1967-1980. Kowloon - A Flawed Paradise

1. Early Days

I tried to find the family home a few years ago, when I was still a trolley dolly. I had a long stopover during a cabin crew assessment trip and took the Island line from Hong Kong International Airport to Kowloon, with the intention of spending an hour driving round in a cab, to see how much I might remember. God knows why - bloody stupid idea as it turned out.

The young cab driver couldn't find it.

We passed waypoints from my early childhood and each time the view from the taxi overlaid some hazy vision from my early childhood, a little ghostly shiver of recognition would supplement the chill of the air-conditioning: the school in Jordan Road, tricky junctions to cycle across, the row of shops where I would fritter my pocket money on twists of sweets. There were the same playing fields and surprising clumps of woodland, and the neat rows of houses and gardens that I remembered peddling past each day. But of the spacious colonial-style villa in which I spent my childhood, there was no trace. We explored every little twist and alley West of Nathan Road but nothing rang a bell. The cabbie was getting fractious, perhaps wondering if the stupid cow in the back was some timewaster and he kept reminding me how much the fare was mounting up.

Back at the MTR station, I waited for my return train with a sense that I had been cheated once again. Part of my life had been erased permanently, buried under the foundations of some high-rise development.

All I had left of those years was a file of my Father's papers and some extremely unreliable and sketchy memories. Plus an indelible clutch of very strong ones, which I preferred not to recall.

Until now. Twenty-five years after I left that house for good, I want to confront the demons and get on with the rest of my life.

This is proving to be the most difficult thing I've ever tried to write.

Even now, having finally taken the agonising decision to click the button and publish this drivel, I'm very unsure. Beneath the thinly-veiled persona that I maintain online to hide my true identity, I remain a desperately private and I admit, still fragile and insecure, person. Marshalling memories suppressed for a quarter of a century and presenting them in words was supposed to be my very own shock therapy.

The shock part is working. I wish I could be sure this is the right thing to do.

Oh dear - this is sounding like the self-indulgent crap I had feared it would be. But I've started, and if it bores people to death and they don't read on, well does it matter?

This is about me, after all. Me, facing up to my past life and saying goodbye and good bloody riddance.

Where was I? Oh yes - Kowloon. Part of Hong Kong. Late 1967, and still a stalwart outpost of Empire despite the sporadic riots that were unsettling the ruling classes. A straight-laced and successful expatriate businessman in his late thirties makes his Chinese PA pregnant. She is a local girl, bright, pretty but not worldly-wise and not much over half his age, and a hasty civil wedding is arranged, respective families disapproving and not invited to participate. No-one is pleased by the arrangement and forgiveness is never offered or accepted by any party.

However, the British financier keeps his job and most of his reputation and his new wife reconciles herself to estrangement from her family and she easily assumes the role of lady of leisure, destined for a shallow life of worthy ladies' circles, business receptions and chain-smoking afternoons lounging in drawing rooms, clattering the mah-jong pieces. The mismatched couple move into a modest yet expensive villa in its own grounds just off Kadoorie Avenue and the following summer their unwanted ugly duckling is born. These days, some people might know her as Penny, although to be pedantic, that's not the name written on her birth certificate.

I can�t summon that last little bit of courage to reveal the whole truth and I must concede that almost all the names in this autobiography here have been changed, mine included. Partly to avoid embarrassing those unfortunate enough to have crossed paths with me. But mainly just in case a skeleton strays from its cupboard.

Anyway, the girl had a content, if perhaps solitary childhood. She attended the local Junior School, where with the innocence of childhood it was barely noticed that she wasn't the same as most of her Chinese classmates, yet neither was she a true guilo (Hong Kong Cantonese for a round eye, or Westerner). It was a good school, lessons in English, values from a fading Empire (British, not Chinese). Neither parent seemed to want to get close to her, perhaps for she was the reason for their enforced marriage. And so she spent much of her time at home in the company of the Lam family.

In the arcane time warp that was HK, it was commonplace for a home like ours to host two families - the Master's in the main quarters and the servants tucked away at the back. In the annex to the villa lived the Lams - Audrey was our amah (part nanny, part cook, part housekeeper), her husband, Jin, was caretaker, gardener, handyman and sometimes referred to by older colonial visitors as the houseboy, although he was well into his forties and looked even older. Their two teenage sons were the nearest I had to older brothers.

