From the Ashes

THERE'S ALREADY A CONSIDERABLE DISTANCE between myself and Hong Kong:
one thousand miles, two years, new events, and new people. I would not have known how or from where to begin speaking of what I saw and heard in Hong Kong during the war, because the experience cut too close to the bone, affecting me in an altogether drastic fashion. My mind is now some-what more settled, at least to the extent that I am able to keep those events in some kind of order when they come up in conversation. And yet my impressions of the battle of Hong Kong seem nevertheless to be almost entirely restricted to a few irrelevant trivialities.
I have neither the desire to write history nor the qualifications to comment on the approach historians ought to bring to their work, but privately I have always found myself wishing that they would concern themselves more with irrelevant things. This thing we call reality is unsystematic, like seven or eight talking machines playing all at once in a chaos of sound, each singing its own song. From within that incomprehensible cacophony, how-ever, there sometimes happens to emerge a moment of sad and luminous clarity, when the musicality of a melody can be heard, just before it is engulfed once more by layer after layer of darkness, snuffing out this unexpected moment of lucidity. Painters, writers, and composers string together these random and accidentally discovered moments of harmony in order to create artistic coherence. When history insists on the same sort of coherence, it becomes fiction. The reason that H. G. Wells's Outline of History
 cannot stand as a proper history is that it is a little too rationalized, chronicling as it does the struggle between the individual and the group from start to finish.
Rigid and unswerving worldviews, be they political or philosophical, can-not help provoking the antipathy of others. What's usually called joie de vivre is to be found entirely in trivial things.
In Hong Kong, when we first received word of the advent of war, one of the girls in the dormitory flew into a panic, "What am I to do? I have nothing to wear!" She was a wealthy overseas Chinese for whom different sorts of social occasions required different sorts of apparel. She had made adequate preparations for all kinds of contingencies, from dancing on a yacht to a formal dinner, but she had never considered the possibility of war. She managed eventually to borrow a baggy black quilted cotton dress, which she figured would not be the least bit attractive to the fighter planes circling overhead. When the time came to flee, all the students in the dormitory went their separate ways. After the battle, when I ran into her again, she had cut her hair short in the boyish Filipino style that was all the rage in Hong Kong at the time, so that she could look more like a man if need be.
The psychological response of different people to the war did, in fact, seem to have something to do with their clothes. Take Sureika, for instance. Sureika was the reigning beauty of a remote little town on the Malay Peninsula, a skinny girl with dark brown skin, heavy-lidded and languorous eyes, and slightly protruding front teeth. Like most girls who have been educated in a convent, she was almost shamefully naive. She chose to study medicine. Medical students have to dissect corpses, but do the corpses wear clothes? Sureika was concerned about this question and made inquiries. This became a standing joke around campus.
When a bomb fell next door to our dormitory, the warden had no choice but to order us to evacuate down the hill. Even at the height of the crisis, Sureika did not neglect to pack up her most luxurious clothes and, in defiance of the earnest counsel of many wise people, found a way to transport them down the hill in a large and unwieldy leather trunk in the midst of an artillery barrage. Sureika later participated in defense work, becoming a substitute nurse for a Red Cross medical unit. She would squat down on her haunches to gather firewood and light bonfires, clad all the while in a copper-red brocade gown, embroidered in green with the character for "longevity." And though it was something of a shame to wear such a nice dress under those circumstances, the brilliance of her attire allowed her an unprecedented degree of self-confidence, without which she would have been unable to mix so well with her male coworkers, and this made it worth‑
 while. As she shared their hardships and braved danger alongside them, sharing jokes, chatting, and growing accustomed to the work, she gradually became a skilled old hand. For her, the war was a rare sort of education.
For must of us students, however, our attitude toward the war can be summed up by a metaphor: we were like someone sitting on a hard plank bench, trying to take a nap. Although in terrible discomfort and ceaselessly complaining of such, we managed all the same to fall asleep in the end.
