…The
sour
tear-like orange was there like a clove
of garlic melting in my mouth. It wasn’t
a time for complaints and nobody
murmured a word of discomfort. It was
the silence of refugees longing for an identity
foreign to this tiny, floating, motherless city.
–Kit
Fan, ‘BN(O)’
A fortnight ago, a story about rumour’s power to fuel a whirlwind of
nationalistic indignation, stoked online and then as quickly averted, played
across the news channels in China. The trigger was a photo circulating on the
Chinese-language internet, which seemed to show an act of recent vandalism. In
a piece of iconoclastic violence uncannily reminiscent of the faceless
Buddhas in the Mogao Caves, the heads had been knocked from several of the
mustard-coloured Buddhas sitting in teal niches on the glazed exterior of the
Hall of the Sea of Wisdom, one of the most treasured buildings in Beijing’s
Summer Palace. Was this the work of mindless vandals?
A couple of months earlier, another furore had broken out among Chinese
netizens when a photo emerged of a carved stone relief inside the famous Luxor
temple in Egypt: one of the 3,500 year old statues had been defaced
across its torso by a Chinese tourist’s incised graffiti, sparking a hunt to
shame the person responsible for so tarnishing China’s global reputation. The
perpetrator had made the rookie mistake of scratching out his full name, and
before long the crowd-sourced force of one of China’s increasingly notorious
Human Flesh Search Engines had tracked him, a fifteen-year-old boy, to his home
in Nanjing.
It looked like it was all happening again, this time on Chinese soil,
until the Summer Palace’s curators came forward to explain that no modern
vandals were involved. The restorer’s glue responsible for re-affixing the
reconstructed heads onto the Buddhas’ necks, expanding and contracting with the
seasonal temperatures, had caused them to fall off again. In fact, the ceramic
heads had been smashed over a century earlier, in 1900, when an army of allied
foreign forces marched into Beijing to respond to the Boxer rebellion.
The story was not, it turned out, about modern morals at all, but rather
was part of a historical narrative about China’s ‘century of humiliation’
familiar to all Chinese school children from their history textbooks. The ruins
of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, ransacked by British and French soldiers during
the Second Opium War, are a symbol of foreign imperialist aggression which the
Communist government are keen to keep fresh in people’s minds. As Julia Lovell
explains in the opening pages of her recent history of The Opium War, tales of China’s past
sufferings under feudalism on the one hand and foreign imperialism on the other
are a crucial part of the current regime’s narrative of its own rise to power,
and thus its legitimacy. What English school children learn about Beijing’s
looted Old Summer Palace, reduced to marble rubble by British troops? For the
Chinese authorities, those Beijing ruins are an important spur to patriotic
feeling – a reminder of the nineteenth-century wrongs against the Chinese
nation that were only symbolically put right when Hong Kong finally returned
from British control in 1997.
I only partly understood it then, but I spent the
first eight years of my life, in Hong Kong, living in the shadow of a
countdown. The Joint Declaration of 1984 – the agreement between Beijing and
London that started the clock on Hong Kong’s eventual return to China – was
signed when I was a year old. That number, 1997, loomed everywhere – was the
subject of so many of the adult conversations I listened to
half-comprehendingly from below. Many Hong Kong Chinese started looking for an
exit strategy, especially the middle-class, which my father had watched grow so
numerous in the decades since he first arrived in the colony in the ’60s. In
the years leading up to the ‘Handover’ of 1997, three quarters of a million
people emigrated from Hong Kong (some unofficial reports suggested even higher
numbers), out of a population of six million. These people’s fears tell us
something about colonialism’s paradoxical legacy in Hong Kong. Would the ‘One Country, Two
Systems’ approach to the island’s gradual reintegration into China end up
eroding the freedoms put in place by the British?
In his poem, ‘BN(O)’, from his first collection, Paper
Scissors Stone, the
Hong Kong-raised poet Kit Fan who now lives in the UK, looks back on a curious
phenomenon of the pre-handover years: the British National (Overseas). The
class of BN(O) was created in response to the question of what would happen to
the people of Hong Kong after the return to China, but actually spoke more to
British anxieties about immigration from their former colonies. Not the same
thing as citizenship, BN(O) status didn’t grant right of abode in the UK, and
needed specifically to be applied for. In the poem, Fan recalls standing, in
1987, in the long queue to register in front of the British Consulate, ‘at the
junction of Supreme Court Road / and Justice Drive’. His grandmother peels and
segments an orange, handing him the pieces one by one as they creep forward in
line. The fruit’s sourness in the mouth is a taste the speaker indelibly
associates, in later years, with the feeling of being ‘abandoned / by two
countries, between two continents.’
My family left Hong Kong
in 1991, with six years to spare, but a Chinese friend whose family stayed on a
few years more, before leaving for Australia, recalled the empty desks that
would appear each week in his primary school classroom, every empty chair
marking another emigrated family. When Chris Pattern, Robin Cook, Tony Blair
and a mournful looking Prince Charles lined up on the red podium at the
exhibition centre in Wan Chai on the night of 30th June 1997, my
parents watched the ceremony not in real time but on the VCR in the lounge. The
video player is long gone, but I think the tape is still in a box in the
garage.
