Gung Hay Fat Choy
In the Gregorian year 2020 Chinese New Year was on January 29th. This year, 2021 it will fall on February 12th. It is actually like most things Chinese a little more complicated than that but let’s just leave things here for a while.
I just remembered when I was in Hong Kong one year at Chinese New Year. I do believe that Hong Kong was my favorite liberty port. For a full week you heard the constant sound of fire crackers. I and a few of my mates had dinner at the China Fleet Club. The China Fleet Club was a place where English sailors and soldiers could go and get a very nice meal at a very reasonable price. It was run by some British service club for the benefit of sailors and soldiers British and American.
While having dinner, at the next table over was an English looking fellow who seemed very drunk and would throw lit fire crackers under the feet of the Chinese waiters as they walked by. He seemed to not be at all concerned about his bad behavior and started to wonder how and why he would be so brazen in a British establishment. My curiosity got the best of me and being I had enough fine English ale under my belt, I enquired.
He told me he was a member of the Queens Own Buffs and he had just returned from Borneo. FYI, The Queens Own Buffs. He told me, were the personal bodyguards of The Queen. Half of the regiment at any given time was in London watching out for Her Majesty. The other half was posted to shit holes like Borneo to keep them toughened up by killing insurgents.
I got to meet and later hang out while in Hong Kong with the rest of these crazy bastards. They introduced me to the wrecks which they called the Woman’s Royal Army Corps. When we all got really stinko I was persuaded to go into a bar frequented by Royal Navy sailors and yell out “rude” things about the Queen. I was to run back out the door while being chased by the English squids and the Buffs would be waiting for the sailors and they all would get into a “donnybrook”.
I was in a bar one evening when a NBC film crew came in with their camera running for a story about what the troops really do when on R&R in Hong Kong. The camera running was a terrible idea because a lot of the guys in the bar, both American and English, were married and they didn’t the little woman back on the home front to get wind of what they were up to. The cameras were immediately requisitioned and tossed into the street as a tram went by rendering them harmless.
I’ve been all over the world since then but never got back to my beloved Hong Kong. Maybe sometime soon, eh?