What we did not have to pay attention to we managed to ignore. As we passed through life and death situations, navigating the most colorful experiences imaginable, we remained ourselves, untouched, maintaining our everyday modes of life. Occasionally, someone might do something that seemed somewhat out of the ordinary, but after careful analysis, one could see that it was in fact entirely in character. Evelyn, for instance, was from the interior of China and had witnessed plenty of combat in her time. By her own account, she was hardy, tough, and entirely accustomed to frightening experiences. When the military garrison next to our dormitory was bombed in an air raid, though, Evelyn was the first to lose control, bursting into hysterical sobs and loudly relating her stock of terrifying war stories for the benefit of the other female students until their faces turned ghostly pale with fright.
Evelyn's pessimism was a healthy sort of pessimism. When the grain reserves in the dormitory were almost gone, Evelyn began to eat more than usual and urged us all to do the same, since there would very soon be nothing left to eat at all. We had actually thought of making a serious bid to cut down our food intake and even ration our supplies, but she did her best to obstruct these efforts, eating more than her fill and sitting to one side and sobbing, all of which eventually resulted in a bad case of constipation.
We congregated in the basement of the dormitory, and in the pitch dark stood between stacks of trunks, listening to the sound of machine gun fire crackling like raindrops on water lotus leaves. Because the little scullery maid was afraid of ricocheting bullets and refused to go near the window to wash the vegetables in the light, our soup was full of little wriggling insects.
Fatima was the only one of my classmates who had any guts.' She risked her life to go into town to see a movie-a Technicolor cartoon-and, when she got back to the dormitory, went upstairs all alone to take a bath. When a ricocheting bullet shattered the bathroom window, she remained calm,
'A Sri Lanlcan woman who was Chang's best friend throughout the war years and who designed the original cover of Written on Water- Chang conferred on her the Chinese name Yanying, and she is the topic of a subsequent essay, "The Sayings of Yanying," also included in this volume.
 leisurely humming a tune as she continued to splash in the tub. The war-den was furious when he heard her singing. Her indifference seemed to make a mockery of everyone else's terror.
When Hong Kong University shut down, out-of-town students were forced to leave the dormitories—driven, in effect, into homelessness. There was no way to solve the problem of room and board save to join the defense effort. I went with a large group of fellow students to register at the Air-Raid Precaution headquarters. As soon as we were done, emerging with newly issued badges in hand, we managed to run right into an air raid. We jumped off the tram we had been riding and made a beeline for the side-walk, flattening ourselves against a doorway, wondering whether we had fulfilled our duties as Air-Raid Precaution volunteers in the process. (Before I had managed to find out what the duties of an Air-Raid Precaution volunteer might be, the battle was already over and done.) The door of the building was crammed with people in bulky winter clothes, redolent of brilliantine. Looking above their heads, I saw a brilliantly clear pale blue sky. The emptied tram sat in the middle of the street. The space outside the tram was full of pale sunlight; the tram, too, was filled with sunlight, and that lone tram possessed at that moment a sort of primitive desolation all its own.
I felt terribly uncomfortable-would I die amid a crowd of strangers? Yet what would be the good of being blown to bits and scraps alongside my own flesh and blood? Someone barked a command: "Hit the deck! Hit the deck!" How could one possibly find a place to hit the deck surrounded by such a lot of people? And yet we somehow managed to collapse against each other's backs and tumble to the ground. An airplane dived through the air and with a bang was right over our heads. I covered my face with an Air-Raid Defense helmet, and only after a long moment of darkness did I begin to realize that we had not died after all. The bomb had landed on the other side of the street. A young store clerk who had been wounded in the thigh was being helped across the street, his pants leg rolled up to reveal a trickle of blood. He was very happy, because he had become the focus of the crowd's attention. At first, the people outside the doorway tried to force the door open, but it wouldn't budge. With the clerk's arrival, they fell to again with the courage of newly discovered moral conviction and began to shout: "Open the door! Don't you know there's a wounded man out here! Open up!" One could hardly blame whoever was inside for not opening the door, because our little group was a rabble and might be capable of anything. The indignation of the crowd grew to such a pitch that they began to curse the people inside for "heartless beasts." Finally, the door opened, and the crowd surged inside with a great shout, received by a couple of old ladies and their maids, who
 stood woodenly in the entrance hall and held their peace. It's hard to say whether all the chests and storage baskets lining the corridor remained in place when everything was over. The plane continued to drop bombs on other parts of the city, receding gradually into the distance. And when the air-raid alert was finally lifted, the entire crowd made a mad dash for the tram car, for fear of forfeiting the price of a ticket if they couldn't get on in time.