I watched that footage
again for the first time this April, on a writing trip to Hong Kong. In the
Hong Kong Museum of History, although there are one or two displays covering
post-1997 events, the last room before the exit is a twilit cinema where you
sit to watch the film of the Handover ceremony on a loop. I was there at the
tail end of the day, just before closing, and I so was alone when I sat down to
watch it. Stray details struck me: Prince Charles’ lugubrious ears; the
strangeness of the fact that the Prime Minister we sent was Tony Blair, who
somehow feels like a figure from too recent memory to have been involved. I
found myself unexpectedly moved by the experience, less by the video than by
the news clippings from all over the world covering the event, which had been
pasted onto the cinema’s walls. In the screen’s half light, I got up and padded
around to glance through articles and editorials from The Times, The New
York Times, The South China Morning Post,
and many others I don’t recall. I suddenly had a feeling of how momentous that
night in 1997 had been – as, among other things, a symbolic end to the British
Empire. That was my history, my origin, my explanation. I blinked to stave off
silly tears.
Wandering round the history
museum’s exhibits, I spotted a white sign next to a wooden crate which had been
used to store black balls of raw opium as they sailed from the fields of
British India towards China’s southern ports. It described the morning when
British troops first planted their flag at a place on the island’s coast which
came to be called Possession Point. On 26th January 1841, Sir Commodore James Bremer, rear-admiral of the
Royal Navy during the First Opium War, took over Hong Kong island,
though The
Treaty of Nanking did not formally incorporate the territory into the British
Empire until the year after. As the Union Jack was hoisted at 8.15am, a gun
salute from the harboured war ships rang around the otherwise empty bay. Away
from the lines of royal marines and a few visitors from the mainland, the
ceremony was observed by a handful of hawkers: the island was almost
uninhabited at the time.
I was staying in Sheung Wan, an
area on the northwest of the island. It was not on my mental map of the Hong
Kong of my childhood, and perhaps I never went there then. I had chosen it
because it was quite central, and because there were some good deals to be found
on short-term sublets. The roads in Sheung Wan wound in parallel along the
hillside, which climbed eventually up towards the Peak, meaning that if you
wanted to cross from one hill-hugging road to another you had to walk down a
‘ladder street’ made up of a multitude of narrow steps. Some days before my
trip to the museum, on one of my late afternoon walks, I had noticed a sign
that read ‘Possession Street’, and mentally filed it as something to look into.
It turned out that the front door of the block of flats I’d been staying in on
Hollywood Road was about twenty feet from
Possession Point – or at least where historians now suspect it lies. A small area of
greenery crossed by pebbled paths called Hollywood Road Park now marks the
site. Because of the land reclamation which has crept the coastline further and
further into the harbour, Possession Point is now marooned, lying several
hundred metres away from the current seafront. When I asked my mum what she
knew about Possession Point, she said she had read about it in a history before
I was born, but it seemed to her nobody was ever really interested. She made an
effort to find the place – in those days there was no salmon pink signboard
marking its location – and when she eventually tracked it down, further inland
than she’d first thought, it was the site of a public lavatory.
During my Easter on Hollywood
Road, I would go and sit on a bench in the park overlooking the fishpond, which
reflected a red-columned pagoda capped by a tapering green roof that looked
like the stem cut off an aubergine. The orange carp seemed happy enough, but
the pond’s population of terrapins was struggling, as the park’s designers
hadn’t incorporated any little islands or rocky outcrops for them to sit on.
When they wanted to emerge into the dry, they had to arduously clamber up
twenty centimetres of green plastic mesh protruding vertically from the water, designed to hold in the water lilies. When they made it to the top, the terrapins had
to balance, without falling off, so that their ventral shells seesawed on the
top edge. I watched one terrapin the size of a makeup compact heave himself up
a few inches and then plop back several times over the course of ten minutes.
When he finally made it to the summit, a heavier, soup-bowl sized companion
bounced onto the plastic net nearby, flinging the little one back into the
water. This was the place where it had all started, the hundred and
fifty year history of British Hong Kong.
Reading about the Opium Wars that
Easter, I would come across details that seemed to reach forward into my life.
The two Scottish magnates of the nineteenth-century opium trade, William
Jardine and James Matheson, secured a prominent role in the histories with
their canny trading. I had heard their names as a child under the guise of
Jardine Matheson & Co., a powerful Far Eastern trading house, or ‘Hong’,
which grew up around the two Scots’ opium profits. Having expanded out of opium
into a variety of trading areas, including insurance, Jardine was the company my
father came to work for when he first moved
to Hong Kong in the ’60s.
