Ewe Paik Leong, The Wordslinger: Sample Chapter 1 of "Burma Road Driver, Resistance Fighter"

Chapter 1

April 9, 1939

Tientsin, China

Standing at the entrance of the Tientsin Grand Theatre, the cheongsum-clad usherette looked at the two tickets handed to her by a fortyish stocky Chinese man, accompanied by a younger man. “Oh? Front-box seats.” She directed an open palm at the aisle. “Please follow me, gentlemen.” Striding on flats, she led the two men, both togged up in Western clothes, to an enclosed box at the front of the stage and they took their seats.

Thirty minutes later, while five women dressed in coat-tails suits, their hands holding canes, their heads crowned with top hats, were tap-dancing on the stage to music, a bomb exploded in the front box. The explosion killed the stocky man, his companion and three others sitting near him.

After the smoke had cleared, a wizened man from a back-row seat moved to the front with his fat wife in tow. “Oh Lord Buddha!” His eyes bulged. “I recognise this man! He’s Cheng Hsi-Keng, the manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of North China!” He turned to his wife standing beside him, cupped a hand to her ear and half-whispered, “He’s a Japanese collaborator! May he burn in hell!”

*****

Edgar George Jamieson, the British Consul-General in Tientsin, looked up from his sheaf of papers when a knock sounded on his office door. “Enter, please.” As he adjusted his spectacles, his personal aide stepped in and closed the door behind him.

“Sir,” said the young man, “Captain Kasuki Fukuda is here to see you.” He blinked. “He has no appointment, but he said it’s very important.”

Edgar took off spectacles and put them on top of the sheaf of papers in front of him. “Show him in.”

The personal aide opened the door and stepped to one side. A stocky moustachioed man garbed in army uniform clomped inside the room and the personal aide took his departure. Both hands holding his cap, Captain Kasuki stopped about three feet away from Edgar’s desk and remained standing. “Sir, I’m here as representative of the Japanese North China Army. I wish to raise the matter concerning the assassination in the British Concession two days ago. My superior General Masaharu Homma wants to know whether the British police have arrested the assassins.” His diction is near-perfect.

Edgar clucked his tongue. “We’re still working on the case but we’ve identified several suspects.”

“When the assassins are arrested, we want the British police to hand them over to us. That is my superior’s message to you.”

“No, they will be tried under British laws.”

“In that case, I have further instructions to inform you that we will blockade the British Concession if you don’t comply with our wishes.” Kasuki shot a hostile glint from his slit-like eyes. “That’s all I want to say.” He turned, stepped forward to open the door and left.

*****

Kuala Lumpur

The morning sun threw her shadow long on the road as Su Liu-Shan pedalled her bicycle, leg muscles straining, heart pounding, along Kepong Road. Oh my goodness, I may be late. I shouldn’t have read the Hua Ch’iao Hsien Feng which contained Chiang Kai Shek’s speech. It kept me awake till 2 a.m.

When she reached a block of shop-houses, she allowed the bicycle to roll on its own momentum towards Fook Rubber Trading. After she had parked and locked her two-wheeler on the walkway, she took a rattan basket off its rear rack and entered the shop-lot, filled with the smokey odour of rubber sheets.

Her boss sat at his desk, his fingers flicking black beads on an abacus. He wore his hair slicked backward and had on a short-sleeved shirt. A thick ledger, dog-eared at many pages, lay beside the beaded counting-frame. Liu-Shan greeted her employer, and he flicked his gaze up and nodded before continuing to work on the abacus.

Liu-Shan settled at her desk behind her boss and put her rattan basket on the grey cement floor. From a left side drawer, she pulled out a debtor’s journal and a file bulging with delivery notes and started to post book-keeping entries. On the other side of the room, her two co-workers were busy writing, their heads lowered.

Murmurings of voices came through the open door at the back. Liu-Shan knew the manual workers were grading rubber sheets in the back section of the shop.

After two hours, her boss rose from his wooden chair and left the office.

Liu-Shan got up and took a few steps to his lacquered escritoire to take his newspaper. She placed the broadsheet on her writing table and scanned the headline: “Japanese Navy maintains blockade along the coast of south and central China.” Oh my goodness, I hope the war doesn’t reach here.

Turning the page, she saw an art exhibition advertisement titled “Eyes on the World: The Best of Chinese Finger Painting”. The event was being held in the Chinese Assembly Hall on Birch Road. Finger painting? Wow, how interesting. Maybe I will get to see a live demonstration.

