Feeling relieved, yet grieved
Mariupol plant evacuees spent two months at the centre of hell, before their escape.
WHEN the moist concrete walls deep below ground and the mould and the cold and the weeks without fresh fruit or vegetables became too much to bear, some in the bunker underneath Elina Tsybulchenko’s office decided to visit the sky.
They made their way, through darkness lit by flashlights and lamps powered by car batteries, to a treasured spot in the bombarded Azovstal steel plant, the last Ukrainian holdout in the ruined city of Mariupol. There, they could look up and see a sliver of blue or smoky grey. It was like peering from the bottom of a well. For those who could not, or dared not, climb to the surface, it was as distant as peace.
But seeing the sky meant hope. It was enough to make Elina’s adult daughter, Tetyana, cry.
The Tsybulchenko family was among the first to emerge from the steel plant in a tense, days-long evacuation negotiated by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross with the government of Russia, which now controls Mariupol, and Ukraine, which wants the city back. A brief cease-fire allowed more than 100 civilians to flee the plant.
They arrived safely in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia this week. There, they described for The Associated Press their two months at the centre of hell, and their escape.
Hundreds of civilians and Ukrainian fighters remain trapped at the plant and Russian forces have pushed their way inside. The seizure of Mariupol is expected to play a central role in Moscow’s celebration on May 9 of Victory Day, historically marking the end of World War II.
In the earliest days of Russia’s invasion Tsybulchenko, 54, was shocked by the bombardment of her city. Like many residents with memories of civil defense drills, she knew the steel plant had the only real bunkers in town. When she, her husband Serhii, her daughter and her son-in-law Ihor Trotsak decided to hole up in the one under her office, she assumed they would stay a few days.
“We didn’t even take toothbrushes,” Elina said. But a few days turned into 60.
They had brought only their documents, three blankets, two dogs and fruit carried in a basket they used for Orthodox Easter. They didn’t think they would mark the holiday there weeks later.
The steel plant has a maze of more than 30 bunkers and tunnels spread out over its 11sq km, and each bunker was its own world. Evacuees had little or no communication with those elsewhere in the plant; they would eventually meet on the buses to Zaporizhzhia and compare experiences.
Their isolation complicates estimates of the number of civilians and Ukrainian fighters who remain. A few hundred civilians are still trapped, the Ukrainian side said this week, including more than 20 children. Another evacuation effort was reported underway recently.
The number of those surviving underground threatens to drop every day. Some evacuees recalled watching in horror as the wounded succumbed to their injuries while first aid supplies, even clean water, ran short or ran out.
“People literally rot like our jackets did,” said 31-year-old Serhii Kuzmenko. The weary foreman at the plant fled along with his wife, eight-year-old daughter and four others from their bunker; 30 were left behind. “They need our help badly,” he said. “We need to get them out.”
In another bunker, the Tsybulchenko family lived among 56 people, including 14 children ages four to 17. They survived by dividing among themselves the bare rations that fighters brought down – tinned meat, porridge, crackers, salt, sugar, water. There was not enough to go around.
The family’s old Cocker Spaniel suffered, shivering and staring at them with wide eyes. The dog had to die, they decided. It was an act of mercy. They asked a soldier for sleeping pills, but he said the dog might survive and suffer more. “Let me shoot it,” he said.
The dog was given a hurried burial above ground amid the shelling; rubble and scrap metal were placed atop it, to protect it from other, starving pets.
There was little comfort. The bunker shook from bombardment. “We went to bed like this every night and thought, ‘Will we survive?’” Elina said.
The Tsybulchenkos and others slept on benches padded with the uniforms of steel plant workers. For toilets, they used buckets. When the bombardment became too heavy to empty the buckets upstairs, they used plastic bags. To pass the time, people made up board games or played cards. One carved bits of wood into toys.
A room in the bunker became a playground for the children. People found markers and paper and held an arts and crafts contest, with the children drawing what they would like to see the most. They drew nature and the sun. As Easter approached in late April, they drew Easter eggs and bunnies.
