Ewe Paik Leong, The Wordslinger: My Books

Chapter 3

When Liu-Shan, Eng-Liang and the other drivers arrived in Kunming, they boarded trucks which took them to the Military Council Transport Training Institute situated on the northern edge of the city.

Inside the grounds of the Institute, when the truck containing Liu-Shan and Eng-Liang ground to a halt, a soldier flipped down its tailgate. Everyone sitting in the back climbed down. They stretched their arms as they cast their gazes at five palatial buildings in front.

Liu-Shan pointed at a fleet of trucks of British and American makes lined up in rows at one side of the grounds. “Look! Austin K2 and Austin K4!”

Eng-Liang blew hot air into his cupped hands. “So, our adventure begins here!”

Earlier in Lashio, the trucks had picked them from the train station. After a 350-mile journey, they had reached Kunming, having passed under its famous Golden Horse Archway. In the city, they had woven through streets chocked with clay-tiled brick houses; thatch-roofed wooden shanties; temples, some still in use, others in ruins; grandiose palaces with gardens; and many corner shrines dedicated to the God of Earth. Street traffic had portended trouble: peasants wearing cartwheel hats pattering on sandals in a hurry, platoons of rifle-toting soldiers trotting on horsebacks to the battlefront; families fleeing in donkey-drawn carts crammed with household items; and motorcars and motorcycles roaring away from the winds of war.

Presently, the drivers gathered on the parade ground. The head of the Institute, a spindly man with a crew cut, delivered a welcome speech chocked with energetic hand gestures. After registration formalities, they were issued khaki uniforms, a peaked cap, a sweater, a cup, a pair of chopsticks and a face towel. Their sleeping quarter was the floor of a hall. The drivers came from several parts of the Chinese diaspora and numbered almost one hundred and fifty. They consisted of Chinese-Burmese, Chinese-Vietnamese, Chinese -Thais and Chinese-Filipinos.

They were divided into two companies; each company was sub-divided into three platoons; each platoon comprised fifteen vehicles. Liu-Shan and Eng-Liang found themselves in Platoon B. They were surprised that their platoon leader was a Sikh man in his early thirties called Manjit, who hailed from Johor Bahru. Adopted by a Chinese family since birth, he spoke Hokkien dialect, English and Malay.

A month of military drills, map-reading lessons and more practice driving rolled by for the drivers. The first assignment of Platoon B was to transport engine parts, small motors and tools from Chengkong Army Depot southward along the Yunnan-Burma Road to three repair depots situated in Tsuyung, Tali and Paoshan respectively. They would then proceed to Lashio in Burma. At Lashio, their empty trucks would be filled with supplies to be transported back to Kunming. The maiden run went smoothly.

Four months passed and December came, as if on wings. The convoy had made over thirty return runs from Kunming to Lashio. Each run took three days and during the night, the drivers slept in their cabs, their vehicles parked in herring-bone fashion on the side of the road. Though the route passed through several towns, they hadn’t any accommodation arranged. In Burma, mosquitoes often attacked the drivers, resulting in several of them contracting malaria.

*****

Toward late afternoon of an early December day, the convoy was travelling northward from Tali after having collected military supplies from Lashio. In the cab of his truck, Eng-Liang looked at the rear-view mirror and saw Liu-Shan’s truck about fifty feet behind. Every waking hour had drawn him closer to Liu-Shan and, now, he realized he had fallen in love with her. He was thinking of her smiles, of her voice, of her playfulness and of her teasing when he heard droning in the sky. It grew louder and louder. Dammit! Must be Japanese warplanes! He immediately recalled the standard operating procedure: even- numbered trucks to pull over to the left, odd-numbered trucks to the right, all drivers to quickly leave the trucks and take cover behind rocks, trees and brush.

Eng-Liang, his heart pounding like a boogie drum, yanked the steering a half-circle to the left and jammed the brakes. As the truck ground to a halt, its brake pads squealing, its tyres scrabbling against red earth, he stuck his head out of the cab window and scanned the sky, grey like a flower ruined. Two propeller-powered fighter planes, rumbling overhead, dove, spraying bullets in the direction of the trucks and kicking a storm of dirt in two straight lines just inches away. Banking and jinking, they pulled up with a roar of power. Eng-Liang leapt down from the cab, bent low, and started running towards a clump of jungle brush near the precipice of the road, about thirty feet away.

