Читать книгу Becky Chan - Jared Mitchell - Страница 7

I asked Feng if he had contacted the police. He had done nothing, other than order his publicity man to track her down. He had made inquiries among Becky’s friends and at the studio but no one knew anything. The publicity man had Telexed a lot of private detectives, overseas Chinese men who worked in Southeast Asian countries. They were watching the Manila Hotel lobby, the sitting room of the Oriental in Bangkok, and the coffee shop of the Shangri-La in Singapore.

“We have to call the police at once,” I said. Feng balked. “What if she’s been kidnapped by the Communists?” I said. “Or by organized gangs?”

Feng was silent for a few moments. I guess he hadn’t figured that. Then he assembled an answer. “It is not suitable for Chinese people to contact the police,” he said. The condescension infuriated me. I knew what Chinese people found “suitable.” I’d lived in Hong Kong for almost two decades. I repeated my suggestion and again he said no. I began to have the strange and plausible idea that Feng might be of two minds about whether Becky should be found at all. She might have been his biggest star, but she was in her thirties now, a decade older than most actresses in Hong Kong movies, and she wasn’t achieving the kind of box office that she used to. Her fame had been in decline since she’d returned from Hollywood in 1963.

I wanted Becky found, regardless of what Feng felt, and decided to go behind his back. She could be in danger. I told him I would make some discreet inquiries. He considered this but became worried. “It would be very harmful to Becky,” he said, “if you were to publish a story about her disappearance in your newspaper.” I disagreed and said it could help find her. He became cross and lectured me about the supremacy of his decisions. He was angry because he could not control me. We left it that I would telephone friends who worked for airlines in Hong Kong to see if she’d left the colony.

I idly turned the carriage knob on my typewriter and my story on radioactive fallout slipped free. I gave it to Billy Fong to pass to the dayside editor.

“You okay?” Billy asked.

I nodded and picked up the telephone. I called some friends at the airlines: Thai Airways International, JAL and Pan Am. They checked passenger manifests for me — back then such favours were possible. They found no record of Becky on any flights. Next I tried to telephone some of Becky’s colleagues at Great World, but they were all shooting on stages. There was a big musical film in production called Life’s Like That which required lots of contract players to appear as a nightclub audience. The scale of Hong Kong movie-making meant that leading players sometimes filled in as extras on such shoots. Feng was paying them anyway, he might as well have kept them busy. I left messages for several of them.

Then I called Becky’s home in Kowloon Tong and spoke with one of the servants in Cantonese. Ah-niu was the maid and had been with Becky for years. She started to cry when I spoke to her. I asked a lot of indirect questions about whether Becky and Feng had been quarrelling but she was reluctant to speak about her employers, especially over the phone. She only allowed that Becky had been especially anxious for about a month, something I had noticed too.

Finally, I called my friend in the Hong Kong Police, regardless of Feng’s wishes. Jack was in the Emergency Unit, the riot police, and would not investigate personally, but he could get inquiries going much faster than I could. When I called, Jack was out patrolling in Kowloon City. I left a message.

That evening I decided to attend the premiere of Becky’s newest film, Long Ago and Far Away. Great World employees would be at the Ambassador and I wanted to talk to them about Becky. I almost couldn’t get to the theatre. The police had found a brown cardboard box left by Maoists on Nathan Road tied to the steel fence that ran down the median. Fearing a bomb, they cordoned off the street so traffic and pedestrians had to find another route through the narrow, jammed side streets of lower Kowloon. Traffic came to a complete halt and pedestrians were reduced to a maddening shuffle. It turned out that the brown box was a hoax designed to cause just such chaos. It contained an old pair of shoes and a note in Chinese that said: “British imperialists! Use these to run away from the proletarian masses!”

As I approached the Ambassador Cinema, a flock of startled pigeons took flight with the first frantic burst of a Maoist song issued from a trio of loudspeakers on the overhang of the Astor cinema. The Astor stood across Nathan Road from the Ambassador. It was operated by a company controlled by leftists sympathetic to China’s Mao Tse-tung. The whole building was completely covered in red bunting, red lanterns with gold tassels and an enormous, brilliantly painted billboard showing Chinese industrial workers, women activists, People’s Liberation Army soldiers and peasants walking arm in arm. They were smiling because above them, where the sun should have been, was a golden cameo of Chairman Mao radiating the brilliant light of his invincible thought. The picture was titled Chairman Mao Joins a Million People to Celebrate the Great Cultural Revolution. It came with a “supporting colour short,” The Pearl River Delta Today, produced by the Central Newsreel & Documentary Film Studio. While such pictures were numbingly dull compared to the glamour, fun, sex and sadness of Hong Kong movies, they did find audiences with dutiful leftists who yawned through four performances a day and joined earnest discussion groups during the intervals. The propaganda music that came honking out of the loudspeakers pounded down on pedestrians packing the sidewalks, one more indignity of urban noise.

