The Piano Tuner and the Kidney Surgeon

One of the tiny costs of freedom is knowing just what to do with all that free speech we have. Please hold that thought for a second.

Back on 29^thJune 1979, a 7,500 ton Panamanian freighter called ‘Skyluck’ deliberately ran itself aground on the Hong Kong island of Lamma, having been trying to land with its ‘cargo’ of 4000 Vietnamese refugees (known back then as boat people) for the previous 4 months. Other ships. Like the ‘Sibonga’ and the ‘Wellpark’ found their way into Hong Kong around that time bringing with them over a couple of years a total of 700 thousand people to safety, each one with a tale of heroism and hardship to rival anything you’ve read in fiction. I have an interest in this, as my battalion was in Hong Kong at the time, and we were involved in ‘receiving’ some of these vessels as they came in.

Leaving alone what actually happened on the  journeys themselves, these people started off by being destitute, scared, repressed, bullied- sometimes even tortured, in the aftermath of the long war that ended in 1975. In the South China Sea it got worse for them, far worse. Piracy was rife, as was dangerous overcrowding, as were vicious storms. No one can even begin to know how many drowned or were syphoned off into some form of slavery. Just in 1981, a UNHCR report suggested that 228 women had been ‘abducted’ and at least 880 people were missing altogether. Just in one year.

Gradually, the world took notice and eventually the ‘boat people’ started to be resettled. Many went to Canada and Australia, with the balancing diaspora going all over the place, including the UK. As so often with refugees who have been circling near the very plughole of life, many of them have gone on to do stunning things.

Twice in the last decade, these refugees have come back into my life. Once, when our hopeless old piano was being tuned by a blind, and scarred, South East Asian man in his early fifties. As I drove him home, I asked him to tell me his story, which he did. As an 8 year old boy, he had been blinded by fragments from a US bomb dropped up on the north end of the Ho Chi Minh trail. For ten years, he had been home educated by his siblings in his tiny village. But they were the wrong ethnic group, in the wrong area, and eventually they all had to make a run for it, and were eventually picked up by the Skyluck, and ended up in Hong Kong. His long journey had taken him to West Sussex, and, after that, his blindness had indirectly taken him to countless pianos when he got there. He thanked me profusely for whatever my battalion had done for him all those years ago.

Five years later, a couple of friends and I had a meeting with an eminent kidney surgeon in one of the cafes of St Pancras Station. We had raised quite a chunk of money in memory of a friend who had been brought down by kidney cancer a few years before, and the surgeon was thanking us, and explaining how she would use what we raised in order to fund a PhD into the early markers of the disease.

‘How do we know it will be effective?’ asked one of my friends.

‘You don’t,’ she answered quietly. ‘But let me tell you why it is that I am quite a determined person’. And out it came, the same story with a different family and a different boat. Baby girl whose family were fleeing the fact that they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. A story of heroism on the part of the skipper who picked them up from the South China Sea, and determination that took her, in four short decades, from salt-soaked hungry baby to being one of the most eminent renal surgeons in Europe. Last year, she told me, she organised a party to thank the captain who rescued her, and forty of the original refugees came along; the images she sent were unbelievably moving.

Trite though this may sound, my own life has been enriched immeasurably by the mere fact of spending time with them both. But it has also given me a slightly more profound understanding than my privileged upbringing had prepared me for, of what destitution looks like.

So back to that free speech stuff. 

Maybe I shouldn’t, and maybe it’s none of my business. But when I see political grandstanding at showbiz awards ceremonies (and, possibly like you, I try very hard not to watch them), I do occasionally marvel at how rarely the planet’s real destitute millions make it onto the stage. Diversity is big business now, and hungry refugees are a bit yesterday, a bit Live Aid.

Attention Deficit Earth can only deal with a few things at a time, apparently, and for some reason the respective lengths of two of this morning’s consecutive news items regarding the evocation of hell on earth that is Syria right now (30 seconds coverage) and what went on and on at the Brits last night (three and a half minutes) made me feel just ever so slightly uneasy. This is not about moral equivalence, but….

But that’s the problem with free speech. You don’t always want to hear it.