I have only the vaguest memories of my early childhood: a few out of focus yet happy images in which the sun was always shining and there is an indistinct soundtrack of laughter to accompany the fireworks and ponies and dancing of butterflies over the back lawn.

It is when I get past the fragmented recollections of birthday cake candles, my first bicycle, and playing netball in a cramped playground, that it gets more difficult. That would put me at about eight-years-old.

I curse my lousy memory. A few occasions remain starkly vivid -I can almost feel them, cold and clammy against my skin. But for the most part, I�ve had to write this part by stringing together odd feelings and flashbacks, with only a few factual cues to supply context and sequence.

You read about false memory syndrome, when people become convinced they remember something that never took place. Well I wish. The starkest episodes I'm dredging up from the back of my mind, where they were safely buried for so long, are certainly real enough to me.

My Father was dreadfully old-fashioned in so many ways. I can hardly recall him in anything other than a sharp suit or perhaps 'planters' in the summer, with his sober tie tightly knotted and sleeves rolled down despite the heat and humidity. I always called him 'Sir', and I rarely dared enter a room with him there, unless I had been invited. And his fiery temper hinted at his Scottish ancestry, as I found to my cost the first time he slapped my legs. I'm sure he wasn't consciously cruel, merely traditional in his thinking, and I�m positive that neither was I particularly naughty, but throughout my later years in the villa, when I was at in the later years at Junior School, it seemed as if I was regularly summoned to his study for a sound spanking across his knee.

For reasons unclear to me, he became yet more intolerant as I grew older. The slightest infraction of his strict code infuriated him and by the time I approaching my graduation to secondary school, he was using his belt on me two or three times a month.

Even at that early age, I could see him becoming more and more uptight. He would work longer hours and be impossibly moody when he did come home. It was wisest to avoid him much of the time. My Mother usually did.

She made no comment, at least in my hearing, but then again she always seemed to be a stranger in the house. She had her own vacuous life and I frequently had the impression that for her I was merely an irritating distraction. She wasn�t especially offhand, but nor was she ever memorably affectionate and I often rarely saw her during the day.

Mother would drift into my life for a while when Audrey Lam was serving my supper, finding time perhaps to talk about my day at school and to amaze me with her elegant looks and beautiful clothes. Floral prints, fancy hats, white gloves. She had always embraced Western things and insisted on using her chosen name, Beatrice. She existed in the shallow afternoon world of the pampered Hong Kong housewife.

When I wasn't at school, I always tried to find new ways to insinuate myself into that world, hanging around as she got ready to go out, happy to listen to her inane chatter about things that meant nothing to me, if it meant I could be with her. I so wanted to be a part of my Mother�s world.

Don't think I wasn't happy. I never wanted for anything. We had some marvellous holidays, when my parents relaxed and we gelled as a family. They made an impressive team when they were minded - I would peep in at their parties and long to be old enough to join in the fun - all those big, confident grown-ups, beautifully dressed and coiffured, braying loudly into the night as their host and hostess played the room so effortlessly.

Most of the time though, Audrey Lam was my surrogate mother, always patiently indulging my presence in the kitchen, provided of course, I made myself useful.

I never questioned the absence of other, real, relatives in my life. A serious omission, as it turned out, when I had great need of them.

Family was a subject not to be raised at any cost - an unspoken taboo. I just accepted that for some reason, to which I need not be privy, that I had no Gran, or uncle or cousins. And what you don�t have, you don�t miss. As far as I can work out, putting together the few tiny hints and clues I�ve filed away over the years, my Father had had no contact or communication with his own parents or family since he announced his intention to marry my Mother. What actually comprised his family, or where they lived, I have not the faintest idea. I suppose they must have known of my existence, for I was the cause of all the trouble in the first place, but I don�t believe anyone has ever tried to track me down for an emotional family reunion. Which is fine by me: I�ve never tried to find them either. If I have living relatives somewhere, there is little chance we�ll ever meet.