He was almost there when he heard a fighter plane make another low pass and a hail of bullets whizzed close to his feet. Phew! The whispers of death, he thought. He shot a glance at Liu-Shan’s truck as he thrashed into the thicket. His gut curled. Her truck—with plumes of white smoke seeping from the edges of the hood—was veering across the road, thrashing through the brush and rolled over the precipice. Despair flooded him. A dull sound puffed up from the ravine, a low crash, then a slow-rising roar of sliding rock and earth. The noise diminished with the hollow cracking of stone against stone.

Chest tightened, he lifted his head to check the fate of the other trucks ahead. As far as he could discern, the warplanes had hit none of them. The sputtering engine of another plane became audible and he looked up. It banked, came in low, heading towards him, it seemed. Eng-Liang almost peed in his pants when he saw a goggled face behind the windscreen of the warplane. Sparks burst from its nose. In a split second, he rolled aside. The loud chatter of a machine gun smote his ear-drums. Bullets thudded the previous spot he had crouched in. The plane pulled upward and vanished into the clouds. He saw the two planes circle once and their droning faded away.

Eng-Ling got up and rushed to the edge where Liu-Shan’s truck had plunged over. He peered below. The face of the slope was jagged, the rock splintered and fissured, with many ledges. Here and there patches of brush and stunted bushes grew in niches. On a ledge about ten feet down lay Liu-Shan, face down, immobile. Her vehicle had turned into a mass of twisted metal at the bottom of the ravine, almost thirty feet below. A voice hollered, “Lucky, she was thrown out of the truck.”

The voice belonged to Manjit, the convoy commander, standing beside Eng-Liang. “Someone’s got to get her out,” Manjit said, casting his gaze at the other men gathered around. “Any volunteer?” He ran his eyes down from side to side. “Dammit, we need a stretcher which we don’t have.”

“I will rappel down the incline first,” Eng-Liang said. “Check out her injuries. I’ve gotta have a long rope. In the meantime, the men can improvise a stretcher. Lower it.”

“You heard the man,” Manjit yelled. “Come on, those with ropes, get them immediately.” He pointed to a few drivers who had remained standing. “All of you, search for things to make a stretcher.”

The men who had gone to their respective trucks returned one by one to join the group gathered around Manjit and Eng-Liang. They held several lengths of coiled ropes in their hands.

“Anyone can help me knot these?” asked Eng-Liang, who had chosen the thickest ropes from them.

“Let me do it,” said a twenty-something driver, his cheeks dotted with pimples. “I was a scout in Penang Free School. “The butterfly bend is the safest knot to join two ends of two ropes.” He got down on his knees and joined three lengths that stretched over thirty feet.

“Better test that rope,” Manjit ordered.

Two men tugged at the separate ends of the jointed rope with their might like they were in a tug-o-war. It seemed secure and amply strong.

“Alright, I want four men to hold each side of the rope,” Manjit said.

Eng-Liang looped one end of the rope round his body under his arms and grasped both sections with his hands. His gaze swept the slope below again, turned his back to the edge and shouted, “Okay, lower me down.”

It was windy and dust blew up from the bottom of the ravine. From cracks and niches in the slopes, black swallows darted out with rustling wings, uttering frightened twittering.

Foot by foot, the drivers let the rope slip, allowing Eng-Liang to scrabble downwards. He peeked over his shoulder. The ledge, about ten feet long and in the shape of a jagged half-circle—four feet at its widest point—seemed to rise towards him.

“Hold!” Eng-Liang shouted as his feet touched the ledge, inches away from Liu-Shan’s body.

He slipped the rope over his head, squatted on his haunches and turned over Liu-Shan. Her eyes were closed. He gently placed the side of his head to her chest and his ears picked up her laboured breathing. Tension evaporated from his body, and he released a quiet exhale. Eng-Liang stood up, put his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Manjit, she’s alive. Is the stretcher ready?”

“We’re putting it together it now. Be patient. Our ex-scout’s coming down too. He’ll help you secure her to the stretcher. We’ve got strips of cloth for the job.”

The makeshift stretcher comprised a rectangular wooden frame criss-crossed with ropes about three inches apart. Eng-Liang thought it resembled an Indian charpoy. A burlap sack was also supplied to him. The ex-scout, who had also been lowered down, laid the burlap sack on the stretcher and together with Eng-Liang, they lifted Liu-Shan on top of the burlap sack and secured her with strips of cloth. Eng-Liang felt chills crawling like insects up his back as he watched the stretcher being hauled upward slowly in a horizontal position. Will the makeshift stretcher withstand her weight? She made it safely.

