Written on Water, page 6
Campus Scenes (1).
During the lecture, when the professor is writing on the blackboard.
Many others have already pointed to the chaos and destruction of every sort of public amenity during the siege of Hong Kong. The cooling ducts of the government cold stores broke down, but the authorities allowed the mountains of beef stored inside to rot rather than distributing it. Volunteers in the defense effort were given rice and soybeans but no oil and no fuel for cooking. The officers of the Air-Raid Precaution corps spent their time looking for firewood and rice with which to provision those under their command and had no time to spare for taking care of bombs. For two days running, I ate nothing and went to work with the floating gait usually associated with immortals unencumbered by base desires. Of course, someone as derelict in duty as I probably deserved to suffer. I finished reading An Exposé of the Bureaucrats during an artillery barrage.4 I had read it when I was little, before I was able to appreciate its virtues, and had always wanted to read it again. As I read, I worried whether I would be allowed to finish the book. The print was minuscule, and the light poor, but if a bomb were to fall, what would I need my eyes for, anyway? “When there’s no skin,” the saying goes, “where do you put the hair?”
Throughout the eighteen days of the siege, was there anyone who did not experience that unbearable, half-past-four-in-the-morning feeling? Waking to another trembling dawn, surrounded by fog, cowering from the cold, with nothing to depend on. No way home. And if or when you got home at all, you might not find it there anymore. Homes can be destroyed, money transformed into worthless paper in the bat of an eyelid, other people can die. And one’s own life? Precarious at best. As the Tang poem puts it: “Bleakly I leave those near and dear / moving into distant misty veils.”5 But even lines like these cannot describe the untenable and unmoored quality of that emptiness and despair. It was intolerable to most people. Some were so anxious to grasp on to something solid that they decided to get married.
A couple came to our office to borrow a car from the Air-Raid Precaution branch director so that they could go to collect their marriage license. The man was a doctor and probably not a very kind person in ordinary circumstances, but now he gazed constantly toward his bride, his eyes brimming over with a devotion so dogged that it was almost tragic. The bride was a nurse, petite and rather pretty, with rosy cheeks glowing with happiness. Unable to obtain a proper wedding dress, she wore instead a sleeveless pale green silk robe, hemmed with dark green lace. They came in several times and were made to wait several hours on each occasion. They would sit quietly across from one another, gazing into each other’s eyes, and so unable to suppress their smiles that we all smiled along with them. We really ought to have given them a better return for the gratuitous happiness they brought us.
Eventually, the battle came to an end. It was a bit difficult to adjust to its absence after the cease-fire. Peace came as a kind of disturbance, acting on us like too much wine. To see airplanes in the blue sky above and know that one could enjoy watching them fly without risking a bomb falling on one’s head—this was enough to make them seem lovable. Forlorn, sparse winter trees spreading their hazy canopies like pale yellow clouds, clear water flowing from a faucet, electric lights, busy street life: all these things belonged to us again. Time itself had been restored to us: the light of day, the dark of night, the four seasons. For the time being, our lease on life was allowed to continue. Wasn’t that enough to make people beside themselves with joy? It was precisely because of this peculiar psychological state that the postwar years in Europe became the Roaring Twenties.
I remember how we scoured the streets in search of ice cream and lip balm after Hong Kong fell. We went into every store we saw to ask whether they had ice cream. Only one place conceded that it might perhaps have some the next day. We trooped several miles back to the store to honor the engagement and were given a plate of expensive ice cream, chock-full of little ice crystals that made a crunchy noise with each mouthful. The streets were full of makeshift stalls selling rouge, Western medicines, canned beef and mutton, stolen suits, cashmere sweaters, lace curtains, cut glass, whole bolts of woolens. We went to the city every day to go shopping. We called it shopping but really did no more than look. It was at that time that I first learned how to transform shopping into a pastime; no wonder the majority of women never tire of it.
Hong Kong discovered anew the joy of eating. Strange how the most natural, the most fundamental of functions, when suddenly accorded excessive attention and subjected to the glare of intense emotion, can come to seem sordid and even perverse. In Hong Kong after the battle, there were people every five or ten paces along the sidewalks, dressed in the immaculate fashion of those employed by foreign firms, squatting by little stoves cooking yellow biscuits that were as hard as iron. Hong Kong is not quite as can-do as Shanghai, and new entrepreneurial opportunities are exploited only very slowly. For what seemed like ages, these yellow cakes continued to monopolize the street-food market. Only very gradually did experimental varieties such as sweet rolls, samosas, and rather dubious-looking coconut cakes begin to make an appearance. Schoolteachers, shopkeepers, legal clerks—everyone had suddenly become a snack vendor.
We stood at the stalls eating turnip cakes fried in bubbling hot oil, while barely a foot away lay the discolored corpse of a pauper. Would winter in Shanghai be just the same? At least Shanghai would not seem to tolerate such a harsh scene. Hong Kong lacks Shanghai’s sense of its own cultivation.
Because of the shortage of petrol, garages were turned into restaurants, and you could hardly find a silk shop or a medicine shop that wasn’t selling pastries on the side. Hong Kong had never before been so gluttonous. The students in the dormitory talked of nothing the whole day except food.
