Oh! You should be so lucky to see Hong Kong’s Bill Yim flash his draws

Of all the missing scraps from my childhood, the ones I yearn for most are the often-outrageous scribbles of my Uncle Bill Yim. They were kept under glass, on top of an elaborate Chinese-style chest of drawers in our flat in Macdonnell Road, Hong Kong. And they were left there. I had no inkling when I departed Hong Kong that my father had plans to leave too, or I would have grabbed them.

There were two quick sketches of my parents – both naked, both on scraps of copy paper – my skinny dad and my voluptuous mother. But mostly they were pictures of animals, usually with some scatological feature – a little pyramid of poo between the legs of a squawking chicken or a piggie being flushed down a toilet.

My favourite was a giraffe with a crazy long leg wrapped around her neck, a look of shock on her face as Bill’s signature bee threatened to sting her on the bottom. He drew that for me in some teahouse somewhere while I watched on, fascinated, down to the final dot dot dot from bee’s eye to giraffe’s arse and I remember squealing with delight that he should be so rude.

We spent a lot of time with Uncle Bill in those days. But even I’m surprised at how many of the old photographs in my collection were either taken by him or depict outings which he remembers far better than I do.

My next Bill Yim original was drawn when I was 16 and back in Hong Kong for a holiday break in my two-year exile to Australia. It was at the Press Club in Lockhart Road and long tables had been set up for Christmas lunch. I was at one end of the room and Bill at the other. We couldn’t have been sitting further away from each other.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something flying across the room from table to table. It would land on someone’s plate, they would look at it, laugh, glance around and fling it on. Strangely, I noticed, the glances were landing on me. When the mystery item arrived in front of my plate I saw it was the bit of cardboard from a Christmas cracker. And as I unrolled it, everyone in the room had their eyes on me.

And they were laughing. I had my first ‘real’ Bill Yim cartoon! No more funny giraffes, sleazy rats or hapless pigs. Bill had drawn me naked. Not full on, offensive naked, but most definitely naked, with an arm modestly covering my teenage breasts and a delightful flush on my pretty cartoon cheek. Trust me, Reader, when I tell you that Your Girl Reporter never looked so gorgeous as I did in that quick little sketch.

And in the careless way of any Pretty Young Thing, I left that little roll of cardboard on the table instead of putting it in my bag straight away. Too late, I ran back for it only to find it had been swept away with all the other festive detritus, never to be seen again.

I made my confession to Uncle Bill at a wake for my dad in a Wanchai bar in 2005 and he rewarded my carelessness with another portrait. But it wasn’t until I was back in Brisbane, doing some research on Dad’s work for Fairfax on the Francis James affair, that I realized how little I knew about my extraordinary Uncle Bill.

There, in old-fashioned black and white, was a newspaper cutting with the startling revelation that my funny Uncle Bill had spent a year in a Chinese prison on charges of spying. He was working for UPI in 1960 when he was sent to Guangzhou, chasing an interview with the brother of imprisoned CIA pilot John Downey who had been shot down over the People’s Republic of China.

Bill was himself arrested for his efforts and spent 12 months in a tiny cell with the light on 24 hours a day before his confounded captors concluded that the CIA would never recruit someone as crazy as him.

It was there, with no crimes to contemplate and little else to do, that he started doodling on toilet paper. “The bathroom is a very inspiring place,” Bill says.

Instead of breaking him, his prison experience made him. Bill had found his talent and, on his return to Hong Kong, he was ready to unleash. He stuck with journalism for a few more years, before turning his back on a career which started with Reuters in 1957 and included stints at just about every major Hong Kong news outlet. It was time to make people laugh.

And laugh they did, at his outrageous caricatures drawn in rapid time, at his nonsensical sense of humour, at his larger than life personality. Styling himself as The Fastest Draw in the East, Bill has travelled around the world as an ambassador for Hong Kong, casually blowing up along the way all those offensive stereotypes that existed at the time about the Inscrutable Oriental.

In 1986 he was on holiday in Vancouver when he visited the Hong Kong pavilion under construction for Expo ’86. It was the start of a long and beautiful relationship with the Hong Kong Trade Development Council

On his return to Hong Kong he pitched a proposal to the organisers to include his talents at the show. Fine, they said, but Bill would have to find his own sponsors as there was no room in the budget to get him over there.

What happened next is typical of Bill Yim’s genius for creative thinking. During his visit to the Hong Kong pavilion he’d noticed a Hong Kong tram on display, decorated with advertisements for some of the city’s best-known products.

He hit the phones and Lee Kum Kee, purveyor of the ubiquitous oyster sauce, was happy to get on board. Ironically, the company had no idea its advertisement had been chosen by the organisers for inclusion on the tram decorations.

“The Lee Kum Kee boss wasn’t slow to realise the potential when I told him my idea would be to have their name printed on the bottom of the sheets of paper I’d use for the caricatures,” Bill said.

Armed with 4,000 sheets of paper, 600 pens and a month’s pay in his pocket, Bill headed to Vancouver where he stole the show. Someone came up with the idea that he should wear an eye-wateringly colourful smock and a red beret while he worked. “I thought that was a terrible idea, but I did it, and after that I wore it all the time,” Bill said.

After his success at Vancouver Expo Bill became a fixture at Hong Kong promotions around the world, as well as corporate dinners and other events, any occasion when a fun caricature, suitably themed, can provide a unique experience for guests.

When pressed, he can turn out 40 faces in an hour and doesn’t stop in his downtime. He will still today present dining or drinking companions with funny little sketches of themselves they didn’t really notice he was drawing as he regaled them simultaneously with his endlessly witty and insightful conversation.

What does he talk about? The immense changes he has seen in journalism, in Hong Kong society, in fashion, in the troubles he’s having with his mobile phone. One thing he doesn’t have time for is sport – “The thing about sport is that there always has to be a loser, and I don’t like things where someone has to lose,” he says.

“I want to make people happy. Everyone is beautiful when they smile.”

© Maria Spackman 2018

Part One of an occasional series on My Extraordinary Uncle. Stay tuned for the further adventures of the one and only Bill Yim. Meanwhile, there’s a chance to see him in action, teaching a few simple Cantonese phrases, in this video produced some years ago for Hong Kong tourists which was shown in all the big hotels. And if you’re organising an event and would like to liven it up with some of the Bill Yim magic, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with him. 

Your Girl Reporter is taking a break to enjoy my first Hong Kong summer in a long time. I’ll be back in August with more of my own adventures, a bit of delving into the Jack Spackman story and, of course, the continuing stories of my other extraordinary relatives, both honorary and actual. Stay tuned!