Under Twin Clouds

By S Kong

The book describes the many adventures of Lee, who was born into poverty and then got afflicted with polio. His worked in wartime Vietnam and learned survival. His many failed business attempts landed him in an oil rich kingdom which gave him the pot of gold to build his multimillion business around the world. He aimed for a P$100 million about US$33 but ended up much richer. Read about his interesting business philosophy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350917857

Book preview

BK90080536.jpg

This book is dedicated to my daughters and god-daughters,

and in-law and my sons.

Barbara

Tracy

Genie and Gareth

Velvet

Lindy

Carol

Lennie

Melvin

Under Twin Clouds

©2023 S. Kong

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

print ISBN: 979-8-35091-784-0

ebook ISBN: 979-8-35091-785-7

Contents

Chapter 1: Challenging Times

Chapter 2: Better Days

Chapter 3: Fancy Cars

Chapter 4: Friends

Chapter 5: The Colour of War

Chapter 6: The Real Business

Chapter 7: Great Expectations

Chapter 8: Food for Thought

Chapter 9: Tough World

Chapter 10: Toy Project

Chapter 11: Settling In

Chapter 12: Opportunities Abound

Chapter 13: It Is Easy for Money to Find Man

Chapter 14: The Oil Industry

Chapter 15: More MoneySpinning Ventures

Chapter 16: The End of an Era

Chapter 17: Breaking into New Ground

Chapter 18: Showcasing China

Chapter 19: Tiananmen

Chapter 20: Their Own Turf

Chapter 21: A Russian Romance

Chapter 22: One Cloud Left

Chapter 1:

Challenging Times

B ing, wake up, baby Lee is very hot with high fever, Bee Chu called to her exhausted husband, Wong Bing.

Baby Lee has had a fever the whole day, and I gave him some sweet herbal soup in the afternoon, but it’s not working, Bee Chu exclaimed in a voice bordering on desperation.

Bing said sleepily, Give him the fever relief powder we have in the drawer.

Will that be too strong for baby Lee? Bee Chu asked.

Wong Bing got off the mattress on the floor and went to the next room to look at baby Lee, who was sleeping on the floor mat with his three older siblings.

Bing and Chu stayed in the tenement room next to their four children on the third floor of an old shophouse in Chinatown’s Tianly Street on Parasol Island. Four other tenement rooms on the third floor were occupied by tenants from other families.

Baby Wong Lee was the youngest child of Wong Bing and Bee Chu. He was a fair, cherubic, lovable baby full of laughter who was approaching three years of age. At two years old he could walk steadily and speak intelligibly. He was the pride of Bee Chu and was the favourite child.

Bing put his palms on Lee’s forehead, felt the intense heat and made a decision. Let’s give him the fever relief powder. Bee Chu fetched the powder and proceeded to feed baby Lee.

Bing, you go back to sleep. You have another long day tomorrow, Bee Chu urged.

Wong Bing ran a small coffee shop in the vicinity of the tenement shophouse where the family lived.

For the next four days and nights, baby Lee’s fever raged on, and Bee Chu had to cradle him in her arms as he would cry whenever he was awake from pains that he could not express in any other way. Chu tried all kinds of herbal preparations for fevers, but none of them helped, and the Wongs were too poor to visit the nearby western doctor whose medical bills were beyond them.

A sympathetic neighbour suggested scraping to remove the toxins causing the fever. Scraping was a Chinese medical procedure where a scraper or spoon was used to scrape the back of the sick patient until raw red striations were visible. Bee Chu applied a spoon on poor baby Lee, leaving red welts on the screaming baby. All treatments were to no avail.

On the fifth day Bee Chu happily told her concerned neighbour, With Goddess Guan Yin’s blessings, baby Lee’s fever has gone away and he has stopped crying nonstop.

Baby Lee was not moving much and his leg muscles would often twitch. That evening Bing, just back from closing the coffee shop, looked at baby Lee and said, I hope baby Lee doesn’t have polio. My customers told me there is an epidemic in Parasol that leaves many children paralysed.

Tomorrow, Bee Chu replied, I will go to Tian Hock Temple and beg the deity to give a charm paper for baby Lee to bless him with good health and a quick recovery. The Chinese believed in amulets called charm papers that monks drew after blessing the sick with prayers to various gods. They held that this ritual could dispel the evil spirits that caused illnesses. These charms papers were burnt, and the ashes were mixed with water and fed to the sick person.

The next day Bee Chu returned with three talisman papers. After some prayers with lit candles and joss sticks, she burnt the charm papers granted by the deity in the temple, mixed the ashes with milk and fed them to baby Lee.