Or there was Yin Je, who would
come to our Midlevels flat to cook during the day, and from whom I learnt
whatever smatterings of Cantonese I had as a child (Fi di sic la! Hurry up and eat your
dinner!). She would turn up each morning in an amah’s sam fu, or pressed uniform
of starched white tunic and black trousers. It was only years later I
discovered she had sewn those clothes herself: when she was first sent to Hong
Kong, aged eleven, to live with an aunt, she had earned money by doing piece
work with a sewing machine. At that time they lived in one of the many tin hut
shantytowns that pressed the Hong Kong hillsides. It was only later, after she
had started work as a cook for an ex-pat family, that they were moved to one of
the new resettlement estates – blocks of flats built by the government after a
series of devastating fires spread through the ramshackle hillside shelters,
killing many of the recent immigrants who squatted there.
Yin Je had been sent to Hong
Kong, my mother told me, because her family had fallen on hard times. Her
father had been the son of the head of the village, and so their family was the
richest in the area. But one year, when times got hard, the villagers resorted
to growing poppy. In Yin Je’s village, men and women all laboured in the
fields. But Yin Je’s father, knowing how to read and write, was deemed
unsuitable for physical labour, and so his appointed part in the venture was to
do the numbers. It also fell to him, as an educated man, to test the village’s
product. He got hooked (my mother’s word) and finally sold his fields and house
to feed his habit. When I came back to Hong Kong for the first time, for a
fortnight, aged 17, my mother and I met Yin Je at a food hall deep in a part of
Kowloon I didn’t know, where the hills outside were covered in lush green
ferns. She had forgotten whatever small English she used to know, and I had
done the same with my scraps of Cantonese, so the two of us couldn’t really communicate
any more. Her black curls had silvered in the intervening years, and she
suddenly looked very small. I felt bad when, smiling, she handed us a round
blue tin of those sugared Danish biscuits you used to get in the ’90s. We
hadn’t brought anything.
'Low Price Shop, Hollywood Road, circa 1999'
Hong Kong’s Hollywood Road has nothing to do
with California, and in fact predates the settlement of the American Hollywood.
The first road ever to be constructed in the nascent colony, in 1844, it seems
it was named by the Governor after his family estate back in England. The many
antique and curio shops that still line it had their origins when Hollywood
Road was still on the coast. Foreign sailors would try to hawk the artefacts
they’d picked up in China before sailing back to Europe. Until I asked her
about Possession Point, I never knew that my mother had lived near this area of
the island when she was small, and would walk along Hollywood Road on her way
to school when she was five or so, playing hop skip jump on the many concrete
flights of stairs that wind off the main drag. She remembered the antique
shops, some of whose windows now display prancing terracotta horses and rare
carved jades excavated from mainland tombs, with a price tag only for tycoons.
My mum also remembered the various coffinmakers who still have workshops there
today. I had never seen a Chinese coffin before I peered in under the
garage-like metal shutters, where the light-wood coffins, clover-shaped at each
end, would park while the craftsmen were still carving or lacquering them.
My stay on Hollywood Road happened to coincide
with the Qingming Festival (Chingming in Cantonese). Also known as the Tomb
Sweeping Festival, or the Day of Clear Brightness, it is the day when Chinese
families go to their ancestors’ tombs to care for the grave, pulling its weeds
and adding fresh flowers and offerings. On the pavement outside the buildings,
people had set up blackened metal tins or little braziers, orange flames
licking up from inside. They would stand by, feeding offerings into the fire,
including Hell money in vast denominations (‘Bank of Hell, $100,000,000’) for
their ancestors to spend in the afterlife. (The currency of the Underworld
usually strikes foreigners as resembling the notes from a monopoly set.) In the
narrow backstreets of Sheung Wan, I came across several shops selling paper
votives. Their wares ranged from basic necessities (socks, polo shirts, baskets
of dim sum) to modern luxuries (iphones, speed boats, Ferraris), and even a
four-storey mansion resembling a paper Barbie house. All were constructed in
three dimensions from printed and folded card or tissue. I couldn’t help
chuckling to myself when I spotted a lifesized gold watch that read ‘RLOEX’
across the dial. Perhaps the afterlife has its copyright enforcers too.
Dim sum paper votives hanging in a shop in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
That day on Hollywood Road you could see the
whole history of Chinese funeral offerings – from an emperor’s tomb-stowed
terracotta horse in the antique shop window, to the 3D paper roast suckling pig
a waitress or taxi driver might burn for a hungering relative. Walking through
the streets on Qingming, passing the smoking braziers converting a descendant’s
proffered love to ash, I felt very much an observer to these rites. I have
never fed a wad of banknotes into a can of fire, or left a saucer of apples in
front of a joss-sticked shrine.
…foreign to this
tiny, floating, motherless city.
My mother’s abandonment as a baby means that,
other than her, I have no Chinese family, no ancestors to whom I might give sacrifice. She
told me once how, when she was very small, her adoptive mother had sublet for
them a room in a flat rented out by another family. Her mother slept in the
tiny room, while she was put out in the corridor, to curl up in the opened
trunk that held the other family’s winter clothes. She fell asleep each night
seeing, in the darkness, the smoldering orange tips of the joss-sticks bedded
in the sand of the other family’s ancestral shrine. In a world where your
ancestors deserve worship like gods, what happens to people who have none?