We received word that Professor France of the history department had been shot dead—by his own men. Like the rest of the English, he had been requisitioned by a military garrison. That day, he had come back to the bar-racks after nightfall. Perhaps he was lost in thought, for when he failed to respond to the sentry's call, the sentry opened fire.
France was an open-minded and magnanimous fellow, thoroughly sinicized, who wrote a passable hand in Chinese (although he did have problems with stroke order), loved to drink, and had once gone on a trip with a group of Chinese professors to Canton, where they visited with the little nuns at a Buddhist nunnery of less-than-sterling repute. He had built him-self a place with three bungalows well off the beaten track. One of the buildings was entirely given over to raising hogs. There was neither electricity nor running water at his house, because he did not approve of material civilization. He did, however, have a beat-up old automobile, which the house boy used for grocery shopping.
He had a childishly ruddy face, porcelain blue eyes, and a prominent round chin, his hair had already begun to thin, and he wore a tattered length of Nankeen silk, printed with Buddhist swastikas, as a necktie. He smoked like a chimney during class. As he delivered his lectures, a cigarette would always dangle precariously from his lips, shuttling up and down like a seesaw but never falling to the ground. When he tossed his cigarette butts toward the window when he was done, they would whiz past the girls' billowy perms: a not inconsiderable fire hazard.
He had his own unique take on historical research. He read official documents to us with such rhetorical flourish that they became very funny We derived a sense of being close to history from him, as well as a cogent world-view, and we could have learned so very much more, but he died-an entirely purposeless death. His life could not be said to have been sacrificed for the good of his country. And even if he had died for king and country, so what? He had very little sympathy for England's colonial policies and didn't take them all that seriously either, perhaps because he felt that it was only one of the world's many follies. Whenever it was time for the volunteer corps to drill, he would always say, "I won't be able to see you next Monday, children. I've got to practice my martial arts." Little did we know

that "practicing martial arts" would one day take his life. A good teacher, a good man. The waste of humanity . . .
Many others have already pointed to the chaos and destruction of every sort of public amenity during the siege of Hong Kong. The cooling ducts of the government cold stores broke down, but the authorities allowed the mountains of beef stored inside to rot rather than distributing it. Volunteers in the defense effort were given rice and soybeans but no oil and no fuel for cooking. The officers of the Air-Raid Precaution corps spent their time looking for firewood and rice with which to provision those under their command and had no time to spare for taking care of bombs. For two days running, I ate nothing and went to work with the floating gait usually associated with immortals unencumbered by base desires. Of course, someone as derelict in duty as I probably deserved to suffer. I finished reading A Gallery of the Bureaucracy during an artillery barrage.2 I had read it once when I was little, before I was able to appreciate its virtues, and had always wanted to read it again. As I read, I worried whether I would be allowed to finish the book. The print was minuscule, and the light poor, but if a bomb were to fall, what would I need my eyes for, anyway? "When there's no skin," the saying goes, "where do you put the hair?"
