Chapter 16 Bloody Saturday
BLOODY SATURDAY
Fifty-two years ago …
Mami was not your only parent, of course. The yang to her yin was Ho Tung, your Baba. He is a big part of the reason why you went to the island, why you stayed so long, and so his story here matters, too.
In many ways, Baba had always been a silent fixture in your life.
He often came home late and tired, having talked all day as a translator—mostly arguing over import paperwork—and seemed to retreat into himself.
He drank tea, smoked cigarettes, ate his meals, did the accounts, and cleaned the stove all in stoic quietude, while you bounced around the kitchen or nattered to the neighbors through the door gate.
Meanwhile, Mami hung the laundry, swept the floor, and put away dishes.
What Baba lacked in words, he made up for in action. He often brought treats and small toys, purchased on his journey home, proffering them with embarrassed gentleness. Once, he brought you back a tiger charm bracelet, a nod to the year of your birth; you never took it off, treasured it always.
And when Mami scolded too hard or hit too often, he could sometimes quietly defuse her—a gifted cigarette, a manufactured errand, occasionally a kiss.
It goes without saying that you loved him.
You knew your father, and yet also didn’t.
You knew what kind of cigarettes he bought (American, to impress the traders), his favorite dish (mutton stewed in a fragrant broth), and the exact order in which he read a newspaper (headlines, obituaries, finance).
But those things were not the man himself, just affectations he had collected.
There were a few things of importance that you learned about him, from listening to snippets of conversations across the years and nosing through his old belongings.
Baba was from a small village just outside Shanghai.
He left it to serve in the First World War, as a young volunteer.
China sent no soldiers to that conflict, but he did work in a munitions factory, producing bullets.
Even that relatively safe exposure was enough to quell his curiosity.
After the conflict ended, he became determined, from then on, to lead a peaceful life.
He returned to Shanghai and met your mother, who was living with northern relatives after the destruction of her home island. They married soon after.
Together, Baba and Mami settled in Hong Kong, where the money was better and life was a little easier.
Her Mandarin had never been good, and she missed the climate; Baba was drawn by the good job opportunities, and liked Southern Chinese food.
Here in this city, they hoped that wealth and modernity and the heavy hand of British colonialism would protect them from strife, from war and typhoons and uncertainty.
It did not.
War came to your lives, unwanted yet predictable, like the cycle of yearly storms, like the crash of a rising tide, and drowned everything in its path.
You were fifteen years old when incendiary bombs began to fall on Beijing in the sun-soaked months of July 1937, adding man-made fire to the sun’s crushing heat. People talked about nothing else at home, at school, at work.
Yet Japan was so small, China so vast—surely, despite everything that had happened to the country in the past, they would weather this, too.
“It is not so simple,” Baba said, when you asked him about it over dinner. “China has been struggling for a long time, little bird.”
He still called you “little bird,” because of the meaning of your name. Even though you were old enough to be leaving school soon, and were already looking for work.
“Struggling with what, Baba? Do you mean the Opium War? I thought that was finished.”
Even the smallest child knew about the Opium War, and how badly Britain had devastated China. At least there was a certain honesty about armed conflict, bloody though it was. But a conflict waged through drugs and extortion was just a dirty, miserable mess.
“War does not finish,” he said, heavily. “It is not a game that stops when enough players quit. It is a wound, sinking into flesh, leaving scars and rot that cause pain for a long time.”
Then he sighed, forced a smile, and told you to come sit next to him.
“Look, I have a new book of poems today,” he said, as he so often did; Baba was forever buying little books of this and that, bringing them home to show you.
“We will forget about the news for a while. Come read with me, Siu Yin.”
You were not interested in the slim volumes of Chinese poetry he found so fascinating. But you enjoyed listening to the sound of his voice, and were always willing to sit next to him, attentive while he read aloud.
The days passed, and the news grew steadily worse.
In the autumn of 1941, the Nazis reached the height of their power, and Japan’s emperor turned his burning gaze upon Hong Kong. Mainland refugees streamed across the border as the Japanese broke China relentlessly, one victory at a time.
You kept your head down, and concentrated on other things.
