Kowloon Tong

by Paul Theroux

  Wang made sandwiches for him. His mother packed them in his lunch pail. Bunt ate them in the clubs—in the Pussy Cat, the Lilac Lounge, the Good Time, Bottoms Up, Fat-Fat Chong's, Happy Bar, and Jack's Place. Even at noon they were open, and though they were usually empty they were ready for business.

  "You want a chicken?" the mama-san would say to Bunt as he ate his cheese and pickle sandwiches at the bar. The woman was matter-of-fact, she did not leer, there was no archness in her tone. That helped. A wink or any suggestion of it would have undone him. In the very beginning he had thought she meant food, and he was hungry, he said yes. Upstairs he was too shy to admit his mistake, and so he was helped, panting, his eyes popping, by an experienced woman with skinny thighs. She complimented him on his performance, he was young enough to believe her, and that was his initiation.

  Mentioning to the mama-san in the Pussy Cat who he was—naming Imperial Stitching—she hinted broadly that she had known his father. No one went to such a place casually. You had to be alert and purposeful, although it was always a mistake to seem so. But his father?

  Bunt found a way of mentioning this to his mother. He laughed, he shrugged, he said, "I don't apportion blame."

  "I do apportion blame," she said, coughing in her fury. "He had an eye for the ladies."

  Bunt did not think less of the man. On the contrary, it seemed to him as though in his lunchtime visits to the Pussy Cat and Happy Bar and Jack's he might be carrying on a family tradition.

  The girls were Chinese, they were Filipino, they were Vietnamese, now and then Eurasians; they were mostly young, they were very pretty, it was so easy. And if you lived with your mother, and your mother was Betty Mullard, they were a necessity. They made no claims on him, they asked for very little, and the mama-san got more than half. This was not Wanchai or Tsim Sha Tsui, in the ridiculous clubs haunted by local gweilos and tourists, overpriced, hurry up, mister, only tree tousand. This was home.

  So, like his father, he had a secret—perhaps the only thing his mother did not know, and this was important to him. It was his only strength. He wanted to tell Mr. Chuck, because he suspected that the old man knew anyway—the Chinese said nothing and seemed to know everything—but as Bunt stumblingly started to confess, Mr. Chuck stopped him. He always remembered how Mr. Chuck had cautioned him.

  "A secret is only a secret if you keep it." And Mr. Chuck smiled.

  Years later Bunt understood the man's wisdom. By then he was frequenting the chicken houses and karaoke lounges in Mong Kok, where gweilos never went. The encounters were brief, frantic, hurried, mostly silent, because he had to get back to the office or back to his mother. And though they were experienced in not showing it, the girls were in a great hurry too.

  One day in Kowloon Tong, in the Pussy Cat, Bunt saw Mr. Chuck in a back booth, his reflection in a mirror. The girl beside him looked familiar too—she was almost certainly one he himself had been with. Bunt understood the old man better that day. You could say anything to these girls, or nothing. Down at the Cricket Club he had heard men speaking of bar girls and complaining, "They have no feelings." Precisely. That was their greatest virtue, that they made no claims, no demands, had no hopes. They were the happy hello-goodbye of urgent sex. It was not about them, but about your own pleas ure. They reserved their feelings for other matters. The workers at Imperial Stitching and Labels—say, one of those pretty girls, Mei-ping or Ah Fu—never said they didn't like the job, nor did they say they liked it; they simply sat down and did it. They were paid, they performed, they were gone, like the girls in the bars. They did their work, and they would do almost anything that was asked of them. Their greatest skill was in vanishing at the end and leaving Bunt to himself. He preferred the simplest, most silent girls. He hated all talk. Humor he felt to be out of place in any sexual encounter. It made him feel self-conscious and silly. He disliked the Filipino girls—whose English was usually good—for attempting jokes.

  Mei-ping was so pretty. She was a good worker too. One day she was in his office past quitting time, going over a badge pattern. "I don't want to keep you." She had lingered. "It's okay, mister." She was seated on his sofa. He left his desk and sat beside her. He touched her, he kissed her. "Do you like that?" She had said nothing. Nothing meant yes. In that Hong Kong way, Mei-ping became one of his lovers.