The drawings were posted on walls that dripped with moisture. Dank-smelling mold crept from the corners and migrated to clothing and blankets. The only way to keep something dry was to wear it. Even after evacuation and after their first proper showers in months, the Tsybulchenkos worried they smelled of mould.
While they tried to collect rainwater, they often used sanitiser to clean themselves and their dishes, to the point where Elina’s hands showed an allergic reaction. In the early days, she went up to her office and brought down lotion, deodorant and a few other personal items she had left there.
Then it became too dangerous to go above. Half the building, including her office, collapsed in the bombardment.
Planning their evacuation
Again and again over the two months, people in the bunker would hear word of possible evacuations from Mariupol, only to learn they had failed. When news arrived of the Un-negotiated evacuation, there was skepticism and fear. But the planning began with decisions on who should leave first.
Others said the Tsybulchenkos should go because Elina’s cramped legs had started to blacken and give her trouble. “But there are small children here, and they should go,” she said. The others insisted. They assumed the evacuation would continue in the days ahead and take everyone, even the fighters. Some hesitated, wanting to see whether the first evacuation was a success.
A small girl staying behind, Violeta, took a marker and drew a flower, a heart and “Good luck” on Elina’s arm. The bunker residents had shortened the girl’s name to Leta, or “sunlight”.
Everyone in the bunker agreed to meet to celebrate at a cafe in Zaporizhzhia when the evacuation was complete.
“We’re so sorry,” the Tsybulchenkos told the others as they started towards the surface.
“Don’t worry,” they replied. “We’ll follow.”
Evading land mines
Elina didn’t recognise her workshop. The roof had been blown away. Walls were in ruins. The ground was pocked with craters and strewn with unexploded shells.
As they emerged from an opening in the rubble, the family and other evacuees blinked. After two months, the sunlight hurt their eyes.
It was quiet. The Russian bombardment, for once, had stopped.
“The weather was brilliant,” said Ivane Bochorishvili, the UN deputy humanitarian chief in Ukraine, who approached the plant to await the evacuees. “The one when you are waiting for the perfect storm, like the blue sky.”
A dangerous stretch lay ahead. A railway bridge near the plant was the receiving point for evacuees. The waiting buses were another kilometre away.
For the evacuation, the Russians had tried to retrieve the mines they had planted. But the machine hadn’t detected everything, Bochorishvili said.
As he and a colleague approached in their vehicle, the Russians shouted from hundreds of metres away – “Don’t move!” The UN workers were told to get out and go back carefully to the last checkpoint on foot. The de-mining machine was brought in again. Eight more mines were found.
Ukrainian soldiers walked ahead and behind the evacuees as they finally emerged, making sure the column of people placed their feet safely.
“Thank God we didn’t see any bodies along the way,” Elina said. The Russians had removed them.
Twenty-one people emerged the first day. The rest came out the next. As the second group met the first, “there were all these hugs and kisses. They’d been in Azovstal but hadn’t seen each other, didn’t know what happened to each other,” said Osnat Lubrani, UN humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine.
The buses set off through a ruined city. Makeshift graves lined the streets. People held their heads in grief and disbelief or hugged each other. “These people are going to have longtime nightmares,” said Esteban Sacco, the UN official responsible for the first leg of the bus journey to safety.
And yet they could still see signs of life. It was market day. There were people walking or biking, even children. Some peered through windows of bombed-out buildings.
The evacuees were still far from safe. The buses at first headed not west towards Ukrainian-held territory but east toward Russia. Even the UN staffers at first thought they were going there, Sacco said.
Fear of ending up in Russia
In a camp at Bezimenne, near the border, the evacuees said they faced pressure from the Russians to go to their side. The Russians even tried to board the buses, saying they wanted to offer the children candy, but they were kept out.
A Russian priest asked evacuees why they were going to Zaporizhzhia. “Ukraine will cease to exist very soon,” Elina Tsybulchenko recalled him saying.
