A galleon. Same size, at least as tall. Like The Golden Hind. It was a floating world. In the typhoon shelter there must be several hundred.
That was the only event of note for the rest of the hour. I subsided muttering as my panic dwindled to boredom. Johny hadn’t seemed concerned in the least, the nerk. To the boat lady it had seemed a mere incidental. But it cured me of thinking uninformed thoughts about these junks. They were oceangoing craft designed for the China Sea when the Western world was unbelievably primitive. I’d now think twice before taking anything in Hong Kong for granted.
Which made me stay alert. The harbor between the long flexuous island’s mountain spine and the spreading green fawns of the mainland was still beautiful, but I began to examine it. And I mean watch. And at least one pattern emerged.
Why did sampans creep out so regularly to only one of the large low-hulled lighters moored near that small island which, not much more than an outcrop, I’d formerly noticed during my starvation period? And why did people climb aboard the lighter and nobody ever disembark? Did local passengers travel on cargo lighters? Never heard of it before. And when a police launch shushed into the typhoon shelter for a quick sprint round, the sampan shuttle trade halted. When the police left, the ferrying resumed. I was becoming interested in this too when Johny’s watch bleeped us back ashore.
On the move, Johny unplugged his trannie and immediately started talking. We got our taxi and tore around the colony sightseeing while he prattled. The tour was logically planned. Only Johny’s babble was disordered.
“Next, Hong Kong’s stock exchange,” he said, doing a reggae in Ice House Street near the police station and heeling ahead into the boring building. “Get the image, man?
Money in and out, dig?” I looked at the mob. Frantic console screens, men hurtling with the glazed eyes of the money-mad.
“Great, Johny.” Bleep bleep. Polka to the taxi and hurtle to where a cargo ship was loading. “Ship to Kyoto, Keelung, dig?”
Files of skeletal men hunched under sacks and boxes trotting up gangways into the ship’s belly while forklifters whined about the godowns.
I looked. “Great, Johny.”
Bleep, shimmy, and zoom to a bank’s marble halls, gilded pillars, the usual berserk customers. “Dollar delight, yoh dig, Lovejoy?”
“Great, Johny.”
Bleep, and hurry to a gold merchant’s with auto-seal doors and a Sikh riding shotgun in the vestibule, tellers weighing and dispensing.
“Great, Johny.”
And a long drive to inspect the Sum Chun River by China’s paddy fields. I was surprised to see so many ducks. The high vantage point overlooked a coastal plain backed by Kwantung’s distant mountains. People worked stooping. A couple of bored water buffalo strolled up and down, a real yawn. You’ve seen the pictures.
“China, Lovejoy. Dig?”
“Great, Johny.” To me, countryside’s countryside and naught else.
We also did a whirlwind zip around selected habitations, every one different. Johny was oblivious, hardly looking at where we’d arrived. His trannie was in action.
“Diamond cutting factory.” And he’d thumb at stacked sheds by Aberdeen’s jammed harbor. “Cameras, import” was a godown alongside Kowloon’s docks. “Antiques an’ all that crap, dig?” was an endless succession of tiny one-room factories in the New Territories—ivory carvings, potteries, furniture, places turning out gilded temple carvings so near to the genuine antique they made me uneasy. “More same” was the retail area along Hollywood Road, while “Same old stuff” summarized fake antique bronzes, coins, calligraphy scrolls, jade carvings, carpets. I reeled, nodded obediently, was suitably impressed. All touristy reproductions, of course, though many were superbly if unimaginatively done. He did not even mention the clothes and material in Wing On Street’s “cloth alley,” just bebopped through, letting me trail behind admiring luscious Thai silk colors and Chinese silks. I saw more phony Gucci and other famous Italian labels along Wong Nei Chung Road than I’d seen all my life, but it’s pleasant to know that modern fashion, like all else, also bends the knee to fakery.
