World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399)

by Mason, Richard

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he laughed. “I’m going to give you that ‘gift’ you told me you expected—we can’t waste all that bargaining. Here you are. Fifty dollars.”

  In a way his willingness to pay up made his rejection of her more insulting, but she congratulated herself on getting the money for nothing. However, the next night, when he surprisingly turned up at the Granada again and requested her as partner, she flatly refused. Muir countered by sending for the manager, who reminded her that it was not a prerogative of employees to pick and choose. Sullenly she entered Muir’s embrace on the dance floor. But soon, provoked by the humorous teasing of that deceptively gentle voice, her anger suddenly flared again. She tried to break from him, but he held her wrists. She struggled. He caught her up and carried her through the gyrating couples to the edge of the floor—only to find that he had walked straight into the arms of the manager. He grinned.

  “Ah, the chap I was looking for,” he said. “I want to buy this girl out.”

  It was only nine o’clock, which meant four hours left to pay for: thirty-two dollars. Suzie was duly given the ticket which entitled her to collect her half-share at the end of the week. However, once outside she told Muir that she would not go another step with him.

  “Then I’ll call the police,” he said. “After all, I’ve paid a mint of money for you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Anyhow, you’ve got to have dinner with me for your own sake.”

  “Why?”

  “So that you can tell me how much you hate me.”

  The dinner ended with Suzie in tears—and secretly hoping that tonight he would take her to a hotel, because she felt strangely drawn to him. But he didn’t. He only suggested meeting the next day for lunch.

  The lunch was followed by several more daytime meetings; and they became so friendly that when at last he took her out to dinner again, and then afterwards to a hotel for the night, Suzie would not accept any money from him. Nevertheless he slipped fifty dollars into her bag.

  The next night they met again. In the morning, when Muir had gone to the bathroom, Suzie noticed his wallet lying on the dressing table. She picked it up as if impelled by some instinct. “What on earth am I doing?” she thought. “What on earth am I doing?” It was as if she was watching somebody else: some stranger over whom she had no control. She opened the wallet and took out three hundred dollars.

  Presently Muir returned. He glanced into the wallet before slipping it into his pocket. He must have noticed the missing money but said nothing. He took her hand.

  “Sunday tomorrow. Let’s drive over to Repulse Bay for a bathe.”

  She said, “I can’t. I’m busy.”

  “Then you can un-busy yourself, because it’ll do you good.”

  She finally agreed and they parted. She wondered what could have possessed her to take the money. It was the first time she had stolen money since she had been dismissed from the other dance hall—why on earth should she have started on Alan? Then she began to justify the theft to herself. “After all, think of the time I’ve spent with him,” she told herself. “Why shouldn’t he pay for it like anybody else?” She decided that he had been unscrupulously taking advantage of her good nature, and that she hated him for it; and the next day, at Repulse Bay, she put herself out to be nasty to him. Her nastiness only seemed to amuse him, and she began to hate him more than ever. She told him exactly what she thought of him.

  He laughed. “You know why you’re so cross with me, don’t you? Because you took that money out of my wallet. But you were worth every cent of it. I don’t mind a bit.”

  “You lie! I never took your money!”

  “Of course you did. And I’ll tell you why. Not because you wanted it, but because you wanted to punish me. To punish men. You hate men, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you do. We’re all one person to you. I don’t know who exactly—but I suspect the man who first seduced you.”

  She flushed scarlet. It was extraordinary—the blood had rushed to her cheeks before she had even had time to think. And Alan had seen it. He was now looking away, pretending he hadn’t—but she had caught his shrewd glance at her face. She was furious.

  “Nonsense,” she said. “You talk just nonsense. My first boy friend was fine, good-looking—we loved each other very much. Yes! Good man! Good heart! Not like you!”

  However, a few days later, when she was in a calmer mood, they talked about it again, and she suddenly found herself telling Alan about her uncle. She agreed that what he had said about hating men was probably true; though once she had said it, it seemed rather ridiculous to judge all men by the same yardstick. And somehow after this she lost interest in wallets. She had never stolen money again—except once at the Nam Kok from a sailor who had cheated her, and that was not really stealing so much as the summary administration of justice.

