Meeting old friends and new

It's now a wet Sunday in Hong Kong, and we're hoping that the weather doesn't delay our departure tomorrow for Chongqing. The last few days have been busy with seeing old friends, but most memorable for meeting for the first time twin sons of the Chinese Admiral Chan Chak, who was the cause of my father's narrow escape from Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941, right after the British surrender. I'd read my father's account of the escape some years ago, and in researching my book I've pieced together many other accounts and met fellow offspring of the British survivors. We'd corresponded with a daughter of Chan Chak, but now thanks to a growing network of the offspring, I've had the great pleasure of spending time with his sons, Donald and Duncan. They are now in their seventies and have both traveled the world, had children and grandchildren, built successful businesses, and settled back in Hong Kong. The network of offspring has grown out of a web site run by Richard Hide, the son of one of the crew of the escape boats. With great timing, Richard also managed to be in Hong Kong this week, so we had a lot to explore together.

On Thursday, I met up with Donald and Duncan Chan, Richard and his friend Sue (who has her own memories of HK from being a nurse at the Bowen Road military hospital in the 1960s). We headed to Aberdeen on the west of the island, in 1941 a fishing village and naval dockyard from where our parents' escape attempt was launched. The escape plan went badly awry at the start because the navy's Motor Torpedo Boats which were expected to pick up the Admiral and his party were nowhere to be seen. So the 'VIP party' of a dozen Chinese and British intelligence officers, including Max and the future Colonial Secretary David MacDougall, grabbed the only available boat - the Cornflower launch - and set off down the Aberdeen channel, in the hope of finding the MTBs on the seaward side of the steep little island of Ap Lei Chau. It was broad daylight on Christmas Day, about 5pm, and Japanese who were still in battle positions quickly spotted the small boat and began firing at it, killing and wounding several men and disabling the craft. The survivors had to jump overboard and swim to the extremely rocky shore of Ap Lei Chau - their vivid personal letters tell of their exhaustion and near despair. The Admiral, already handicapped because he had only one good leg, got a bullet in his shoulder, but with the help of his ADC Henry Hsu unstrapped his wooden leg and somehow swam to shore. They had to leave behind a large quantity of cash kept in the wooden leg - money which would have eased their journey. Donald and Duncan confirmed a story I'd heard before - the Admiral promised Henry, who was Christian, that if he the Admiral survived he would convert to Christianity - and this he did on the anniversary of the escape in Chungking in 1942.

After some desperate hours on Ap Lei Chau, where the men were separated into several groups and each had adventures which I won't go into here, they finally saw hope of rescue in the shape of MTBs lying offshore and were picked up or swam out to the boats. Well after nightfall, a flotilla of 5 MTBs with a total of over 60 men, including the naval crew, Z Force members and the 'swimming party', revved up their engines and left the fallen colony behind them as they headed for the coast of mainland China and further adventures.

I've visited the scene of this drama before, with Mike and my sister and also with David MacDougall's eldest daughter, Ann Partridge - making a circuit of Ap Lei Chau in a sampan, and clambering over the rocks and up to the peak of the island. This time, it was amazing to take a sampan ride with the Chan twins, and with Richard who has researched the events in great depth, but had never been to Hong Kong before. We spent a lot of time talking through various possible scenarios of the long ago events, while Sue recorded us on video. The Chans then took us to a fine dim sum lunch aboard the Jumbo, Aberdeen's famous floating restaurant which happens to sit right in the channel where the Cornflower launch got shot up.

On Thursday and over the next couple of days, we met several more times - the Chans' daughters and their husbands treated us all to a wonderful dinner at the Aberdeen Marina Club on Friday night, and we exchanged news of our extended families. With such a warm reception from the Chans, it was like rediscovering a long lost family. We talked about plans which are taking shape for a re-enactment of the escape in 2009, and will all stay in touch about this through Richard's website: http://www.mwadui.com/HongKong/Escape_09.htm

The twins, Donald and Duncan, were seven years old in 1941 and I heard something of their own remarkable story. They were stranded on Hong Kong island with their mother after the Japanese takeover, getting away to China weeks later after a fraught spell in hiding, and making their own difficult journey to Kweilin. Months later they were reunited with their father who had ended up, like mine, in Chiang Kai-shek's capital Chungking. They asked us to look out there for the church where their father was baptized in 1942!