Chapter 14 In Another Life, Maybe
IN ANOTHER LIFE, MAYBE
Thirty-three years ago …
In the distance, the city recedes like an outgoing tide.
One final glance gives sight of pale colonial-style buildings clustered like barnacles around the coastline and docks.
Junk boats cut through the harbor with their red, fan-like sails and narrow prows.
There are occasional cars and frequent rickshaws, schools and temples and hospitals; there are trading offices filled with people speaking multiple languages, and dusty warehouses processing a steady stream of goods.
From here, it is almost pretty. But home is never more beautiful than when you see it for the last time.
The year is 1941. You are twenty years old, and were born during the lull of relative calm between two brutal wars: a squalling and reluctant addition to an ever-growing port city.
The flat in Wanchai District that your parents rented overlooked the crowded, ship-thick harbor, thronging with people and cargo and ferries.
As a girl, you could see the ocean from your window, a stone’s throw from the ferry docks and their ceaseless shipping traffic.
For most of your life, that simply was Hong Kong, sprawling on China’s southeastern coast like a hungry, concrete octopus, infested with busy humans. No better or worse than a thousand such cities across the globe, except this one is—was?—your home. The only place you’ve ever lived.
But Hong Kong has another side.
A different face, if you will.
Here’s how to find it. First, help your mother pack six suitcases on a warm December morning, with all the food and clothes you can cram in. Most of your family’s possessions must be left behind. Then go to the nearest pier, and hire a small junk boat.
Pile your luggage in the hold and sail forth through Victoria Harbor and beyond it.
Slip past shipping lanes and ferries, past British naval vessels and American cargo carriers, and up round the coast of Sai Kung toward shorelines softly eroded by yearly typhoons.
Skirt around the archipelago islands that dot the coast, tiny yet steep, studding the ocean’s face like rocky freckles.
The city shrinks smaller and smaller every time you look back until, at last, it isn’t visible at all.
And breathe.
Turn down the engine, embrace the quiet.
No busy morning traffic, jostling with the rickshaws and bicycles and pedal-traders.
No crowds surging round the ports, the buildings, the narrow streets.
Pollution left behind. Open sewers too far away to smell.
Shade your eyes, look outward from the small deck.
On this dazzling, sunlit morning, you can see for miles; the eye travels like a bird set free.
Gaze to the left, toward the mainland. Hills are draped in clustering trees.
The coastal beaches are a mix of white and soft, or else stony and raw; the ocean is a swirl of inky green.
Somewhere, bauhinia flowers drift on the wind in dashes of pink, red, white.
Somewhere, sharks and stingrays and dolphins are swimming.
This, this is the face of Hong Kong you will learn to fall in love with. The bit everyone else calls “city” is just a cold monstrosity.
If you wished, you could dive from the boat, let the salt water drink you up until the skin of your body is cracked and wrinkled. Beneath the surface there will be the clownfish, the urchins, the sprawls of coral. Take a moment to catch your breath while the sun runs renegade across the sky.
Welcome to heaven. It was just over the horizon, all along.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Those gorgeous moments aren’t quite upon you yet. For now, it is enough to lean on the railings, elbows pressed against sun-stung metal. Life has been so bleak, for so many months, that you’ve forgotten how to be happy.
It’s almost like there is no war, no distant bombs, no constant air raid sirens.
No more city on the teetering edge of occupation.
The Japanese will arrive soon with guns and submarines and cruel prison camps but that isn’t your problem, not any longer.
You’re just here with Mami and both of you are doing what Baba told you to do, before he left: getting somewhere safe.
In truth, few places in the world are safe right now. But some places are less tactically advantageous than others, and a tiny abandoned island with no strategic importance is surely safer than the bustling urban jewel you’ve left behind. There’s less chance of trouble out here.
Mami stands next to you on the deck, after stashing the luggage away. For most of the trip, she has said very little. Just stares at the horizon, as if resentful about what lies beyond its edge. If she is enjoying this, it doesn’t show.
You’ve seen her happy in photographs, if rarely in real life. There’s an old snapshot of her wedding day, black-and-white, much faded, with Sung Ho Tung and Chen Daiyu—married Sept 1922 written on the back to mark the Western year. Unlike Western wives, Chinese women keep their names in marriage.