The evacuees were questioned and searched, even stripped at times to check for military-style tattoos. Some Russians were polite, said Ihor, Elina’s son-in-law. Others were mocking or insulting, especially if he slipped and spoke Ukrainian instead of Russian. “Why are you speaking a foreign language?” they asked.
The buses turned west for the slow route toward Zaporizhzhia and safety. “We always had this fear,” Ihor said. “We knew we could’ve ended up going to Russia.”
As the convoy slowly arced around Mariupol, they could see faraway flashes as the Russian bombardment resumed. Two civilian women at the steel plant were killed and 10 civilians wounded, said Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of Ukraine’s Azov Regiment there.
Ukrainian authorities said Russian forces pushed into the plant’s perimeter with “heavy, bloody battles”.
The evacuees had entered their bunkers in winter. They emerged to a black-and-grey landscape, a grotesque spring. Only after passing through no man’s land did Elina notice green and yellow fields again.
They entered Ukrainian-held territory after a harrowing, final stretch of more than 20 checkpoints.
Ukrainian officials had urged residents of Russian-controlled communities to climb aboard the convoy along the way. But in the end, the buses were not allowed to take them. Elina and other evacuees cried as they passed people standing near the road, waiting in vain.
“We really felt shame,” Elina said. “We never stopped.”
WHEN the petition to get James Hong a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame began, the response was immediate and overwhelming.
Recognising the groundbreaking body of work from the 93-year-old actor, who has more than 650 credits to his name, actor-producer Daniel Dae Kim started a crowdfunding campaign in 2020 to raise the US$55,000 (RM 241,272) necessary for the star. The goal was met within four days.
The only person who didn’t respond right away was Hong himself.
“In actuality, I didn’t hear a thing,” Hong says with a laugh. “Somehow the Internet wasn’t quite working or I didn’t get the email. The next thing I hear, they had the money already.”
Hong, who received his star in a ceremony on May 10, is still somewhat overwhelmed by the honour.
“I want to thank all the fans and friends who donated their money. It boggles my mind to think that there’s enough people out there who would do that,” he says. “And I don’t know who they are, so I’ll just have to thank them through your article.”
Instantly recognisable
It’s hard to imagine anyone who has consumed entertainment in the past seven decades who isn’t a fan of the actor.
People still call out “Seinfeld, four!” when they see him, referencing an infamous Seinfeld episode in which Hong plays the maitre d’ of a Chinese restaurant who continues to tell the gang their table will be ready in five or 10 minutes.
Hong says most people approach him and reference his role as the evil David Lo Pan in the 1986 cult hit Big Trouble In Little China or as Chew, the synthetic eyeball specialist in 1982’s Blade Runner.
With that instantly recognisable face and voice, Hong’s career can be traced back all the way to 1950s TV series including The New Adventures Of Charlie Chan and Dragnet to such films as his current hit, Everything Everywhere All At Once.
That film’s directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – known collectively as the Daniels – say that working with Hong was everything they could have imagined.
“There are a million things you could say about James Hong and the experience of working with him,” they told Variety via email. “But the most striking thing to us was how, after almost a century of being in this industry, he still hustles harder than anyone we know, how much he still cares about the work he is doing, and above all, how hard this man still loves to party.”
Kim met Hong for the first time when they worked together on the TV show Charmed in 2001.
“Of course, even then I knew who he was and all that he had accomplished,” says Kim.
“Then, around five or six years ago, I was meeting some friends and we started naming all the amazing projects that he’d been a part of.
“We realised the number was literally in the thousands. It caused me to ask why more people didn’t know him by name, or recognised his incredible career.
“That’s when I decided that I would do what I could to get him a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.”
Creating opportunities
It’s been a long journey for Hong, who was born the son of Chinese immigrants in Minneapolis, before his father moved the family back to Hong Kong when Hong was five.
When the family returned to the United States a few years later, the shy, quiet Hong had to learn English all over again.
