The Harmony Silk Factory

I told Father about this woman and how she had smiled at me. His response was as I expected. He reached slowly for my ear and twisted it hard, squeezing the blood from it. He said, “Don’t tell stories,” and then slapped my face twice.

To tell the truth, I had become used to this kind of punishment.

Even when I was young, I was aware of what my father did. I wasn’t exactly proud, but I didn’t really care. Now I would give everything to be the son of a mere liar and cheat, because, as I have said, that wasn’t all he was. Of all the bad things he ever did, the worst happened long before the big cars, the pretty women, and the Harmony Silk Factory.

Now is a good time to tell his story. At long last, I have put my crime-funded education to good use, and have read every single article in every book, newspaper, and magazine that mentions my father, in order to understand the real story of what happened. For more than a few years of my useless life, I have devoted myself to this enterprise, sitting in libraries and government offices even. My diligence has been surprising. I will admit that I have never been a scholar, but recent times have shown that I am capable of rational, organised study, in spite of my father’s belief that I would always be a dreamer and a wastrel.

There is another reason I now feel particularly well placed to relate the truth of my father’s life. An observant reader may sense forthwith that it is because the revelation of this truth has, in some strange way, brought me a measure of calm. I am not ashamed to admit that I have searched for this all my life. Now, at last, I know the truth and I am no longer angry. In fact, I am at peace.

As far as it is possible, I have constructed a clear and complete picture of the events surrounding my father’s terrible past. I say “as far as it is possible” because we all know that the retelling of history can never be perfectly accurate, especially when the piecing together of the story has been done by a person with as modest an intellect as myself. But now, at last, I am ready to give you this, “The True Story of the Infamous Chinaman Called Johnny.”

2. The True Story of the Infamous Chinaman Called Johnny (Early Years)

SOME SAY JOHNNY WAS BORN IN 1920, the year of the riots in Taiping following a dispute between Hakkas and Hokkiens over the right to mine a newly discovered tin deposit near Slim River. We do not know who Johnny’s parents were. Most likely, they were labourers of Southern Chinese origin who had been transported to Malaya by the British in the late nineteenth century to work in the mines in the Valley. Such people were known to the British as coolies, which is generally believed to be a bastardisation of the word kulhi, the name of a tribe native to Gujerat in India.

Fleeing floods, famine, and crushing poverty, these illiterate people made the hazardous journey across the South China Sea to the rich equatorial lands they had heard about. It was mainly the men who came, often all the young men from one village. They arrived with nothing but the simple aim of making enough money to send for their families to join them. Traditionally viewed as semi-civilised peasants by the cultured overlords of the Imperial North of China, these Southern Chinese had, over the course of centuries, become expert at surviving in the most difficult of conditions. Their new lives were no less harsh, but here they found a place which offered hope, a place which could, in some small way, belong to them.

They called it, simply, Nanyang, the South Seas.

The Southern Chinese look markedly different from their Northern brethren. Whereas Northerners have candle-wax skin and icy, angular features betraying their mixed, part-Mongol ancestry, Southerners appear hardier, with a durable complexion that easily turns brown in the sun. They have fuller, warmer features and compact frames which, in the case of overindulgent men like my father, become squat with the passing of time.

Of course this is a generalisation, meant as a rough guide for those unfamiliar with basic racial fault lines. For evidence of the unreliability of this rule of thumb, witness my own features, which are more Northern than Southern, if they are at all Chinese (in fact, I have even been told that I have the look of a Japanese prince).