Kowloon Tong

by Paul Theroux

  "The rice is cooked," Mr. Hung said.

  Betty's jaw stuck out at Mr. Hung. It was a challenge made more dramatic by her having adjusted her bite. Slipping her dentures slightly gave her a look of wolfish defiance.

  "It's a dog's dinner," she said. "There are no arrangements. No bookings, no tickets."

  "You're on the one-twenty Cathay Pacific flight to London. Confirmed seats. I've put you in First."

  "We've no tickets," Bunt said.

  "Here we are," Monty said, digging into his briefcase. He produced a plastic wallet thick with itineraries and tickets, which he handed over. He said, "Next question."

  In a trapped and fretful voice—he was breathing hard—Bunt said, "We're not going anywhere. The deal's off. Mum?"

  She was staring at Hung. She said, "I don't think they're giving us much of a choice."

  "There is a choice," Hung said. He was truculent, his English blunter and less elegant, even less fluent as he had become sulkier. "You can leave now or you can wait and follow Mr. Chuck. As for your factory—we own it now. In a sense we have always owned it."

  Bunt said, "We'd like some assurances about the welfare of the employees."

  Hung was enigmatic when he sulked, but had an alarming smile. It was this smile that he turned towards Bunt, and then he calmly selected a toothpick, and not changing his expression, began working it between his teeth.

  "Mum," Bunt said again. He looked pitiable. He was reaching for his cellular phone. "We can't." And once more, "Mum?"

  Betty's expression, fixed on Hung, was one of fear and resignation, and yet she seemed in silence to be holding a conversation with him.

  "I have to make a phone call," Bunt said.

  He dragged himself from the table. In the hubbub of the crowded restaurant, almost overwhelmed by the rising tide of chattering voices—the Chinese army owned this place?—he dialed his office at Imperial Stitching.

  It rang and rang, and then the answering machine clicked on. This is the executive office of Imperial Stitching...

  "It's me," he said urgently. "Please pick up the phone ... May, please pick it up ... Pick it up ... Pick it up ... May, are you there?"

  He was still pleading into the phone when he turned to see his mother approaching him. "Come along, Bunt."

  She was at his elbow, and there was a Chinese man on either side of her. They were as tall and as solid as Hung, with flat bony faces and military haircuts.

  Bunt said, "She won't pick up the phone."

  "Oh?" his mother said, and seemed unconcerned. Then, "I shouldn't worry."

  "If she's not there, where could she possibly be?"

  "How should I know?" his mother said peevishly.

  "Mum, we can't leave her," Bunt said in a pleading voice.

  But his mother had gripped his arm and she was tugging him to the door.

  "Why isn't she answering?"

  Now the two Chinese men were just behind them and hurrying them forward to the entrance of the restaurant, the gold-painted moongate.

  "I told her I'd pick her up," Bunt said. "She said she'd be waiting." One of the Chinese men jabbed him in the small of his back. "Pardon!"

  Many times at Imperial Stitching employees had been recommended by Cheung for dismissal, and Bunt had authorized each one. Now and then the person, usually the men, returned and made a fuss—stood on the street and yelled obscenities at the windows or crept into the building and grappled with Mr. Woo. But it was Bunt they wanted to see, so that they could insult him. A few had reached the eighth floor and it had always been horrible, the raging indignant man causing a commotion.

  "See him out," Bunt would say, and the man would be propelled like a bundle down the stairs and into the street. That was how Bunt felt now, like a sacked employee. Almost without moving his legs he was being whisked out of the restaurant. He could not understand why his mother had not objected.

  "This car is yours," Monty was saying. Somehow he had materialized outside the restaurant.

  Bunt said, "There is something you have to know. Wait!"

  He had seen those humiliated employees shoehorned into taxis and sent off in just this way. He was standing next to the car with his mother, and then a man was pressing his head and the next instant they were inside, jammed between the two Chinese guards. Bunt saw Hung standing on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, working a toothpick around his mouth, his hand cupped for delicacy. Still the man darted the thing at his teeth as the car started up. He followed it with his eyes for a few seconds, no more, and then turned away and conferred with a man next to him. Bunt understood that as far as Hung was concerned, he did not exist.