On the opposite pavement, a huge hand-painted billboard for Long Ago and Far Away completely masked the Ambassador’s façade. A three-storey painted billboard showed Becky in a head scarf, looking sad. The disembodied heads of supporting actors, comparative Lilliputians, floated in the background at odd angles, like runaway balloons. Long Ago and Far Away was a tragic love story about arranged marriage. It was as free of politics as the Astor’s Communist film was larded with it. The Chinese title of the picture gave a different angle on the story: She Must Smile at a Man She Does Not Like.

Fans were buying tickets to the premiere and I lined up to get one from the booking windows. In Hong Kong you still bought cinema tickets from a paper seating plan the cashier presented to you. You pointed to your seat, either in the front stalls or in the balcony’s Dress Circle. Before the Second World War, only the British got to sit in Dress Circle, but they really had to dress — evening clothes were a requirement of admission. Now everybody sat wherever they chose, and evening clothes for Dress Circle was only a peculiar, faint memory. If it was a quality film in a classy house like those on the Great World circuit, you might get a promotional gift with admission, such as a new brand of soft drink or a tube of lipstick. Great World tried tie-in contests — to promote Becky’s 1965 picture That Day at the Airport, which featured the repeated image of a wristwatch, Feng raffled off Tissots, the Swiss Omega company’s cheaper brand.

There were a few Great World performers in the lobby, mobbed by fans. I spoke to the company’s publicity chief. He was cagey and too much of a creature of his employer to reveal anything. I was getting nowhere. Then I spotted Netty Leung, a Cantonese star with Great World. Netty appeared in as many as seventy films a year. In 1964, she too had abruptly disappeared from the studio to flee her workload. She had been acting in three pictures simultaneously and her disappearance forced Feng to shut all of them down. A few days later, the general manager of Feng’s Malaysian theatre circuit spotted her in a Singapore restaurant.

Netty’s excuse for running away: she was just plain exhausted. Feng fined her six months’ pay as a warning to other would-be bolters. For half a year she was indentured labour at Great World.

“Have you seen Becky?” I asked her. I must have appeared so upset that Netty chuckled with embarrassment and bobbed her head to encourage me to find my equilibrium. Netty said she knew nothing of Becky’s disappearance. “Although,” she said as she went into the auditorium, “if she walked out, good for her.”

I was going to leave at that point. I didn’t want to sit around in a movie while my best friend was missing. I could hear the film begin with the familiar trumpeting fanfare of the Great World Organisation. Feng, who was almost pathologically vigilant about production costs, hated colour. Back then, Feng had to double his lighting budgets for Eastmancolor. He had shot his first colour production almost in defiance of practicality, using black-and-white-film lighting levels. The performers’ faces came out a bilious green, but, with typical patience, cinema-goers didn’t seem to mind. At first, Feng was going to keep working that way. Part of him did want his films to look better. So up went the lighting budget. Great World didn’t have a colour-processing lab for several years so Feng had to air-freight negatives to Rank Laboratories in England, raising costs and causing unacceptable delays. He ordered that all editing be done on a clipboard, with directors and film editors keeping track of film can numbers and ordering on the spot which pieces of film to use in the final product. Once the processed film was flown back from Rank, a Great World negative cutter pasted the picture together in twenty gruelling hours. Feng also committed his theatre circuit to wide-screen projection using the CinemaScope process, which he renamed WorldScope. Shooting was often rushed and clumsy, so the extremities of images were blurred. Again, Chinese movie fans didn’t mind - they loved the colour and WorldScope dimensions, the vast brightness a respite from their hard lives in the grey, cramped streets of Hong Kong.

I grew curious, standing in the empty lobby of the Ambassador, listening to the Great World fanfare. Feng had complained of the expense of reshooting the Great World fanfare sequence in colour: the old one had featured a revolving Plasticine globe hovering on a cloud of carbon dioxide. Technicians would have to go out to an electrical goods factory and buy a new electric motor to make the Plasticine globe spin because they had failed to keep the old one they’d used when they’d shot the black-and-white version. So he ordered that the spinning globe be ditched in favour of a beautiful young woman opening a fan in front of her face. Painted on the fan was a map of the world. She became framed by the superimposed Chinese characters Tai Shai Kaai and their English counterparts: “Great World.”

