 Tale of war
By Zhao Xu (HK Edition)
Updated: 2008-11-25 07:32
They say every old man is a book. But the full meaning of it doesn't naturally reveal itself - not before you have talked to one of them. And in the case of Peter Choy, an 87-year-old veteran soldier who fought the Japanese both in Hong Kong and on the mainland during World War II, that book is painful, yet irresistibly fascinating. But for the old man, his life is no more than what it was, and what it should be: long years shaped by the sweeping forces of his time. "I don't really spend time thinking about it (the war) now; it has been such a long time," he said during a recent interview at the World War II Veterans Association, where he currently serves as a committee member. Like a small canoe in the middle of tumultuous sea, Choy's life boat was put into the water when the water was seething. It had been at times overwhelmed, inundated and carried around by the powerful currents. But the boat didn't founder, because the man at its helm never lost hope. Choy joined the British Garrison Forces defending Hong Kong at the age of 18, three months before the Japanese invaded on Dec 8, 1941. Choy recalled eight Indians and six Chinese, including himself, manning the two anti-aircraft positions at Pok-fu-lam, on the western side of Hong Kong Island. It was from there that Choy and his comrades shot down an enemy airplane. When asked whether there was any difference between the Chinese and the Indian soldiers, as far as their determination to hold back the Japanese, he simply answered: "You don't think that much when you are in a fight". At one time, he and another fellow soldier were ordered to carry telephone wires from Pok-fu-lam to a neighboring area known today as Cyberport. In those days, communication between army units still relied on field telephones. "At the beginning, everything was fine as we ran with the wire - probably weighing more than 100 pounds - toward our destination. But then a Japanese plane spotted us midway. It roared past our heads and started shooting at us," Choy said. The bullets hit the ground as solid as concrete. The fragments were thrown out in all directions, some hitting Choy on his right leg. "I'll let you have a look," he said while lifting his leg and rolling up his trousers. There, on the lower half of the leg, worn as badges of honor, were red patches of skin. "I stopped, bound up the wound with the first aid I was carrying and continued walking," Choy said. "I didn't really feel the pain." Throughout the Battle, which lasted for 18 days and ended on Christmas Day, 1941, the Japanese were unable to penetrate as far west as Pok-fu-lam. As a result, no ground fighting took place, and the majority of the casualties were actually caused by the intense bombing of the area.
When the order to surrender finally reached Pok-fu-lam by phone in the late afternoon of Dec 25, there were no Japanese soldiers there - they were caught up in fighting elsewhere, including Stanley. This meant that Choy and fellow Chinese soldiers were given precious time to put on civilian clothes and disappear. The Indians, unable to conceal their identity, marched to Central and surrendered there. What had happened seemed to be the antithesis of what one might expect from the experiences of a World War II veteran - there were no lost limbs or deaths of fellow soldiers and friends. However, Choy's life took an unexpected turn soon after the Japanese occupation, which added a fiction-novel quality to his unraveling story. One day while walking on the street, Choy chanced upon a man who used to teach him English in the army. The man revealed his true identity as a secret agent for British Army Aid Group (BAAG), an organization formed at the outbreak of battle in Hong Kong to provide medical services to defense forces. After the fall of the island, it was relocated to the mainland, where it functioned as a secret intelligence service and facilitated POW escapes from Hong Kong. Choy joined BAAG, and for seven months worked on Japanese ships with fellow recruits to gather information for the Allied troops. "Every time a Japanese ship entered the harbor, we would get ourselves onboard under the disguise of moving men," he said. "We tried to find out the ships' cargo and personnel, as well as their times of departure and arrival. "Then one day, the 'teacher' suddenly disappeared, probably having been found out and captured by the Japanese. We all fled in a hurry." With Hong Kong no longer safe, Choy got into a boat and smuggled himself over the boarder to Panyu, in the neighboring Guangdong province. From there he managed to get in contact with the BAAG headquarters in Chongqing. Upon receiving its order, Choy set out for Huizhou, another area in Guangdong where the organization had a presence. "I walked on the mountainous roads for four days," he said. "But before I got there, I was kidnapped by the locals who then handed me over to the Kuomintang troops." Or rather, sold him to them at a price, as the troops were in desperate need of men to fill the ranks. Soldiers who were recruited forcibly in this way were called "piglets" - an indication of their helplessness and vulnerability. Eventually, Choy arrived in Huizhou, not as a BAAB agent, but a Kuomintang infantry soldier. There, the troops stayed for about seven months, fighting the Japanese. However, according to Choy, it was not as much fighting as throwing bombs and firing shots at a distant hill. "We couldn't even see the Japanese, and they couldn't see us either. But once we heard the gunshots, we knew that they were firing at us, and we started firing back," Choy said. "But it was too far for any bullet to reach the other side. And I don't think we suffered any injuries, let alone deaths." After the war, Choy went back to Hong Kong and rejoined the British garrison. But that lasted for only a year, as he left the army for what he saw as its "unfair treatment" of soldiers of Chinese origin. In 1987, Choy founded the Hong Kong World War II Veterans Association. The goal was to provide a place for old soldiers to get together, and to offer help when they needed it. However, Choy left the association in 1991 and didn't rejoin until 2006. "The chairman at the time opened the door for non-veterans, which was totally unacceptable," he said. But despite his insistence on maintaining what he called the purity of the organization, Choy did realize, especially over the past few years, that something would have to be done for the association to continue to exist. "There were more than 200 people when the association was first founded. Now, that number has dwindled to a mere 30," he said. One solution is to band together with a bigger organization and a similar mission, like what they are currently doing with the Royal British Legion (Hong Kong and China branch). Talking with him, one gets the impression that this is a strongly opinionated and highly practical man who sports bushy eyebrows and speaks with a roar in his chest. And his consistent refusal to yield to any strong feeling makes one wonder if the accumulation of years has turned his memory blunt and callous, or if there is really an emotional onion left to peel away. But for a man who has been without his wife for the past 47 years, emotional indifference may be the best anesthesia against the pain. His wife died in 1961 after being affected by atomic radiation while working as a nurse on a small off-shore island in the Pacific in 1945. Choy was left to bring up their seven children alone, which he did without receiving any war compensation. Papers identifying him as a veteran soldier were lost and thus his name was crossed out from the Japanese government's compensating list. He never married again. "My children seldom asked me, so I told them very little," he said, referring to his World War II experiences. "These days, I sometimes speak to students who come to me for their school projects, but I've never talked this much." (HK Edition 11/25/2008 page4) |