For two days baby Lee hardly moved and refused most food and water. On the third day he recovered and began to eat, but Bee Chu found he could not raise his legs. Normally he was an active baby who kicked his legs vigorously when he gurgled with laughter. Now both his legs were not moving.

Wong Bing’s biggest fear had materialised, and Bee Chu wept when he said, I think baby Lee has contracted polio.

Baby Wong Lee had been born in this tenement room on a floor the Wong family shared with the other tenants. They also shared a common sootcoated kitchen, a dark smelly toilet and a grimy bathroom. All the rooms were separated by wooden board partitions that left gaps well below the ceiling to promote air circulation. A front window faced the street on one end, an open veranda looked down on the air well on the other end, and together they provided air flow.

Before he had come down with polio, baby Lee had been a noisy baby with frequent demands for food and milk. Before he was two years old, he would toddle to Bee Chu frequently to ask for something to eat.

After his bout of polio fever, he hardly made a noise and could not walk. Bee Chu was worried and told Bing, Baby Lee looks tired and cannot speak and walk.

Then the next day baby Lee started asking for his food, much to Bee Chu’s relief. Still, he just couldn’t stand, let alone walk. Bee Chu, on the advice of a Chinese physician who occupied one of the tenement rooms on the same floor, started massaging baby Lee’s legs day and night with medicinal oils. She encouraged him to stand, and after a few weeks he could stand on his left leg, but the right leg was clearly weak and unable to support his weight.

Wong Lee grew up with his right leg much shorter and thinner than his left leg. He walked with a distinct limp. He also became a child drawn to himself and seldom spoke. He stopped playing with his brothers and sister as he could not play their usual game of hide and seek. He had a lot of mobility difficulties.

Parasol Island, then under the colonial government, was rough and quite lawless. The slum areas were controlled by gangs that had started as coolie societies. Coolies, or manual labourers, were stevedores who moved goods from visiting ships into tongkangs, or bumboats, that would then deliver the goods to the warehouses along Parasol River. These were the urban gangs that controlled much of the slum areas in Parasol Chinatown.

Gang clashes happened often when the control of territorial interests was challenged. In those early days, gang members used to parade openly with long parang knives slung over their shoulders, very much like the characters in swordwielding saga movies that were then very popular in Parasol. Most of these gangs operated in Chinatown where most coolie associations were located, as this enclave was near the port and warehouse areas.

The police were corrupt and stood protecting the heads of the various coolie gangs. These gangs thrived by operating illegal vice and gambling joints. They also controlled the illicit drug trade during a time when opium was openly cooked and smoked. The cooking of opium could often be detected even from a distance with its distinctly raw and nauseating odour. Businesses operating in shops or peddling on the streets paid protection money to avoid the gangs’ harassment or assault.

The shared kitchen on the thirdfloor tenement where the Wong family lived added to the stress of daily life, and there were frequent quarrels among the tenants. Common ingredients like salt, sugar and cooking oil had to be stored in the private rooms to avoid pilfering by other tenants.

The shared use of the kitchen caused quarrels at every mealtime as tenants, frustrated with living from hand to mouth, vented their misery and anger on each other. The use of the single common toilet also caused contentions, and the bathroom was especially crowded in the mornings.

Adults venting their anger often targeted Little Wong Lee and pushed him around. His falls were accompanied by his wailing, and Bee Chu would rush to pacify and console him, usually unable to discern who had bullied her son. The poor with their small stalls and businesses were plagued by protection money collectors. Shops or stalls that refused to pay protection money were wrecked and the owners assaulted by these gangs. Wong Bing did not pay daily protection fees to the gang controlling the area as he was also a sworn member of a gang. As a gang member he could be called to enforce protection money collection. In return he was given a small allowance every month. He carefully squirrelled the money away for renovating and upgrading his little coffee shop.

In his teens, Wong Bing had joined the Na Zha gang, a group of young fearless men, all immigrants from Southern China that lived on protection money or worked on the tongkangs as labourers. He had a large tattoo of the legendary god Prince Na Zha riding on fiery wheels across his left arm, an identity mark for all Na Zha gang members. With side income from his gang activities, he had spent money on the coffee shop and renovated it to be the best meeting place for chatting and snacks over coffee. The place was cooled by ceiling and stand fans and had a wired radio, which blasted the old Shanghai Chinese songs of Zhou Xuan, Bai Guang and Wu Ying Yin. Soon it had become the place to assemble for gossip and coffee on this side of Chinatown.