In it, Mami wears a traditional qun kwa, the gold dragons and vermillion cloth all bled to gray by the camera’s inadequate eye.
She is young and smiling, surrounded by double-happiness decorations.
Baba—Ho Tung—stands next to her in a Tang suit and looks dazed, as if all his good fortune has come at once.
Unusually for most Chinese women, your Mami chose to take her husband’s surname on marriage, for reasons that were never quite explained to you. Baba said once in passing that she did not wish to be reminded of the family she’d lost as a child, and you’d never questioned it.
Regardless, little trace remains of that youthful, happy Daiyu. Years of hard living have eroded her smile, and fresh worry has caricatured her into a shell, hollow and haunted. Even on this boat, with the sun a relentless shower of light above, joy can’t touch her.
It’s hard not to feel like this is your fault, because a lot about Baba’s departure feels like your fault. Mami says it isn’t, but you know in your bones that isn’t true, that she blames you at least a little for not stopping him—as you blame yourself.
Your heart lives in a state of tug-o’-war between her misery and your guilt.
“Sit still,” she says, abruptly. It’s the first thing she’s said all trip. “Always you are fidgeting, like ants are biting.”
Truthfully, you hadn’t noticed. Your body likes to be in motion, and becoming a statue is not easy. It’s been a long couple of hours crammed on the boat.
But you want to be respectful. You fold both arms across your chest, and hug yourself to quietude. Daughters should be obedient and respectful, when possible. She seems satisfied with that, or at least isn’t complaining anymore.
Since even glancing her way dampens the mood, you angle both shoulders to cut her out of view, until the searing line of horizon fills your eyes and heart. For now, it’s enough. Time aplenty for unhappiness later.
The boat needs refueling. That demands a stopover at Silverstrand Beach, if only briefly. A few of the locals give you sideways looks when they hear of your destination. Everyone pointedly doesn’t talk about the war, which means there is little to say.
Then the tank is full and you’re moving again, on toward the island. They’re almost as relieved to see you go as you are to leave.
Shek Ham Chau in Cantonese, or Shak Ham Chiu if speaking Hakka.
The syllables roll off the tongue, modest and gentle.
The British translation on maps says: Stone Temple Island, though this is not quite accurate.
A closer translation would be Stone Shrine Island, though the nuance of that was probably lost in the English translation.
Regardless, there was a village on it once, going back hundreds of years. Your mother was born in this place, the daughter of salt farmers. That was her life and identity, until 1918 or so, when the worst typhoon in two centuries wrecked the community.
Everyone died except Mami and a few other children. Baba told you that she lost her entire family in the storm. All survivors relocated to the mainland, to live with distant relatives. Shek Ham Chau stands abandoned, now, aside from the lonely ghosts who linger in its remains.
However, fewer people means greater safety for you, because empty islands are worthless to Japanese invaders.
And Mami owns the house where your grandmother once lived, with a farm attached.
She’s never been able to sell the land, because of the ghosts.
That is where you’re headed, the pair of you; a quiet refuge from the war, if there is such a thing.
A haunted island is a daunting retreat, but it’s only temporary. Just until Baba can get the supplies and money he needs, and come for you in a boat of his own. And then you’ll all go somewhere safe together. That’s the plan, and your heart is hinged on it.
“We are almost there.” Mami’s voice breaks a silence that has grown thick without you noticing.
“I can’t see it,” you say. “There’s too much mist.”
She points. “Look. Look there.”
The boat draws closer. It is indeed misty, the atmosphere cloying with the promise of rain. A cool breeze rolls in from the east. Squint, shade your eyes, and peer vainly into that white haze, seeking a first glimpse of your destination.
Then the sun comes out, quick as a child’s smile; clouds part at her warm touch. And Shek Ham Chau seems to rise in front of you like a woman surfacing for air.
Sunlight shimmers on the water. Boxy houses, brightly painted, refract color at unexpected angles. Glossy mangroves fuzz the shoreline as the boat glides toward docking, offering glimpses of tangled forests farther inland. Scintillating peace lingers.
It’s beautiful enough to send a flutter through your heart.