Adrift Read online

  To describe precisely all the intricate inter-connections and sharp practices in the decades after World War II would be harder than to unravel one of the 170-odd mind-defying koans which have been handed down by Chinese and Japanese Zen masters since the start of the seventh century. One day, a truly great poet might come along to sing of the sorrows and the defiances, the tragedies and the successes of that once fabled city. Otherwise, all that would be known by the jet-setters of today would be the astronomical prices for a square footage of prime property there or how many of Asia’s richest tycoons lived there. After all, would anyone be moved nowadays over a sordid little tale of royal adultery if Homer had not come along to sing so sweetly of the Trojan Wars?

  In 1989, after reaching the age of 60, I reflected upon my experiences during my years in Hong Kong. I found a sentimental attachment to many of them, as if they had been fragments of coloured stones or unusual pebbles I had picked up while beach-combing with some fair maiden. Was I reading too much into them? Could they not simply be part of the usual sentimental junk a man accumulates over a lifetime? I concluded that if they were worthless, then someone else could get rid of them after I am gone. In the meantime, I wanted to retain them, and perhaps to fashion a little sliver of memory out of them.

  I decided to relocate myself to London, to gain some distance and detachment, and then to relate my experiences as fiction. No one’s nose would be put out of joint that way. Besides, I never expected anybody to show the slightest interest in my efforts, for Hong Kong represented something of a literary Sahara in European circles. I would simply write for my own amusement.

  But I yielded to temptation. Just for the fun of it, I sent a story to a short story competition organised by the University of Hong Kong in conjunction with the British Council. To my surprise, I found myself winning the first prize. The following year, I sent another entry to a competition held by the South China Morning Post and Cathay Pacific Airways. I unexpectedly won the first prize again. When my entries got published in the local press, magazines started asking for more stories. The first request I received was from a magazine in Thailand. Then other requests followed. Short Story International in the United States liked them so much that it published more than 10 of them in successive issues. Even the BBC broadcast a number of them.

  After about 50 short stories had been published, a couple of publishers became foolhardy enough to suggest putting out collections. I was dubious because short stories were not a popular genre, but I went along. In the end, I think it was only the pure generosity of friends buying more copies than they required that saved those publishers from seeing red ink splashed over their corporate accounts.

  Then it became my turn to be foolhardy. I decided to try my hand at a novel with a Hong Kong setting. The Evergreen Tea House was published in 2003. Again, friends came to the rescue.

  By then, writing fiction had become an addiction and I was hooked. I wrote a few more stories for a new collection and then began another novel.

  However, I fell seriously ill in June of 2008. The doctors at the Royal Free Hospital in London told me I was suffering from cancer of the pancreas. They strongly recommended a surgical procedure known as a Whipple.

  I had little idea what the procedure entailed, except that it was quite invasive and risky at my age. The doctors indicated that, without the Whipple, I would probably last no more than six to nine months.

  I was not at all fussed about dying, for I was then approaching 80. I had led a full and eventful life and if I had to go, 80 appeared as respectable an age as any. Furthermore, I had a sneaking curiosity over what might be waiting on the other side of death. Lazarus was one of the few reputed to have returned from the dead but there was no Sunday tabloid in those days to offer him a fabulous fortune for his exclusive. So he kept his trap shut and left everybody wondering.

  When I die, would I be reincarnated into a lower life form after death because of my sins, as the Buddhists have held, or would my spirit simply be reabsorbed into the great Nothingness of the Taoists? One thing I was very confident of was that I would not be heading for the Christian heaven where, if it existed, my maternal grandparents might be waiting. Even though baptised, I would probably still be destined for the other place.

  But I was also dead keen to finish my second novel before passing on. I estimated it would take me at least another 18 months. An unfinished novel, unlike an unfinished symphony, was no good to man or beast. I had already devoted four years to it and I hated to leave loose ends.

  About 10 per cent of patients did not survive a Whipple, the doctors explained, because it was a major procedure. They performed about 60 a year. On the other hand, if successful, a patient might live on for a good many years.

  I have always been sceptical about statistics of every type, unless I had some notion of the methodology for their collection and how they were interpreted. If, for instance, the patients lost had all been men around the age of 80, that fact would suggest I should not submit myself to it. I asked for the age, sex and health profiles of all those who had undergone the operation but was told such information was not available.

  Prudence told me I needed another opinion. I consulted two friends, one a retired doctor and the other a retired surgeon. The doctor said he thought a man my age would probably have no better than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving a Whipple and advised me to put my affairs in order before getting on the operating table. The surgeon, on the other hand, told me to forget about statistics. It all boiled down to fate and a person’s will to live, he said.

  A gambling man by nature, I decided to risk the Whipple in July, since it represented the best chance I had for finishing my novel. It was not that I had any illusion I was engaged in some work filled with deathless prose. I had started the second novel to amuse myself and I wanted to get as much amusement as I could out of it.

