“You know why. We’re yellow, Asiatic. The white man can’t relate to us. In the back of his mind we’re basically slave material anyway. Less than a hundred years ago we were selling each other into slavery in the West Indies and Brazil. They don’t care because we don’t care. Have a drink.”
Chan went to the kitchen to fetch glasses. He opened the whiskey and poured two generous slugs. The old man hardly looked at the glass before knocking back half the contents. He breathed out appreciatively.
“You have your uses.” He expelled some of his rage with a sigh. “You’re partly right, the race thing. It’s also the sheer mass: one point four billion! How do you even begin to communicate? I tell myself you’ve got to start somewhere. Hong Kong seemed a good place. But here everyone has other concerns. How to make money or how to escape. Or both. And then I have a credibility problem. I’m too old, too weird and not even Cantonese. I guess I come across as a pompous old fart.” The old man finished the whiskey in one long swallow, smacked his lips and held the glass out for more. “I’m out of sync with the times. Ezra Pound said that. Look, while we’re still sober, would you listen to my presentation? I recorded it. That’s what salesmen do these days, so I’m told.” He fetched a tape recorder from one of the shelves, placed it beside him on the sofa and switched it on. His voice emerged from the machine in a slow, steady and, to Chan, haunting rhythm.
“Slavery is like malaria,” the voice said. “Forty years ago it seemed as if it had been eradicated worldwide except for a few small, isolated pockets. But nothing mutates like evil. The twentieth century will be remembered for many awful things, but who’s predicting that it will be the century when numerically more human beings were enslaved than at any time in history? No one except me.”
Bad start, Chan thought. A shocking and difficult idea delivered pitilessly. On the tape a woman said irritably: “You haven’t told us why you were imprisoned in the first place.”
“Good question. When I was nineteen, my father had saved up enough to send me to study humanities at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States of America. It was 1947. I specialized in English and American literature. After graduation I went back to be part of the great adventure of socialism, the finest challenge and the greatest revolution in the history of mankind.”
There was a long silence while the tape wound on; then the old man finally resumed. “I had about a month teaching English at the University of Beijing before my first purge. See, no true Communist could believe that anyone would be dumb enough to leave the United States to return to China. I had to be a capitalist spy. From then on I was branded socially.”
Chan got up to pause the tape. “Bad mistake.”
The old man rolled his eyes. “I know.”
“Never tell Chinese you’re branded socially. They’ll brand you socially.”
“I know.”
“For God’s sake, it was you who told me that stuff about cultures of shame, cultures of guilt.”
The old man groaned. “You’re a ruthless coach.”
“The Chinese have a culture of shame par excellence. To be branded socially is the ultimate sanction, a kind of death penalty. That’s how we’ve been manipulated by a ruling class for five thousand years.”
The old man switched off the tape recorder. “You’re right, definitely lost them there. Tons too heavy.” He picked up the glass that Chan had replenished. “What the hell. Am I wrong or are they? I worry about human destiny, the obscenity of slavery in the late twentieth century. They think about what kind of washing machine they’ll have in New Zealand, how life will be without a Filipina servant. My soul may be black, but at least I have a soul.”
“You should be more forgiving,” Chan said. “You had forty years to meditate on the human condition. They’re lucky if they get five minutes on the underground on the way home.”
The old man finished the whiskey again and smirked. “Don’t insult my virility. Forty years thinking about the human condition, are you crazy? I spent forty years thinking about women. Why d’you think I live in the red-light district?”
Chan watched the old man laugh. He was free, this old man; behind his outrage he walked with his god. Was that the way to go? In an inverted world, stand on your head and let the gods decide who was right? Did Chan want to end up like that?
At the door the old man held his elbow for a moment.
“Answer me one question. Thirty miles north over the border they’re starving girl orphans to death in state-run orphanages. Why don’t we care?”
When Chan searched his face, the old man held up his hand. “I’m not being self-righteous here; it’s a simple question. The peasants dump little girls down wells; the state exterminates them. You know about it, I know about it, America and Europe know about it, it was on CNN-why don’t we care?”
Chan was still pondering this question the next day when the commissioner of police himself telephoned to invite him to a meeting the following morning.
27
When Chan was shown into Cuthbert’s suite at Queensway Plaza, Commissioner Tsui was already there with Caxton Smith, the commissioner for security, and Roland Brown, the commissioner for the Independent Commission Against Corruption. Chan sat at the extreme end of the long table that was the main feature of the anteroom annexed to Cuthbert’s office; only the political adviser and his positively vetted English secretary were allowed to enter the office itself. Cuthbert sat at the head of the table with Roland Brown on his left, Tsui and Caxton Smith on his right.
Over the years Chan had learned some of the semaphore that the English use in place of speech. Within seconds he had absorbed signals to the effect that the meeting was informal, that he was no longer in trouble, that indeed the three men staring at him were according him a measure of respect usually reserved for their own ranks; in other words, they wanted his help. Now it was time for someone to say something. Cuthbert coughed.
“I’ve asked the commissioner for ICAC to be here simply to underline what we all already know. Roland?”
It was Roland Brown’s turn to cough. Chan watched the Englishman work himself up to the infinitely painful act of communication. Brown searched in his pockets for something that never emerged, coughed again. As the head of ICAC he had powers in the colony greater than those accorded to the head of the FBI in America, but his shyness was known to be crippling. Finally he wriggled and spoke. Chan caught the words “radiation,” “death of three good men,” “uranium,” “panic reaction,” “apology in order” before the Englishman’s whisper merged with the rattle of a tea trolley outside the office.
An English mandarin apologize? Chan was almost disappointed, as if he had watched a famous Pacific island, a landmark to shipping, subside slowly into the ocean and, with a yawn, disappear forever.
“Well, there we are then.” Cuthbert beamed.
Roland Brown stood up, nodded once to Chan and left without a word. It seemed from the looks on the faces of the two remaining Englishmen and Tsui that Chan had not merely been rehabilitated but elevated to a position of intimate friendship with these three powerful men. Chan saw an opportunity to take one small advantage.
“Mind if I smoke?”
In unison the three men signaled that they were very happy for Chan to smoke. He tapped a Benson out of the box, lit up and inhaled gratefully.
Cuthbert shuffled with a piece of blank paper in front of him. “In view of the fact that I don’t… I mean… you’re not… how shall I say?… not on my staff, perhaps the commissioner of police would explain a little of what we have in mind.”
Clearly Cuthbert had not prepared Tsui for this moment, for Tsui threw him a quick glare. He drew a cough sweet out of a tin box that was on the table in front of him, began to suck. He thought carefully, it seemed, before speaking.