Malvern, where he rents a house with a student and a young architect. ‘Only one number away from Toorak,’ he says, referring to the postcode being a digit off the most sought-after suburb in the state.
With her airline career in full swing, Theresa is looking for a permanent helper. She takes on a girl called Brigit to be her maid. Brigit is fifteen and – like many tens of thousands of Filipina girls – is in desperate need of work. She has three sisters, two brothers and a mother back home to support, and she is farmed out by an agency that hawks human labour between countries, this one specialising in placing girls from the Philippines with wealthy Chinese families in Hong Kong and across South-East Asia. Filipina maids go to the Middle East as well, but nowhere is the throng of them so obvious than in this British colony.
Every Sunday the square outside St Joseph’s Cathedral in Central heaves with domestic helpers. Filipina maids live with their employers and are expected to be of service twenty-four hours a day, but the Hong Kong government has ruled that domestic workers must be given twelve consecutive hours off per week. On Sundays the maids of Hong Kong can just be girls, women and friends – free for a little while, they giggle over idle gossip, compare lives, show off trinkets, and talk about how their masters treat and pay them. With all their money going home to loved ones, they cannot afford to visit the pictures or restaurants on their one day off, so they congregate to feel less alone and have fun together. They exchange romance novels, play cards and laugh. They cannot afford picnic blankets or even straw mats, so they usually lay out old newspapers to sit on.
These young women are used to a basic existence and are often forced to sleep in corridors, kitchens and broom cupboards. The lucky ones, like Brigit, have their own room with a television. Brigit considers herself incredibly privileged to have found herself a job in the house of Theresa Kwa.
From the beginning, Theresa takes on Brigit like a guardian would her charge; Brigit is almost like a dutiful daughter to Theresa – a loyal, enduring servant. At its core their relationship is transactional; in many ways Brigit is part of the family but she is acutely aware of her place. Theresa grooms her as an invaluable asset. In this era in Hong Kong, a successful Filipina maid never questions and doesn’t argue, but she usually has a ripe sense of humour and a likeable personality beneath her obsequious exterior. Brigit has both, and she’s smart too, able to master the boundaries and perfectly understand the extent to which she can question or tease Theresa in a well-meaning way.
In her spare time, Theresa is an avid painter. Illustrious artists offer her tuition, and she works hard to hone her talent and compose an impressive series of Chinese brush paintings. She is trained by the pre-eminent master Qi Baishi, and international newspapers report on her first overseas exhibition:
Jul. 1959 – Chinese Air Hostess Holds Exhibition Of Her Painting In London. An exhibition of paintings by B.O.A.C. air hostess Miss Theresa Wai Ching Kwa from Hong Kong opened this morning at the Commonwealth Institute, South Kensington.
Theresa takes her work to Leningrad, Vienna, Lisbon, Paris and Rome, the proceeds of sales going directly into her dream to educate the children of House of Kwa.
Mary is still single and finally of an age perfect for BOAC recruitment, so Theresa helps her find a position with the airline.
In airports around the world, the sisters exchange knowing glances as they pass one other with their respective crews. When the two stunning women travel the same leg, they are a sight to behold. Their way with people is enchanting. Passengers are enraptured, especially Tony, a judge, who falls head over heels for Mary. Her laughter lights up a room. She and Tony are an item but don’t marry, as she doesn’t want to lose her job, flying the BOAC flag for House of Kwa alongside her sister. Mary makes headlines herself, exhibiting her paintings at David Jones World Fair in Sydney, Australia. She wins hearts as she’s photographed smiling broadly despite discovering the shattered glass on her framed pictures upon unpacking them, as the papers report.
Four years later, Francis steps out onto his own stage at twenty-eight, making his solo singing debut at the Malvern Town Hall. He is accompanied by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. The piano comes in, introducing violins, with brass and woodwind instruments soon to follow. He sings ‘Moon River’ along with ‘Autumn Leaves’ and a few other favourites, which he records onto a vinyl LP with a photo of a serious and debonair Francis on its sleeve. He sings his heart out, relishing the privilege and honour. It is his heyday.
But his love affair with Anne peters out, and his musical aspirations give way to a travel bug. He plans to see more of Australia, and sets out in an old Ford.
Francis discovers a more vast landscape than he could ever have imagined – infinitely bigger than Hong Kong and immeasurably sparser.
Francis takes his fascination with mechanics, structures and architecture on his bushwalks, marvelling at lofty gum trees and stooping in awe at wildflowers. He admires the cantilever of branches and the mathematical precision of a sprig of yellow bloom. God must have created with rulers and angles on a drawing board. Francis wonders how koalas calculate what weight a bough will take, and as he watches ants build their hills, he imagines Egyptian slaves constructing the pyramids. At the Great Australian Bight, he estimates the voltage of lightning strikes as they hit the horizon. Whenever he can, he thinks of the mathematics behind natural phenomena. This is how Francis Kwa makes sense of the world, and how he feels in control.
The tyres on Francis’s Ford turn over the dirt road, leaving clouds of dust in their wake that will settle until the next car passes over the Nullarbor Plain. He visits the Blowholes of Albany and dines in a roadhouse full of rough-looking men. When they call out, ‘Go home, ya chink,’ he realises he should have gone to dinner with the two friendlier fellows he met at the hostel. The bartender tells the patrons to leave Francis alone; it’s more of a well-humoured suggestion than an order, but they shut up and drink their beer. Francis gratefully leaves once he has finished his meal, then runs all the way back to his hostel.
After a few weeks, he arrives in Perth.