She moved to her boss’ desk again and used his phone to call her ex-classmate. “Hello, Alice, want to go with me to a finger-painting exhibition tomorrow?” She paused for a second. “That’s great! We can travel by Ah-Keong’s rickshaw. This evening, I’ll go over and ask him to pick us up at 7 p.m. Your place first. Bye-bye.” She replaced the receiver to its cradle and returned to her desk.

Both Liu-Shan and Ah-Keong, the rickshaw puller, lived in Kapur Village, linked to Kepong Village by Kepong Road. The two settlements sprawled ten miles north-west of Kuala Lumpur.

*****

The patter of Ah-Keong’s slippered feet came to a stop, and he lowered the bars of the rickshaw. Liu-Shan, garbed in a cheong-sam, and Alice, donned in a print dress, got down from the wheeled conveyance at the gate of Chinese Assembly Hall. The facade of the white domed building of Corinthian Order featured four fluted pillars each topped with an astragal, a rosette and a volute, in that order. Several small clusters of visitors streamed continually towards the entrance.

Cork-board partitions divided the hall lengthwise into three corridors. Unframed paintings done on rice paper practically covered the partitions. Liu-Shan and Alice shuffled from one corridor to the next, admiring the dragons, landscapes, flowers and birds.

A cardboard sign about two feet by six inches hung from a tack on the last third-row partition. The title read: “Japanese atrocities in Nanking.” Displayed below were more than twenty black-and-white photographs of civilians massacred by Japanese troops when they overran Nanking in December 1937. One photo showed scores of dead bodies lying on the bank of the Yangtze River. Another depicted a grinning Japanese solder holding a decapitated head in one hand, a samurai sword in the other. A third showed Japanese soldiers shovelling earth into a pit to bury civilians alive. A chill spread down Liu-Shan’s body and her heart shattered, eyes shimmering with tears. She pulled put a handkerchief and staunched at her eyes. On another partition, a huge poster was tacked.

She read it carefully.

RECRUITMENT NOTICE

This is an enlistment notice for drivers and vehicle mechanics in Nanyang to serve in our motherland. Willing parties with the necessary skills can contact the various China Relief Fund Committees or branches. The following are the required criteria:

1. Skilled in driving and hold a driver’s licence. Must understand simple Chinese, be in good health and don’t have undesirable habits. Between 20 to 40 years of age.

2. Monthly salary will be $30 Chinese currency, calculated from the day of embarkation. There will be a bonus for excellence in performance.

3. The location of work will be in Yunnan, Kunming or Guangxi. The China Relief Fund Committee will bear travel costs.

4. All applicants must be recommended by a local contact or shop owner who can vouch for their loyalty to China.

5. Forms have been sent to the China Relief Fund Committees in each locality. Once a certain number of qualified applicants have been reached, they will be contacted for an interview and be sent for training in Singapore.

For further information, please contact Mr Tony Tan, Recruitment Co-ordinator, Chinese Assembly Hall, Birch Road, Kuala Lumpur.

Chiang Kai Shek’s speech in Hua Ch'iao Hsien Feng which Liu-Shan had read two days ago made a deeper impact on her. The generalissimo had appealed to the Chinese in Southeast-Asia, termed Nanyang in Mandarin, to help China. The country’s ports had been blockaded and its only supply route for war materials was the 713-mile Yunnan Burma Road, running ran from Lashio in Burma to Kunming in China.

“My goodness, this is dangerous work.” Alice screwed up her face. “I’m not brave enough to do it.”

Liu-Shan looked downward a few inches. A rectangular cloth bag filled with sheaves of paper was hanging beneath the poster. She picked out one sheet and looked at it. The heading stated: Application to be a Nanyang Transport Volunteer. She folded the form into half, slipped it inside her handbag and flipped her gaze upward to Alice. “Come, let’s go for supper at Great Eastern Amusement Park. I heard it has the best tok-tok mee in town.”

Alice blanched. “Goodness gracious, Liu-Shan, you’re not thinking of volunteering, are you? That region’s terrain is mountainous. Worse, Japanese fighter planes sometimes attack the trucks.”

*****

With a fork, Liu-Shan speared a piece of chicken to her mouth and started to chew. Round porcelain plates piled with stir-fried water spinach, fried chicken and fermented bean paste lay on the table. The blustery wind from a wall fan prevented a few flitting flies from settling down on the food.

Her parents, both in their mid-forties and her younger brother, two years her junior, were seated at the square dining table with her. Their home was a single-storey brick-and-plank structure in Kapur village, a predominantly Chinese settlement of four hundred houses.

Liu-Shan’s gaze moved from face to face of his family members. I may not see them for god knows how long. Her father was engaged in small talk with her mother about the day’s business.