Though he began performing on stage in junior high and high school, he opted to pursue a degree in civil engineering, first at University of Minnesota.
The Korean War interrupted his studies and when Hong was sent to Camp Rucker in Alabama with the US Army, he found his skills being used to put together performances for Special Services.
Rather than be sent overseas, he jumped at the opportunity to stay and continue to organise live shows.
After the war, he picked back up with his civil engineering studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
But he found it hard to go back to his studies, and now he was in the centre of the filmmaking capital of the world.
An appearance on Groucho Marx’s game show You Bet Your Life in which he did an imitation of the host garnered a huge response – Hong received tons of fan mail and nightclub offers, and it helped him land his first agent.
Despite his impressive filmography, Hong says it wasn’t easy.
“In the early days, there were no opportunities whatsoever,” he recalls. “Opportunities were very few and Asians were still looked down upon as this silent minority. In a sense I feel I was born too early, because there were no chances.”
So the actor took it upon himself to create more opportunities and learning experiences.
He started the first class for Asian Americans at the Desilu Playhouse where they trained under director Joseph Sargent (The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three).
In 1965, he and other artistes, including Mako, co-founded the East/west Players, the prestigious Los Angeles-based theatre company for Asian American artists that continues to thrive today.
“We started with a small group and now look, thousands and thousands of people pour through that door,” Hong says. “And they get trained by the best teachers in the organisation.”
Hong was also a vital voice in protesting poor representations of Asians on screen, such as the 1962 film Confessions Of An Opium Eater.
Hong says it was the first protest in Hollywood by an Asian American group.
Asked if he ever worried about repercussions for his actions, he states: “No, not really. That really never entered my mind. I just go ahead and do what I had to do.”
Even today, Hong says there is a still a ways to go.
“I would definitely like to see what I work for become a reality,” he says.
“I’d love for movies and series to have better representation, to see us playing roles like doctors and businessmen and politicians, like the reality of society.”
He feels encouraged that things are improving, and cites fellow actors including Kim for taking up the effort.
“I’ve worked for all that for 70 years and it’s just beginning as far as I’m concerned. Maybe another 10 years when I’m looking down at this world and I say, ‘Yeah, progress’.”
Still hustling
And Hong is still adding to that busy filmography.
“Even if I wanted to retire, I don’t think they would let me,” he says with a laugh.
He’ll soon be heard in the animated series Kung Fu Panda: Paws Of Destiny and Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai and will reunite with his Everything Everywhere co-star Michelle Yeoh in the Apple TV+ series American Born Chinese.
And he’s earning raves for Everything Everywhere, which is proving to be a big hit for indie studio A24.
Playing Yeoh’s elderly father, Gong Gong, Hong was the only actor the Daniels saw for the role.
“The only reservation we had
was we didn’t know if he would be available or comfortable doing a role that demanded so much because he was already over 90 years old at the time we reached out to him,” the Daniels said.
“He came in and asked, ‘How senile do you want me to act for this role?’ We were curious to see how far he could take it, so we told him to go as senile as he wanted.
“He immediately turned on a switch and became so convincingly ‘old’ – wandering around as if lost, losing his train of thought, and even singing to himself – that we were genuinely afraid it was no longer an act and he was going to fall over and hurt himself.
“The moment we said cut, he was back to his witty, sharp self again. The amount of control he has as a performer was astounding.
“We immediately knew we had
found Gong Gong.”
Guest speakers at Hong’s Walk Of Fame ceremony included Everything Everywhere co-star Jamie Lee Curtis and Kim.
“It’s so satisfying, for a number of reasons,” Kim says of the honour.
“First and foremost, he’s earned it. It also gives me hope that other Asian American actors whose work has been overlooked will get their chance to be recognised, both by the public and during awards season.
“I also think it’s so important that those of us lucky enough to work in the industry today acknowledge the achievements of those who came before us.
“It’s one way we can show our gratitude for all the ways they blazed the trail so that we could walk an easier path today.” – Reuters