Читать книгу Becky Chan - Jared Mitchell - Страница 10

Even as a child in Canada I invited peril as a kind of thrill, a plea, a punishment, a dare. I had great fun walking across the black steel railway bridges in Winnipeg, hoping a freight or passenger train would catch me at mid-crossing. Once, a livestock train did. I was right over the middle of the Red River when it came and I stood on the tracks and waited until the last possible moment, before skipping to the edge of the bridge, clutching one of the thick diagonal trusses. I must have been eleven years old and after the train had passed I cried violently, and that made it even better. What if my leg had slipped between the creosote-stained timbers of the open bridge deck and become wedged there? I couldn’t have got out of the way. Too horrible. Too wonderful. I possessed a foolishness that I’ve never completely shaken. When I was a teenager I saw Niagara Falls with my family. As I stood at the edge of the water, a few yards above the precipice, that hypnotic current racing past beckoned me, as if to say, jump in, ride down the cataract with me, tumble about at the bottom and swirl among the boulders there. My dad stood there with me, oblivious to my urges, and asked, “What do you think of it?” I replied: “Lead us not into temptation.” He only looked blank and then back at the water. I often wonder if my dad lived out the rest of his life thinking his son was psychotic.

The China Telegraph

Rioting spreads to Central

By Paul HauerChina Telegraph

Mobs of leftists laid siege to Central District for seven hours yesterday, stoning Hongkong residents, tourists and journalists, and causing extensive property damage.

In the morning, left-wing union representatives took to Garden Road with the intention of laying siege to Government House, but found their path blocked by police just outside the Lower Peak Tram station.

Using loudhailers, police ordered the group to disperse. They refused and resorted to demonstrating outside the Hongkong Hilton. By early afternoon police took up positions at road junctions around the hotel and forced crowds to retreat to the waterfront.

A group of 40 stick-wielding rioters knocked an American journalist to the ground, punched and kicked him and smashed his camera. Members of the Emergency Unit made baton charges and fired four tear-gas cartridges before the crowd dispersed.

At the Fire Station in Harcourt Road someone tore down the Union Jack and burned it in front of a cheering, slogan-chanting crowd.

Mr. Anthony Benbow of MacDonnell Road was seriously injured by rioters outside Central Market. He was taken to Queen Mary Hospital and is said to be in satisfactory condition.

By 7.20 p.m. the mobs had dispersed and the situation was calm. Police arrested 44 people during the disturbances.

I can still recall quite plainly the sound of the policemen’s paint scrapers shrieking over the surface of the windows on the building that housed the Hongkong and Kowloon Rubber and Plastics Union in July 1967. It was a few days after the riot in Central. I had gone out with a police patrol for a story. They were removing what were called “big-character posters,” inflammatory polemics glued to windows. By early July 1967 the colony had entered a new and hysterical phase of Maoist agitation. One of the posters read as follows: “Plunge yourselves into a struggle against factory management’s devices to step up exploitation! Smash the British imperialists and the Hong Kong capitalist running dogs!” While two policemen, both Chinese, scraped the posters off, a British officer photographed the remaining ones. This was going smoothly enough when suddenly a melee burst upon us. It was very wild and very dangerous. I, of course, was fascinated by the fighting and, just as I had been tempted by the current at Niagara, I instinctively walked toward it.

Rubber and plastics workers rushed out the entrance of the union building and came right for us. All the built-up anger, frustration and want in every Hong Kong man’s heart, the poison of bitterly hard lives, came to the surface, abetted by the rhetoric of the Communist bosses who’d taken over the union. I confess that I stood there foolishly with my pen and notebook, like a maitre d’ steeling himself for an onslaught of unhappy diners. I relished the riot coverage and would later write without irony of a fierce attack by “rubber men.” They came at us with bars and knives. One crazed young man swung about wildly with a fluorescent light tube, deeply wedded to the idea of smashing it in someone’s face. The street filled with noise. It was very sunny and hot. The two Chinese policemen dropped their paint scrapers and drew their pistols. The British policemen pointed at the unionists and told them in Cantonese to withdraw. He could hardly be heard above the awkward chants about “Invincible Chairman Mao Thought” and “We will deal harshly with British imperialists! ”They were just as filled with hate for the Chinese policemen working for the Hong Kong Police as they were for the British ones, and they chased the three of them back down Canton Road.

