27 May 2009

Jenny

(Mrs Ng Muk Kah- Telegraph Photo)

Jenny died back in February of this year, the 19th, to be precise. It would have been pleasant in Hong Kong then, not oppressively humid and hot like it is later in the season.

It is curious in this world of instantaneous communication that it should have taken so long for the news to arrive here. An old shipmate passed it along with sadness, and he had reason to know her- he had been the A/ALUSNA in the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, back in the day when the South China Sea was an American Lake, and the Governor General was appointed in London.

Even the title seems quaint now. “Assistant, American Legation- US Naval Attache.

I loved that town- still do.

I remember sending my young teen-aged son out to the colony in 1997 so that he could walk the ground there by the harbor under the green mountain and say in later years that he saw Hong Kong before it was China.

My son is now in his mid-twenties. Jenny was 92 when she passed on, and was more of an institution than even Jimmy, of Jimmy’s Kitchen fame. Generations of sailors, Royal Navy and American, knew her and her girls, and don’t get the wrong idea.

In a city that re-invents itself with more dizzying regularity than even New York, she was a constant fixture.

I have a portrait on the wall of Tunnel Eight, and it could be of Suzy Wong of the long-gone Wan-chai that I remember. It is definitely not Jenny, though they were of the same place and time. Jenny was a working woman, born on a junk in Causeway Bay, not a honky-tonk courtesan.

Though of course, if elegant service at a ship-board cocktail reception was required, she could do that, too. She ran a full-service concern. She remained the same incomparable golden-toothed institution for most of her life.
 
Jenny would not have been the girl in my portrait with the downcast eyes and acceptance of her perfumed fate. Jenny led a “side party” of girls who attached themselves to ships when they arrived in Hong Kong, taking over the domestic chores of the ship on each Naval Ship that called. Her labor enabled the sailors to put aside the drudgery of shipboard tasks and go on liberty in the town.

Jenny’s girls washed and ironed, cleaned ship, chipped rust and painted, attended the liberty boats as buoy jumpers and sold cold sodas. She provided newspapers and fresh flowers for the wardroom along with fresh gray paint.

Jenny’s mother was Jenny One, who "provided serviceable sampans for the general use of the Royal Navy, obtained sand, and was useful for changing money." There is no record of when she started doing that- the Royal Navy arrived with Sir Edward Belcher during the First Opium War in 1841. There was a continuous Royal Navy presence there until 1997, the year of retrocession.

Except, of course, for the unfortunate events of 1941-45. If Jenny provided the same sort of services for the Imperial Navy, there was no mention of it. The citizens of the Colony did what they had to do to get by.

Actually, even in the worst of that time, the Navy never left. Some were held as POWs at the site of the long-gone Repulse Bay Hotel, and for generations after, the staff took their revenge by assigning the Japanese from the tour-buses the most oppressive tables in the interior of the hotel restaurant for brunch.

Jenny herself had a "date of volunteering" in 1928. At one time, based on the heavy traffic of ships operating off Vietnam, her staff numbered around three dozen girls. Her intelligence system was second to none: many a captain leaving Portsmouth or Norfolk would get an inquiry from her about services, knowing of schedule changes before they did.

As ship traffic diminished, it grew harder for Jenny to maintain a large staff. At the end of the shore-station HMS Tamar, she could still be seen in the Naval base, fit and active and wearing baggy black trousers and high-collared, silk smock. She was awarded the British Empire Medal in 1980.

Jenny was definitely not the woman in my portrait. That is Suzy Wong, maybe, but they share something in that the world that she and Jenny lived in are long gone now.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com