Exhibit 14: The Wartime Love Letter That Sealed a Triad Boss’s Fate#
The war ended the way it started—with a piece of paper.
On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito’s voice crackled through radios across the Pacific, speaking words most of his subjects had never heard him say: We have resolved to endure the unendurable. The occupation of Hong Kong was over. Three years, eight months. The Japanese lowered their flags. The British came back. The flagpoles didn’t change.
Namchoi was arrested on September 12, 1945, by officers of the reconstituted Hong Kong Police, acting on intelligence from the British Military Administration. The charge was collaboration with the enemy. The specific allegation: providing information to the Japanese military police that led to the detention, interrogation, and death of civilian internees.
He didn’t resist. He was sitting in the mahjong den on Reclamation Street when they showed up—three officers, two Chinese and one British, the British one holding the warrant. The den was empty except for Namchoi and a table with tiles still spread from a game nobody had finished. He looked at the officers, looked at the warrant, and stood up. Didn’t ask to read it. He already knew what it said.
~
The trial took place in March 1946, at the Supreme Court building on Queensway—back to its English name now, the Japanese placard ripped down, the old stone letters showing again. The courtroom was wood-paneled, high-ceilinged, built by the British to project the weight of law. It did the job. The room was designed to make people feel small, and it worked.
Proceedings were conducted in English, with Cantonese interpretation. The judge was British. The prosecutor was British. The defense counsel was a local barrister named Wong Kwok-leung, who’d survived the occupation by keeping his head down and his opinions to himself—a skill that served him well in court.
The trial transcript, held in the Hong Kong Public Records Office, runs 247 pages. It’s written in the flat, bloodless language of legal procedure—a language built to contain the uncontainable, to squeeze human catastrophe into paragraphs and exhibit numbers. The transcript doesn’t care about feelings. It cares about facts, sequence, attribution. For that reason, it’s the most devastating document in this entire story.
~
EXCERPT FROM TRIAL TRANSCRIPT Case No. 1946/CR/0073 Regina v. WONG Nam-choi Before the Honourable Mr. Justice Ninham
PROSECUTOR: Mr. Wong, you have stated that you maintained a working relationship with Lieutenant Yamaguchi Kenji of the Japanese Military Police from approximately March 1942 until August 1945. Is that correct?
DEFENDANT: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: And in the course of that relationship, you provided Lieutenant Yamaguchi with information regarding persons detained in civilian internment camps. Is that also correct?
DEFENDANT: I provided information on one occasion.
PROSECUTOR: One occasion. And on that occasion, the information you provided concerned a person by the name of CHAN Di-chen, a civilian internee at the Stanley Civilian Internment Camp. Is that correct?
DEFENDANT: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: What was the nature of the information you provided?
DEFENDANT: I told Lieutenant Yamaguchi that Chan Di-chen was involved in resistance activities within the camp.
PROSECUTOR: Was that true?
DEFENDANT: No.
PROSECUTOR: You knowingly provided false information to the Japanese Military Police regarding a civilian internee, knowing that such information would likely result in that person’s detention and interrogation by the Kempeitai?
DEFENDANT: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: Why?
(Pause recorded in transcript. Duration noted as “approximately fifteen seconds.”)
DEFENDANT: I had personal reasons.
PROSECUTOR: What were those personal reasons?
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Objection. The question calls for testimony regarding the defendant’s private life, which is not relevant to the charge of collaboration.
JUDGE: Overruled. The defendant’s motive is relevant to establishing the nature and degree of the collaboration. The defendant will answer.
DEFENDANT: Chan Di-chen was… a person of importance to me. I believed he had formed a close relationship with another internee, a British officer. I wanted him removed from that situation.
PROSECUTOR: You wanted him removed.
DEFENDANT: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: And the method you chose for his removal was to denounce him to the Japanese Military Police as a resistance operative.
DEFENDANT: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: Chan Di-chen was subsequently detained by the Kempeitai, interrogated, and died during interrogation on or about June 14, 1943. His death was recorded as cardiac failure. Were you aware of this outcome?
DEFENDANT: I was informed after the fact.
PROSECUTOR: Mr. Wong, I will ask you plainly. Did you intend for Chan Di-chen to die?
(Pause recorded. Duration noted as “approximately twenty seconds.”)
DEFENDANT: No.
PROSECUTOR: What did you intend?
DEFENDANT: I intended for him to be moved. Relocated. Away from the camp. Away from the officer. I did not intend—
(Transcript notes: “Defendant became unable to continue. Proceedings adjourned for fifteen minutes at the direction of the Court.”)
~
The transcript runs another 180 pages after that. Witnesses. Exhibits. Cross-examination. The machinery of justice grinding through the details of one man’s catastrophe with the patience of a millstone. The facts weren’t in dispute. The defendant had collaborated. The defendant had fed the enemy false intelligence. A man had died because of it. The only question left was the sentence.
