A VETERAN RETIRES AFTER 42 IT'IEIT'IORABLE YEARS
Eddie Tseng did not have far to go to become a war correspondent. On December 8, 1g41, his elder brother called him to the balcony of their apartment in Shamshuipo. "The military has got a big practice going on at Kai Tak," his brother said, pointing to aircraft wheeling and diving over Kowloon. Eddie looked, saw the Rising Sun emblem
glinting on the wings of the aircraft and said "Practice hell. They've invaded.,' So they had. Reporter Tseng dashed to the telephone and called the South China Morning post where he was employed as a general ,eporier. Get up to the New Territories, he was told. So Eddie grabbed a cab and went to war.
It was to be the first of five wars he has
covered in a career which came to an end a couple of weeks ago when Eddie Tseng retired as head of the Central News Agency of Taiwan in Hongkong and publisher of the Hongkong Times atter 42 years as a newsman. He didn't like war then and he likes it even less now.
"Only fools and people who haven't seen what war does can like it," he says. He saw what it was like a few hours after he called the office when he arrived in yuenlong. The Japanese had smashed across the border and the British were in full retreat. Eddie Tseng was with them, telephoning in stories every couple of hours as he trudged south along Castle Peak Road with a rearguard of Scottish soldiers. By the time they had walked to Kowloon, the
The editor and most of the reportยกng staff were detained waiting to be sent to internment in Stanley Camp but Eddie thought it was worth the risk of going to the office to try to 'get the month's pay which was owed to him because he was penniless and starving. But the cashier told him the editor wanted to see him and when Eddie went into the editor's office there was an unfamiliar figure behind the desk. a Japanese called lto who was in charge of puttยกng out Hongkong News, an occupation English language paper on the Post presses. "He offered me a job and l told him as politely
as I could what he could do with it."
Eddie
recalls.
When the Japanese newsman got the message
he was not amused and promptly called the
military police to arrest the young reporter. Eddie hurried home, got his brother, collected bedding, clothes and whatever else they could carry and headed north towards the border. They crossed over at Shataukok and slowly made their way towards the city of Wuchow on the Kwangtung coast, an area of Free China which was stยกll held by Kuomintang troops. They tramped north for 16 days, dodging patrolling Japanese until they reached Wuchow. The first place he looked for was the Central News Agency office, an organisation to which he had already applied for a job before he left university.
When the fighting died down and
Japan
clamped Hongkong under military rule, he returned to his office in the old post building in Wyndham Street.
Eddie smiles as he sips his whisky and water..."l was an idealist in those days." His persuasion worked and he went to Yench-
ing University. He was recommended to CNA as a bright prospect, but by the time he had graduated in 1 939 the Japanese had occupied Canton. The nearest he could get to his home town was Hongkong and he began as a reporter for the English-language Daily Press before switching to the SCM Post. (He remembers on the Posr covering what was to prove to be one of the most complex, frustrating and mysterious assignments of his long and distinguished career - a cricket match. "l
didn't know what the hell was going on,"
he
admits."l still don't understand the game.") So by the time he reached Wuchow and found the CNA office located on board an old junk tied up at the waterfront, Eddie Tseng was an experienced reporter. He got a job, but once over not clear sailing.
that hurdle all was
He still had to get to CNA head office in the far distant wartime capital of Chungking and that
peninsula had fallen. Eddie found his way home only to discover the Japanese had set up artillery in the nearby police
sports ground and this had become a target for the British gunners on The peak. But he couldn't move because Japanese soldiers were shooting anyone who ventured out on the streets.
Eddie Tseng had become a reporter over the opposition of his family. His mother and brother were both doctors and he was to have followed them into a career in medicine. But after a vear in pre-med school at university in his native Canton, Eddie went to his father and said he wanted to be a newspaperman. "Doctors can save only one life at a time, but a journalist might be able to save many," he told his father.
One of Asia's most prominent newsmen and one of the Club's most popular members has for many years been Eddie E.P. Tseng of the Central News Agency. But now, after more than four decades of covering war, ranolution md riots - and the equally significant changes in economics, tade and trends - Eddie Tseng is calling it a day.
was easier said than done. He went by truck, jumping a lift from village to village across the breadth of China. The trucks were somewhat akin to the modern-day snakeboats that smuggle illegal immigrants into Hongkong. They were known as "Yellowfish" trucks because of their human cargo. "l was a yellow fish," Eddie explains. ln Chungking, he was placed on the English desk of the newsagency, handling translations and writing storยกes for the English service. When the American 14th Air Force began to build up its presence in China, Eddie Tseng was assigned to cover them because of his fluency in English.
Happy Birthday: Eddie at Panmunjom during the long peace talks which ended the Korean War and wheriz Eddie celebrated his 30th birthday. A bottle of wine to any reader who can identify the largest number of familiar faces in the picture. Surely, most correspondents will recognise the immortal Arnold Dibble who is one of those in the photograph.
From bomber command headquarters in Kunming and fighter command in Kweilin, he sent a constant stream of stories on the war in the air. It wasn't just a desk job; he went out on missions with the airmen. One, he remembers well... Agents had reported a Japanese naval convoy would be heading south through the Straits of Taiwan and the Americans decided to stage an aerial ambush. Eddie was aboard one
of the two B25s which
took off from Kunming, heavily loaded with bombs and fuel, and headed for a secret, makeshift airport levelled by farmers near the Fukien coast. The planes landed safely, refuelled
with aviation
spirit carried to the airport by hundreds of volunteers, then set off to keep their rendezvous with the unsuspecting Japanese. Sure enough, the agent had been correct and right on time the American airmen - and Eddie Tseng - spotted the nine-ship convoy, three destroyers and six freighters. "We went in at wave-top height," he recalls. "There was a new technique of skip bombing, dropping the bombs so they would skip across the water and explode in the side of the ship." This was demonstrated with devastating effect; two destroyers were hit, exploded spectacularly and sank.