  He succeeded with Mei-ping by treating her like a chicken, like a phoenix. He expected only that she cooperate, and at the end of it he rewarded her, with money or with a present. She said she preferred presents; he suspected her preference to be money. He tried to keep the other girls in the factory from knowing, but they probably knew—they knew everything. Mei-ping had no family. She said she had come from China some years ago. She lived in a room with the other one, Ah Fu, who was similarly alone. He wanted to make love to Ah Fu too, but he knew it would complicate matters. They would not say when or how they had come from China. They were probably eye-eyes, illegal immigrants, though what did it matter? This was not China, it was a British colony, with the Union Jack flying over the whorehouses and factories and bars and banks and police stations and Government House.

  They were afternoon and early evening affairs, in the hours between work and home, between his factory and his mother. Nearly every day of his life he had spent under her roof. They ate every night at Albion Cottage. They rarely went out—they disliked Chinese food and indeed made a point of never eating it. In the years before television they had listened to Armed Forces Radio, and often still did, on the green radio that was as big as a breadbox, that got hot when it was left on.

  Betty gambled at Happy Valley and Sha Tin, but never recklessly. "Just a flutter." She hedged her bets with what was known at the Hong Kong racecourses as a quinella, choosing the first and second horse in the same race. She liked sitting in the members' enclosure on race days with a plate of chips and her binoculars. Bunt was a member of the Hong Kong Club, by virtue of his father's membership, and the Cricket Club, not for the cricket but the lawn bowling. He went to St. John's Cathedral. He saw Mr. Chuck less and less at the factory, but at least once a month he showed the old man the month's accounts, the orders, the payroll, the overheads, the revenue.

  "Lovely and cool in here," a visitor had once said to him on the cutting floor. It was a typical Hong Kong May, the city was stifling. "Good air conditioning." But there was no air conditioning. It was just open windows and damp bricks, ventilation and shadows. It was the feng shut, perfect harmony.

  Bunt turned forty. He gave up smoking. His father had smoked, so had his mum. A bad month at the factory had him on three packs a day, and soon the skin on his forearms turned as brown as a kipper, and he seemed to be sweating smoky poisons through his pores. His throat was raw, his eyes stung, his fingers were trembly. It was not hard for him to lay off cigarettes for a day—indeed, it made him feel a bit better to desist. But after two days it became an effort of will to fight off the urge to light up. He sucked sweets, he paced, he shouted, he even barked. And he stopped drinking, because alcohol made his craving worse.

  He had believed that in the long run giving up smoking would make little difference to his health. But the change was profound and unpleasant: not smoking turned him into someone else, a simpler, fatter, more agitated person with chronic indigestion. It became a way of dating his life, to before and after smoking. He was smug and took some satisfaction in having quit, but he mourned the loss of his cigarettes. And he suffered.

  There was first of all the shock to his system. He was lightheaded, he slept badly, his throat ached as though he had been smoking. Without cigarettes he had to learn how to eat again. He had to find new ways to digest his food. He was never more constipated than when he gave up, and that never left him. He was much hungrier, and each meal ended with an urge to smoke. He ate more, he developed a sweet tooth, for almost a year he drank nothing but cream sherry. After a time he was disgusted by the smell of other people's smoke, but he knew that these smokers had inhaled the best of it—
the heated sweetness of the toasted leaves—gulped away the tobacco aromas of roasted nuts and ripe fruit, and what they snorted out of their nostrils was the sour exhaust.

  Smoking was a blotter that soaked up time, the minutes of a phone call, the hours between meetings, the meetings themselves. So, without smoking, his days were longer by three or four hours, and having no use for the time—and every minute being aware of the pleasure he was missing in having abandoned tobacco—he spent more hours at the Pussy Cat and Fat-Fat Chong's rather than at Imperial Stitching. The decision to quit smoking changed his life, and he was never able to say for certain that it had been a change for the better.

