Perhaps I underestimated him. “I could use a pilot with guts as well as some ability. Especially as it appears I will be forced to accept you into the family.” He reached into his jacket pocket and handed Baptiste a heavy gold coin. It was embossed with a Napoleonic eagle and a Corsican crest. “This is your passport to the Union Corse. It may be perverse of me, but I believe you have earned it. Come to dinner tonight. Nine o'clock.” He got up to leave. “By the way, I assume you plan to have children?'
“Of course.”
“A word of advice, then. Don't have daughters.”
Chapter 22
Hong Kong
H O KUAN-LI realised that freedom would not be as easy as he had imagined. When he had first been brought to the hospital he had been confused by the language: in his own province of Swatow everyone spoke a chiu chao dialect of Mandarin, but here in the hospital the nurses and his fellow patients spoke Cantonese or English.
He lay there in a crowded ward of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, listening to the babble of voices around him, and did not understand what had happened to him. He and stared at the tent of sheets over the lower half of his body and whispered his supplications to Kuan Yi, Goddess of Mercy.
Finally, one of the Chinese doctors told him, in halting Mandarin, that the shark had taken a piece of muscle the size of a baby's fist from his thigh. He would keep the leg, but he would be left with a permanent limp. In other words, he would be a virtual cripple for the rest of his life.
We'll see about that, Ho had thought.
While his leg healed, he watched the slow ceiling fans and battled the pain and the isolation and planned his return to a world that remained just out of view beyond the hospital walls.
***
But he never realized just how difficult that return would be until the day he limped from the hospital on Nathan Road and surveyed his new world.
Kowloon was a marriage of colour and noise, of slender, expensive women in sheath tight red and gold cheongsams , bowed amahs in black pongee tops and trousers, businessmen in western suits. He could smell garlic, barbecued pork, raw fish, kerosene, sweat and sewage, all in one breath. The streets were crammed with scaffolding and people and traffic, a blur of commerce and construction and hurry. On Hong Kong island, the pinnacles of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and the Bank of China stood guard over the harbour like sentinels.
He wandered along Nathan Road, gaping like a country boy. It was a teeming, noisy sprawl of tenements and skyscrapers. There were still a few ancient stucco and wood shop houses with awnings of oiled rice paper, the balconies crammed with potted plants and caged birds. But they were quickly disappearing. They were being extracted one by one, like rotten teeth, the ugly brown gaps quickly replaced with concrete towers that seemed to sway dizzyingly overhead.
People jostled him in the street, did not spare him a second glance. He felt like a cork bobbing on the ocean.
A sixteen year old boy could get swept away in this place, he decided, gobbled up in some tenement or factory. But Ho Kuan-Li knew he would be saved because he had a direction and a purpose. In Swatow, when he had first begun to plan his night swim over the border, his mother had told him where to go. She told him about her brother-in-law, Ho Chan-Fu, who lived in a place called the Walled City.
“But if Hong Kong is such a big place, how will I find one man?' he had asked her.
“You'll find him,” was all she had said.
***
The Chinese called it Hak Nam: Darkness .
The Walled City of Kowloon was an ugly, tenement fortress off Tung Tau Tsuen Road, on the north side of Kai Tak airport. To get there Ho followed a street of glass-fronted shops, which were the surgeries of unqualified dentists that plied their trade along the street. They announced their business with the gold and silver teeth they kept in bottles in
“Of course.”
“A word of advice, then. Don't have daughters.”
Chapter 22
Hong Kong
H O KUAN-LI realised that freedom would not be as easy as he had imagined. When he had first been brought to the hospital he had been confused by the language: in his own province of Swatow everyone spoke a chiu chao dialect of Mandarin, but here in the hospital the nurses and his fellow patients spoke Cantonese or English.
He lay there in a crowded ward of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, listening to the babble of voices around him, and did not understand what had happened to him. He and stared at the tent of sheets over the lower half of his body and whispered his supplications to Kuan Yi, Goddess of Mercy.
Finally, one of the Chinese doctors told him, in halting Mandarin, that the shark had taken a piece of muscle the size of a baby's fist from his thigh. He would keep the leg, but he would be left with a permanent limp. In other words, he would be a virtual cripple for the rest of his life.
We'll see about that, Ho had thought.
While his leg healed, he watched the slow ceiling fans and battled the pain and the isolation and planned his return to a world that remained just out of view beyond the hospital walls.
***
But he never realized just how difficult that return would be until the day he limped from the hospital on Nathan Road and surveyed his new world.
Kowloon was a marriage of colour and noise, of slender, expensive women in sheath tight red and gold cheongsams , bowed amahs in black pongee tops and trousers, businessmen in western suits. He could smell garlic, barbecued pork, raw fish, kerosene, sweat and sewage, all in one breath. The streets were crammed with scaffolding and people and traffic, a blur of commerce and construction and hurry. On Hong Kong island, the pinnacles of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and the Bank of China stood guard over the harbour like sentinels.
He wandered along Nathan Road, gaping like a country boy. It was a teeming, noisy sprawl of tenements and skyscrapers. There were still a few ancient stucco and wood shop houses with awnings of oiled rice paper, the balconies crammed with potted plants and caged birds. But they were quickly disappearing. They were being extracted one by one, like rotten teeth, the ugly brown gaps quickly replaced with concrete towers that seemed to sway dizzyingly overhead.
People jostled him in the street, did not spare him a second glance. He felt like a cork bobbing on the ocean.
A sixteen year old boy could get swept away in this place, he decided, gobbled up in some tenement or factory. But Ho Kuan-Li knew he would be saved because he had a direction and a purpose. In Swatow, when he had first begun to plan his night swim over the border, his mother had told him where to go. She told him about her brother-in-law, Ho Chan-Fu, who lived in a place called the Walled City.
“But if Hong Kong is such a big place, how will I find one man?' he had asked her.
“You'll find him,” was all she had said.
***
The Chinese called it Hak Nam: Darkness .
The Walled City of Kowloon was an ugly, tenement fortress off Tung Tau Tsuen Road, on the north side of Kai Tak airport. To get there Ho followed a street of glass-fronted shops, which were the surgeries of unqualified dentists that plied their trade along the street. They announced their business with the gold and silver teeth they kept in bottles in
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