Throughout the eighteen days of the siege, was there anyone who did not experience that unbearable, half-past-four-in-the-morning feeling? Waking to another trembling dawn, surrounded by fog, cowering from the cold, with nothing to depend on. No way home. And if or when you got home at all, you might not find it there anymore. Homes can be destroyed, money transformed into worthless paper in the bat of an eyelid, other people can die. And one's own life? Precarious at best. As the Tang poem puts it: "Bleakly I leave those near and dear / moving into distant misty veils. "3 But even lines like these cannot describe the untenable and unmoored quality of that emptiness and despair. It was intolerable to most people, and that is why they were so anxious to grasp on to something solid, and that is why they got married.
A couple came to our office to borrow a car from the Air-Raid Precaution branch director so that they could go to collect their marriage license. The man was a doctor and probably not a very kind person in ordinary circum-stances, but now he gazed constantly toward his bride, his eyes brimming over with a devotion so dogged that it was almost tragic. The bride was a nurse, petite and rather pretty, with rosy cheeks glowing with happiness. Unable to obtain a proper wedding dress, she wore instead a sleeveless pale green silk robe, hemmed with dark green lace. They came in several times and were made to wait several hours on each occasion. They would sit quietly across from one another, gazing into each other's eyes, and so unable to suppress their smiles that we all smiled along with them. We really ought to have given them a better return for the gratuitous happiness they brought us.
Eventually, the battle came to an end. It was a bit difficult to adjust to its absence after the cease-fire. Peace came as a kind of disturbance, acting on us like too much wine. To see airplanes in the blue sky above and know that one could enjoy watching them fly without risking a bomb falling on one's
2A late Qing dynasty novel by Li Boyuan (1867-1906) that exposed the foibles and corruption of the official class, first published in 1903-
3The line is from a poem by the eight-century poet Wei Yingwu titled "Chu fa Yangzi ji Yuan da jiaoshu" (On first setting out on the Yangzi River; sent to Collator Yuan the Senior).
 head - this was enough to make them seem lovable. Forlorn, sparse winter trees spreading their hazy canopies like pale yellow clouds, clear water flowing from a faucet, electric lights, busy street life: all these things belonged to us again. Time itself had been restored to us: the light of day, the dark of night, the four seasons. For the time being, our lease on life was allowed to continue. Wasn't that enough to make people beside themselves with joy?
. It was precisely because of this peculiar psychological state that the postwar years in Europe became the Roaring Twenties.
I remember how we scoured the streets in search of ice cream and lipstick after Hong Kong fell. We went into every store we saw to ask whether they had ice cream. Only one place conceded that it might perhaps have some the next day. We trooped several miles back to the store to honor the engagement and were given a plate of expensive ice cream, chock-full of little ice crystals that made a crunchy noise with each mouthful. The streets were full of makeshift stalls selling rouge, western medicines, canned beef and mutton, stolen suits, cashmere sweaters, lace curtains, cut glass, whole bolts of woolens. We went to the city every day to go shopping. We called it shopping but really did no more than look. It was at that time that I first learned how to transform shopping into a pastime; no wonder the majority of women never tire of it.
Hong Kong discovered anew the joy of eating. Strange how the most natural, the most fundamental of functions, when suddenly accorded excessive attention and subjected to the glare of intense emotion, can come to seem sordid and even perverse. In Hong Kong after the battle, there were people every five or ten paces along the sidewalks, dressed in the immaculate fashion of those employed by foreign firms, squatting by little stoves cooking yellow biscuits that were as hard as iron. Hong Kong is not quite as can-do as Shanghai, and new entrepreneurial opportunities are exploited only very slowly. For what seemed like ages, these yellow cakes continued to monopolize the street food market. Only very gradually did experimental varieties such as sweet rolls, samosas, and rather dubious-looking coconut cakes begin to make an appearance. Schoolteachers, shopkeepers, legal clerks everyone had suddenly become a snack vendor.