  Business had been good in the 1950s, but that was hearsay. Bunt's awareness dated from the 1960s, when business had been poor. Orders had picked up in the seventies, boomed and busted in the eighties, and after a brief recovery most of the factories, textiles especially, had moved to China, relocating just over the border in Guangdong.

  Mr. Chuck refused to move. Instead he adjusted, approved cutting back the staff, retooled to make cheaper labels and badges, stopped making shirts, made fewer uniforms—how could he compete with the China-based factories?—and Imperial Stitching grew smaller. It still occupied eight floors but there was more empty space. The offices were on the top floor, Shipping was on the ground floor. Nearby factories manufactured goods for Eddie Bauer, Anne Klein, and Donna Karan, and some of them made five different brands on the same floor. But Bunt was almost exclusively engaged in making labels, and in defiance, with Mr. Chuck's permission, he dropped "Labels" from the company name, changing it to Imperial Stitching.

  In 1984 Margaret Thatcher announced the Hand-over of Hong Kong to China. The Chinese had been mentioning it for years, but the British had scoffed. Incredibly, the promise was made.

  Betty said, "It may never happen." One of her sayings, it meant, "Cheer up!"

  But events moved ahead, baffling the Milliards, mother and son, baffling many people they knew, and enraging Mr. Chuck. It was now inevitable. What had changed? Business was not good but there was money around. Many Chinese had gone to Canada, some had returned. Now they hardly thought about the Hand-over, except when it was boringly described in the newspaper or ranted about by some politicians. Mr. Chuck's heroes were Emily Lau and Martin Lee. Betty refused to think about the Hand-over, she hated all the talk.

  "Jeremiahs," she said. "It's just Chinese take-away!"

  That was why, when Mr. Chuck died, Betty said, "Maybe it's for the better," thinking of how upset Mr. Chuck was at the prospect of 1997. "Maybe you could say it was one of those merciful releases."

  3

  AFTER THE two funerals, after the reading of the will, after the departure of Mr. Chuck's relatives, after all the urgencies and interruptions of the old man's death—the fuss, the sniveling, the expense—life returned to normal for Betty and Bunt. The soft-boiled eggs at Albion Cottage and the lunch pail. Wang's oaties, his dismal fruit salads, his dinners of boiled vegetables and burned meat. Betty's knitting: "I've got a new color," she said. "It's called graphite." She was making coasters again. Imperial Stitching resumed with its full workforce and some new accounts. "Royal" was being dropped from many club and company names in anticipation of the Hand-over, so new badges and monograms were being ordered. The factory was busy, phones were ringing more often in the office, there was greater noise from the cutting and stitching floors, and the Hong Kong radio in Shipping played meaningless music.

  The clammy cold days of early March gave way a week later to humid heat: a taste of the next six months, growing worse by the week, a foretaste of stifling April, monsoon May, suffocating June, and the summer sauna. Bunt liked the bad weather for its being an easy topic of conversation with his mother, and a handy source of excuses for being home late and looking harassed, when the truth was that he had been with a woman in a blue hotel or the back booth of the Pussy Cat.

  It seemed remarkable to Bunt that the whole of Imperial Stitching was now his. Yet he felt the pressure of others hovering near him in the enterprise—his dead brother and namesake, his dead father, and now dead Mr. Chuck. They guided, they chivvied, they signaled for attention. These ghostly presences were as real to him and as awkward and demanding as his mother—Betty with her quarter-share of Imperial. He was working for them all as much as he was for himself. They were restless, they allowed him no peace—and he would have welcomed a bit of solitude. Seeing him, club members said, "You're on your own an awful lot, Neville," and seemed to pity him. But he was never alone.

  About ten days after the reading of the will, Bunt's routine was reestablished. He woke at seven, listened to the radio, switched it off when the Hand-over news came on, then met his mother in the lounge and had breakfast while she watched. "And a wee scrap of toast..." He gulped his tea, he filled his mouth with toast, he cracked and lopped off the top of his egg with one sideways hit of his spoon, scraped that bit of cranium clean, then went at it with toast soldiers. He never stopped chewing, he breathed through his nose, and all the while his mother hovered, not eating herself, so it was less a meal than a performance.

