A Book of Changes

By Krystyna Horko

In the summer of 1989 Melissa is in London, gripped by events in Tiananmen Square. They trigger memories of a time thirteen years earlier, when as a former hippie-turned-pseudo-Maoist, she obtained a scholarship to China. 

Although 1976 is an eventful year (the Tangshan earthquake, Mao’s death and the campaign against the so-cal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Krstyna Horko
• Release date: Jun 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9782956816805

Krystyna Horko

Krystyna Horko was born in London to a Polish father and a half-German mother. Her parents were both journalists and her complex family form the basis for her forthcoming memoir, called Picnic in Mongolia. She is currently a translator based in Paris. In an earlier life she studied Mandarin and Mongolian at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), went to China on a British Council scholarship and then worked as a China-watching journalist in Hong Kong, where she was a sub-editor for East Asian Civilizations, correspondent for the Foreign News Agency, editor of China Trader Magazine and, under the pen name of Stéphane Fantanange, a regular contributor to AsiaWeek (all those journals are now defunct!).

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Krystyna Horko

A Book of Changes

First published by IngramSpark 2020

Copyright © 2020 by Krystyna Horko

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Krystyna Horko asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Second edition

ISBN: 978-2-9568168-0-5

Editing by Jennifer Barclay

Cover art by Jessica Bell

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

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Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity and the mother of truth.

Liu Xiaobo

Contents

1. Prologue - Harriet

Hong Kong 1950s

2. London 1989 - Melissa

Peking 1976

3. London 1989

London 1960s-1972

4. London 1989

Leeds 1972-76

5. London 1989

Peking, Shenyang 1976-1977

6. London 1989

Hong Kong 1977-78

7. London 1989

Peking, 1978-79

8. London 1989

Peacehaven 1979

9. London 1979-1989

10. London 1989

11. Epilogue - Baohong

Afterword

About the Author

1

Prologue - Harriet

Hong Kong 1950s

Hong Kong?

Harriet had never spoken those words before. She liked the way they surged from the back of her throat. They evoked an exotic world blessedly removed from the banality of her day-to-day existence: battling with boilers and gas fires, mangles and meals, bottles and a fretful baby.

Hong Kong.

This time it was a statement rather than a question. Yes, Charles confirmed, a posting to the colony. He was to oversee housing, something to do with squatters. Now Harriet envisioned a schoolroom picture of a man in shorts, corks dangling from his hat, surveying vast stretches of land. No, said Charles, these were people fleeing China after the Commies took over. Thousands of them. Getting to be a bit of a problem. Silence. Then, you’ll accept? she asked, You won’t mind going back? She understood a fear of memories surging on street corners when you least expect them. He nodded and her heart sank. Was this then her comeuppance for having pursued him after the war, still flushed with the brash recklessness it had instilled in her. The confidence that had enabled her to bag (her mother’s words) someone above her station.

She had only met Charles Bingham fleetingly in those war years, which for her had meant financial independence, the fun of flat-sharing, the terrifying elation of fire-watching on roof tops and the exhaustion of long working hours, all amply compensated by the cosmopolitan pleasures of London. Without the war she would never have been wined and dined by tall Americans with pockets full of silk stockings, scent and cigarettes, or handsome, courteous Poles, who bent to kiss her hand and made her feel like a princess. But the young captain from the Royal Engineers who had just returned from the Far East made such an impression on her that the Poles and Americans fell by the wayside, and when the war was over she badgered the secretaries in every department until she succeeded in tracking him down. She learnt that he had been discharged from the army and was living in Kensington. Unashamedly, she started frequenting his local shops and pubs, so far from her own in NW1, until she was certain that he was not married and knew his habits and where he spent his Saturday evenings. In the smoke-filled pub where she contrived to meet him, he was sitting alone with a glass of scotch and a packet of Craven A, staring into space. When she went to ask him for a light she saw that he was sadder, leaner and greyer than she remembered. Charles Bingham had returned from the war with a gammy leg and was detached to an administrative post in the Colonial Office. In broad, post-war daylight he proved to be neither quite so dashing nor quite so young. He was also a widower. But he touched something in her and so she pursued her mission, relieved that that there were no children from his first marriage. He finally succumbed to her long, insistent courtship and proposed — almost spontaneously — after closing time one bright evening in June. They were wed, despite objections from Harriet’s parents, in Chelsea Registry Office in September 1948. Their daughter, Melissa, was born, with some difficulty, two years later. Needing more space and being a little tight for money — and perhaps too, Harriet sometimes wondered, to distance themselves from his friends and class — they moved to Worthing.