*******

Liu-Shan shifted her body. Pain like horrible claws tore at her left ribs. At the foot of her bed hung a clip board with two X-ray films which showed she had suffered a fracture in two rib bones, a broken radius on her right arm and a dislocated left shoulder. Yesterday, the doctor had popped the dislocated head of the humerus back in place by pulling her arm in a C-curve motion, a quick process that had Liu-Shan screaming in pain. Then he had put her arm in a plaster cast and wrapped a bandage splint round her chest.

Now, she shifted her eyes from side to side, the smell of antiseptic teasing her nostrils. Three cloth screens stood at both sides and at the foot of her bed. She recalled a nurse had told her she was in a military hospital where there was no female ward; hence they had screened off her bed.

Above the other patients’ occasional groans, coughs and hushed babble, footsteps sounded and then a familiar voice asked, “Liu-Shan, how are you feeling?”

Liu-Shan turned slightly, pain strangling her features. Eng-Liang was standing at the side of the bed. There was stubble on his chin and dark rings under his eyes.

“Bad. I’m in great pain. The doctor fixed my shoulder but two of my ribs are also fractured.”

Eng-Liang sat down on the edge of the bed at Liu-Shan’s feet. “Didn’t the doctor give you medication to relieve the pain?”

“No. They’ve run out of pain-killers.”

“Maybe that’s an excuse to stinge on medicines.” Eng-Liang rose from the bed, slipped between a gap in the cloth screens and disappeared from Liu-Shan’s view. A few moments later, Li-Shan heard him say, “Nurse! This patient here is in pain. Can you do something?”

A female voice replied, “There’s neither phenacetin nor morphine available.”

“What about alternative drugs?” It was Eng-Liang’s voice.

The female voice rose an octave higher. “Don’t you know that Changsha has been under attack? That’s only seven hundred miles away. Most of our medical supplies have been shipped to the front-line. If General Xue Yue can’t defend Changsha, the Japanese will attack Kunming next.”

Liu-Shan raised her voice. “Eng-Liang, please don’t bother her. The supply situation’s critical.”

Eng-Liang slipped through a gap between the cloth screens and returned to his former spot on the bed. “Dammit, I never knew that the Japanese are so close to us,” he cursed. “Makes me wonder about the combined efficiency of the Kuomintang and the Communists. One party’s just trying to use the other and vice versa. When the Japanese are driven out, they’ll turn against each other like wolves fighting over the kill.”

“Thank you for rescuing me.”

“You mean everything to me, Liu-Shan.” He placed his right hand over her left, gently squeezing it for a moment.

“I regained consciousness while travelling in Manjit’s truck. I’m sorry the convoy had to drive non-stop back to Kunming.”

“We’d no choice. There’s no hospital in Tali and Tsuyung.”

“When’s your next run?”

“The day after tomorrow. Our platoon’s trucks are under inspection and maintenance.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll recover in time. The pain’s the only bother. As for you, you’ve to be alert. Alert to what’s in the sky, what’s ahead of you on the road.”

Eng-Liang swung his gaze at the hot-water flask and a mug on the side table. “Is there anything you need?”

“Not really, the food’s bearable.” She released Eng-Liang’s hand and rested both her hands on her belly. “I just need to focus on pleasant things, maybe recall happy memories to get my mind off the pain.”

Eng-Liang locked gazes with Liu-Shan for a moment. “I’ll get something for you to relieve the pain. I’ll be back before I set off for the next run. You take care.”

Liu-Shan nodded and Eng-Liang rose, turned and left.

******

Kwong Eng-Liang sat on a rickshaw as it carried him down a back alley in a residential district of Kunming, the night wind blowing in his face. Locked doors whizzed past him, and light spilling from windows and flickering oil-lamps standing on small altars provided the only sources of illumination. The altars were riveted to back walls.

After zigzagging round a series of sharp bends, the puller of the rickshaw reduced his running speed and slowed to a halt outside a door where two small red lanterns hanging from above revealed a curtain of heavy fabric. Eng-Liang stepped down from the rickshaw and paid the puller. “Wait for me.”

Eng-Liang pushed aside the cloth curtain. Inside, a few feet from the doorway, a man with grey hair and a beard of the same colour sat at a table. The inside of the room startled him. It looked like a tea store in which crockery, opium-smoking paraphernalia and curios sat on shelves for sale. Lanterns dangled by red cords from the ceiling and scarlet streamers, covered with dragons and mythical animals, fluttered from hooks.

The grey-haired man thrust his chin. “What do you want?”

Eng-Liang stretched out his left arm with its palm facing upward as if supporting an imaginary opium pipe. “I want to smoke the herb of joy.”

