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A 'Yellow Fish' in Wartime China Leslie L. Sung Leslie Sung, BA, the University of Hong Kong, 1941, taught in Queen's College for afew months bifore the fall qf Hong Kong in December 1941. Soon after, in China, he spent the war years mostly in Kwangtung and Kwangsi, as a schoolteacher and secretary in business. MOVitlg to Shanghai at war's end in September 1945 he worked as a journalist until the Communist takeover. Returning to Hong Kong in 1950, he was on the editorial stqif 4 the Hong Kong Standard until 1967, when he decided to practise law. He joined Messrs. Lo and Lo in 1967, qualified as a solicitor in 1970, became a partner in 1977, and retired in 1995. He now lives in Toronto, Canada, close to his daughter Elaine. T he attack on and the capture of Hong Kong in December 1941 came a few months after I had graduated from the University of Hong Kong and started teaching in Queen's College. Like many others, I found myself in a quandary as to what I should do next. During the siege, we had been told on the radio that Chinese armies were coming to our aid and would drive off the Japanese, but in the ensuing weeks it became obvious that such a happy event would not materialize. With no home and no income or prospect of income in Hong Kong, it became clear to me that I would have to leave. My first thought was to go home to my family in Tsingtao, but as the months passed the resumption of passenger traffic to Tsingtao by ship never got any closer. In April I wrote to my parents asking them whether I should continue to wait, or whether I should go into the interior of China, as so many of my university friends and acquaintances were doing. In July Rayson Huang told me that he and his brother Raymond were joining a group that would shortly leave for China, and asked me whether 143 144 Leslie L. Sung I would like to join them. I had still not received a reply from my parents, and felt that I could not wait any longer, so with considerable trepidation at the thought of leaving behind everything familiar and plunging into the unknown, I decided to go with them. On 31 July we took a small boat from Shataukok to a beach in the No Man's Land between the areas controlled by the Japanese and the Chinese government, spent the night in a nearby village, and then walked through the No Man's Land - where a guerilla sitting by the roadside with a battered rifle in his hands made sure that our group had duly paid the toll exacted from travellers like us - to a river town called Tamshui under the control of the Chinese government. From there I went to Waichow and then by launch upriver to Laolong. Thus began my three years' stay in the interior of China. Unlike many of my friends, such as Rayson and Raymond Huang, John H.T. Huang, Oswald Cheung and Chung Heung Sung, I did not move about much in the first two years and spent almost all of that period in Samkong, a small walled town in Kwangtung, and in Liuchow in Kwangsi. I saw a lot of P.K. and Audrey Tcheng and Lau Din Cheuk, who were also living in Liuchow, but otherwise only met old university friends when they passed through Liuchow and looked me up. Things changed in the autumn of 1944, when the Japanese began their final offensive and marched down from Hunan through Kwangtung into Kwangsi past Kweilin and Liuchow all the way to Kweichow, driving a mass of refugees ahead of them. I was one of those refugees and it was then that I made a number of journeys by motor vehicle under conditions quite out of the ordinary and which I shall not, I trust, encounter again. These were not, of course, the first trips I had taken by motor vehicle in the interior of China. The first came right at the beginning in August 1942, when, after going by launch upriver to Laolong, I continued my journey to my destination, the important city of Shaoguan, or Kukong as it was more usually called, by road and discovered that there was a great deal more to motor travel than I previously dreamt of. One of the first things...

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