I remained standing amid the leftists, getting jostled and shoved as they passed. I hardly moved. It was later said by another reporter present that I appeared to have achieved some kind of professional rapture. Then, in an instant, something made me snap to. A macabre group of young women came toward me bearing brilliant green plastic toy water pistols. I knew this trick because they’d used it before on others: they’d filled the pistols with highly corrosive industrial acid. They ran toward me squirting the toys madly and I bolted up Canton Road.

I was met by a squad from the Emergency Unit marching south. These were the riot police and they wore coal-black helmets with gas masks on their faces, giving them an impersonal, almost robotic appearance. They carried black hardwood batons, lightweight and flexible circular wicker shields, pistols and Greener guns. To be caught between factory workers with acid-filled squirt guns and charging riot police is a clarifying thing. I finally retreated at a right angle to the confrontation and fetched up beneath a shophouse arcade. Two policemen hoisted a black cloth banner on bamboo poles that warned in English and Chinese: “TEAR SMOKE.”

By now the rubber men had been joined by a larger crowd. Apart from the Communists, much of the rioting in the summer of 1967 was run by what the Chinese called “Ah-feis,” what the British police called “corner boys” and North Americans called hoodlums. They conducted much of the havoc to mask petty crimes such as burglary, extortion or racketeering. Sometimes just for badness. Nevertheless, the Communists lionized them and frequently characterized in the left-wing press some nasty little Ah-fei the police had collared as a “proletarian fighter.”

Some rioters engaged the police with a variety of savage weapons culled from the storehouses of an industrial city. They swung sharpened bicycle chains or lashed out with gloves impregnated with nails or stabbed wildly with copper water pipes filed into sharp spears. Once, when a riot platoon raided a trade union office, they found that the concrete stairs leading to a second-floor arsenal had been washed down with cooking oil then sprayed with water, making them virtually impassable.

I followed the Emergency Unit back down Canton Road. The young man with the fluorescent tube had made contact with another young man, perhaps an enemy of Chairman Mao or perhaps just another aimlessly angry young man. The victim lay on the ground, clutching his bleeding face and screaming about his eyes. He was surrounded by little bits of glass and there was a fine powder all over him.

The EU fired tear-gas canisters, which left a white trail in the air as they arced upward and came back down amid the rioters. Several riot policemen had affixed wooden tubes to their guns and fired them into the crowd. The projectiles were very painful but usually did no serious injury. The crowd began to break apart and run down side streets. It looked like it was almost all over until someone on the roof of the Rubber and Plastic union lobbed a small refrigerator off the roof. Through some ingenuity they managed to set the refrigerator alight. The EU backed away as it slammed to the pavement and popped open as it bounced. Inside, a huge carboy of gasoline smashed and gushed forth fire with a terrific concussion. It blew the fridge door down the street. Despite such fine showmanship, the Maoists lost the day because the fire forced their own ranks to scatter. The riot evaporated.

While plain-clothed investigators sealed off the union building with wooden hobby horses and went inside to make arrests, the EU boys began to relax. The tear gas had blown south, away from us, so the police removed their masks. I found my friend, Sergeant Jack Rudman, among them. There was a large sweat stain on the back of his tunic and sweat poured off his face. Rudman’s dark eyebrows sank in a fierce V toward a beak-like nose, parallel with a widow’s peak, which made him look stern and all-seeing. Few people could see so much of others as Jack could, and yet he saw so little of himself. He was still breathing hard and scanning the windows of buildings above us for trouble.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” I said.

He gave me an examining look but did not respond. He flicked his head to get the sweat off his brow. Drops fell on my hand. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said then looked about at the civilians at the side of Canton Road. “But what about you, mate? You almost got a sting there, pursued by those dollies and their toy guns. Why the hell did you stand there ...” He paused to think of a literate-sounding metaphor, then said: “... like a garden gnome.” He looked back to me for a moment and added, “Trust you.”

I tried to make a joke, knowing that I’d been foolish. Inwardly, I was very unhappy that Jack couldn’t have been a little more sympathetic. He could have murmured a kind word or something, at least expressed the most oblique thanksgiving that I hadn’t been injured. Otherwise, what was the point of standing in harm’s way? He looked about to satisfy himself that none of his fellow coppers had been injured in the fight. They got his tender concern. I envied them for having his loyalty.

Fire engines came down Canton Road to put out the gasoline fire, bumping over rioters’ stones and EU projectiles, so we went and stood over by the harbour side of the street.

“Got your message about your girlfriend,” Rudman said. “Been too busy.”

I told him I understood.

“I feel like a steak,” Rudman said.