We stood at the stalls eating turnip cakes fried in bubbling hot oil, while barely a meter away the discolored corpse of a pauper lay by our feet. Would winter in Shanghai be just the same? At least Shanghai would not seem to tolerate such a scene so readily. Hong Kong lacks Shanghai's sense of its own cultivation.
Because of the shortage of petrol, garages were turned into restaurants, and you could hardly find a silk shop or a medicine shop that wasn't selling pastries on the side. Hon! Kong had never before been so gluttonous. The students in the dormitory talked of nothing the whole day except food.

In this euphoric atmosphere, only Jonathan stood alone, brimming over with disdain and fury. Jonathan was another overseas Chinese classmate who had joined the ranks of the Volunteer Corps and fought in combat. He wore an open-necked shirt under his greatcoat, his face was wan, and a lock of hair dangled between his brows in a manner reminiscent of Byron­ such a shame that his pallor was merely the result of a bad cold. Jonathan knew all about what had happened during the fighting in Kowloon. What made him angriest was that they had sent two undergraduates to the trenches to carry an English soldier back from the front: "Two of our lives weren't worth one of theirs. They promised special treatment when they recruited us, said we would be supervised by our own professors, but they broke every single one of their promises." As he had thrown aside his scholar's brush to join the ranks, he must have thought the war would resemble an excursion to Kowloon chaperoned by the Young Men's Christian Association.

After the cease-fire, we worked as nurses in a makeshift hospital at the university. Aside from a few regular patients moved from the larger hospitals, most were coolies hit by stray bullets and looters who had been injured as they were being arrested. There was a tuberculosis patient who had a bit more money than most and hired another patient to serve as his valet, sending him out into the street in his baggy, wide-sleeved hospital gown to run errands. The hospital chief felt that this represented a lapse of decorum, flew into a rage, and threw them both out. Another patient was found to have secreted a roll of gauze, several surgical knives, and three pairs of hospital trousers under his pillow.

Moments of drama wee rare. The patients' days passed so slowly that they were driven to distraction. The higher-ups sent word that they were to sift rice, picking out the little pebbles and chaff, and because they really had nothing else to do, they seemed to take to this monotonous task. In time, they even began to grow fond of their own wounds. In the hospital, each patient's wounds came to represent the sum of his individuality. Each morning when ointments were applied and dressings changed, I watched as they gazed with adoring eyes at the new flesh forming around the wounds, with something resembling the love of a creator for his handiwork.

They lived in the dining hall of the men's dormitory. In the past, this room had always been busting with noise: a gramophone playing the Brazilian ballads of Carman Miranda, students breaking plates and cursing the cook at every turn. Now some thirty silent, seething, and smelly men occupied the room, unable to move their legs, unable to stir their minds, unaccustomed to thought. There weren't enough pillows so their beds were pushed up against the columns, and they lay with their heads propped against them, their necks at right angles to the rest of their bodies. They sat with their eyes wide open, waiting to be served two portions of brown rice per day, one dry, one gruel. With continued exposure to the elements, most of the air-raid protection paper pasted over the glass doors had begun to flake away, and when the sun shone through the glass, the white shreds looked like paper voodoo dolls. At night, these grotesque little white goblins were silhouetted against the deep blue of the glass panes.
We didn't mind the night shift, because even though it was ten hours long, very little had to be done. When the patients needed to urinate or move their bowels, all we had to do was to call for one of the orderlies: "Bedpan for number 23" (using the Cantonese Anglicism "pan"), or "Piss-pot for number 30." We sat behind a screen reading, and we even had late-night snacks of specially delivered milk and bread. The only drawback was that eight or nine times out of ten, patients would die during the night.
