Freddy's War by Judy Schultz

Author:Judy Schultz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-926972-31-2
Publisher: Brindle & Glass
Published: 2011-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

BOOK THREE

Eating Bitterness

One: A Place for Dragons

Hong Kong, November 1941

NOVEMBER 16, 1941, WAS GREY with fog. As far as anybody in Hong Kong could tell, the rolling green hills where the nine dragons lived might have disappeared overnight.

The amah had explained about the dragons four years ago, the day she and Su Li arrived in Hong Kong. On that day, the old woman and the small-for-her-age ten-year-old climbed the last hill of their journey from China and looked down on the city that was to be their new home. It sprawled all the way to the water’s edge, across a broad harbour and onto an island.

“Tell me a story,” whined the tired child when they sat down to rest, so the amah began:

“One day, long time ago, boy emperor tells his servant: eight hills here, home of eight dragons.”

The amah raised her short arms and made a sweeping gesture that embraced the eight hills of Kowloon.

“But this servant is clever. He say, ‘Majesty, you, too, are great dragon. You are ninth dragon!’ Sweet words in small emperor’s ear, you see. Kowloon. Means nine dragons.”

It was a good thing to have dragons on your side, Ah Ming told the child. In spring their breath in the warm wind brought rain and turned the land green. When there was lightning you knew they were fighting, and their fiery breath would strike a tree or a house, or even a luckless human who got in their way, and whatever the dragons struck would be reduced to cinders. No more to be said.

This morning the dragon hills could not be seen at all, and the Peak, that lofty perch of the rich and privileged across The Fragrant Harbour on Hong Kong Island, might have evaporated overnight.

All that was left on this foggy morning was the chaotic sprawl of waterfront and the burgeoning slums of Kowloon.

They were a no man’s land. Decrepit tenements. Open sewers. Walls thrown up from scraps of this and that, roofs of corrugated tin anchored by assorted garbage thrown from the windows of taller buildings.

This place existed outside the law, and the vast bureaucracy of Hong Kong ignored it as buildings rose higgledy-piggledy. Through poor construction and necessity of space, alleys and passageways narrowed until, in some places, they were no wider than the length of a woman’s arm.

The city within a city began to close in on itself, shutting out the sun and the rest of the world. It became home to the homeless, the coolies, the beggars, the destitute, and the professional criminals. Then the refugees came, the first of the million or so who would eventually wash up on Hong Kong’s shore like a great human river running south and east from the Japanese. The ones who made it that far burrowed in, living nine, ten, a dozen to a room, sleeping in shifts, sharing their lice and their diseases. Children were born, lived, and died here, their brief presence on Earth unremarked by any official document.

The enterprising

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