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made it home in one peace, my wish would come true. I pedaled harder, like I was racing against my own bad luck. And then in the white brightness of a lightning flash, I saw a figure in a balcony above my head, and somehow I knew it was her, that I’d won the race, that she was mine forever. I threw the old bicycle aside, splashed through the dirty water of the street, and leaped up to grab the side of the balcony, clambering up and over despite the slickness of the wet ironwork.
It was a woman’s wet blouse, left twisting and forgotten on a drying pole, that I’d mistaken for her—for my Oh Chang. I laughed to myself; it was a sign of how stupid I was. How could she be here, in Singapore? Why would she be standing out in the rain? She was hundreds of miles away, being showered with praise and the attention of rich admirers.
Stupid me! She was sweet and beautiful, she lived in a nice house, and she was one of the most famous actresses in the Chieu Chow opera circle. And me, I was a poor dumb stuntman, a big-nosed, ugly kid with no future.
Huddling under the pitiful shelter of the balcony canopy, I put my head down on my knees and dropped off to sleep. The wetness on my cheeks could have rain, or something else.
I apologize: I didn’t intend to go so far off course, but Oh Chang was probably the most wonderful thing to happen to me up to that point, and just thinking about her still makes me a little happy and a little sad. Many years later, Oh Chang retired from singing in the Beijing Opera and opened a small boutique in Hong Kong. Every so often, I would send one of my assistants over to check on the store, to make sure things were going okay, and to buy expensive items of clothing, which we would later donate to charity. I didn’t want her to know that I was keeping an eye on her—she would never have let me support her like that, even as a friend, so everything had to be done in complete secrecy.
Recently, she decided to move from Hong Kong, and announced to her customers that she was closing the store. I gave all of my female staff members money and told them to go over to the boutique, and they ended up buying everything that Oh Chang had! Oh Chang was happy that she had so many loyal customers—and my staff members were happy to get some nice things for free.
You know, she never got married, and didn’t even have a boyfriend.
It makes me wonder sometimes.
But I’ve said it before: history is history, the past is the past, and that’s where it belongs, in our happy memories. I’m sure she’d agree with me. That’s the kind of person she is.
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HEARTBROKEN
Once I’d settled into my new apartment, my furniture built—it wasn’t very pretty, but it suited my needs—my life in the real world could really begin. Without Master on my back all day and my brothers and sisters at my side all night, I had twenty—four hours each day to play with. After waking up in the morning at the luxurious hour of eight o’clock, I’d go buy some buns and eat them on them on the bus to the movie studio, where I’d stand around with the other junior stuntmen, waiting to be called out for work. Some of them were my brothers, and we’d sit around on the set in the shade, telling jokes, bragging, and watching the actors and senior stuntmen. Usually we weren’t impressed with what we saw. Even today, making movies can be a pretty tedious job—if you’re at the bottom of the food chain. Most of it is waiting around while other people argue and shout, trying to doze and look alert at the same time. I’s a tough skill to master, but we had plenty of practice while we were at the school, and ir served us well.
You never wanted to look like you were too bored, because then someone would grab you and make you carry things around, even if you weren’t working that day. Then again, you didn’t want to look like you were too interested, because we were young, and even back then, you had to act like you didn’t give a damn about anything if you wanted to be cool.
Hong Kong’s biggest studio at the time was owned by the Shaw Brothers, Run Run and Runme Shaw—two of Hong Kong’s first tycoons. It was called Movie Town, and it was huge, over forty acres in size, with hundreds of buildings ranging in size from prop sheds to giant soundstages and dormitories for actors who were working on contract for Shaw Brothers. It even had a mock-up of an entire Ch’ing dynasty village, which served as the set for most of the Shaws’ movies—since most of the films they were making at the time were period martial arts epics and swordsman films. That’s why stuntmen (even “stunt boys” like us) were in such big demand: we were the unknown grunts who made all of the slashing, smashing, diving, jumping, punching, kicking, flying magic possible.
The studio wouldn’t risk its big names doing things that might hurt them, not because they cared what happened to them (most contract actors got just a HK$200-a-month stipend and HK$700 per film), but because
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an injury might stop or slow down production—and Shaw Brothers churned out dozens and dozens of movies a year.