  The procedure took more than five hours. Afterwards, I was in hospital for two months, most of the time weaker than a kitten and slipping in and out of a mental blur. I left hospital more than 30 pounds lighter and with a nine-inch scar across my abdomen. It took another two months or more before I could begin to move about unaided.

  Having survived, I was not about to waste any more time. I quickly set up a home in Kuala Lumpur early in 2009 in order to finish my novel. I had chosen Malaysia because I had neither friend nor relative there; hence I could count on not being distracted by birthday parties, wedding anniversaries, marriages of children or funerals. Its medical facilities were also reputed to be good and it was handy for Singapore, where two of my ailing sisters, Helen and Pauline, were residing.

  By the middle of 2010, I had completed my novel and my cancer had not returned. I had come out a winner on both scores. The Embrace of Harlots was published by Marshall Cavendish, an old established Singapore publisher, in January of the following year. I became thoroughly relaxed and contented after that.

  I settled down to savouring what some mystics have called one’s “daily dose of death”. Wistfully, I recalled lines from the Diamond Sutra:

  This earthy life may be liken to a dream,

  It may be liken to a bubble;

  It may be liken to the dew and lightning,

  For all sentient life must be so regarded.

  How very true, I thought. My own life of 82 years had indeed flown by like a dream. I reflected upon my childhood and my wanderings around the world and the great variety of people I had encountered along the way. Then it came to me how undeservedly blessed I had been. Not only had I lived to a considerable age with my faculties in reasonable nick, but I had at every stage happened upon wonderful souls, both from within my family and outside. Such a great number of them had been in a variety of ways kind, generous, loving, helpful, patient and illuminating. They had willingly eased some of my worries and brought me insights and understandings I would never otherwise have attained.

  Virtually all of them had since shed their mortal coils but in my heart and in my
mind, they remained as ever alive, animated, endearing and sharply delineated. They constantly invaded my thoughts and filled my idle hours with wonder and joy—my elders, wry and wistful; my teachers, harsh or long-suffering; my wives and lovers, each with her individual personality and brand of magic; my stout-hearted friends and supportive colleagues, mah-jong addicted or otherwise; and strangers in many lands, lavishing spontaneous kindnesses upon me.

  By simply walking around my home, I could catch glimpses of paintings on the walls some of them had done for me, books resting inside bookcases others had written and presented to me, and here and there, on ledges and side tables, a vase, a bowl, an antique wine vessel, a butterfly mounted inside a perspex box, all standing as tokens of affection and enduring friendship.

  One day, in the midst of my reminiscences, it struck me like a thunderbolt that when the time came for me to quit the earth, they would all have to vanish with me, for I was the sole keeper of the flame of their memories! With me gone, no one would ever know the splendour of their deeds, the kindness in their hearts or even their names.

  A nameless anguish swept over me. I desperately wanted for them to live on somehow. The fact that such decent human beings could have existed in our kind of topsy-turvy world was no mean achievement. They had been sterling examples of lives lived with dignity and purpose, even as they searched for their own individual meanings. They deserved to be known and recognised. I thereupon decided I had to write about them, no matter how inadequate I might be for the job.

  But to make such an attempt requires providing the appropriate settings and the relevant contexts, details of time, place and circumstances. That in turn implies descriptions of how each of our paths came to be crossed and how we had interacted with each other. A compromise had to be made. In spite of my strong inclinations towards personal privacy, I had to reveal something of myself if their stories were to be told.

  Of course, apart from dealing with admirable people, I had my share of rascals, frauds, egotists and racists as well. But there is little need to mention them. They might have angered or irritated me at particular moments but only juveniles would gain much satisfaction from settling scores with those who had already turned to dust. The only exceptions might be where the public interest or inaccurate historical accounts required rectifications.

  In the next two volumes, I shall set out some wonderful and some not so wonderful aspects of my 20 years as a senior colonial civil servant. In doing so, I will have to touch upon some matters which may be yet covered by the provisions of the British Official Secrets Act. Governments are secretive organisations and they always prefer to hide from their citizens how decisions are arrived at. It is frequently the case that those running governments do not relish their cock-ups to be exposed or for their citizens to realise with how little wisdom they are being governed.

  To be open and accountable is essential for any democratic society to flourish and endure. I have kept silent for 35 years over some of the mess I have been involved in. During that long lapse, most of the main players have passed from the scene. Anything I can say at this stage should be incapable of causing anyone much harm, except perhaps a dent or two to their historical reputations. Those events, nonetheless, should be on record for others to make impartial assessments on their roles.

  In the fourth volume, I shall relate some of my experiences in the Hong Kong private sector and some of the deviousness and unbridled greed that pervaded and still pervades it.

  I shall also record an epic struggle I had with the Communist bureaucracy in China for the right to marry a Chinese girl I had met there. The ramifications for gaining fulfillment to a quite ordinary and everyday desire took years to run their course. Success came only after the involvement of friends and supporters in the National People’s Congress and in the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party itself. It may perhaps show that even Communist Party members had not been without their touch of Chinese humanity.