And now Charles was telling her that she and Melissa would join him as soon he had found somewhere for them to live and after she had let their house. Now he was promising her Amahs and servants and a life she could not have imagined even minutes ago, and her anguish evaporated. She laughed and threw herself on him, smothering him with kisses until, slightly embarrassed, he disentangled himself from her and launched into a potted history of the colony.

And so it was that some months later Harriet and Melissa boarded an aeroplane for the first time in their lives and headed for Asia. Smartly dressed BOAC air hostesses took charge of the baby while Harriet dozed and dreamt that she arrived in a beautiful Chinese mansion only to find Charles’ first wife installed there and that she was merely to be his concubine. She awoke and ate a large meal to reassure herself and wondered what her new life would bring.

Her first impression, standing on the gangplank, was of being enveloped in a hot damp and rather smelly towel. She struggled to undo some of Melissa’s wraps and stepped down to greet Charles who was standing on the tarmac looking handsome and tanned. He drove her to a low block of flats on MacDonnell Road, which Harriet thought looked more American than Chinese. Charles was clearly pleased with his choice, having opted out of government housing, perhaps to avoid contact with people he had known before.

An ageless Chinese woman appeared almost as soon as Charles opened the front door. She wore baggy black trousers with a white cotton jacket toggled along the side, across her bony chest right up to a high Chinese collar. A tight little bun at the back of her head seemed to pull her thinning hair straight out of her scalp. Her only ornament, excluding two gold teeth, was a green jade bracelet with a gold clasp on her right wrist. She looked Harriet up and down, took a surprised Melissa out of her arms, muttered something incomprehensible, and disappeared with her down a long corridor. Charles took Harriet on a tour of the flat, which seemed quite as big than their house in Worthing, albeit all on one level, and then ushered her into a large, sparsely equipped white-tiled kitchen with a door at the back, to the servants’ staircase, he explained. Here she found the Amah already seated at a table feeding a white paste to her child, rice congee, she was told, and to Harriet’s surprise, her daughter appeared perfectly content.

Harriet soon took to colonial life, rather better in fact than she had taken to motherhood. That was due in part to two women who she would later come to think of as the Good and the Bad — and wonder why she had been so much more attracted to the latter.

Geraldine Wheatly was unquestionably Good. Charles had known her widowed missionary father during the war. She had been brought up in Shanghai and had worked with her father in his mission. They had moved to Canton in 1937 during the Sino-Japanese war, and two years later to Hong Kong in the mistaken belief that the British colony was a safe haven. Her father had died only recently but Geraldine was pursing his good work. She was the kind of soul who makes up for not having a social life of her own by organising everyone else’s, but she did serve a purpose, for she introduced Harriet to ‘the wives’ as Charles called them. Since Charles had made it clear that he wanted no truck with colonial social life (but was prepared to devote Sundays to his family) Harriet had no compunction about throwing herself into the round of picnics, horse races, tea and bridge parties, cricket and yacht club events that she could only have dreamed of in Worthing, and provided such excitement and colour after the drab let-down of post-war Britain.

