Hong Kong 1967: Summer of discontent
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 18: In the Neighbourhood
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Phil Brown
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Perhaps I should have seen a portent in the entrails, but I could divine only horror from the scene. We'd come home from a pleasant Chinese New Year lunch to find our backyard had become a charnel house. The chickens which had arrived that morning had been slaughtered; their decapitated, plucked bodies now lay in a small fleshy pile on the concrete.
At the Chinese New Year open house at our home in Kowloon Tong that day in early 1967 – the dawning of the Year of the Ram – my father had doled out, in customary red packets, bonuses to the top men in his construction company. In response they showered him with gifts; no gold, frankincense or myrrh, but plenty of cigars, brandy, dried beef and other food of doubtful provenance and the chickens, in several clucking bags.
My younger brother, sister and I were delighted. We planned to build a coop out the back, near the servants' quarters where our amah, Ah Lun, lived. She had other plans and while we were out wielded her kitchen cleaver with deadly results.
We gawped at the scene but she grinned, pleased with herself. We were mortified; tears were shed. Ah Lun couldn't understand the fuss. ‘I make good dinner," she said. ‘See yau gai.'
She collected the guts and put them in a bowl for her own meal. I felt sick.
There was no seer on hand to divine any forebodings from the blood and guts she hosed into the back gutter. Chinese New Year is a time to think about peace and prosperity. Nobody foresaw the shadow about to fall across our lives, cast by the Cultural Revolution ravaging China, just across the border from the tiny British colony we called home.
But there were warnings. The year before Hong Kong had been rocked by protests and rioting. Leftists emboldened by the Cultural Revolution protested against the rise in fares for the Star Ferry, the main method of crossing Hong Kong harbour. The rise was infinitesimal, but it provided an excuse for the cadres to vent their hatred of the imperialist rulers, paper tigers and capitalist running dogs. Us, that is.
As a ten-year-old I read the South China Morning Post, after my father finished with it, and knew something of what was going on in the region. The Vietnam War was raging not far away, while in Hong Kong, hate-filled Red Guards sought to introduce Mao's Cultural Revolution and disrupt British rule of the colony China coveted since it lost the first Opium War in 1842. I knew the red peril was nearby, poised to strike. We were safe in our quiet suburban enclave of privilege but my parents were concerned.
My father's family were old China hands, British expats, who hadn't called England home for decades. They lived in Shanghai in the 1930s, until the Japanese invasion of Manchuria pushed them to the safety of Hong Kong. When it became clear that the Japanese push south would not stop, my grandfather shipped his family to Australia. He remained in Hong Kong to tie up business, was captured when the Japanese invaded in 1941, and was imprisoned at Stanley civilian POW camp for the war.
The Browns began to consider themselves Australian after their sojourn in Sydney, but returned to Hong Kong until the communists took over in China, which made my grandfather nervous. He didn't fancy staying around for another invasion and moved permanently to Australia. The feared invasion didn't happen and Hong Kong remained strangely immune to the troubles of the region. Meanwhile my father had met and married my Queenslander mother, but hankered for Hong Kong and moved us back there in the early 1960s.
At first the only visible sign of instability was the constant presence of serviceman on rest and recreation leave from Vietnam. The 1966 riots had been a worry but were quickly quelled. Still, everyone sensed the horrors occurring north of the border; headless corpses washed down the Pearl River and into Hong Kong waters, so we knew terrible things were happening.
One of my father's favourite employees, Little Lee (a small, nut-brown man with a mouth full of gold teeth) left to visit his dying mother in Canton just after Christmas 1966, but had not retuned by New Year. We missed him on the day the chickens arrived; his gifts were always the best. I overheard my father and one of his colleagues talking about Little Lee some days later. My father, propped at the bar dispensing gin and tonics, drew a finger across his throat and made a strangling noise, much to my mother's disgust. Apart from that, and the chicken massacre, 1967 started normally enough.