A tinsmith, Su Poh-Hock operated a shop in Jinjang village knocking out mugs, sieves, funnels, kettles, water scoops, hand-operated fluid pumps and rain gutters for roofs of houses. Every weekday, he rode a Norton 16H motorcycle to his workshop which employed two workers. His son, Wah-Keong, had dropped out of school at sixteen and had been working as an apprentice at a carpenter’s yard for almost eight years.

Poh-Hock stopped chatting, took a gulp of Chinese tea from a glass, and Liu-Shan took the opportunity to cut in. “Papa, I’ve something important to tell you.” She studied her father, seated across her. He was a small man with button eyes and a comedian’s eye brows—so thick they looked like they had been touched up with a sketching pencil.

“Yes, what is it?”

Liu-Shan flicked her gaze to her mother. “Mama, I’d like to keep the small family photograph. The one in the photo album. It’s in your dresser.” She noticed surprise flicker in her mother’s eyes and cast her gaze to her father again.

“Papa, I want to sign up as a Nanyang Volunteer.”

“What!” Poh-Hock’s jaw dropped.

Her mother put down her fork and spoon, laid them on her plate. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Young people like you are just swayed by a sense of adventure and idealism, not patriotism.”

“That’s not true.” Liu-Shan shook her head. “If we don’t help, many innocent civilians will die.”

“What’s the pay like?” Poh-Hock asked. “You’re also going to get a big shiny model to wear after your service?”

“It’s not the money, Papa. I’ve seen photos of the brutal massacre of civilians in Nanking. Thousands of defenceless women and helpless children.” She raised her voice a decible for emphasis. “Papa, you should go see the photo display I went to. There were photographs of women raped and their vaginas pierced with bamboo stakes!” She noticed her mother’s jaw drop and her face turned white. “My mind’s made up, Papa. I’ve decided to be a Nanyang driver.”

A heavy silence hung in the room, the groans of the wall fan became louder. Poh-Hock locked gazes with his daughter. “If you feel so strongly about this volunteer work, then go ahead.” His eyes grew clouded, and he wiped his tears with his sleeves.

*****

Inside the office of a smoke-filled gambling den in High Street, Kwong Eng-Liang sat facing Chin-Leung, the bald scarred-faced owner. The former wiped sweat on his forehead with his sleeve. “I’ll pay you eventually — just give me more time.” He flicked his gaze at a batch of IOU’s on the table in front and returned his attention to Chin-Leung. Hell, that’s a big stack!

“Mr Kwong, my patience is running out.” Chin-Leung leaned back on the low-backed chair and placed his slippered feet on the mahogany desk. “Luckily for you, I’m a reasonable man.” He lowered his feet and stood to his full six feet, legs apart in a warrior’s stance. “I’ll let you settle this sum in three equal installments.” He levelled a gnarled finger in Eng-Liang’s face. “My man will wait for you outside the Cold Storage on pay day for three consecutive months to collect payment. Don’t try to slip out through the back door. Another of my boys will be stationed there.”

Eng-Liang blinked and nodded. Good luck to you! Tomorrow, I’m taking an advance salary on the excuse that Mama has fallen seriously ill and needs an operation. “Don’t worry, sir, I won’t try to abscond.” Then I’ll discreetly clear away my belongings in my desk and disappear. “You’ve my word of honour.”

*****

Bangalore, India

In the hall of the RAF Flying Training School, the emcee standing at a wooden lecturn atop the stage leaned towards the chrome microphone. “Graduates, please stand for our national anthem.” Overhead, fans spun furiously, cooling down the temperature in the hall to a tolerable level.

Seated on wooden chairs facing the stage, forty-three graduates jackknifed to their feet. The tune of God Save Our King played on a gramophone came out from a pair of loudspeakers at the stage and when it ended, the emcee continued, “Now, I have the pleasure to invite the Superintendent of the Flying Training School to deliver his speech.” The emcee moved away to the wing and a slim middle-aged man climbed up to the lecturn from a front-row seat. He harrumphed before starting his speech.

Outside, fields of sorghum, their grain heads swaying in the wind, lay in swatches in the near distance around the grounds of the school, soaking up the sunlight. This school was one of nine in India that had been set up by the British government to produce more pilots to counter the threat of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. A few other countries in the British Empire also operated such training schools.

After the Superintendent finished his speech to loud applause, the emcee announced, “Now, graduates, please come to receive your Pilot’s Wings. I shall call the names in alphabetical order.” He cast his gaze down at a piece of paper, paused, looked up and announced. “Timothy Clarke.”

As Timothy rose to go to the stage to receive his Pilot’s Wings, he wished his girlfriend Stephanie and his parents back in Manchester could have been here to witness this proud moment of his.