Jenny was altogether a different proposition. Harriet met her when she got lost hunting for antiques in the maze of narrow streets above Central one steamy afternoon. She had turned around on Pottinger Street to see the sea and get her bearings, when she noticed a tall, fair-haired woman striding up the endless steps at far too rapid a pace for the climate, Harriet thought, although she didn’t appear the least bit puffed or overheated. The woman stopped when she reached Harriet.

‘Lost are you?’ she said, by way of greeting. Harriet confirmed that she was.

‘Visitor or ex-pat?’

‘Ex-pat.’

‘Been here long?’

‘Three months.’

‘I’m Jenny by the way. Been here for ever. Fancy a drink?’ Harriet was to learn that when Jenny wanted a drink she did not mean juice or a Coca-Cola. They walked down the stairs together and boarded a rickety tram. Within 15 minutes they were in a cool, dark dive permanently set at cocktail hour, and Harriet was telling Jenny what little there was to tell about herself.

Harriet resolved to see more of her. She learnt from Geraldine that Jenny’s husband was a reporter covering the war in Korea and it was rumoured that she had taken a lover — worse still, a Chinese lover — and the wives did not approve of her. That was no deterrent for Harriet and soon the two met regularly, but always in places Harriet somewhat disdainfully considered to be dives, the worst among them being the Foreign Correspondents’ Club on Conduit Road, a raucous, smoke-filled bar full of men where Jenny was apparently one of the boys — and she certainly held her booze as well as any of them. In this, as in most things, she was the antithesis of Harriet, whose preference would have been English Tea in the Peninsula Hotel. Jenny was worldly and streetwise; she spoke fluent Cantonese and criticised Harriet mercilessly for not even attempting to learn it — and for speaking pidgin to the servants which prevented them from ever learning proper English. She was insatiably curious about everything and berated Harriet for her lack of curiosity about her surroundings. Even Jenny’s clothes, those loose linen trousers and silk shirts tied at the wait, the tailor-made silk dresses she wore in the evenings, seemed to Harriet a reproach for the floral frocks that had seemed so attractive in England and now felt positively frumpy.

Harriet, with plenty of time on her hands for the first time in her life, navigated between her two friends and their different worlds. Above them all, the blue-blooded Colonial Taitais peered down their long noses from their lofty heights on the Peak, living as they did in a parallel colonial universe that rarely interacted, except vicariously through their husbands’ jobs and the occasional public event. Perhaps the ambient poverty of Hong Kong added to her novel feeling of wealth — or perhaps she did not notice it. Yet despite all the pleasures and comforts she enjoyed, she joined the wives in complaining incessantly about the heat, the humidity, the mildew, the rashes, the servants and, worst of all, the food — though ensconced as she was in her British enclave her contact with local food, let alone the natives (other than those who worked for her), was very limited. Her Chinese cook had been trained to ruin food the way the British liked it, and the Amah had taken over Melissa. So while baby-boomer babies at home were spooned NHS orange juice and cod-liver oil, Melissa thrived on Ah Mui’s congee, and slivers of dragon’s eyes or mango. Melissa was not the first gwailo child in her care, nor would she be the last. Harriet constantly fretted about heat and germs — which she fought with a nauseous mix of prickly-heat powder and Chanel No 5, a scent Melissa would loathe for the rest of her life — but her daughter gurgled happily, limbs free in the warm, humid air. She grew strong and healthy clasped to her Amah’s back in a garish red embroidered cloth, the grey pram Harriet insisted on (for fear of permanent bow legs) being discretely parked until their official return.

But the more Harriet saw of Jenny the less she saw of the Wives for they dropped off, one by one. Geraldine had tried to warn her but Harriet was indifferent, and in any case growing bored with both her and them. At least Jenny amused and surprised her. It was Jenny, of course, who introduced her to mah-jong and persuaded her to gamble. Soon Harriet was a regular at Mrs Wong’s establishment, a maze-like building in a seedy side street off Nathan Road in Kowloon, where the clattering of tiles echoed above the shouts of the street vendors, the rattling rickshaws and honking traffic.