  The events I am writing about, of course, all happened a long time ago, back in the era of fading Western colonialism. That era is now happily over. There are very few former colonial subjects now who can write at first hand about growing up and working under foreign rule. This work might therefore be of some small use to future social scientists investigating the broader features of that bygone era.

  Would new forms of globalised colonialism and exploitation take hold in the future? No one can be very sure. Present trends are not encouraging. Some changes steal upon us very subtly and we discover too late that vital parts of our lives have been lost, such as the loss of solitude, peace, quietness, the leisure to contemplate the beauty of mountains or the gnarled magnificence of a solitary cypress and the casual connectedness with neighbours, family members, friends and fellow human beings.

  Many decades ago, when the British writer Aldous Huxley noticed the bluebell woods, hedgerows, ponds and streams disappearing from the British countryside to make way for so-called modern progress, he remarked that half the subject matter of English poetry was being lost. This could happen almost unaware in all societies. Vigilance in guarding what a people hold most precious should never be lowered.

  If I live long enough, there might be a fifth volume on the literary life in Britain. But that is more in hope than in expectation.

  CHAPTER 2

  Historical Background

  THE GREAT EXHIBITION on the Works of Industry of All Nations opened with great fanfare on May 1, 1851, inside a massive structure called the Crystal Palace built within London’s Hyde Park. It was an impressive affair, displaying over 100,000 technological and other objects from around the world. But that stunning spectacle was really aimed at showing the world the sheer ingenuity and superiority of British achievements, for half the space was taken up by exhibits of British industrial machinery and design.

  The Exhibition, first announced in 1849, was the brainchild of Prince Albert, the Prince Consort. He had conceived it as the great end towards which human history was supposedly pointing—“the realisation of the unity of mankind.”

  The cream of Victorian society greeted the show with unfeigned enthusiasm. That was a time filled with a heady belief in the possibility of human progress, due to advances in science, technology and economic arrangements.

  Nonetheless, the Exhibition provoked some controversy. A few sour notes were sounded. Karl Marx, for instance, dismissed it as a mere emblem of capitalist fetishism. The followers of the ideas of Rousseau rejected the notion that progress and human happiness could be secured through civilisation corrupting the freedom and dignity of the noble savage.

  Newspapers of the era were overwhelmingly supportive, however, with editorials brimming with optimism and uplifting sentiments. The Times asserted the Exhibition foreshadowed universal peace. Presumably the writer had in mind some sort of Pax Britannica imposed through British military might. Such hyperboles, unfortunately, bore little resemblance to the realities in the semi-colonised and yet-to-be-colonised parts of the world.

  People like my forebears living in China were unlikely to have heard of Prince Albert’s ideas or the trumpeting newspaper editorials. If they had, they would have had difficulty figuring out how the “unity of mankind” and “universal peace” could possibly apply to them. They were in an impoverished agricultural environment, where the capriciousness of nature repeatedly brought hunger, injury, homelessness, epidemics and other dislocations to life. Widespread corruption, bureaucratic bullying, drug addiction, rebellion, seizure of property and forceful conscriptions by warlords and bandits, as well as the random forfeiture of life, were everyday occurrences.

  Oral family history indicated that my more recent ancestors had been spared much of that iliad of woes. They had not been persecuted for their religious beliefs, like the Huguenots, or starved, like the Irish during the Potato Famine. They had enjoyed for the most part the security and comfort of a middle class life. So why had so many of them chosen to leave China to chance their arm in forei
gn-administered places like Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere?

  During my mature years, I had tried to nail down their motives. I met with little success, for I had started my quest too late, after most of the main players had passed from the scene. Much of the comments and observations I now offer are based more on inferences, deductions and speculations rather than hard, provable facts.

  A potted account of the social, political and economic history of China during the nineteenth century may nevertheless provide a useful backdrop. A note of caution ought to be sounded, however. Historical accounts, no matter how well-meaning, are inevitably biased, if only in the way certain facts are chosen or omitted. My efforts are no exception. I have selected materials which, in my opinion, had been relevant to the lives of my forebears or which might have affected their decisions. My presentation must therefore necessarily be of a boutique version of history, perhaps not to everybody’s taste. My interpretations are also strictly my own.

  I shall begin arbitrarily, around 1839, the year China stumbled into the first of the so-called opium wars with Britain.

  Even before the start of the First Opium War, the Manchu Ching Dynasty was already in decline, having been in power for almost 200 years. Its once-fierce Manchu Bannermen were no longer in fighting condition, their military ardour having been leached away through widespread drug-taking, indifferent leadership and poor living conditions. Pay for the ordinary soldier, for instance, had not been re-adjusted for more than a century! Some had taken to becoming part-time robbers, which merely served to alienate the citizenry further. Manchu rulers had grown increasingly effete and out of touch. Though they had adopted many Chinese habits and attitudes, large segments of popular sentiments still regarded them as “foreigners”.