A Time of Ghosts. Hok-Pang Tang
boots and pants, they had refused me the one object that really made a cowboy a cowboy – a gun.
I was becoming rather excited. “Where is it?” I asked, looking about and seeing nothing.
“Oh, it isn’t far away. Just come with us and we will get it for you.”
That aroused my suspicion again. “Why didn’t you just deliver it to my house?”
“Oh, no time, no time!” they replied, smiling. “We are in a hurry to catch our train back to Hong Kong, and we did not want to leave without giving you your gift, so we stopped here on our way – but we need to hurry.”
Two forces struggled within me. On the one hand their story seemed rather peculiar and did not make a lot of sense. On the other I really wanted a gun, and how could they have known that if they were not friends of my father? As I stood hesitating, they moved in on both sides of me and took my arms. “We really must hurry now!” they said.
Well, they had me. But I really wanted that gun! So I allowed myself to be hustled out of the schoolyard.
When we got about a block from the school, the one who seemed the servant threw a blanket over my head and pulled it tight. I felt myself being picked up and carried. The cloth was pressing against my nose and mouth, and I could barely breathe. Not long after, I was put down, and felt the long, easy glide and bump of a rickshaw beneath me. As I struggled for breath, it seemed that the suffocation and darkness went on forever.
Finally the blanket was pulled off and I could breath again. I found we were near a barn in the center of a grassy field. At that point I was really befuddled, but children never really know what adults are about anyway, so I still half-believed that these men had something for me. They told me it was in the barn, and took me inside. Then we went down through a trap door into a kind of basement with small, high windows. The light was dim.
I soon realized that I was in a difficult situation. There was no gun. If there was no gun, then these men were most likely not friends of my father, and that meant serious trouble.
They told me to stay in the basement, and went up through the trap door, closing and fastening it tightly behind them. Not knowing what to do, I waited there in the dim shadows for a long, long time. The two did not return. I could hear no sound indicating their presence on the floor above.
Looking about, I found a small digging tool and threw it at a high window as hard as I could. There was the sound of breaking glass, but no human noises inside or out. I took a long, bamboo pole – probably the handle of some farming implement – and leaned it against the wall below the broken window. Then, grasping it tightly with my hands and knees, I climbed up toward the failing light. The pole was just long enough, and when I reached the narrow window ledge I pulled out the remaining teeth of broken glass from the frame and squeezed out through it to freedom.
The evening sun had gone down. I walked across the wide fields through gathering darkness. After some time I came to a small village. I was leery of speaking to anyone there, not knowing what to expect of these strange country people after what had happened. But soon I remembered that in most of the stories I had heard, it was always the old people who were kind – so when I happened on an old man, I asked him the way to my house.
“Oh, what are you doing so far from home?” he said. I did not tell him how I came to be lost so far in the countryside, but he was nonetheless kind, and ordered his young daughter to get a lantern and take me home. We walked and walked through the night, and finally I began to recognize my surroundings. I told her that my house was nearby, and she, wanting to get back to her distant village, left me to walk the rest of the way by myself.
My parents were both ecstatic and very angry. They had been searching everywhere for me, and no one had any idea what had become of me. When I told the story of my kidnapping, my father was at first scornful. “How could you be so stupid!” he said. “You let your desire for a gun overcome your good sense!” But when I told him the story of how I had escaped by breaking a window, he praised me for my cleverness.
I was, after all, back home safe. We often wondered how my captors had known about my interest in guns, and how they knew also about my family’s connections with Hong Kong. Many years later the mystery was solved when a minor criminal appearing in my father’s court hoped to alleviate his punishment with a confession. He was one of the men who kidnapped me. The plot had been hatched by my uncle, my grandfather’s adopted son. He thought that by conspiring with his shady friends he could easily get a ransom from my family, a great sum that would keep him in gambling money for a long time.
My uncle had a great weakness for gambling. In my childhood he was frequently the reason for the disappearance of certain of Grandmother’s jewels and of money. Whenever the old lady could not find one or the other she was certain to blame the disappearance on this or that servant. The unfortunate suspect was then beaten and tortured to force out the inevitable false confession.
An incident occurred that drastically changed my grandmother’s reluctant liking for my father. Once again jewels were missing, and once again the house was in an uproar with Granny raging shrilly at the servants. But this time the end was to be different. My father had put a “tail” on my uncle, and when discretely followed, he was found selling the stolen objects in a pawnshop. When my father relayed this information to Granny she was livid. She screeched at him and accused him of being more interested in servants than the family. Why – so her son was seen pawning the jewels? So what! It was no doubt those wicked servants who had put him up to it!
There was no reasoning with her. Instead of seeing her prodigal adopted son in his true light, she became inflamed with a fierce hatred for my father that lasted to the end of her days.
I must admit that though I liked my father, I had little respect for him. I thought him weak and rather stupid. That was because he was always being terrorized by my grandmother, who seemed to hold the upper hand in all situations. Granny knew how to take advantage of her state in life, but Father did not. Instead of lording it over the servants and punishing them soundly when they did not please, he treated them with gentle kindness.
My father often went to restaurants two or three times a day. There he both took his meals and carried on business. He liked to take me with him to show off his son. It took us a long time to arrive, because whenever he saw someone he knew on the way, he would stop the rickshaw and chat. Then we would again proceed on our way until he encountered another acquaintance and stopped for more conversation.
The lengthy trips to eating places were worth it. I found the one we frequented mornings both exciting and absorbing, and I enjoyed the atmosphere even more than the food. It was very noisy. The chatter of patrons mingled with the creaking of ceiling fans that did little to disperse the clouds of smoke from cigarettes and pipes. Through the haze moved young waitresses dressed in the then fashionable chi-pao, a long, tightly-fitted gown with a high neck and a slit up the leg. They knew me well, and on my arrival I would usually pick a particularly pretty one and sit on her lap. I enjoyed calling her “mother,” which seemed to throw her into amused consternation because it was considered an insult, implying that she had slept with my father.
The charming waitresses flirted unashamedly with single men and even with married men who happened to be unaccompanied by their wives. Here my father was nicknamed “Restaurant Fly” because he was always flitting from table to table to talk with friends or business acquaintances. His waitress had to follow after him bearing his teacup as he moved constantly about the place.
I was the center of interest – praised and fussed over by waitresses, complimented and flattered by my father’s friends. There was only one aspect of the establishment that disgusted me. It was abundantly equipped with brass spittoons, and looking inside one of those was enough to make me lose my appetite. They were the targets for various old men who would often attempt a hit from four or five feet away, and would, to my fastidious displeasure, frequently miss. But even this defect was made up for by the caged birds hanging everywhere. They were placed there temporarily by customers who