And Hing’s business boomed.
I had known Hing long before I jumped ship. The Allegro was registered in Panama, but her home port was Hong Kong. We were often in Singapore, and the only occasion in eleven months we left the Indian Ocean was to take a cargo of rubber to Vancouver. I thought of jumping ship there, and nearly did it, except that beyond Vancouver and the cold wastes of Canadian America I saw the United States, and that was the place I was fleeing.
Hing was the first person I thought of when I developed my plan for leaving the Allegro. At the time he seemed the kindest man. I always looked forward to our stops in Singapore, and Hing was glad of our business. Just a small-time provisioner, delivering corn flakes to housewives at the British bases and glad for the unexpected order of an extra pound of sausages, he worked out of his little shop on Beach Road; Gopi packed the cardboard cartons, and Little Hing took the groceries around in a beat-up van. We were not dealing with Hing then. Our ship chandler was a large firm, also on Beach Road, just down from Raffles Hotel. One day, checking over our crates of supplies, I saw some secondhand valves wrapped in newspaper that I felt were being palmed off on me.
“We didn’t order these,” I said.
The clerk took them out of the crate. He dropped them on the floor.
“Where are the ones we ordered?”
The clerk said nothing. The Chinese mouth is naturally grim; his was drawn down, his nether lip pouted; his head, too large for the rest of his body, had corners, and looked just like a skull, not a head fleshed out with an expression, but in contour and lightness, the sutures and jaw hinges visible, a bone with a flat skeletal crown. This feller’s head, ridiculously mounted on a scrawny neck, infuriated me.
“Where,” I repeated, “are the ones we ordered?”
He swallowed, setting his Adam’s apple in motion. “Out of stock.”
“I thought as much. So you gave us these. You’re always doing that!” I almost blew a gasket. “We’re going to be at sea for the next ten days. What if a valve goes? They aren’t going to be any good to us, are they?” I wanted him to reply. “Are they?”
Anger takes some responsive cooperation to fan blustering to rage. He would not play; the Chinese seldom did. Some fellers accused the Chinese of harboring a motiveless evil, but it was not so. Their blank look was disturbing because it did nothing to discourage the feeling that they meant us harm. The blankness was blankness, a facial void reflecting a mental one: confusion. If I had to name the look I would call it fear, the kind that can make the Chinese cower or be wild. The clerk cowered, withdrawing behind the counter.
I kicked the crate and stamped out of the shop. Next door Hing was smiling in the doorway of his shop. I was immediately well disposed to him; he was reliably fat and calm, and he had the prosperous, satisfying bulk, the easy grace of a trader with many employees.
“Yes?”
Apart from a few wooden stools, a calendar, an abacus, bills withering on a spike, and on the wall a red altar with a pot full of smoldering joss sticks, the shop was empty of merchandise. Little Hing was carrying groceries from the back room, Gopi was ramming them into a crate.
“I need some valves,” I said. Then, “Got?”
He thought I was saying “bulbs,” but we got that straight, and finally, after I described the size, he said, “Can get.”
“When?”
“Now,” he said, calling Little over. “You want tea? Cigarette? Here—” He shook a cigarette out of a can. “Plenty for you. Don’t mention. Come, I light. Thank you.”
He had the valves for me in twenty minutes, and that was how we started doing business with Hing. The next time the Allegro called at Singapore, Hing had put up his ship chandler’s sign. There was nothing he could not get; he had a genius for winkling out the scarcest supplies, confirming the claim he printed on his stationery, Provisions of Every Description Shall Be Supplied at Shortest Notice. And every time I called on him with my shopping list he took me out to dinner, a roast beef and Yorkshire pudding feed at the Elizabethan Grill, or a twelve-course Chinese dinner with everything but bears’ paws and fish lips on the table.
It was simple business courtesy, the ritual meal. I was buying a thousand dollars’ worth of provisions and supplies from him; for this he was paying for my dinner. I was an amateur. I thought I was doing very well, and always congratulated myself as, lamed by brandy, I staggered to the quay to catch a sampan back to the Allegro. I only understood the business logic of “Have a cigar — take two,” when it was too late; but as I say, I started out hissing, “Hey bud” from doorways along Robinson Road. I was old enough to know better.
During one of the large meals, Hing, who in the Chinese style watched me closely and heaped my plate with food every five minutes, leaned over and said, “You… wucking… me.” His English failed him and he began gabbing in Cantonese. The waitress was boning an awed steamed garupa that was stranded on a platter of vegetables. She translated shyly, without looking up.
“He say… he like you. He say… he want a young man…”
“Ang moh,” I heard Hing say. “Redhead.”
The waitress removed the elaborate comb of the fish’s spine and softened Hing’s slang to, “European man… do very good business for European ship. European people… not speak awkward like Chinese people. And he say…”
Hing implored with his eyes and his whole smooth face.
I was thirty-nine. At thirty-nine you’re in your thirties; at forty, or so I thought then, you’re in the shadow of middle age. It was as if he had whispered, “Brace yourself, Flowers. I’ve had my eye on you for a long time…” I was excited. The Chinese life in Singapore was mainly noodles and children in a single room, the noise of washing and hoicking. It could not have been duller, but because it was dull the Chinese had a gift for creating special occasions, a night out, a large banquet or festive gathering which sustained them through a year of yellow noodles. Hing communicated this festive singularity to me; I believed my magic had worked, my luck had changed with my age; not fortune, but the promise of it was spoken. I saw myself speeding forward in a wind like silk.
Three weeks later, I walked into Hing’s shop. He shook my hand, offered the can of cigarettes, and began clacking his lighter, saying, “Yes, Jack, yes.”
Little Hing came over and asked for the shopping list, the manifests and indents.
“No list,” I said, and grinned. “No ship, no list!” I had turned away to explain. “From now on I’m working for the towkay.”
Behind me, Big Hing was screwing the lid back on to the can of cigarettes, and that was the only sound; the tin lid caught and clicked and rasped in the metal grooves, and was finally silent.
Big Hing was grave, reflectively biting his upper lip with his lower teeth. He banged the cigarette tin onto the trestle table, making the beads on the abacus spin and tick. He became brisk. He led me to my cubicle, two beaverboard partitions, without a ceiling, narrow as a urinal, and he shot the curtain along its rod, jangling the chrome hoops. I climbed onto the stool and put my head down. I did not turn around. I knew the Allegro had sailed without me.