  Her affair with Alan Muir continued, and she realized that for the first time in her life she had fallen in love. And now she wanted to spend all her money on presents for him; she wanted to sacrifice herself for him; she longed desperately to have a child. Her whole personality seemed to melt and glow. And she even enjoyed making love with him. Yes, even making love, even that act of utter drudgery, had become a pleasure! And indeed on every occasion it became more so; on every occasion Alan’s tenderness and consideration drew a greater response, and she felt herself approaching closer to some glittering, tantalizing, mysterious summit. And at last the day arrived when she reached it, and there were great blinding flashes like the lightning you saw over China, and a great cataclysm that shook the earth, and then it was dark, and she was falling and falling and falling through the darkness, and she could hear the burry whisper of Alan’s voice in her ear, though she did not know what he was saying until she asked afterwards, “What did you say?”

  “I said you must remember today,” he said. “It’s the day you became a woman.”

  The day was Thursday. On Saturday they met again and he gave her a gold bangle engraved with their initials and Thursday’s date. The next day, Sunday, he was bathing from a Chinese friend’s launch when a shark attacked him and tore his right leg to tatters. He died before the launch reached shore.

  Alan Muir had been an excellent ambassador for his nation, and thereafter Suzie showed a preference for Englishmen; and whenever they came to the Granada she would put herself forward. A few months after Alan Muir’s death she was bought out by a sub-inspector of police who was seeking to make a discreet arrangement, not uncommon among bachelors in the colony, to keep a girl on call. He liked Suzie, and since he had private means and was able to afford exclusive rights, she gave up the Granada to be available as required. She spent most nights at his flat. He was in his mid-thirties, undemonstrative and inclined to brooding, though subject to unpredictable rages. His name was Gerald Parry. He inspired in Suzie no such devotion as Alan Muir. Nevertheless her attachment to him went beyond the purely financial, for her womanhood had been awakened and Parry was currently her man.

  Soon she found herself pregnant. It was not by any means for the first time: often enough had she parted with four hundred dollars to a Chinese doctor. But ever since the advent of Alan Muir she had longed for a baby—even a baby that wasn’t Alan’s. Many of the dance girls had babies, and she had become more and more painfully envious when she heard them discussed. And she decided that this time she could not bear to lose the baby that had started inside her. She would not go for an injection.

  She was still sharing the room with Yu-lan in Kowloon, but she said nothing to Yu-lan about the pregnancy; she knew that Yu-lan would think her out of her mind. Nor, for fear of his anger, did she tell Parry—until her secret began to threaten its own revelation. Then she gathered up her courage and broke the news. And she told him that she was determined to keep the child. Even if it meant the
end of their relationship; she was going to keep it.

  Parry listened and said nothing. He said nothing for two days. He remained brooding and cut off from her, and she waited on tenterhooks for one of those violent outbursts of temper with which his periods of brooding would commonly end. But she was due for a wonderful surprise. For on the third evening, arriving at his flat, she found herself greeted as she had never been greeted before—by a Parry whom she could hardly recognize, a Parry who was grinning, excited, tender, warm. And before she had recovered from her astonishment, he was declaring himself delighted about the child, and delighted even more by her determination to keep it: by her courage, her loyalty, her womanliness. In the past, he explained, he had suffered bitterly at the hands of women. Supposedly respectable women—yet all worthless and deceitful, all trollops. Indeed it was disgust for such a woman that had made him decide to leave England, come to Hong Kong. But now his faith had been restored. Now, at last, in a Chinese dance girl, he had found all those ideal qualities of whose existence he had despaired. He wanted to pay her the tribute she deserved. He wanted to marry her.

  “No,” Suzie said. “No good.”

  “No good? Why?”

  “You marry Chinese girl, and other English people make trouble. Number One policeman make trouble. He call you to his office. He say, ‘Good morning. You’re fired!’”

  “I’ll leave the police,” Parry said. “I’ll go into business here. I’ve hundreds of contacts—and there’s much more money in it.”

  Yu-lan was thrilled when she heard Suzie’s news. She had never thought Suzie’s heart had been in her work—no, she’d really been cut out for motherhood and marriage. And what wonderful fortune—an English husband! Oh, much more tractable than a Chinese husband—none of this trotting off every evening to brothels and dance halls! And she was so excited that she rushed out and bought Suzie an expensive pair of earrings as a wedding present in advance.

