Dragon Boat
Dragon boat in a typhoon, that’s blowing across my heart, Dragon boat in a typhoon, searching for the eastern star
1989. I travelled to Hong Kong to play bass in a steamy little nightclub that was permanently packed to the rafters with US marines and English ex-patriots in a seven piece jazz combo with my dad for a few months. His regular bassist had just died from a heroin overdose, and my father’s own baby son (from his second marriage) had recently died from complications in surgery, just before his first birthday.
There was so much grief and darkness when I arrived, that I focused my whole attention on the music. The gig was six nights a week for a couple of months until they could locate a new and permanent bass player.
On New year’s day, my father and his wife travelled to a resort island for a chance to be alone with their grief and to find some comfort in being anywhere else, and I stayed on in Hong playing in the band with a piss-poor replacement pianist, an American blues-man without a clue on the notion of swing. Not one iota.
There were a lot of other good players about town, so usually after the gig, I’d race off to listen, and sit-in with the band wherever I could, which creatively satisfied me much more than the lacklustre gig I’d just come from.
Nervous, lung-sour smoke filled the foreign correspondent’s club on Tuesday nights and that’s when Alan delivered his hip, lip-service jazz and black gospel routine.
He was cool, customarily perched on the piano stool, stylishly blue upon the warm, chunky terracotta floor tiles that just lay there, lacquered, slick with puddles of a glistening adrenal secretion that rolled down the leopard legs of so many half-cut journos. Those feverishly languid few; bar-posed and hammered on each other’s jet-lagged gags. Crusty with the foul flecks of toxic spittle that shrivel-cast their lipless faces over Carlsbergs, clutching cynical claws around their wrinkled smokes.
The long, low, luxurious foyer lounges testified that, right here within all that high-brow temerity, even the bonsai survive the noxious gases. I draped my limbs across the leather lounges. Such plush, clammy landscapes of cold, hairless carcass coverings.
“Oooh, what soft leather, let me guess,…. cow, sheep, goat, snake, deer, rabbit, kangaroo, fish, chicken, elk, buffalo, bear, tiger, panther, elephant, frog, dog, cat, koala, emu, horse or hippo? Human?”
The dining room was packed with studied sufferance. The maitre-d’ brandished fresh linen napkins as the staff practiced pleating their internal organs in fanned elegance, just to be sure, just to guarantee that the late walk back to the Star Ferry terminal would remain clear of humiliation and sudden facelessness. The walk was already steep and convoluted around the British pubs and the sizzling minutiae of Hong Kong’s sales pitch glare.
I needed to get off the island and make it back to Tsim Sha Tsui. By the time I arrived back at Central, it was really raining and the harbour was turning evil. The dragon had arched her back and belched a long slow stream of virulence into the Pearl estuary and all the way across the flight path into Kai Tak. A signal nine typhoon warning had closed the airport with a snap of her jaws. Smoke curled around me and the grim faces of tired locals stared straight ahead on the gang-plank as we disembarked.
The humidity had formed a dense fog as tiny particles of south east Asia drifted in on the grey monster’s back. Hefting my bass guitar onto my other shoulder, I crossed Nathan road and slowed in the thickened wave of hurriers. The typhoon winds had streaked the green harbour with an eerie darkness that pressed us into a tension of congestion, beyond the usual pushing throngs. I was tired and desperate to get behind the doors of Chatham Court.
The sidewalks were unusually difficult to manage because people were lying in the spaces outside of shops, and large white sheets were draped around, splattered with the shouts of Chinese characters, hastily, passionately painted by an urge to speak out.
Trucks and taxis banked up into the narrow side streets, and the drenching rain made it virtually impossible for a gwaipoh to get a ride anywhere. Gwai poh? White foreign devil chick. Ghost woman. Not from around here…
I went shoe shopping in Central with my sister-in-law. Our bus became stuck in a traffic jam so dense that we wondered if the world had stopped. Thousands and thousands of people were flooding the streets.
The demonstration had begun.
Every road was blocked by a river of bodies, surging endlessly through the underpass, drenching the streets of Hong Kong island with humanity’s next new kids on the block. We stepped off the bus, and simply joined in with the flow. We had no choice, we were just swept along by the surging tide of people.
Unseen hands took mine as I was caught up, captured, inspired and stepping the way. I was clueless. I neither spoke Cantonese nor read any Chinese characters. Young people were smiling at me, welcoming my participation, and it felt safe enough to be jostled along in the current.
I knew nothing of Chinese politics, aside from a very shallow brush with modern history in high school; pre-internet snippets about Britain’s devastating gift of opium in exchange for all of China’s silver, the Boxer rebellion, war with Japan, followed by civil wars that witnessed the rise and fall of Chinese Nationalists, the Kuomintang, and the Chinese Communist party. I’d only read scant information about the Cultural Revolution, and anything that came later, (as decrypted in the wild-child mind of a young woman musician of the West), was simply the aftermath.
As we marched, I asked for translation, and somehow pieced together an understanding that this was a collective message from the students of Hong Kong, for China’s leaders to enter a bright new vision for change.
Democracy.
I had momentarily, unwittingly entered a festival for all youth, everywhere. I was witnessing a vibrant dream arouse itself with an unquenchable thirst for freedom, and I watched it fall, facedown in a whirling darkness that swelled and shaped such a gross error of judgement.
I saw every lantern of that bright dream burn, until tiny spark-wisps and ash fragments scattered across the night, drifting down in the blackness, extinguished. Forever gone.
The Hong Kong gig finished, after which I quit playing music for a while, came home to Australia and auditioned for my next life.