“I’ll buy,” I said too quickly. “Tonight.”

Rudman surveyed the wrecked street again then glanced back at me. This time he had a look of warmth. He touched his sweaty hand to my jacket. “Yeah, all right.” He even smiled.

When I returned to the newsroom in Central shortly before noon there was a message from Chen Lo-wen at Great World. Chen was Becky’s favourite director and the creator of Long Ago and Far Away. He had come down with Feng from Shanghai after the Communists took power and had laboured for Great World for little money ever since. The studio directors were grotesquely underpaid relative to their commercial value. Actors frequently planted rumours in the mosquito press about imminent retirement from films; actresses hinted they were getting married to rich businessmen and were leaving the screen. It was the only way to guarantee a meeting with Feng Hsiao-foon to discuss their lousy pay. He kept everyone waiting in strict silence out in Miss Chin’s anteroom, where she gave them hard, disciplinary looks until they were cowed into thinking they were badly spoiled children exploiting the studio’s father. Confucian deference to Feng, as well as highly restrictive contracts, meant that performers rarely had the sort of tantrums and upsets that Hollywood performers indulged in. They almost never complained on the set, issued few protests, and if they did, Feng would punish them with fines and a lecture. A couple of months before Becky vanished, Tina Ti from Cathay Studios disappeared for a few days without explanation. She washed up safe and sound at the studio a couple of days later, citing a curfew surrounding the Maoist riots in Kowloon. She may have just wanted a few days off from her hectic shooting schedule. Most top actresses had a reputation with audiences for inaccessible glamour, but the reputation they had with impecunious and dominating studio lords like Feng Hsiao-foon was something else: they were dispensable goddesses with short shelf lives who wouldn’t have known how to put on lipstick if it hadn’t been for his instruction. Becky hadn’t, before she went into the movies. Many performers had miserable lives — some were actually refused permission to marry. Others were never allowed to travel abroad for fear they wouldn’t come home. They all fought bitterly with Feng and sometimes walked out, paying contract penalties or launching lawsuits to free themselves.

Feng didn’t mind the atmosphere of anxiety at all. He made sure that no one ever really knew what he was thinking - he would only sit behind his desk and nod his head while employees vented their spleens, wept furiously or shouted feeble threats. Then he would simply say: “Go back to work now and stop making a fool of yourself ”Humiliated and no wiser or richer, they just went back to work. The only time I had ever seen him unnerved was when a young actress hung herself in her dormitory room at the Great World studio. They brought Feng to see her body, gently swaying and swollen. He had the room exorcised.

As a director, Chen Lo-wen had even less latitude than the performers. He was so beholden to Feng, who had kept him all these years, that his complaints were few and he worked very hard, often at great personal sacrifice. Chen gave himself a serious groin pull loading one of Great World’s heavy old Mitchell cameras into a truck for a location shoot on The Herdsman and the Weaver. Feng told him to keep working or lose pay for every day he was off. Chen was in such pain that he miscalculated in lining up a close-up shot of Becky’s climactic scene because the Mitchell used a range-finder rather than the through-the-lens reflex system. When the film came back from Rank, her face was away off to one side of the frame, one eye obscured. I thought the shot had an appealing quality because it made it look as if the weaver were trying to hide her sorrow over her husband’s long absences. But Feng was furious. He ordered the whole scene reshot and expenses charged against Chen’s pay. Why Chen stayed with Feng was a testimony to not only his loyalty to the studio father but also to the desperate oversupply of Shanghai movie directors.

I called Chen back. You could hear the upset in his voice and I assumed it was because of Becky’s disappearance. “Have you learned anything?” I asked him in English.

He made a lengthy and suspicious protest: “I do not want any harm to come to Miss Chan. No one has told me anything about her going away. I had nothing to do with it. I know nothing. No one has informed me of anything.”

His answer was peculiar so I poked about with a few questions. When had he last seen her? How did she seem at the time? I had no strategy in my questions to cause any direction to emerge so I gave up. I just put my head in my hand and rubbed my eyes. “I don’t want her hurt,” I said.

“Neither do I!” Chen said. “You must run a story in the China Telegraph saying that I do not know anything about her disappearance! Please telephone Mr. Feng at once and tell him the same. I have told this very same thing to Cloudburst! You must not tell Feng that I spoke to Cloudburst. They get everything wrong in that paper and I want to make sure they understand that I had nothing to do with her disappearance. I am no one. I am just a quiet man who does his job.”