You Damn Chinese: How Racial Hatred Fueled Hong Kong’s Underworld#

The bottle hit the wall three inches from Namchoi’s left ear. Glass shrapnel sprayed across the bar counter, and a shard nicked his cheekbone—a thin red line that’d take two weeks to fade and a lifetime to forget.

“You damn Chinese,” the sailor said, swaying on his feet. Royal Navy, still in his whites, stinking of gin and the particular entitlement of men who believed oceans belonged to them. “Get out of my fucking seat.”

Namchoi hadn’t been sitting in anyone’s seat. He’d been standing at the end of the bar in Wanchai, nursing a whiskey he couldn’t afford, waiting for a man who wouldn’t show for another forty minutes. The seat in question was empty. The sailor wanted it empty in a specific way—empty of Chinese proximity.

Two of the sailor’s mates laughed. A third looked away. The bartender, a Shanghainese man named Lao Wu who’d survived three bar brawls that year alone, quietly moved the remaining bottles off the counter.

Namchoi wiped the blood from his cheek with his thumb. Looked at it. Then looked at the sailor.

“I said get out.”

He got out.

~

Wanchai’s streets at eleven p.m. smelled of fish sauce and diesel and the sweet rot of overripe fruit stacked in crates behind the market stalls. Namchoi walked with blood drying on his face, not heading home, not heading anywhere. Just walking. The way a man walks when the motion matters more than the destination.

Three blocks on, he heard footsteps behind him. Quick, deliberate. Not the sailor’s stumble. He turned.

Dichen stood under a streetlamp, still in uniform. The light turned her blonde hair almost white, and the brass buttons on her jacket caught the glow like tiny fires. Inspector Dichen Powell of the Hong Kong Police Force, twenty-nine years old, five-seven, Welsh-born, posted to the colony eighteen months back. Namchoi’s handler. His contact. The woman who paid him for names and took in information the way a doctor takes symptoms—clinically, without a flicker.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

“I noticed.”

“Come with me.”

It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t quite an order either. It lived in the space between—the space where their whole relationship existed.

~

Her flat was on the third floor of a building on Lockhart Road, above a tailor’s shop that shut at nine. The stairwell smelled of mothballs and pressed cotton. She unlocked the door without flipping on the hallway light, a habit so ingrained she didn’t notice it anymore. Namchoi noticed. He noticed everything about how she moved through space—the economy, the trained awareness, the way she checked corners without looking like she was checking corners.

Inside, the flat was smaller than he’d expected. A single room with a partition screening off the sleeping area. A desk buried in papers she flipped face-down when he walked in. A kettle. Two cups, both clean—suggesting she rarely had visitors. Or that she washed up right after.

She pointed to a chair. He sat. She opened a cabinet and pulled out a first-aid tin—military issue, green metal, the kind with gauze and iodine and tiny scissors that never cut straight.

She cleaned the cut on his cheekbone without a word. Her fingers were cool and exact. When the iodine stung, he didn’t flinch, and she didn’t ask if it hurt. They both understood the protocol of this kind of closeness—efficient, purposeful, stripped clean of sentiment.

But she didn’t step back when she finished. She stayed there, close enough that he could smell the soap she used—carbolic, institutional, the same stuff they issued at the police barracks. Her hand was still on his jaw, holding his face at the angle she’d needed for the cleaning. The angle wasn’t necessary anymore. Her hand stayed.

“Who did this?”

“Royal Navy. Drunk. Doesn’t matter.”

“It matters.”

The way she said it—flat, quiet, carrying a weight that had nothing to do with professional concern. It was the first time he’d heard her voice hold something other than instructions.

“Why?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. Instead she did something he’d replay in his mind for years—in different beds, in different cities, in the dark hours when sleep wouldn’t come. She traced the cut on his cheekbone with her fingertip. Slowly. The way you trace a line on a map—following it to see where it goes.

~

What happened next wasn’t a decision. Decisions mean weighing options, thinking through consequences, picking one path over another. This was more like gravity—the inevitable pull of two bodies that’d been orbiting each other for months, held apart by rules and roles and the vast machinery of colonial hierarchy. The machinery broke down. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe it just became, for one night, beside the point.

