RETURNING WITH A SAGA I was in the United States Navy in 1946 and we operated out of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Qingdao. I fell in love with Hong Kong then and vowed to come back and stay. I was in the deck crew of the USS Norris, which meant I had to sweep the deck and serve the crew their dinner.
In 1954, I returned on a cargo ship called the Eastern Saga - which is the name of my book. We took five days to make the journey from Osaka, Japan. In those days, big ships weren't permitted to come to shore and we were ferried over in walla-wallas, or water taxis. I marvelled at the houses that hung precariously from the hills over Lei Yue Mun Gap as we entered the harbour. There were junks, great ships and sampans in the harbour. I remember the mix of colonial buildings, with their arches, and, although they were five or six storeys tall, each one was an individual with its own style. The squatter areas were spread all over every hill.
I spent one night in Kowloon in the YMCA. Back in 1946, the British and American navies had had a punch up and Kowloon was out of bounds for US servicemen. But this was eight years later and I was determined to go there just to see it.
Someone in Tokyo had told me that the place to go in Hong Kong was the Foreign Correspondents' Club. When I got off the Star Ferry to come to the FCC, I was besieged by about 30 rickshaws trying to get my business. The building resembled an old castle. I stayed at the FCC for more than two years; the main reason was I couldn't settle my account! I ran up a bill of more than US$7,000 and didn't have the money to pay it. The FCC was a lively place, although the rooms left something to be desired. Lunch was US$5, dinner US$6 and it had a wonderful food bar.
TIGER SUB I worked as a foreign correspondent for about 40 years and covered the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, the Indo-Pak war, an earthquake in Bali, a student uprising in Japan and one in Korea. It all started because my father had given me a Rolleiflex camera and a cheque for US$500 and told me to go and 'get some experience'. I went to all the news agencies but they didn't have jobs for me. I wasn't trained professionally as a journalist but I didn't tell them that. I 'made-believe' I had gone to Stanford University, which had the top journalism course in the US. At the Tiger Standard [the original name for The Standard], the general manager offered me HK$600 a month and when I asked why they paid such low salaries she answered that it was a Chinese custom. I was hired as a sub-editor and erroneously thought this meant 'assistant to the editor'.
EASTERN ENGLAND Hong Kong was poor but quite colourful. The streets were full of rickshaws. Most of the British or the very rich Chinese had chauffeur-driven cars. There weren't that many Europeans around back then, except for the English, who kept to themselves and had exclusive clubs like the Shek O Club, which didn't admit Chinese. The [British] ran all the big businesses but they had Chinese compradors to give them advice on doing business with the locals. The compradors made a great deal of money but most never attained their dream of being admitted to 'British high society'. My time at the Tiger Standard meant I made a lot of Chinese and Portuguese friends and often went with them to restaurants and dance halls.