  Monty was in the front seat, sitting sideways, his elbow propped on the backrest.

  "We have nothing," Bunt said. "No baggage—nothing."

  "You're not short of a bob or two," Monty said with undisguised contempt.

  He meant the million pounds, but Bunt was thinking only of Mei-ping. Why had she not answered the phone?

  "Mum, I'm worried," Bunt said.

  Betty took hold of his hot hand and said, "Oh, she'll be along." She seemed so sure. She gripped his hand harder. "If we don't leave now, there's no deal. There won't be any money. And that's not the half of it. You heard him."

  Bunt screamed, "Take a left!"

  The command came with such conviction that the driver reacted instantly and they were traveling down Waterloo Road at great speed.

  Monty tapped the driver's shoulder and said, "Kai Tak is the other way, Alex."

  "Boss?" the driver said.

  "Alex is confused," Monty said to Bunt.

  "I have to get something at the factory. It won't take a minute."

  Bunt leaned forward and spoke so urgently that the driver listened and responded. Imperial Stitching wasn't far—the roof sign was already in sight. Bunt gave the driver directions, and the Sunday traffic was so light that they arrived at the front door while Monty was still protesting.

  Even before the car came to a complete stop, Bunt was out on the street, struggling with the lock on the factory door. There was something in the look of the building, a blankness in the windows reflecting the sky, that told him it was empty. He pushed inside and, too impatient to wait for the elevator, he hurried up the stairs, his feet clattering, all the while shouting, "Mei-ping!" Hoisting himself upward using the handrail, he went from landing to landing, floor to floor, Shipping, Labels, Storage, Packing, Stitching, Cutting, the old underwear floor—now closed—and finally the executive offices, calling, "Mei-ping!"

  There was no sign that Mei-ping was there, that she had ever been there, only emptiness and immobility and motionless dust, stilled machines and silenced activity, that made the factory seem haunted by the ghosts of departed workers, a place of bones. That, and residue. A faint vibration lingered in the air, like the echo after a tremendous sound has been struck from a simple instrument, as though he were hearing the last audible whimper from the thunder of a gong.

  Feeling that the small sound was slipping away, Bunt screamed Mei-ping's name and became terrified when it, too, diminished to a faint echo among all the indifferent machines. And then, slowly, he descended the stairs.

  "Mum," Bunt said in the car. He wanted to weep.

  "Pull yourself together, Neville," Monty said.

  They were at the Kai Tak entrance, gliding up the ramp. Monty was chatting confidently about the future, the new airport on the western side of Kowloon, the new road and flyover, the reclaimed land, the massive investment. Next year, next year, he said. Next year.

  "I'll take care of everything," he said.

  Bunt had gone weak. At the check-in counter he had his cellular phone open and he was pleading into it, still imploring it, calling her apartment, calling the factory; and again at the security check, and on the jetway; and after they boarded, in his seat, still pleading, Pick up the phone, May!

  "I expect something came up," Betty said. She had a gin and tonic in one hand and the fingers o
f the other scratched in her dish of warmed mixed nuts. "I've got no more bally almonds."

  They were in the air. Side by side in the sharply accelerating plane they felt themselves swaying this way and that over the city and were soon being thumped by clouds.

  "Maybe she changed her mind," Betty said.

  Why was she so sure, why no sentiment or hesitation, why had she not questioned that sinister detail of Mr. Chuck's demise? Nothing, it seemed, had really surprised her.

  Bunt was numb. He was sick, his stomach distended with fear, the terror that was no different from the worst runny tummy.

  He whimpered but was almost unintelligible. He was holding his cellular phone. He was trying to say, "Mei-ping."

  In and out of the dense clouds he saw the city in a dusty twilight in which Kowloon Tong with all its lighted signs was a massive grid of red streets. Then the plane cruised into a cloudscape of whiteness, like a sea of foam, a limitless Arctic.

  "Mum," he said again, feeling like an infant. "Did you say anything to Mr. Hung?"

  His mother's teeth always seemed to slip out of alignment when she was untruthful, and though she had not yet said a word, she was chewing her teeth, seeming to right them.