There was one man whose tailbone was rotting with gangrene, exuding an evil stench. When his suffering was at its worst, his facial expression actually seemed almost ecstatic: eyelids drooping, mouth pulled into the smile of someone who has an itch he can't quite scratch. He called out all night long, "Miss! Oh, Miss!" The syllables were drawn out, quavering, even melodic. I paid no attention. I was an irresponsible, heartless nurse. I hated him, because he was suffering terrible things. Eventually, every patient in the room was roused from sleep, and, unable to ignore him, they began to call out in unison, "Miss." I could only walk over, stand sullenly by his bed.
"What do you want?"
He thought for a while, then moaned, "Water." All he really wanted was for someone to wait on him; the task didn't matter. I told him there was no boiled water in the kitchen and walked away. He sighed, fell silent for a moment, and then began to call out again, until he couldn't manage any-thing but a kind of low moan:
"Miss . . . Oh, miss . . . Hey, miss . ."
At three in the morning, as my colleagues slept, I went to boil milk, heedlessly carrying the fat white milk bottle through the hospital ward and down to the kitchen. Most of the patients were awake, and they stared wide-eyed at the bottle, which to them was even more beautiful than a lily blossom.
Hong Kong had never had such a bitterly cold winter. As I washed the old, coverless copper pot with a bar of soap, my hands felt like they were being cut by a knife. The pot was sticky with grime and grease. The order‑
 lies used it to make soup, and the patients to wash their faces. I poured the milk, and the copper pot sat atop the blue gas flame, like an image of Buddha sitting astride a blue lotus flower, pure and luminous. But that interminable drawl of "Miss . . . Oh, Miss" pursued me all the way to the kitchen. One white candle illuminated the small room as I kept watch over the milk as it came to a boil, as flustered and angry as a hunted beast.
The day the man died we were all happy enough to dance. Just as the sun began to rise, we entrusted his funeral arrangements to a professional nurse and retreated to the kitchen. One of my companions used coconut oil to bake some bread that tasted a bit like Chinese fermented rice cakes. A cock was crowing over another icy white morning. Selfish people such as ourselves went nonchalantly on with living.
Besides work, we studied Japanese. The teacher they sent was a young Russian whose yellow hair was cropped close to his skull. Each time we went to class, he would begin the lesson by asking a female student her age in Japanese. If she hesitated, he would hazard a guess: "Eighteen? Nineteen? No more than twenty, I should think. Which floor do you live on? May I come and visit you sometime?" As the student contemplated how to discourage his advances, he would chuckle: "No English allowed. You have to answer in Japanese. All you know how to say is 'Please come in and sit down. Have something to eat.' You don't know the Japanese for, 'Get out of here!' " When he had finished his joke, he himself would be the first to blush. At first, students jostled for a place in the lecture hall, but gradually fewer and fewer students showed up for his class. When the numbers had dwindled to embarrassing lows, he quit in a fit of pique and was replaced by another teacher.
This Russian teacher saw my drawings but had eyes only for a portrait of Fatima wearing a corset. He was willing to part with five Hong Kong dollars for it, but when he saw how reluctant we were to sell, he quickly relented, "Five dollars-not including the frame."
The special atmosphere during the war inspired me to draw a lot of pictures- Fatima colored them in. Going into transports over one's own sketches might be unseemly, but the fact is that these pictures were actually quite good. They didn't seem anything like my own work, and I can never dream of drawing the likes of them again. My only reservation is that people found them somewhat baffling. I could have spent a lifetime writing annotated biographies for those pell-mell character sketches and never regretted a moment. For example: the irascible sub letter’s wife, crossed-eyed, her pupils protruding like two water faucets; the young matron whose head and neck are the barrel of an electric hair dryer at a salon; a prostitute

with an infectious disease squatting like a lion or a dog, garters and the tops of her red silk stockings showing beneath her dress.
I especially liked the colors Fatima used for one picture in particular, all different blues and greens, reminiscent of the line in the poem: "Blue seas lit by the moon, a pearl sheds tears / Indigo fields warmed by the sun, jade gives rise to mist."4
I sketched with the knowledge that I would very soon lose the ability to do so. And from this I derived a lesson, an old lesson. If there is something you want to do, do it right away; even then, you might already be too late. Man is the most changeable of creatures.