Johny being Johny, he had his joke in the central market—four stories of ghoulish creatures—chickens, fishes, crabs—awaiting execution. He prompted a fishmonger to slash a live fish open and reveal its throbbing heart squirting blood. Everybody roared laughing when I squealed and shot like hell out of that wet and ghastly place.
On the way into Kowloon Johny was especially noisy, telling me how he’d won the Indianapolis dragster championship on a souped-up Jaguar super-special XL 8000, been short-listed for the next NASA space shuttle… “Great, Johny,” I said, my feet dangerously close to joining in his trannie beat.
Trying to deflect him from inanities about Boston, Philly, New Orleans, I asked him where he lived. Mistake. We took a detour round Kowloon Tong to admire a tall apartment block built with all the imagination of a cereal packet. He pointed out a balcony. It was all I could do to avoid getting dragged up to see it. “Over fo’ dozen wall posters, Lovejoy!”
“America’s got that many counties?” I guessed.
“You got it!” He was over the moon. “But states, man! ’Nited States, see?”
We did more locations, including an enormous cinema complex, a football ground, a busy shopping mall, and a sports pavilion filled with Chinese exercising like mad.
“Great, Johny.” became my stock phrase. Okay, I’d got the message: Hong Kong was a ball of fire in production, commerce, business. I was dulled into stupor. It was that and my weariness that made me increasingly edgy.
What with Johny’s endless bopping, prattling about America, I was shell-shocked. Every so often we stopped for a drink from a street vendor. I noticed Johny never paid, simply said a few words, lifted three or four Cokes, and on we went. We saw a shop covered in red flowers while firecrackers exploded and a flutey band did its stuff. We saw a gem merchant in Des Voeux Road sorting stones, aquamarines to diamonds, while a trio of Cantonese girls watched and learned. At each stop Johny Chen stood as still as he was able and pointed. I dutifully stared at whatever he was indicating—a cluster of street bars, a cinema advertising six hectic Westerns a day, a sky-scraper building; sometimes a mere street hawker on a pedal bike beside a barrow piled with shirts; one sampan among hundreds, or an oceangoing freighter feverishly unloading at a Kowloon wharf. It was crazy and exhausting. I was beginning to think there was nothing I hadn’t seen when I finally wilted and begged for a rest.
“No rest, buddy. Jade market. Diggaroo?”
“Eh?” We were in a crowded narrow street. We’d seen scores like it. A line of street hawkers, trams doing their robot turns in the crowded distance. I could see no market.
“Diggaroo what exactly?”
He pointed with an elbow. “Oooooeee, baby,” he crooned, eyes closed. I looked at the two people he’d indicated. The man and woman were only a couple of yards off and stood facing each other in rapt concentration. Both wore traditional long Chinese robes, of the sort I’d seen in the street opera on that terrible day. The sleeves were whitish, trailing absurdly owing to their enormous length and size. I could have climbed into any of the cuffs. But for the first time I felt a twinge of excitement and drew closer. Beside the man’s feet was a lumpy cloth-covered heap. And that still heap was pealing magic signals out into the ether. I swallowed. The woman put out her hand, the man his.
They gripped hands as if in wordless greeting, then flicked their respective sleeves to cover their grip, and stood motionless. I glanced at Johny for explanation but he was oblivious. When I looked back, the pair’s concealed hands were wriggling gently. I was fascinated. Like watching mice in a stealthy tryst under a sheet. Then I noticed other Chinese, similarly garbed but with sleeves atrail, standing motionless nearby, beside small covered piles of stuff on the pavement, and it dawned. The pair shaking hands were dealing. By touch. A kind of stealthy communication in open daylight. And under the cloths were pieces of jade. I felt exhilarated, so near to throbbingly vitally genuine ancient jade, when Johny touched my arm and jived off. I followed, narked. The one enthralling event I wanted to watch, the jade dealers, was irrelevant to my dancing minder. I caught him in a few strides and yanked him to a standstill.