  "We're well out of it," she finally said. She was smiling. Why? "You'll find someone else. It's true. They all look alike." Then she lowered her voice because she saw a Chinese woman in a uniform coming down the aisle. "Chinky-Chonks."

  Tottering slightly in the banking plane, the flight attendant said to Bunt, "Do you want to turn that off for me?"

  Working his thumb into the power switch, Bunt pressed and watched the lights blink and then fail, and the window faded and the little thing died in his hand with a gulp like a small peep of protest.

  16

  ALL OF Kowloon Tong trembled as the wrecking ball swung sideways from the crane, hit the sign Imperial Stitching, and punched it from the roof of the building. The sign shattered as it fell. On the next swing a corner of the top floor went, shaped like a wedge of cake but made of brick. It came apart in a dumping of single bricks as it dropped to the ground. The solid hit on the rest of that floor exposed Miss Liu's office, Lily's cubicle, Mr. Cheung's office, the lavatory, the interior of Bunt's suite. The floor was soon on the ground in pieces. Still the wrecking ball swung, smacking the yielding brick. By degrees the cutting floor, the old underwear floor, Stitching, Packing, Storage, Labels, Shipping, all collapsed in a shower of dust and bricks. It was an old building. It went fast, many of the former employees watched, and some of them wept—wept harder than when they had been fired just a week before, harder than they had at Mr. Chuck's funeral.

  No one spoke Mr. Hung's name. It seemed dangerous to do so. In any case, he was not present for the demolition.

  It was a hot day in late May, the air thick with the morning's evaporated downpour, and the dust was vile, like another wicked aspect of the humidity.

  And so it went on, the wrecking ball swinging back and forth, the dumb pockmarked thing suspended from a greasy cable that was worked by a small Chinese man in the dented cab of a Chinese-made crane. The ball brought down the old building and all its brackets and ornaments, its bricks, its beams, its red doors, its mirrors, its sewing machines—the parts of Imperial Stitching that represented the Five Elements and held the whole enterprise in balance: Earth, Wood, Fire, Water, Metal.

  Soon everything that had been standing lay buried, and the Hong Kong people watching, sensing the ch'i whirling like gas, and feeling exposed and conspicuous with the building gone, tucked their heads down and hurried away. Then the site was empty, just broken stones with the junked and rubbly look of reclaimed land, and sitting on it was the long-necked crane, like a green dragon with a toy in its mouth.

  * * *

  AFTERWORD

  ONE DAY early in those years of intense speculation that preceded the Hand-over of Hong Kong to China, I asked a man in Hong Kong what book I should read to understand the mood of the people. He suggested On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. "We've gone through all those stages," he said. When I read the book, which is about coping with terminal illness, I saw what he meant: First Stage, Denial and Isolation; Second Stage, Anger; Third Stage, Bargaining; and so on, through Depression, Acceptance, and Hope. In much the same spirit Jan Morris wrote in her first Hong Kong book (1988) that reflecting on the colony before the Hand-over was like "contemplating the mysteries of death."

  In this morbid way, a political death watch, the Hand-over was on people's minds. Some people found the suspense unbearable and emigrated to other countries; others stayed. It was unprecedented in the modern world for a colony to be handed back—especially to be handed back to a repressive, puritanical regime in which there were no democratic institutions. The contradiction, of course, was that as a colony Hong Kong had hardly any democracy either. On the eve of the Hand-over there were furious but futile debates.

  Because the Hand-over was an absolute certainty, it fascinated me and many others, and we buzzed around it, knowing that after June 30,1997, Hong Kong would be a Chinese possession. Except for a hazy notion that stricter laws would be enforced and unsmiling rulers would be in power, I had no idea what would happen to Hong Kong after that. The train trip across the border to Shenzhen, a fifty-minute ride from the terminal in Kowloon to the gloomy Chinese city of ugly new buildings, gave some clues to the future, but any sensible person must concede that the future is unknowable. I concentrated on the present. Telling the truth is often like fortunetelling; more so in fiction—the imaginative truth can be prophetic.

