The junk’s diesel chugged—they all have diesel engines. It glided forward, towards the entrance outside which we bobbed idly. I glanced up at the lady. She too was looking, still standing reassuringly at the oar. The junk was nearing.
No problem. Broad sunlight, vessels everywhere, ferries toing and froing. The junk was bigger than our sampan, but it could see us. Of course, in my terrible introduction to destitution Hong Kong-style two or three days ago, I had seen junks knocking about the harbor, same as I’d seen the Star Ferry ships and the P and O liners. But at the time I’d been practically delirious, paid no attention. Now, here was one emerging from the typhoon shelter with a bow wave growing under its nose. And growing.
And turning towards our sampan. This one. Mine.
“Watch out, love,” I said. The boat lady too was looking. Unperturbed, she made a slow but skilled correction.
Growing. Fifty yards off. And growing. Christ, were they all that big? It was a ship, not a mere boat. Three masts, tree trunks stripped bare. Ropes, spars. People. And coming at us. Me.
I gave a scream. “Look out, you stupid—” The sky darkened. The prow loomed, filled the sky. Its deep slow cough became a boom. Our sampan lifted on the wave. It missed us by a fraction as we rocked aside. I was yelling blasphemy and prayers, clutching on the sides. The air stank of fumes which hung about us. Johny Chen was laughing, bloody fool, still sitting and shuffling.
The junk’s huge stern stormed past and we were safe, rocking madly but still afloat.
The boat woman was calmly slogging at the oar, forcing round our sampan’s bow in a superb demonstration of natural skill. I stared in awe after the receding junk. The stern had railings and a great rudder. Unbelievably, a range of garden boxes ran the width of it. A goat’s head showed for a second. Chickens peered down at us from a crate.
A galleon. Same size, at least as tall. Like The Golden Hind. It was a floating world. In the typhoon shelter there must be several hundred.
That was the only event of note for the rest of the hour. I subsided muttering as my panic dwindled to boredom. Johny hadn’t seemed concerned in the least, the nerk. To the boat lady it had seemed a mere incidental. But it cured me of thinking uninformed thoughts about these junks. They were oceangoing craft designed for the China Sea when the Western world was unbelievably primitive. I’d now think twice before taking anything in Hong Kong for granted.
Which made me stay alert. The harbor between the long flexuous island’s mountain spine and the spreading green fawns of the mainland was still beautiful, but I began to examine it. And I mean watch. And at least one pattern emerged.
Why did sampans creep out so regularly to only one of the large low-hulled lighters moored near that small island which, not much more than an outcrop, I’d formerly noticed during my starvation period? And why did people climb aboard the lighter and nobody ever disembark? Did local passengers travel on cargo lighters? Never heard of it before. And when a police launch shushed into the typhoon shelter for a quick sprint round, the sampan shuttle trade halted. When the police left, the ferrying resumed. I was becoming interested in this too when Johny’s watch bleeped us back ashore.
On the move, Johny unplugged his trannie and immediately started talking. We got our taxi and tore around the colony sightseeing while he prattled. The tour was logically planned. Only Johny’s babble was disordered.
“Next, Hong Kong’s stock exchange,” he said, doing a reggae in Ice House Street near the police station and heeling ahead into the boring building. “Get the image, man?
Money in and out, dig?” I looked at the mob. Frantic console screens, men hurtling with the glazed eyes of the money-mad.
“Great, Johny.” Bleep bleep. Polka to the taxi and hurtle to where a cargo ship was loading. “Ship to Kyoto, Keelung, dig?”
Files of skeletal men hunched under sacks and boxes trotting up gangways into the ship’s belly while forklifters whined about the godowns.
I looked. “Great, Johny.”
Bleep, shimmy, and zoom to a bank’s marble halls, gilded pillars, the usual berserk customers. “Dollar delight, yoh dig, Lovejoy?”
“Great, Johny.”
Bleep, and hurry to a gold merchant’s with auto-seal doors and a Sikh riding shotgun in the vestibule, tellers weighing and dispensing.
“Great, Johny.”
And a long drive to inspect the Sum Chun River by China’s paddy fields. I was surprised to see so many ducks. The high vantage point overlooked a coastal plain backed by Kwantung’s distant mountains. People worked stooping. A couple of bored water buffalo strolled up and down, a real yawn. You’ve seen the pictures.
“China, Lovejoy. Dig?”
“Great, Johny.” To me, countryside’s countryside and naught else.
We also did a whirlwind zip around selected habitations, every one different. Johny was oblivious, hardly looking at where we’d arrived. His trannie was in action.
“Diamond cutting factory.” And he’d thumb at stacked sheds by Aberdeen’s jammed harbor. “Cameras, import” was a godown alongside Kowloon’s docks. “Antiques an’ all that crap, dig?” was an endless succession of tiny one- room factories in the New Territories—ivory carvings, potteries, furniture, places turning out gilded temple carvings so near to the genuine antique they made me uneasy. “More same” was the retail area along Hollywood Road, while “Same old stuff” summarized fake antique bronzes, coins, calligraphy scrolls, jade carvings, carpets. I reeled, nodded obediently, was suitably impressed. All touristy reproductions, of course, though many were superbly if unimaginatively done. He did not even mention the clothes and material in Wing On Street’s “cloth alley,” just bebopped through, letting me trail behind admiring luscious Thai silk colors and Chinese silks. I saw more phony Gucci and other famous Italian labels along Wong Nei Chung Road than I’d seen all my life, but it’s pleasant to know that modern fashion, like all else, also bends the knee to fakery.