In that room above the tailor’s shop, Inspector Dichen Powell wasn’t an inspector. Namchoi wasn’t an informant. She wasn’t British. He wasn’t Chinese. These categories—the ones that ruled every second of their public lives—dissolved like salt in warm water. Completely, invisibly, as if they’d never been solid.

That was the lie, of course. They were always solid. They’d resolidify by morning.

But in the dark, with Wanchai’s noise bleeding through the thin walls—a drunk singing, a dog barking, the clatter of a mahjong table folding up for the night—none of it applied. The rules were suspended. Not broken. Suspended. Like a card game paused mid-hand, tiles face-down, everyone pretending they’d lost track of the score.

Nobody loses track of the score.

~

She smoked afterward. He didn’t know she smoked. She kept the cigarettes in the first-aid tin, tucked under the gauze, which struck him as either practical or symbolic—and he didn’t want to figure out which.

“This doesn’t change anything,” she said, blowing smoke at the ceiling.

“I know.”

“Monday, the usual place. You’ll have the names from the Sham Shui Po warehouse.”

“I’ll have them.”

She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him. In the dark, her eyes were the color of nothing—just shadow, just the absence of light. He couldn’t read her expression. He wasn’t sure she had one.

“That sailor,” she said. “The one who threw the bottle.”

“What about him?”

“His name’s Corporal James Whitfield. HMS Tamar. He’s got a wife in Cardiff and a gambling debt his commanding officer doesn’t know about.”

Namchoi said nothing.

“I’m not telling you what to do with that.”

“I know.”

She stubbed out the cigarette on the windowsill, leaving a small black mark on the white paint. Evidence. She didn’t wipe it away.

~

He left before dawn, the way they both knew he would. The tailor’s shop below was silent. The street was empty except for a woman carrying two buckets of water on a bamboo pole across her shoulders, moving with the swaying rhythm of someone who’d carried weight her whole life.

Namchoi touched the cut on his cheekbone. It’d scabbed over, dark and rough under his fingertip. He could still feel the ghost of her touch along the same line—iodine first, and then something else. Something that burned differently.

You damn Chinese.

The words sat in his chest like a stone. Not because they stung—he’d heard worse, would hear worse, had been called things that made “damn Chinese” sound like a pet name. They sat there because of what came after. Because violence had opened a door that politeness never could. Because the bottle meant to drive him out had, through some twisted alchemy, driven him in.

Into her flat. Into her bed. Into a complication that’d outlast both of them.

He walked home through pre-dawn Wanchai, and the city was the same city it’d been twelve hours earlier—same fish-sauce smell, same diesel, same colonial architecture bearing down on the same Chinese streets. Nothing had changed. And yet everything the sailor’s slur represented—the casual racism baked into every layer of colonial life—had been pushing men like Namchoi toward the triads for generations. The South China Morning Post would eventually trace that arc in its own long look at triad history: how the secret societies grew not despite colonial contempt, but because of it. When the legitimate world calls you “damn Chinese” and throws a bottle at your face, the illegitimate world starts to look like the only world that wants you.

Everything had changed.

The cut on his cheekbone would heal in two weeks. The thing it’d started would take a hell of a lot longer.

~

On Monday, at the usual place—a tea house on Queen’s Road where the owner owed favors to both the police and the triads and served everyone with equal indifference—Inspector Powell sat across from her informant and received the names from the Sham Shui Po warehouse. She wrote them in her notebook with the same handwriting she always used. Same follow-up questions. Same payment, folded inside a newspaper, slid across the table with the same practiced motion.

Nothing had changed.

Her hand, when she reached for the newspaper to double-check a detail, brushed his. The contact lasted less than a second. Neither of them acknowledged it. The tea house owner poured more tea. The world kept turning.

But Namchoi noticed—and he’d carry this detail for years, turning it over like a worn mahjong tile, smooth from handling—that she hadn’t wiped the cigarette burn from her windowsill. He’d checked that morning, walking past the building, glancing up at the third-floor window. The small black mark was still there.

In a world where Inspector Dichen Powell erased every trace, every trail, every scrap of evidence as a matter of survival, she’d left one mark.

He didn’t know what it meant. He knew it meant something.

The score wasn’t what it’d been. The tiles had been reshuffled. And the game—the long, dangerous, impossible game between a Chinese informant and a British inspector in a colony that belonged to neither of them—had entered a new phase.

Neither of them knew the rules anymore.

That was the most dangerous part.