  Kowloon Tong was a calculated novel. I wanted to write about Hong Kong as it was on the eve of the Hand-over. It did not percolate up from my past, the way most of my fiction has seemed to, but struck me suddenly one day in Hong Kong when I saw the story whole. I made notes, like a painter urgently sketching, and then back home I sat down and wrote it, confident that I was fulfilling an artistic as well as a political intention. I feel awkward using the word "artistic," though. All I mean is that I was guided by my imagination and being myself.

  I had been in Hong Kong for an extended period, devising the story for Wayne Wang's film Chinese Box (released in 1998). I spent my afternoons walking the back streets. One day I was walking through Kowloon in a cold spring drizzle, going north from Mong Kok up Lai Chi Kok Road, just prowling. Not knowing what I was looking for, I looked at everything. A Union Jack flapping on a tall pole at the Sham Shui Po police station caught my eye. Soon after, a red van sped by, on its side the British crest and the gold letters Royal Mail A large truckload of doomed squealing pigs was driven into the slaughterhouse on Fat Tseung Street. Nearby, on the western side of Kowloon, an enormous land reclamation project was under way, and the bridge to the new airport was being finished. Moody Mong Kok and its bird market were scheduled for demolition. All the newspapers were full of stories about the coming of the Chinese, and in the bookstores were dire titles: The Fall of Hong Kong, The Last Colony, The Last Days of Hong Kong.

  And people were talking. They were thinking out loud in the most un-Chinese way. In this interim period, while the British government was being ineffectual, and the People's Republic was quietly maneuvering, and it was business as usual in Hong Kong, people were behaving somewhat out of character. Great events bring people together and make them talkative, just as, with the dire forecast of a storm, people chatter, comparing what they know, which is usually very little. Their sense of being ignorant and vulnerable makes for intimacy.

  I was not interviewing people, for such formal questions, with my taking notes, made for self-consciousness and equivocation—on both my part and theirs. The way to the truth was the humbler route of anonymity, faceless me striking up conversations with strangers. I did it all the time in Hong Kong, and nearly always the person said: It's all right for rich people here, they can go anywhere, but I have to stay, and I am worried I am afraid for my family, I don't know what will happen, the Chinese will not be like the British.


  Shop clerks, taxi drivers, people at the herbalist's, the women at the fresh-squeezed-juice stand, newspaper vendors, schoolchildren, the pimps in the karaoke lounges, the mama-sans in the girlie bars, the shoeshine boys, the camera dealers. They didn't know who I was.

  I think it will be bad when the Chinese take over, they said. The Chinese are not clever. With the Chinese it is just money, money, money, which was exactly what a woman from Beijing said to me about these Hong Kong critics, adding, They are refugees. They live in the present, they are politically naive, and very few of them are interested in democracy.

  It had been that way in Hong Kong for the past year, and if anything people had become more garrulous as the wind had begun to rise. The Hong Kongers were worried, and they giggled with apprehension. I had the feeling that on July 1,1997, their voices would be stilled.

  Looking ahead, I realized that this would be gone: not just the Union Jacks and the mail vans and the old buildings—indeed, whole districts—but also this revealing talk, the apprehension, and all the maneuvering. In the Hong Kong Club the businessmen seemed hearty; many had grown rich on joint ventures with China. I wanted to capture all those feelings, and the landscape, before they were lost forever.

  The Hand-over, with its rituals and pyrotechnics, happened on schedule. It spectacularly demonstrated the British genius for putting on a parade and the Chinese gusto for ñreworks. At midnight, the Union Jack was run down the pole and the governor-general, Christopher Patten, sailed into the darkness with Prince Charles, on the royal yacht Britannia.

  Now that some time has passed, what has happened in Hong Kong in its first year as a Chinese Special Administrative Region? In the beginning I had a personal experience of change. An excerpt from Kowloon Tong that was bought and paid for by Playboy was ultimately not included in the magazine. When I looked for reasons, I was candidly told that Playboy's marketing department had been hoping to sell T-shirts, cigars, and condoms in the People's Republic, and it was felt that some of the odious-seeming Chinese in my novel would offend the commissars, who would hold Playboy responsible for my book. Playboy's Hong Kong licensee, Chaifa Holdings, had more than five hundred outlets in China, which generated revenue in the tens of millions of U.S. dollars. Fearing China's wrath, Playboy kowtowed by scrapping my "anti-Chinese" story.