In this euphoric atmosphere, only Jonathan stood alone, brimming over with disdain and fury. Jonathan was another overseas Chinese classmate who had joined the ranks of the Volunteer Corps and fought in combat. He wore an open-necked shirt under his greatcoat, his face was wan, and a lock of hair dangled between his brows in a manner reminiscent of Byron—such a shame that his pallor was merely the result of a bad cold. Jonathan knew all about what had happened during the fighting in Kowloon. What made him angriest was that they had sent two undergraduates to the trenches to carry an English soldier back from the front: “Two of our lives weren’t worth one of theirs. They promised special treatment when they recruited us, said we would be supervised by our own professors, but they broke every single one of their promises.” As he had thrown aside his scholar’s brush to join the ranks, he must have thought the war would resemble an excursion to Kowloon chaperoned by the Young Men’s Christian Association.
After the cease-fire, we worked as nurses in a makeshift hospital at the university. Aside from a few regular patients moved from the larger hospitals, most were coolies hit by stray bullets and looters who had been injured as they were being arrested. There was a tuberculosis patient who had a bit more money than most and hired another patient to serve as his valet, sending him out into the streets in his baggy, wide-sleeved hospital gown to run errands. The hospital chief felt that this represented a lapse of decorum, flew into a rage, and threw them both out. Another patient was found to have secreted a roll of gauze, several surgical knives, and three pairs of hospital trousers under his pillow.
Moments of drama were rare. The patients’ days passed so slowly that they were driven to distraction. The higher-ups sent word that they were to sift rice, picking out the little pebbles and chaff, and because they really had nothing else to do, they seemed to take to this monotonous task. In time, they even began to grow fond of their own wounds. In the hospital, each patient’s wounds came to represent the sum of his individuality. Each morning when ointments were applied and dressings changed, I watched as they gazed with adoring eyes at the new flesh forming around the wounds, with something resembling the love of a creator for his handiwork.
They lived in the dining hall of the men’s dormitory. In the past, this room had always been bursting with noise: a gramophone playing the Brazilian ballads of Carmen Miranda, students breaking plates and cursing the cook at every turn. Now some thirty silent, seething, and smelly men occupied the room, unable to move their legs, unable to stir their minds, unaccustomed to thought. There weren’t enough pillows so their beds were pushed up against the columns, and they lay with their heads propped against them, their necks at right angles to the rest of their bodies. They sat with their eyes wide open, waiting to be served two portions of brown rice per day, one dry, one gruel. With continued exposure to the elements, most of the air-raid protection paper pasted over the glass doors had begun to flake away, and when the sun shone through the glass, the white shreds looked like paper voodoo dolls. At night, these grotesque little white goblins were silhouetted against the deep blue of the glass panes.
We didn’t mind the night shift, because even though it was ten hours long, very little had to be done. When the patients needed to urinate or move their bowels, all we had to do was to call for one of the orderlies: “Bedpan for number 23” (using the Cantonese Anglicism “pan”), or “Piss-pot for number 30.” We sat behind a screen reading, and we even had late-night snacks of specially delivered milk and bread. The only drawback was that eight or nine times out of ten, patients would die during the night.
There was one man whose tailbone was rotting with gangrene, exuding an evil stench. When his suffering was at its worst, his facial expression actually seemed almost ecstatic: eyelids drooping, mouth pulled into the smile of someone who has an itch he can’t quite scratch. He called out all night long, “Miss! Oh, miss!” The syllables were drawn out, quavering, even melodic. I paid no attention. I was an irresponsible, heartless nurse. I hated him, because he was suffering terrible things. Eventually, every patient in the room was roused from sleep, and, unable to ignore him, they began to call out in unison, “Miss.” I could only walk over, stand sullenly by his bed.
“What do you want?”
He thought for a while, then moaned, “Water.” All he really wanted was for someone to wait on him; the task didn’t matter. I told him there was no boiled water in the kitchen and walked away. He sighed, fell silent for a moment, and then began to call out again, until he couldn’t manage anything but a kind of low moan:
“Miss . . . Oh, miss . . . Hey, miss . . .”
At three in the morning, as my colleagues slept, I went to boil milk, heedlessly carrying the fat white milk bottle through the hospital ward and down to the kitchen. Most of the patients were awake, and they stared wide-eyed at the bottle, which to them was even more beautiful than a lily blossom.
Hong Kong had never had such a bitterly cold winter. As I washed the old, coverless copper pot with a bar of soap, my hands felt like they were being cut by a knife. The pot was sticky with grime and grease. The orderlies used it to make soup, and the patients to wash their faces. I poured the milk, and the copper pot sat atop the blue gas flame, like an image of Buddha sitting astride a blue lotus flower, pure and luminous. But that interminable drawl of “Miss . . . Oh, miss” pursued me all the way to the kitchen. One white candle illuminated the small room as I kept watch over the milk as it came to a boil, as flustered and angry as a hunted beast.