4The line derives from the famously cryptic and lyrical ninth-century poet Li Shang-yin's celebrated poem Jinse (Brocade zither)-
 There was a young Annamese classmate who had a minor reputation as a painter among his fellow students. He complained that in the wake of the battle, his line was not nearly as forceful as it had once been, since he was now compelled to cook for himself, which left his arms fatigued. It pained us terribly to watch each day as he fried aubergines (for fried aubergine was the only dish he knew how to cook).
When the war broke out, most Hong Kong University students were overjoyed, because December 8 also happened to be the first day of exams, and to be excused from exams for no reason was an almost unprecedented godsend. That winter, we suffered through a fair amount of hardship and through these trials gained a better sense of our priorities. But priorities are difficult to define. Once you dispose of all the specious ornaments of culture, what seems to remain is merely "food and drink, man and woman." Human civilization does its best to transcend the realm of the bestial, but could it be that several thousand years of work have been nothing but wasted effort? So it seems. Students from overseas, stranded in one spot with nothing at all to do, spent their days grocery shopping, cooking, and flirting-and not the gentle sort of flirting that normally takes place among students, leavened with a touch of sentimentality. In the dormitories after the war, a male student might lie on a girl's bed playing cards deep into the night and then come back the very next morning before she had even awoken and sit himself right back down on the edge of the bed. From next door, one would hear her coy cries of "No! Didn't I say no? No, I will not" and so on until she was dressed. This sort of phenomenon produced different reactions in different people and may even have compelled some of us to retreat in horror to Confucius's side. In the end, one cannot dispense with restrictions. Primitive people may well have had a certain innocence, but, in the final analysis, they weren't completely human, either
The hospital director was extremely worried by the prospect of illegitimate-mate war babies. One day, he happened to catch sight of a female student sneaking out of the dormitory with a rectangular bundle in her arms and thought his nightmare had already become reality. Only later did he learn that she was carrying rice she had gotten at work to sell on the black market but had disguised the sack as a baby to forestall the possibility of being mugged by the hoodlums who filled the streets.
In point of fact, what we had were over eighty young people who had narrowly escaped with their lives and for that reason were all the more full of vitality. There was food, there was shelter, and there were none of the usual entertainments outside to distract us. There were no professors (in truth, most professors are eminently dispensable), but there were lots of
 books: the pre-Han philosophers, Shijing (The classic of poetry), the Bible, Shakespeare. This was, in short, the ideal environment for higher education. And yet our classmates treated it as a tedious transitional period; behind them lay the ordeal of battle and ahead the moment when they could finally sit at their mothers' knee and sob out their sorrows. In the meantime, the best they could do was listlessly scribble the legend "home sweet home" across a dusty windowpane. Getting married, even if out of boredom, was at least a somewhat less passive approach to the situation.
That people who have neither professions nor pastimes find solace in marriage was attested to by the endless parade of marriage announcements in the Hong Kong newspapers. Some of the students among us got married as well. Students typically have very little understanding of the realities of human nature. When they have had for the first time an opportunity to peel away someone else's surface, revealing the timid, pitiful, or laughable being underneath who shrinks from the slightest touch, they almost always fall in love with this first discovery. There is no question, of course, that they had everything to gain and nothing to lose by love and marriage, but willingly to limit their own horizons when still so young seems rather tragic.
The vehicle of the times drives inexorably forward. We ride along, passing through thoroughfares that are perhaps already quite familiar. Against a sky lit by flames, they are capable nevertheless of shaking us to the core. What a shame that we occupy ourselves instead searching for shadows of ourselves in the shop windows that flit so quickly by-we see only our own faces, pallid and trivial. In our selfishness and emptiness, in our smug and shameless ignorance, everyone of us is like all the others. And each of us is alone.