***

It might have been a slippery slope, she realized later. It was the first win — real cash — that spurred her on. Soon she was spending entire days playing. At first she hid the money, since she couldn’t spend it without arousing Charles’ suspicion. Then she began to pick up antiques; she couldn’t resist them, tiny things, ornaments, jewellery or small items of furniture. There was such an abundance of beautiful objects and they were so ridiculously cheap that most could easily have come out of her housekeeping money. She bought on instinct, not knowing anything about her exotic purchases, but loving the look and feel of them. It was Geraldine Wheatley who enlightened her. She still regularly forced her way into the flat to gaze adoringly at Charles, and chat familiarly with Ah Mui. ‘Oh that’s a mid-Qing dynasty lacquer toiletries box,’ she might say, or ‘A little side table with inlay, recent, not worth much.’ And then one day she gasped at a little green glazed camel.

‘Goodness,’ she said, ‘that is a lovely Tang dynasty piece. How much did you pay for it? Oh the poor, poor person who had to sell that.’ Harriet had never associated her purchases with any person, least of all a poor one, or indeed given any thought as to how those items found their way into the dusty shops around Hollywood Road.

‘A refugee certainly,’ muttered Miss Wheatley.

‘You mean the squatters?’

‘Yes, if you like. They’re squatting because there’s not enough housing for them. Terrible conditions, shanty towns that collapse in heavy rain, let alone a typhoon. You should come with me one day.’

‘Where? What for?’

‘Around Sham Shui Po. We’ve got a soup kitchen going there with the mission, and we’re working on a little school for the children. If you want to do something useful…’ But Harriet had no desire to do good works with Geraldine Wheatley, she was far too busy with Melissa she claimed. When she later mentioned the conversation, Jenny dismissed it immediately.

‘Oh Geraldine’s a do-gooder. The Chinese don’t want interfering guailos, food in one hand, bibles in the other. They’re quite capable of dealing with their own problems.’

‘Well at least she’s helping them. Charles says they’re living in terrible conditions.’

‘That’s his job isn’t it? He’s in the colonial administration. It’s not hers.’ Which settled it as far as Harriet was concerned.

Whenever Harriet hit a losing streak some of her treasures would disappear, the camel among them. On the rare occasions Charles noticed and enquired, Harriet would invent a polishing or a repair job until, in some cases, she got the item out of hock. Jenny was now pressing her to go out with her in the evenings and see the real Hong Kong, but up to now Harriet held out. She knew that Charles was her rock and she would not risk losing him despite Jenny’s disdainful teasing about her being the perfect little housewife.

And then one day her pleasant colonial life ended as abruptly as it had started. Later, in maudlin moments, she would think of it as the end of her youth. On 11 June 1958 she returned home from a shopping expedition to find the flat in an uproar. Charles had collapsed in his office and been rushed to Queen Mary Hospital. A car was waiting to take her there and she was immediately ushered in to see the surgeon, Dr Bonnington, a man she had never trusted because of rumours about his behaviour with some of the wives when they were not in a position to defend themselves. It was septicaemia the doctor said, off with his leg. So that was it. End of career. And end of life for the wife.

Charles’ posting was not renewed — he was fifty-six and near retirement after all. They had no choice but to leave Hong Kong and return to cool, quiet Worthing, once they succeeded in evicting their tenants. On their last evening in Hong Kong, Miss Wheatly held a small going-away party for Charles and Harriet but since this was primarily a wives’ do Charles refused to go. He was still in pain and more antisocial than ever. He was getting around quite well on crutches but was waiting to get fitted up with a decent wooden leg at home. A gaggle of forgiving wives had gathered in Geraldine’s little flat, probably to gloat, thought Harriet. Geraldine had prepared a profusion of little cakes and sandwiches, daintily laid out on Chinese plates and placed on a beautiful dark lacquered table that had belonged to her father, together with bottles of Coca-Cola proudly brought out of an ancient ice box as though they were champagne. Jenny, who had been invited at Harriet’s insistence, arrived late, looked scornfully at the Coca-Cola, nodded disdainfully at the wives and whispered in Harriet’s ear, ‘I’ll give you exactly five minutes to say your goodbyes and get us out of here!’