We, on the other hand, worked cheap, and we did everything, no matter how dirty or dangerous, and if they didn’t need us on a given day, they just ignored us. At least they gave us lunch, though the food was even worse than the meals at school, if you can imagine that—just rice and vegetables or soup dumped out big pots.
I mentioned before that most of the time, junior boys like me did the very worst jobs: we played corpses, or were extras in crowd scenes, wearing the oldest, smelliest costumes and standing in the back. But no matter how rotten the jobs were, they put us right in the middle of the action. We watched the seniors, and learned, and thought to ourselves how much better we’d be when we finally joined their ranks.
The day wouldn’t be over until late at night. When a movie has to be finished in less than a month, you aren’t stopped by a silly thing like the sun going down. Even though it didn’t match the look of daylight, they’d bring out huge electric lamps and keep us shooting, knowing that we’d cost the same—one day’s pay—whether they wrapped at suppertime or at midnight.
Usually I managed to leave the studio in time to get back to Kowloon by ten o’clock (Movie Town was in Clear Water Bay, on the Hong Kong side). By that time I’d be starving, so I’d grab some noodles or rice from a roadside vendor and eat it on the way to Oh Chang’s house. It’s funny: my father’s a cook, one of the best I’ve ever seen, but in all the time I lived on my own in Kowloon, I never made a real meal for myself. It was always the same street food, cheap, quick, and hot, day after day—but back then, that was what I loved. “I’m still a simple eater meal anytime.
And then, like clockwork, Oh Chang would peek her head out from the gateway to her house, and wave, and walk with me on the long, slow walk to Kowloon Park, to our bench, our moon, and our two hours together. Each day I’d carefully remember all of the strange things that happened on the set—a director got so angry at an actor that he fell out of his chair! One of the senior stuntmen fell off a roof the wrong way and landed in a horse cart, and the cart broke and wheels rolled everywhere!—just so I’d have something new and interesting to tell her. Hoping that I’d be funny enough that she’d want to see me the next night because I didn’t know what I’d do if I showed up and saw the gate closed and locked…
It was a few months after we’d returned from our trips to Southeast Asia when my worst fears finally came true.
I was a little late getting to Oh Chang’s, delayed because the director had gotten into a screaming match with the stunt coordinator over how a
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certain scene should be choreographed. I was just window dressing in the shot—a bystander in the crowd watching the fight—but the stupid director wouldn’t let any of us leave until he got his way, even though he knew that the coordinator should have say over all stunt sequences. That was stupid: you never wanted to alienate a good stunt coordinator, and the whole thing had made the coordinator lose face before his stuntmen. The director would be lucky if the rest of his film had a single battle worth watching. If I were the coordinator, I’d have walked off the set on the sport.
But as a junior nobody, I couldn’t walk away—not if I wanted to come back the next day. So I ran, breathless and sweaty, all the way from the bus stop, not even pausing to eat.
She was still there! My heart jumped up, since I’d half expected her to have gone inside and back to sleep. And then I noticed that her expression wasn’t the sweet and happy one I was used to, and that I loved so much. Her face was pale, and her eyes red. What had happened?
“Oh Chang, what’s wrong?” I said, swallowing hard.
She shook her head.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Oh Chang; it was the director— “She turned away from me, and the story I was ready to tell her, about the stupid director and his fight with the stunt coordinator, faded away unspoken. I was crushed. I knew in my heart something was wrong , and that it didn’t have anything to do with my being late.
“Yuen Lo…” she said softly, a catch in her voice. “I can’t see you anymore.”
And then she walked inside and closed the gate behind her.
I stared at the gate, a metal wall cutting me off from my happiness, and then began to run.
I wanted to scream, and if I screamed, I wanted to be as far away as possible.
I spent that night slumped in a corner in my apartment, just staring at the walls, the lights out and the shutters closed. In the pitch black of my room, I could almost imagine that I was surrounded by people, by my brothers and sisters, sound asleep and as quiet as the grave. It was better than realizing that I was alone.
I called her the next day, begging the building manager to use his phone.
The phone rang for what seemed like hours, before a stern male voice answered.
“Hello?” it said, without an ounce of kindness.
“Hello, sir,” I said, finding my tongue after a moment’s hesitation.
“I’m—I’m looking for Oh Chang.”
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