Too old for school, you had a job by then, working in the kitchen of a local restaurant.
Hard and greasy hours, but it paid almost as well as Mami’s cleaning role at the local hospital, and left you too exhausted to think much about what was happening elsewhere.
Then came the Battle of Nanjing—the wide-scale torture and massacre of its civilians, the weaponized mass rape of its women and children.
The exact numbers sent scholars spiraling into arguments, but across the next few months, over one hundred thousand people were massacred in that region alone.
The scale of that horror defied your teenage brain to comprehend; would horrify you for the rest of your life.
A few weeks later, Beijing fell to the Japanese, followed by Tianjin.
You saw the pictures in newspapers: bodies blown to pieces, limbs piled in doorways, buildings collapsing, children pin-cushioned by shrapnel. This was war as your country had never known, another level of hell bleaker and harsher than even the artillery-fueled misery of previous generations.
Tens of thousands died, mostly civilians, until the ghosts and the rubble began to outnumber the living.
Worse, the ghosts created in these firestorms were neither sentient nor friendly, nor easily pacified; they were screaming, rageful, traumatized things, as much a danger to the locals as the bombings.
Sometimes you would lie awake at night, trying to imagine how it felt to live in a city being smashed to bits from a daily rain of sky-weapons, and then discover the spirits of your loved ones trying to dismember you as they’d been dismembered.
One morning, you were folding clean laundry in the bedroom when your father gave a strangled gasp in the next room.
“Baba?” You came into the living area, found him reading the paper.
An English headline dominated the front in towering black font. Pictures of a city devastated by bombing splashed the front; a small, screaming child sat among the ruins, chubby form picked out in black and white. The usual grim images of violence.
Mami, who couldn’t read English, leaned over him. “What is wrong?”
“Shanghai has been captured by the Japanese empire,” he said, in the quietest voice you’d ever heard from him.
“Captured?” you echoed. “What about the people in the city? What will happen to them?”
Other cities had already fallen, but Baba’s brother was still living in Shanghai; children, relatives, the lot. Or had been, anyway.
Baba didn’t answer. He just kept flipping through pages describing grisly deaths and mounting damage. Bloody Saturday, the papers were calling it.
“The ghosts will kill them, or the Japanese will, or their own side will in counterattacks,” Mami said, when he remained silent. “Same as the other cities.”
“Some will live.” Baba sounded strained. “Some will run.”
“If they can,” Mami said, waspish. “And there will be more refugees soon, taking trains and boats and coming across borders to our city, I’m sure.”
“What about us?” you said. “Will the bombs come here?”
“No,” Baba said, at the same time as your mother answered, “Yes, of course.”
You looked back and forth between them, unsure who to believe.
“Hong Kong is full of English refugees from Shanghai, and Westerners are everywhere.” Baba gripped the paper tightly. “Our port is valuable and strategic. Most of the aid that China receives comes through Hong Kong ports.”
“And Shanghai was full of gweilo people too, till they left!” Mami often called the Westerners “gweilo” behind their backs. “If this city is important to the war, then the Japanese will surely come here. They will attack us soon, and the gweilos will leave.”
“They may think to do that,” he said firmly, “but the British would never just give Hong Kong away—”
“Aiyah!” She flung down a dishcloth. “Who says the gweilos will give it? They don’t have to give anything!
The Japanese will take it all the same. Their empire is very strong and we are very weak, much weaker than Shanghai was, which they also took.
And the foreigners care more about Malaya than us. ”
A shocked silence filled the small flat.
“Why do you trust the British so much?” she said, shaking with vehemence.
“They bought this land, this city”—her foot stomped emphatically—“in exchange for the profits they made, off the opium they forced China to buy. A few years of repeating their English words, and suddenly you think they are saviors? Working for them has made you—” She clamped her lips together.
Baba stared at her. “Made me what?”
Mami half-turned to glare at you, as if the exchange were your fault. “Go play in the stairs,” she said, in a tone that brooked no argument.
You were nearly grown, too old to be entertained by running aimlessly. The jian you’d once raced had long since dispersed. Still, you did as she ordered and escaped the kitchen.