And five minutes later, pleading a lonely, suffering Charles, they were in a taxi heading for a Wanchai jazz bar. Flashing neon lights lit the sky and music pulsated from the densely packed street, each bar competing in the cacophony. Inside, the women were all Chinese, gorgeous in bright cheongsams, standing in multi-coloured clusters, or leaning against slim US Marines, so white of skin and uniform, or dancing on the tiny dance floor, swirling gracefully around the foreigners, some of whom were jiving expertly with looks of intense concentration on their sweating faces. The barman appeared to be the only Chinese male in the place, and Jenny called to him as soon as they had pushed their way to the long wood-and-brass bar, ‘Two pink gins please Johnnywong!’

‘You know him?’

‘No, the barman here is always Johnnywong.’

‘Oh. Why are there so many Americans?’ In all her time in Hong Kong, Harriet had not met a single one.

‘R&R.’ replied Jenny. ‘They don’t usually hang out in the same bars as the square old Brits, and I go where they go — they’re so much more fun!’ She raised her glass, ‘Well, here’s to Blighty and your new life!’ Harriet felt tears well up in her eyes. She looked down at her glass and suddenly wished she could run away, leave Charles and Melissa and hide in the backstreets of Hong Kong. Live like Jenny, outside both British and Chinese convention. But Jenny had a husband who paid the rent. How would she live? She would have to find work but what could she do? And eventually she would, of course, miss both her daughter and her husband. Even to consider the idea was ridiculous. A gangly American in a tropical suit came up behind Jenny and put his arms around her.

‘My favourite Limey,’ he said, ‘Come dance with me!’ He started nuzzling her ear.

‘Oh bugger off,’ said Jenny, ‘Can’t you see I’m talking to my friend.’ The man backed off, his hands in the air,

‘OK, OK, just say the word!’ and he moved down the bar to chat up a group of Chinese hostesses who had just come on duty. Harriet cleared her throat. She had a question she wanted to ask Jenny.

‘Those men, do you, well, I mean, well do you go to bed with them?’

Jenny looked at her and laughed.

‘Oh some of them, sure.’

‘And doesn’t your husband mind?’

‘Well as you can see, he’s never here, and knowing my husband, he won’t exactly be keeping his hands off the ladies during his travels.’ Jenny paused and then added softly, ‘I can’t have children you know. Might as well use that to my advantage – though actually I quite envy you your Melissa. And I suppose you’ll have more children when you get back to England. Oh well, that’s life.’ She looked up brightly and turned to the bar, waving her empty glass in the air. ‘Another two please Johnnywong!’

‘Actually,’ said Harriet ‘since Charles’ operation… he can’t.’

‘Can’t?’ Jenny turned to face her friend. ‘Can’t or won’t?’ She was talking loudly now to make herself heard over the music and Harriet blushed. ‘Surely losing a leg’s got nothing to do with it!’

‘Well he says he can’t.’

‘But you haven’t put it to the test.’

‘No. He doesn’t want to. To be honest, I’m not sure that I do… the stump, I mean – oh I don’t know.’

‘That depends on how much you care for each other.’

‘I suppose.’ Harriet looked so forlorn that Jenny waved to the tall American, still engaged in an animated but one-sided discussion with the giggling Chinese girls.

‘Hey Handsome, whatever your name is, come and give my friend here a good time!’ The man excused himself from the group and joined them. He bowed to Harriet and put on an exaggerated Southern accent, ‘Ma’am, may ah have the pleasure of the next dance?’ Harriet drained her glass. ‘Why thank you kindly sir,’ she replied taking the proffered arm. She felt Jenny’s eyes on them as they made their way to the crowded dance floor