As a man in his early twenties and as a towkay (boss) running a coffee shop, Bing had been an eligible bachelor. A matchmaker had introduced Wong Bing to her niece from a rural farm in Parasol’s Fishponds District. This girl, named Bee Chu, had been fair skinned and tall with a pretty face, and her widowed mother had operated a small fish farm and a coconut plantation.

Wong Bing had liked Bee Chu with her very pleasant and extroverted disposition. Soon they had been married and had settled down into a tenement room on the third floor of an old shophouse that they shared with other tenants. When they had started a family, they had rented another room for their children. Soon they had had four children.

With the entrepreneur spirit in him, Bing had started providing Hokkien food and served lunch and dinner. The coffee shop had moved up a rung and become a favourite restaurant haunt as he had proved to be a talented cook.

Bee Chu had also been a great help in the little restaurant that now had a daily stream of customers. She was good at bargaining and had become a very astute purchaser of ingredients that were cheap and fresh. She had also bought vegetables and fish directly from her family farm, which had allowed her to bypass the market stall resellers and get a much better price.

With Bee Chu’s bright and happy demeanour towards customers, many had become regulars and some remained in contact with her even in later years when these customers became millionaires. This had been the beginning of building a network for the restaurant and her future business.

Polio changed Lee from an animated baby into a withdrawn and quiet child as he grew up.

His weakened and debilitated right leg made walking ever so difficult with frequent falls. From a tender age, he grew up with pain. This made him a tough child who gradually learnt to suffer in silence and rarely shared his feelings.

His siblings pitied him and often helped him up when he fell, but they never become very close. Back then, each child was adjusting to living in the stressful jaws of poverty. Adults often vented their anger on any child crossing their paths in the crowded and stifling tenement.

Then the armed forces of the colonial masters, which were an important contributor to Parasol’s economy, announced their withdrawal and suddenly threw the Parasol economy into a recession.

Banks stopped lending money and many businesses faced a liquidity squeeze. The businesses in Chinatown came up with their own savings and financing scheme called tontines (or Hway).

Tontines were run by an organiser with participants contributing to a common fund every month. By paying some interest, any contributor could borrow money from the fund and would repay their loan in instalments. The organiser earned a commission deducted from the drawn down loans. Many businesses used their network to organise tontines and made a living from the organiser commission.

This immensely popular tontine (Hway) became a savings scheme as well as a source of urgently needed capital. Bing also had to resort to taking out loans from tontines for his working capital and upgrading plans for his little restaurant.

Bing had decided to name the restaurant Ho Bin Hokkien Restaurant (Good People Hokkien Restaurant), which had become a popular Hokkien cuisine restaurant. Over the years the restaurant had grown in size and popularity.

Sometimes dinners were organised by chieftains of deity worshippers or followers of the Seventh Moon Ghost Festival.

Most of these organised dinners were budget dinners so the organisers (who were often gangland chieftains) could collect protection money legally as law and order was slowly being established in Parasol Island. They normally would worship a specific deity and hold birthday celebrations for that deity. Businesses were expected to buy up complete tables in celebrative dinners as contributions to the deity’s birthday celebrations.

They also organised Lunar Seventh Moon dinners and getai, which were singing and skit shows with prayers to the wandering souls who roamed the earth for that month. This Seventh Moon Festival was called Zhong Yuan Jie, which means Hungry Ghost Festival.

Dinners and prayers were organised and businesses either willingly contributed or did so as protection money payment.

Bing built a cold room in his restaurant. This was a refrigerated room where food could be stored below freezing temperatures for months. Under Bing and his balding chef, staff at Ho Bin Restaurant prepared soups and cooked food that were kept in the cold room for months.

Bing had the restaurant staff thaw and cook all these frozen foods for these organised dinners. The logistics, which included recruiting daily parttime staff as cooks and waitresses, was mind boggling. Bing provided such impressive catering that it earned him a reputation in the heydays.

With the Ho Bin Restaurant prospering, the Wong family quickly moved from their overcrowded tenement rooms to the ground floor of another nearby shophouse where the accommodations included a private kitchen, bathroom and flush squat toilet. Now the family had a floor to themselves and the squabbles over the use of the kitchen, toilet, and bathroom ended.

Lee grew up in this hustle and bustle. Bee Chu became too busy with the affairs of the restaurant and engaged a nanny to take care of the children.

The nanny, Ho Jie, was a fortyyearold single lady who belonged to the red headwear movement where the members, who were all ladies, vowed to remain single for life. She was a kind, eventempered woman and treated the Wong family children like her own. Bee Chu was very happy with her.

Ho Jie especially doted on Lee, not just out of pity but also because Lee was very well behaved, spoke like a child beyond his age and,