The Man from Madrid: A Spanish Soldier Lost in Colonial Hong Kong#
The Spaniard’s name was Diego, and he called every Chinese person he met “amigo”—the Spanish word for friend, and the only word of any Asian language he’d ever bothered to learn. He was thirty-one, dark-haired, built like a dock worker, and he’d come to Hong Kong the way most Europeans who weren’t British came to Hong Kong—through a chain of decisions that each made sense on its own and together added up to a catastrophe.
He worked at the Peninsula Hotel as a kitchen porter. Not a chef—a porter. He hauled vegetable crates from the loading dock to the kitchen, dragged rice sacks up staircases too narrow for them, and scrubbed pots too big for the sink. It was coolie work at white-man’s wages. The hotel paid him three times what the Chinese porters earned for the same job, because he was European, and European skin came with a surcharge even when it was strapped to a man who couldn’t read.
Namchoi met him in the alley behind the Peninsula, where kitchen waste got dumped into bins that smelled like a war crime. It was September 1941, and Namchoi was there because Ah Fuk’s network ran a side hustle in restaurant grease—used cooking oil skimmed from hotel kitchens and resold to soap makers in Sham Shui Po. The margins were razor-thin and the work was filthy, but margins were margins, and Ah Fuk’s outfit ran on margins the way the British Empire ran on tea.
Diego was perched on an overturned crate, smoking a cigarette, talking to himself in Spanish. He did this a lot, Namchoi would later learn—carried on full conversations with himself, complete with hand gestures and shifts in tone, like he was two people jammed into one body and both of them had opinions.
Namchoi was loading grease tins onto a handcart. Diego watched him for a few minutes, then said, in English even worse than Namchoi’s: “You. Chinese. Strong for small man.”
Namchoi looked at him. Diego grinned—a wide, uncomplicated grin, the kind Namchoi had learned to distrust because it usually came right before someone asked you for something.
“I am Diego,” Diego said. “From Madrid. You know Madrid?”
“No,” Namchoi said.
“Is beautiful city,” Diego said. “Better than this shithole.” He waved at the alley, the bins, the Peninsula Hotel looming above them like a monument to someone else’s money. “Much better.”
“Then why are you here?” Namchoi said.
Diego’s grin didn’t falter, but something behind it did—a flicker, quick as a match strike, then gone. “Because Madrid is also shithole,” he said. “Different shithole. Spanish shithole. Here is British shithole. Same shit, different hole.”
He laughed at his own joke. Namchoi didn’t. But he didn’t walk away either, which in his vocabulary of human interaction was practically a hug.
~
Diego’s story came out in pieces over the following weeks, the way stories always come out between men who don’t fully trust each other—in fragments, offered and pulled back, tested against the listener’s face before more got revealed.
He’d been a soldier in the Spanish Civil War. Republican side. The wrong side, as it turned out—meaning the side that lost. When Franco won in 1939, Diego crossed into France with half a million other refugees and got thrown into a camp on a beach near Perpignan, where the French government treated the Spanish republicans the way governments always treat people who’ve lost wars on someone else’s behalf—with bureaucratic contempt and not enough food.
He’d escaped the camp. Worked his way across France, then through the Mediterranean to British-controlled ports, grabbing whatever ship work he could find. Ended up in Hong Kong because a cargo ship needed a deck hand and Hong Kong was where the ship was headed. He’d planned to stay a week. That was two years ago.
“Plans,” Diego said, “are what God makes when he wants to laugh at you.”
Namchoi didn’t believe in God. But he understood the idea. Plans required a future you could control, and control was something that happened to other people.
~
The thing about Diego was that he was the first white man Namchoi had ever met who was actually poor. Not pretending to be poor, not temporarily poor, not poor-by-choice the way missionaries and adventurers sometimes were. Genuinely poor. Diego’s shoes had holes. His shirts were patched with thread that didn’t match. He ate the kitchen scraps the Chinese porters ate, not the staff meals European employees were entitled to, because he’d been caught stealing wine from the cellar and his meal privileges had been yanked.
