Free Gweilo by Martin Booth Page A

far from Canton. I asked how he came to speak such good English if he had lived in China. He replied that his father had been rich enough to send him to a Christian missionary school.
    'It was a very good school. The brothers were trained teachers, men of learning. I was taught by them, not only English but mathematics, geography, history. One, a Chinese brother, also taught Cantonese and Mandarin. Then, one day when I was eight years old, there was much fighting. People were shot in the street and the paddy-fields. It was Japanese fighting Chinese. Then, when I was seventeen years old, there was more fighting. This time, it was Communist Chinese fighting Kuomintang Chinese.'
    'What are Kuo—' I began.
    'Nationalist Chinese,' Ching explained. 'The army of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.'
    'What happened?' I asked.
    'They lost,' Ching said candidly. 'Then the Communist soldiers came, and the officers, and they took away my father's land and our house. Our belongings were taken, our farm animals killed. My father had a motor car. They burnt it. We had horses to ride. They shot them.'
    'Were the horses ill?' I enquired. I knew sick horses were shot: I had stayed for a holiday on a farm in Devon the year before when a dray horse broke its leg and was put down.
    'No.' Ching shook his head. 'They just shot them.'
    It seemed incomprehensible that anyone would deliberately set fire to a car and barbaric that they should shoot a perfectly healthy horse.
    'What happened to you?'
    'We were told to go, so we went. If we had not they would have killed us. They killed our friends who refused to go. I came to Hong Kong.'
    'If your father is so rich,' I ventured as we waited to cross at a busy junction, 'why do you work as a hotel room boy?'
    'I have no money,' Ching answered. There was no regret in his voice. 'All I have are my clothes. When the Communists drove us away, we could only take what we could carry.' We crossed the road and started walking slowly along the pavement towards the hotel. 'There are many, many people like me in Hong Kong.' Ahead of us, the Fourseas Hotel transport, a cream-painted, American shooting brake with varnished wooden bars on the side, drove out of the hotel garage and across both lanes. 'You see Mickey, the hotel driver?' Ching asked. 'He is one who escaped from the Communists. At least half the room boys have escaped from China. Some with their families, some, like me, alone.'
    I felt a terrible sadness for Ching and took hold of his hand.
    'You've got me and my mum,' I said comfortingly.
    I never discovered where Ching laid his head, but I found where others did. A week or so later, my mother was invited out to a dinner party on Hong Kong-side.
    It was already dark before she left in the Studebaker shooting brake for the Star Ferry to cross the harbour to Hong Kong island. I waited a respectable time, got dressed and walked out of the hotel tradesmen's door, a steel gate that gave on to a street called Emma Avenue. I turned left and headed for Soares Avenue, a fairly busy thoroughfare used by traffic taking a short cut to the next main road, Argyle Street.
    At the time I was not to know it, but these streets were to be my patch, my playground, and I was to become as well-known in them as any of the shopkeepers.
    The streets were warm, the air heavy with the unfamiliar scents of exotic food cooking in the tenements. Traffic fumes fought to suppress these smells but failed. Above the sound of passing cars was a trill of argumentative birdsong from the trees. Finches in bamboo cages, hung outside the tenement windows for an evening airing, joining in the conference with their free-living brethren.
    Walking along the streets was mildly hazardous. First, one was periodically peppered with bird seed and desiccated droppings as a finch had a scratch-about in the bottom of its cage three floors above. Second, one was dripped on from laundry hanging out to dry over the street on bamboo poles. Third, and less benign,