On my Mother�s side, I know just a little more, courtesy of Audrey�s indiscreet tongue. Mother was an only child, and before she met my Father, lived with her parents, commuting daily through the madness of Hong Kong�s teeming streets to the merchant bank where she worked in my Father�s outer office. The scandal of her falling pregnant with me caused them to disown her, and although she did stay in touch with them, they never came to our house. As for more distant relatives, I think both my parents found it easier to deny their existence entirely rather than perpetuate old animosities, so I�ve always assumed, whether strictly accurately or not, that I have none.

It was mutually convenient for the family to consist of just the three of us. I used to worry greatly about the dreadful prospect of having a younger brother or sister, which would have meant I would have competition for my parents� attention, such as it was. I had no idea that for their own reasons, they would have hated that idea even more than me.

But it was my innocent desire to emulate my distant, yet utterly fascinating parents that prompted a sea change in my Father's disciplinary regime. Even now, it does seems so unfair, really.

It would have been a few months after my ninth birthday, as my parents had thrown a party to celebrate Mid-Autumn. I used to like that time - there were always little cakes with secret messages inside. That's it: mooncakes. Each year I hoped I would like the taste and texture and each year I was again disappointed! Nancy Lu�s parents brought some one year and they had something quite disgusting inside them; but Audrey�s cakes had rice-paper messages and I would collect them up and ask Mother to explain them (as they were meaningless hieroglyphics to me). She would always faithfully read out me some profound or mystic saying and then I would take them to my Father, who always made up extremely silly versions like �My dragon has a puncture� or �You will meet a tall, dark elephant� and I would giggle and scurry off to find some more. I was actually allowed to stay up late to see the lanterns and the big moon.

On that occasion, or more specifically the next morning, my Mother and Father slept in late and I got up first and wandered down to the drawing room, where Audrey had yet to clear away the debris of the evening's festivities. I suspect my parents� parties involved more booze than food, compared to more traditional Chinese celebrations. There were several half-finished glasses scattered about and I innocently picked one up and swirled in my nightie around the room with it in my hand, pretending to be my Mother, joking and gossiping with my elegant guests. I retrieved from an ashtray a part-smoked cigarette, unlit of course, waving it about whilst I slugged the flat, tepid wine. I'm sure I didn't particularly like it, but I was having such fun. Hosting my very own party with my own imaginary guests. So I emptied another glass. And another.

Until I looked up to see my Father watching me.

My goodness, he was apoplectic. He looked unusually unkempt and thick-headed and I rather think that it had been a serious mistake for me to have turned on the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, for the loud music had woken him from his alcohol-fugged lie-in.

The drink had been swift to take effect on me. I just swayed and giggled stupidly as his face darkened.

I can recall quite clearly the familiar sweet smell of his leather chair as I bent over it, minus my nightie, clutching the studded back to stop the room spinning, and getting increasingly nervous as I waited and waited for him to come back into his study. He'd been searching for something special. In the garden.

How that bamboo cane stung! A traditional six strokes on to my little bare arse. Followed by a second six when I was too slow to say I was sorry. By the last, I was shaking all over and my eyes stung from the tears. As the initial shock of the caning sunk passed, I was left with the agonising, burning throb and a rising nausea. Disgusted with me, Father stormed off and back to his bedroom.

But above all else that morning I can vividly remember Jin Lam, passing by the open window of the study as I knelt there, naked and shivering and sobbing in a puddle of my own reeking vomit, �reflecting� how bad I had been, exactly as my livid Father had instructed me.

Jin stopped and just stood there, watching me, and there was a cold, knowing smile playing across his lips as he looked me up and down. It spooks me to this day.

I've no idea how many times such harsh punishments were repeated: having proved effective, the cane was taken into regular use. Quite a few I think, for later my Father later deemed it a good idea for me to parade my shame, and after a caning or thrashing with his belt, he would frequently forbid me to dress for an hour or two, so that my throbbing red bottom would signal to the world (or at least anyone in the house) that I had received my just rewards for my dreadful behaviour. And no matter how much I would lie awake at night, frantically planning the events of the next day or week to avoid risking his wrath, he would always find something at fault and summon me to his study.

It was as if punishing me released some of the pent-up anger and frustration he brought home from the bank.

He must have been very stressed there.

Next Chapter: 2. Bad Girl