The defense argued mitigating circumstances—the coercive atmosphere of the occupation, the defendant’s role in shielding his organization’s members, his cooperation with the post-war authorities. Wong Kwok-leung was thorough, professional, and in the end, unsuccessful.
The judge’s summation ran forty minutes. It acknowledged the moral complexity of life under occupation. It noted the defendant’s clear remorse. It observed that the court’s job was not to judge the human heart but to apply the law.
The sentence was death by hanging.
~
There’s a photograph. Black and white, slightly overexposed, taken in the corridor outside the courtroom. Namchoi is being led away by two officers. He’s wearing the same grey suit—the one from Kimberley Road, the one he’d worn to dinner with Yamaguchi, the one that had stopped fitting years ago. His face is turned partly toward the camera, but he isn’t looking at it. He’s looking at something off-frame, something to the left, something the photograph doesn’t show.
His expression is hard to read. Not grief—grief has a shape to it, a crumpling around the eyes and mouth. Not anger. Not fear. If anything, it’s the face of a man who’s just had something confirmed that he already knew—the look of a gambler who’s watched the last tile flip and found it’s exactly the tile he expected. Not surprised. Not relieved. Just done.
The photograph is in the archives. It’s the only known image of Namchoi.
~
I’ve spent years looking at that photograph.
I found it in a box of unsorted court records at the Public Records Office on a Wednesday afternoon in October, sandwiched between a property dispute from 1947 and a customs violation from 1949. It wasn’t filed under his name. It was filed under the case number, which I’d pulled from a footnote in a footnote in a dissertation nobody had read.
I held the photograph in both hands and looked at a man I’d never met, who’d been dead for decades, who shared my blood, and who had done something unforgivable for reasons I understood completely.
That’s the cruelty of this story. Not the betrayal itself—betrayals are common, ordinary, the daily currency of human weakness. The cruelty is the understanding. I understand why he did it. I understand the desperation, the jealousy, the need to own what you love because you can’t trust it to stay. I understand the logic of the lie he told himself—that it was protection, that it was rescue, that it was love in a different mask. I understand it, and the understanding doesn’t help. It makes it worse.
~
Namchoi. I’m writing this for you.
Not to forgive you—forgiveness isn’t mine to give, and the person who could give it is gone. Not to condemn you—the court handled that, efficiently and correctly, with forty minutes of summation and a sentence carried out on a Tuesday morning in April 1946.
I’m writing this because no one else will. Because your story—the real one, not the case file, not the transcript, not the rumors that bounced around tea houses and mahjong dens for a generation before fading to silence—your story deserves to be told. Not because you deserve it. Because Dichen deserves it. Because the truth deserves it. Because in this world, no secret ever truly vanishes. It just waits.
You carried a postcard in your pocket for three years. “Dear Namchoi. Yours.” Two words in a language that wasn’t yours, written by a hand that would never write again, carrying a meaning you spent a lifetime trying to crack and only understood when it was too late.
I found the postcard. It was in the evidence box, filed as Exhibit 14, between a photograph of a military notepad and a receipt for sulfanilamide tablets bought on the black market. The brown paper had gone dark with age. The handwriting was still legible. “Dear.” “Yours.”
I held it in the same building where you were sentenced. Same wood panels. Same high ceiling. Different light—fluorescent now, not the grey daylight of 1946. But the same room. And for a moment, holding that scrap of brown paper, I understood something the transcript couldn’t contain and the judge couldn’t weigh and the sentence couldn’t settle:
You loved him. Badly, destructively, in a way that consumed everything it touched. But you loved him. And he loved you. And the proof of both is a postcard that has outlasted everyone involved—the writer, the recipient, the judge, the translator, the officers, the empire that fell and the empire that replaced it and the empire that replaced that one.
The postcard remains. “Dear.” “Yours.”
~
The oral histories say different things. Some say Namchoi went to the gallows in silence. Some say he spoke—a sentence, two, addressed to nobody in particular. Some say he asked for the postcard and was turned down. Some say he didn’t ask.
The court record says only: “Sentence carried out at 7:00 a.m., 16 April 1946. Death confirmed by the attending physician at 7:14 a.m.”
Fourteen minutes. A life boiled down to fourteen minutes between the drop and the confirmation. Everything else—the childhood, the triad years, the face-building and the face-losing, the love and the betrayal, the postcard—all of it compressed into the gap between 7:00 and 7:14 on a Tuesday morning, and then silence.
The trial transcript is in the archives. The photograph is in the archives. The postcard is in the archives. The man is in the ground.
But stories don’t stay in the ground. They come back. They surface in court records and family whispers and doctoral footnotes and boxes of unsorted documents nobody opens for fifty years. They surface because the dead aren’t finished with us, and we aren’t finished with them.
I’m not finished with you, Namchoi.
In this world, no secret ever truly disappears.
It just waits for someone to find it, hold it up to the light, and read the words that were always there—faded, smudged, nearly gone, but there. Still there.
“Dear.”
“Yours.”
Always.