He was poor, and he was white, and these two facts sat side by side in a way that Hong Kong’s colonial pecking order wasn’t built to handle. The British treated him with a special brand of contempt—worse than what they showed the Chinese, because Chinese people were expected to be poor and Diego wasn’t. A poor white man was a failure. A poor Chinese man was a statistic. The difference mattered to the British in ways that were hard to put into words but impossible to miss.
The Chinese porters at the Peninsula didn’t know what to make of him either. He was European, which put him above them. But he was poor, which put him right beside them. And he was Spanish, which made him neither British nor anything else they had a slot for. He lived in a gap—between races, between classes, between the colonial architecture of above and below—and gaps, in colonial Hong Kong, were uncomfortable places to exist.
Namchoi understood gaps. He’d been living in one his whole life.
~
The insults piled up the way silt piles up in a harbor—slowly, invisibly, until one day the ships can’t dock.
There was the British sous-chef who called Diego “the dago” and laughed when Diego didn’t know the word. There was the hotel manager who made Diego use the service entrance even on his days off, because a European who looked like Diego—dark-skinned, badly dressed, reeking of kitchen grease—was bad for the lobby. There was the police constable on Nathan Road who stopped Diego twice in one week to check his papers, because a white man walking Kowloon after dark who wasn’t drunk and wasn’t in uniform was automatically suspicious.
Small things. Each one small enough to swallow. Each one leaving a film that wouldn’t wash off.
Namchoi watched it all with the detached focus of a naturalist studying a species in its habitat. He’d assumed—without ever putting it into words—that whiteness was a shield. That being European in Hong Kong meant being wrapped in the invisible armor of colonial power, the way a building’s protected by its walls. Diego showed him that the armor had conditions. You had to be the right kind of European. British, ideally. Wealthy, definitely. White in the way the British defined white—which wasn’t just about skin but about accent, class, nationality, and some indefinable quality of “belonging” that the British handed out like a currency only they could mint.
Diego was white but not British. Poor but not Chinese. European but not colonial. He slipped through every category like water through a sieve, and the system—which needed categories the way a building needs walls—punished him for it.
~
The incident happened on a Saturday evening in October. Namchoi wasn’t there. He heard about it afterward from three different people, which gave him three different versions, which meant the truth was hiding somewhere in the cracks between them.
Version one, from a Chinese porter who was there: Diego was in the kitchen after his shift, eating leftovers. A British cook—a big man, ex-Navy, name of Perkins—told him to clear out, that the kitchen was staff-only after hours. Diego said he was staff. Perkins said, “You’re not staff, you’re a fucking refugee.” Diego said something in Spanish. Perkins hit him. Diego hit back. Two other British kitchen workers pulled them apart. Diego’s nose was broken. Perkins had a cut above his eye.
Version two, from a Sikh security guard who saw the aftermath: Diego had been drunk and started the fight. Perkins was defending himself. The Spanish are hot-blooded. Everyone knows this.
Version three, from Diego himself, told to Namchoi a week later on the same overturned crate in the alley, bandage across his nose and purple bruises under both eyes that made him look like a raccoon: “He called me a refugee. I’m not a refugee. I’m a soldier. A soldier who lost. There’s a difference.”
“What’s the difference?” Namchoi asked.
“A refugee runs away,” Diego said. “A soldier walks away. The direction’s the same. The dignity’s different.”
He said it with dead seriousness, like the gap between running and walking was a matter of metaphysical weight. Namchoi thought about his own exit from the army—the pre-dawn walk in the wrong direction, the traded rifle, the fishing boat. Had he run or walked? Did it matter? The army was behind him either way.
“Did you hit him first?” Namchoi asked.