The day the man died we were all happy enough to dance. Just as the sun began to rise, we entrusted his funeral arrangements to a professional nurse and retreated to the kitchen. One of my companions used coconut oil to bake some bread that tasted a bit like Chinese fermented rice cakes. A cock was crowing over another icy white morning. Selfish people such as ourselves went nonchalantly on with living.
Besides work, we studied Japanese. The teacher they sent was a young Russian whose yellow hair was cropped close to his skull. Each time we went to class, he would begin the lesson by asking a female student her age in Japanese. If she hesitated, he would hazard a guess: “Eighteen? Nineteen? No more than twenty, I should think. Which floor do you live on? May I come and visit you sometime?” As the student contemplated how to discourage his advances, he would chuckle: “No English allowed. You have to answer in Japanese. All you know how to say is ‘Please come in and sit down. Have something to eat.’ You don’t know the Japanese for, ‘Get out of here!’” When he had finished his joke, he himself would be the first to blush. At first, students jostled for a place in the lecture hall, but gradually fewer and fewer students showed up for his class. When the numbers had dwindled to embarrassing lows, he quit in a fit of pique and was replaced by another teacher.
This Russian teacher saw my drawings but had eyes only for a portrait of Yanying wearing a corset. He was willing to part with five Hong Kong dollars for it, but when he saw how reluctant we were to sell, he quickly relented, “Five dollars—not including the frame.”
The special atmosphere during the war inspired me to draw a lot of pictures. Yanying colored them in. Going into transports over one’s own sketches might be unseemly, but the fact is that these pictures were actually quite good. They didn’t seem anything like my own work, and I can never dream of drawing the likes of them again. My only reservation is that people found them somewhat baffling. I could have spent a lifetime writing annotated biographies for those pell-mell character sketches and never regretted a moment. For example: the irascible subletter’s wife, crossed-eyed, her pupils protruding like two water faucets; the young matron whose head and neck are the barrel of an electric hair dryer at a salon; a prostitute with an infectious disease squatting like a lion or a dog, garters and the tops of her red silk stockings showing beneath her dress.
Campus Scenes (2).
I especially liked the colors Yanying used for one picture in particular, all different blues and greens, reminiscent of the line in the poem: “Blue seas lit by the moon, a pearl sheds tears / Indigo fields warmed by the sun, jade gives rise to mist.”6
I sketched with the knowledge that I would very soon lose the ability to do so. And from this I derived a lesson, an old lesson. If there is something you want to do, do it right away; even then, you might already be too late. Man is the most changeable of creatures.
There was a young Annamese classmate who had a minor reputation as a painter among his fellow students. He complained that in the wake of the battle, his line was not nearly as forceful as it had once been, since he was now compelled to cook for himself, which left his arms fatigued. It pained us terribly to watch each day as he fried aubergines (for fried aubergine was the only dish he knew how to cook).
When the war broke out, most Hong Kong University students were overjoyed, because December 8 also happened to be the first day of exams, and to be excused from exams for no reason was an almost unprecedented godsend. That winter, we suffered through a fair amount of hardship and through these trials gained a better sense of our priorities. But priorities are difficult to define. Once you dispose of all the specious ornaments of culture, what seems to remain is merely “food and drink, man and woman.” Human civilization does its best to transcend the realm of the bestial, but could it be that several thousand years of work have been nothing but wasted effort? So it seems. Students from overseas, stranded in one spot with nothing at all to do, spent their days grocery shopping, cooking, and flirting—and not the gentle sort of flirting that normally takes place among students, leavened with a touch of sentimentality. In the dormitories after the war, a male student might lie on a girl’s bed playing cards deep into the night and then come back the very next morning before she had even awoken and sit himself right back down on the edge of the bed. From next door, one would hear her coy cries of “No! Didn’t I say no? No, I will not” and so on until she was dressed. This sort of phenomenon produced different reactions in different people and may even have compelled some of us to retreat in horror to Confucius’s side. In the end, one cannot dispense with restrictions. Primitive people may well have had a certain innocence, but, in the final analysis, they weren’t completely human, either.
The hospital director was extremely worried by the prospect of illegitimate war babies. One day, he happened to catch sight of a female student sneaking out of the dormitory with a rectangular bundle in her arms and thought his nightmare had already become reality. Only later did he learn that she was carrying rice she had gotten at work to sell on the black market but had disguised the sack as a baby to forestall the possibility of being mugged by the hoodlums who filled the streets.
In point of fact, what we had were over eighty young people who had narrowly escaped with their lives and for that reason were all the more full of vitality. There was food, there was shelter, and there were none of the usual entertainments outside to distract us. There were no professors (in truth, most professors are eminently dispensable), but there were lots of books: the pre-Han philosophers, Shijing (The classic of poetry), the Bible, Shakespeare. This was, in short, the ideal environment for higher education. And yet our classmates treated it as a tedious transitional period; behind them lay the ordeal of battle and ahead the moment when they could finally sit at their mothers’ knee and sob out their sorrows. In the meantime, the best they could do was listlessly scribble the legend “home sweet home” across a dusty windowpane. Getting married, even if out of boredom, was at least a somewhat less passive approach to the situation.