The grey-haired man got up, waddled to the other end of the room and pushed open a rear door which creaked. “Please go inside.”

Eng-Liang stepped into a room with two brass lanterns hanging from the ceiling. A number of two-tiered wooden bunks were set round the walls. Men smoking long bamboo pipes with bowls occupied four bunks, while in others, almost ten in number, the occupants were in a deep stupor, their pipes lying at their sides. Looks like an upper-class opium den, Eng-Liang observed mentally. None of the smokers resembles coolies. They’re attired like merchants and traders. At one corner, a thirtyish man with a sallow face rose from his chair, grabbed an opium pipe from several hanging from a rack behind him and approached Eng-Liang.

“Good evening,” greeted the attendant. “How many pills?” His glazed eyes betrayed that he was also an opium fiend.

“I brought my own opium. I just want a pipe and a bunk for a few hours.”

The sallow-faced man scowled. “That’ll be five fen.” He held out an open palm and Eng-Liang dropped five coins into it.

Eng-Liang took the pipe from the attendant and slinked to a lower bunk. The bamboo stem was highly polished, one end was tipped with metal and the mouthpiece was made of ivory. He lit an oil lamp and, from his pocket, took out a small metal box which contained a modicum of tobacco. When the attendant had returned to his spot, Eng-Liang put some tobacco into the bowl of the opium pipe, lit it and smoked.

Soon, the smokers were asleep from the effects of the drug and the attendant was snoring, slumped in his chair. All over the room hung a languorous meditative spell. Eng-Liang got down from his bunk and, from his trouser pocket, took out a small tobacco tin and a small spoon. He moved from bunk to bunk, scraping the opium ashes from the pipes into the tobacco tin. Once he completed his task, he left in his rickshaw to another opium den. Five hours later, he had visited six opium dens and had filled his tobacco tin with opium ash.

*****

Eng-Liang sat on the edge of Liu-Shan’s hospital bed and leaned forward to her. “Are you all right?” His right hand gently stroked the hair tousled hair at her forehead.

Liu-Shan blinked. “Yes.”

“Were you able to sleep?”

“How I wish I could get up. All this lying down is causing me body aches.”

Eng-Liang produced a small tobacco tin from his trouser pocket. “I brought you something.”

“What’s this?”

Eng-Liang lowered his voice as if whispering a secret. ‘It’s opium ash. It’ll help to relieve the pain.” He opened the lid of the box.

Liu-Shan’s brows crinkled in surprise. “Are you sure it’s safe?” Her voice was hushed.

“Yes, as long as you don’t consume it excessively.”

“Where did you get it?"

“I visited almost all the opium dens in Kunming to collect it.” He poured some water from the flask into the mug, added one teaspoonful of opium ash and stirred the mixture with a spoon.

Liu-Shan struggled to sit up in bed, her face contorted in pain. She held the mug with one hand and swallowed the infusion. “Thank you, Eng-Liang.” She lay back on the pillow and Eng-Liang dabbed the corner of her mouth with a cotton handkerchief.

“I’ll keep this tin in the side cupboard,” he said.

“That’ll be fine.” She held Eng-Liang’s wrist. “I need to tell you something.”

His muscles tensed under her touch. “Yes?”

“An officer from the Military Council came this morning. He discussed my condition with the doctor. The Military Council’s giving me a medical discharge. My injuries will take several months to heal, and they don’t want me to be a liability to them.”

Eng-Liang felt breathless. “When will that be?”

“In two weeks’ time I shall be discharged from the hospital. Then I’ll travel by train to Rangoon and back to Kuala Lumpur.”

Shit! I’m going to miss her! A cold fist gripped Eng-Liang’s insides. “Maybe it’s for the better. The Burma Road’s like a death-trap.”

“Actually, the officer came to investigate what happened when the warplanes attacked us. I told him I panicked when I heard the roar of airplane engines so low above me. I was crouching behind the wheel — actually I froze — and when I realized the truck was slipping over the slope, I flung open the door and leaped out. I was scared, very scared.”

Eng Liang’s gaze became intent, his eyes sparkling and alert. “I’ll try to return to Malaya as soon as I can.”

“What do you mean? How?” Her eyes searched for answers as she had learned over the past several months that he had the determination to do what he set out to do either by hook or crook. “You’re not thinking of deserting, are you?”

His features grew tight with determination. “You take a good rest.” He leaned forward and pecked her lightly on the cheek. “My next run starts tomorrow. I promise you we’ll be together again.

[Note: To read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, please visit my postings on December 22, 2019 and January 20, 2020 respectively.]

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