  Wang went back and forth from kitchen to lounge, scuffing in his plastic sandals, stacking plates, setting Bunt's teeth on edge. The man's height—he was a little over six feet—was impressive, because it was useless in this job. But what Bunt found himself reflecting on from time to time was that Wang was his own age. The fact preoccupied him, and sometimes it baffled him. He seldom thought about Wang anymore, except when remembering how Wang's mother, Jia-Jia, had been his amah and how the man at times had frightened him. And whenever he compared himself to Wang, Bunt concluded that although they were different in every way, nothing would change for either of them, ever. Their lives were fixed for good as master and servant.

  This morning Bunt stood and smacked his lips while his mother wiped a fleck of yolk from his chin, and then, muttering something about the heat, he left the house. He remembered Mr. Chuck as he released the hand brake and left in his Rover, driving past the Peak fire station, down the long hill and into the tunnel traffic to Kowloon, taking all the familiar detours. From home to office he saw nothing. After all these years Hong Kong had become invisible to him, and even when someone pointed out a new hotel or office block, more land reclaimed, another shop, he might look but he saw nothing. The city was no more real to him than the shop signs he could not read, in the Cantonese language which was just a grating noise that did not remotely resemble human speech. Up the flyover to Princess, to Waterloo, and at last he came to rest at a painted parking space beside the building, which he had begun to think of as his building.

  Mr. Woo, the janitor, said good morning and stuck his arm into the elevator to hold open the door and punched the top-floor button to save Bunt the trouble. Bunt went directly to his office. Miss Liu brought him a cup of tea and a folder of mail—bills, queries, busybody brochures. "Hand-over bumf," Bunt said, and gave those items back to Miss Liu, the schedules and new regulations. "File it." He did not want to think about the event. Whenever he was asked his intentions, he said, "I'm staying. Nothing will change," and most of the time he meant it. To him Hong Kong was just an anthill with a Union Jack flying over it. The flag was changing but Hong Kong would remain an anthill.

  Where was Mr. Cheung? There was no sign of the general manager. They met each morning and went over the orders and the daily objectives. Because of Cheung the factory was well run and productive, and orders were filled on time. Cheung simply asked for approval—like Bunt, Cheung had been trained by Mr. Chuck.

  Bunt usually saved his reading of the South China Morning Post for his second cup of tea, after Cheung left, but today—untypically—he opened the paper. He skimmed the world news, skipped the Hand-over news, and settled on crime, which was always unusual and sometimes gripping. Of a page of violent stories, one caught his eye: a man in jail for assaulting his wife was bringing a case against the poor woman because she had refused to sell the family house. TWo thi
ngs interested Bunt about the story. The first was the audacity of the man in suing his wife—his victim; the second was the crime itself. He had accused her of adultery and demanded she leave him. You must leave, but your face belongs to me, the man had said, and he had bound her with his neckties and poured acid on her face. I will take your face away. The burns were so gruesome that she had been unable to get a job, and she needed the house. She had two children. The violent acid-throwing husband wanted the profit from his half of the house. Seriously disfigured, the story said. Bunt wondered what she looked like.

  "Excuse me, sir."

  Bunt was so startled that for an instant he saw the villain from the newspaper story at his office door.

  But it was Mr. Cheung, jerking his head and grunting, his way of saying sorry.

  "The train was late."

  "What train?"

  Cheung lived in Kowloon Tong.

  "This morning I went to China," Mr. Cheung said.

  "Fancy that."

  To wake up and travel to the People's Republic of China and return before ten the same morning seemed foolish. Bunt told himself that such a journey was so pointless he would not inquire further into the absurdity.

  Licking his thumb, Mr. Cheung worked his way through a clipboard of orders, and only when he looked up did he realize that Bunt was still staring at him, wondering about the China trip.