Diego touched his broken nose, gently, the way you touch something that used to be whole. “No,” he said. “But I wish I had. When you hit second, you’re defending. When you hit first, you’re choosing. I’d rather choose.”
~
After the fight, Diego got fired from the Peninsula. The hotel’s math was simple: Perkins was British and essential; Diego was Spanish and replaceable. Colonial arithmetic. Diego packed his one bag—a canvas duffel holding two shirts, a pair of trousers, a Spanish-English dictionary, and a photograph of a woman he never talked about—and moved into a room in Yau Ma Tei that was even smaller than Namchoi’s place in Sham Shui Po.
He found work at the docks, loading and unloading cargo ships. Coolie work again, but this time without the European markup. The dock bosses paid him the same rate as the Chinese laborers—sixty cents a day—because a fired European was worth less than an employed one, and the market for disgraced Spaniards in colonial Hong Kong was exactly as thin as you’d expect.
Namchoi helped him land the dock job. Not out of friendship—Namchoi didn’t trust that word and wouldn’t have used it—but out of usefulness. Ah Fuk’s network operated at the docks, and a European who owed you a favor was a handy thing to have. Diego could go places Chinese couldn’t. He could talk to people Chinese couldn’t reach. He could stand in rooms where Chinese weren’t allowed and listen to conversations that Chinese ears would never catch.
Diego became, in Ah Fuk’s organization, what Namchoi had been before him: an ear. But a European ear. An ear with access to the other side of the colonial wall.
~
The night before the Japanese invaded Hong Kong—December 7, 1941, a Sunday the city would later remember the way a body remembers a car crash, in shards of glass and sound—Namchoi and Diego sat on the roof of the tenement in Yau Ma Tei and stared at the harbor. The water was black. Ship lights shimmered on the surface like fallen stars. Somewhere across the water, on the Island side, a band was playing at a hotel party—the sound drifted over, tinny and faint, like music from another century.
Diego was drinking cheap baijiu from a bottle with no label. He held it out to Namchoi. Namchoi took a sip and winced. It tasted like paint remover with dreams of grandeur.
“You know what the difference is between Hong Kong and Madrid?” Diego said.
“What?”
“In Madrid, when someone insults you, you know why. Because you’re poor, or because you’re ugly, or because you fucked someone’s wife. The reason’s personal. Here—” He swept his hand across the city, the harbor, the ships, the invisible weight of colonial hierarchy pressing down on everything like weather. “Here, someone insults you and you don’t even know if it’s because of you or because of your face. Your skin. Your language. The shape of your fucking eyes.”
He drank. Namchoi drank.
“In Madrid,” Diego said, “I was Diego. Here, I’m ’the Spaniard.’ Not even a name. A nationality. A category.” He paused. “You know what that’s like.”
Namchoi knew what that was like. He knew it so deeply it had stopped feeling like knowledge and started feeling like gravity—a force so constant you forgot it existed until someone named it.
“Boy,” Namchoi said quietly.
“What?”
“That’s what they call us. Boy. Every Chinese man is ‘boy.’”
Diego looked at him. For a moment, something passed between them—not understanding, exactly, because their lives were too different for that. Something closer to recognition. Two people standing in different rooms of the same building, hearing the same noise through different walls.
“Fuck them,” Diego said.
“Fuck them,” Namchoi agreed.
It was the most honest conversation he’d ever had in English. Two words. No grammar required.
~
The next morning, the Japanese bombed Kai Tak airport, and the world that had insulted both of them stopped being the world they knew. But that’s the next chapter.
On the roof, in the dark, with the terrible baijiu and the faraway music, two men who didn’t fully trust each other sat in the particular silence of people who’d been ground down by the same machine. They didn’t call it friendship. They didn’t call it anything. Naming things made them real, and real things could be taken away.
The harbor was black. The music played. The city had twelve hours left of being the city it was.
Neither of them knew that. Nobody did. Knowing the future was the one secret nobody had.