Then Becky was on screen and I confess that I so longed to see her again that I was willing to stare at her giant projected image as a substitute. An insistent usher tugged me to my seat. Long Ago and Far Away was Becky’s 190th film. The story was unusually sophisticated and represented a high point in the career of Becky’s favourite director, Chen Lo-wen, a veteran of the pre-war Shanghai movie studios. In it, Becky plays a tragic woman riding a train through the countryside. She sits at the window with her hair fashionably swept to the side and heavily lacquered, the way smart women all over the world wore it in 1967. Like all Mandarin-track movies made in Hong Kong, this picture never exactly spelled out where the story was set - certainly not Hong Kong, a small, provincial city that Shanghanese filmmakers such as Feng and Chen disdained. It was probably supposed to take place in some fantasy of a modern, affluent China, near a middle-class Shanghai-like city that had never existed, a conceit every bit as proud and weirdly unreal as the notion of making Mandarin pictures in a Cantonese market, or a colour film with black-and-white lighting. Everything Feng did was proud and weirdly unreal.

The device on which Long Ago relies on is that whenever Becky’s train stops in a station, she sees something on the platform that reminds her of her past. At the first stop, while a soft rain drizzles down the window, she sees a little girl in a fancy Western dress being tugged along by a happy father. That triggers a memory of the heroines own childhood. She had grown up in a wealthy home. But from early childhood her character has been pledged by her parents to marry the ugly, cruel son of a neighbouring wealthy family. At another station, there are two happy lovers pooling their pennies to buy dried salty plums. This makes her think of how she had once met a poor but kind and handsome artist with whom she fell in love long ago and far away, putting her at odds with her family and their promise to marry her off to the cruel boy.

And so the story goes, with this train of memories pulling in and out of stations. Great World had used the British section of the Kowloon-Canton Railway and, with studio efficiency, shot the entire picture in twenty days. Becky had spent three days just riding the KCR’s big olive-coloured trains back and forth while the crew filmed her. She held a hankie to her mouth every time the diesel engine roared through the mile-long Lion Rock Tunnel, spewing blue exhaust and overwhelming noise into the cars behind.

At one point, and for no intended reason, Becky sings. Even in first-class Mandarin dramas things sometimes happened for no reason - moviegoers expected a song. Feng Hsiao-foon understood this as a ritual rather than logical device and gave moviegoers what they wanted. She sings a Mandarin version of the famous song from the 1944 American movie Cover Girl, which justifies the film’s English title. It actually carries more freight in Becky’s picture than it had in the American one, serving as a soliloquy.

“Long ago and far away, I dreamed a dream one day; And now that dream is here beside me!”

As Becky’s character made her way down the railway line, suffering and agonizing, I glanced about the movie theatre at the patrons. This might have been the film’s premiere, but it was no exclusive Hollywood-style gala. Tickets had been sold to the public at regular prices, just as with any other performance. Money had to be made at every showing. There in the audience, their faces illuminated by the screen’s reflection, were Becky’s fans. They were refugees: about one-third of Hong Kong’s population of three million had recently fled China for the British colony. These movie-goers were middle-aged, married women with their hair pulled back into ponytails and fixed with rubber bands who came to escape the monotony of their tiny, drab homes in Kowloon housing estates — the ones where your kitchen was nothing more than a small brazier on a balcony and the lavatory was a malfunctioning communal toilet down the hall shared by twenty-four people. And there were hawker women who sold vegetables or cheap plastic goods on Hong Kong’s crowded and bustling sidewalks who now sat in the Ambassador in light day-pyjamas.

There were lonely single men, mostly factory workers, who had fled China’s upheavals and had become the lost souls of Hong Kong. One man used to turn up for every single premiere of a Becky Chan picture. That had been years before, in the ’50s and early ’60s. He always wore the tattered and faded uniform of the Kuomintang Army, which had been vanquished by the Communists on the mainland in 1949. He and other hapless Kuomintang soldiers had been forced to flee to Hong Kong when the Communists ultimately proved victorious. Had they stayed behind they might have been imprisoned in the vengeful early years after Liberation, or slaughtered. They wandered around Hong Kong like ghosts, still wearing their uniforms and trying to make a living at odd jobs.

Whenever people saw that pathetic man at Becky’s premieres they spoke of “Chiang Kai-shek’s lost brother.” He would sit down at the front and stare up at Becky. Before The Goddess of Mercy, he would sit in awe and contemplation, perhaps adoration. His oily face shone in the movie reflection and you could see two bumpy cheek bones sticking out on his Cantonese face, the faded Republican Sun flashes on the shoulders of his worn-out uniform plainly and pathetically visible. He had inspired in me endless questions about where he had come from, what he had done with his life, and why he always came to worship the Goddess of Mercy. People joked at her premieres that Becky should say hello to her biggest and grubbiest fan, but so far as I know Becky never did. He wasn’t around anymore; nobody had seen him in years, and I often wondered what had happened to him. Now I looked up at Becky on the WorldScope screen, so magnified, so vividly coloured. This was my friend, this was the Goddess of Mercy. She was gone. It wounded me to be left with no more than her shadow.