  And now Parry was full of enthusiastic talk about their future: about where they would live, about how contemptuously he would deal with anybody who tried to snub him for marrying a Chinese. This went on for three or four months. Then Suzie noticed that he was growing less communicative, that he was having those brooding spells again. One night she asked him when he intended to resign from the police, start looking round for another job. He replied impatiently that there was no hurry: he couldn’t leave the police, anyhow, until he had completed another half-year. Then he said he was tired. He sent her home.

  The next night he sent her home again; and a few nights later, after further brusque dismissals, she turned up at his flat to find it full of luggage and crates.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Borneo.” He looked at her as if she was a stranger. He took five hundred dollars out of his wallet and handed them to her. “Now get out.”

  “How long you go to Borneo for?”

  “How long? I’m being transferred to the Borneo police—I’m going for good.”

  “What about getting married?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Getting married.”

  He stared at her with such a convincing show of bewilderment that Suzie wondered if he had really gone mad and forgotten.

  “What the devil are you talking about?” he said.

  “You said we get married at English church. Live North Point. Nice flat.”

  His eyes blazed with anger. “What are you trying on? Blackmail?”

  “No blackmail. You’re father of my baby.”

  “That’s your story. But I know you dance-hall girls—you’re just a bunch of dirty tarts. All right, I’ll send you fifty dollars a month for maintenance. Only don’t try any funny business, or you’ll regret it. Now get out!”

  The baby was born two months later. Shortly afterwards she received a money order for fifty dollars. The payment continued for another three months and then stopped. She never heard of Parry again.

  Soon after the arrival of Suzie’s baby Yu-lan left Hong Kong to take a dance-hall job in Japan. The heyday of the Hong Kong dance halls was passing as the wealthy refugees from New China drifted away to Formosa, and the girls were feeling the pinch; but in Tokyo there was always an opening for Chinese girls, who appealed to exotic tastes. Yu-lan had been recruited along with five other girls by a little Japanese gentleman with a toothbrush moustache, who had made arrangements for their transit by air; and Suzie, prevented by the baby from going herself, said a tearful farewell at the airfield.

  Until this time Suzie, who had started work again at the Granada, had continued to share Yu-lan’s room in Kowloon—for the obliging and easy-going Yu-lan had thought nothing of the addition of a baby and amah, which indeed by local standards had still left the room luxuriously underpopulated. However, now that Yu-lan had gone Suzie took a room on the Hong Kong side to save the endless ferry crossings. She consulted a fortuneteller about the best day for removal, and moved strictly according to advice. Nevertheless her tenancy of the new room began unluckily: the following day she fell ill with some sort of fever. She grew worse from week to week, and lost all her flesh. She became like a skeleton. She was bedridden for three months.

  During this time her savings ran low, and before she had properly recovered she went out to find work again. She took a tram to the Central District to ask for her job back at the Granada. The dance hall was on the sixth floor above a department store. The lift was out of order and she had to walk up the stairs. She arrived feeling dizzy and sick. She noticed that there was a new sign outside the dance hall, although she could not read it. She went in. It had been turned into a restaurant.

  After this outing she was in bed for another three weeks. Then the amah left because Suzie could not pay her. There was no food for the baby, no money, and Suzie decided that she would have to sell her only remaining piece of jewelry: the gold bangle given her by Alan Muir on the last occasion they had met. She looked for it, but it had vanished. The amah must have taken it in lieu of wages.

  She felt very ill again; but the baby was crying. She went round to a girl friend’s room to borrow some money. The girl was out. She returned to the street and hung about on the corner until she was picked up by a coolie from the docks. He paid her two dollars. She was so ashamed of this episode as a “street girl” that she had never told anybody about it before. She had not even told Gwenny.

  The next day she found a job in another dance hall. But there was less money nowadays, and more girls; prices had dropped. She made scarcely enough to pay the rent and the new amah.

  Then one day in the street she ran into a Shanghai girl she had known at the Granada. The girl, who looked very prosperous, told her that she was now working in a hotel catering for European sailors. She much preferred it to the dance hall. There was no bossy manager to push you around, no time wasted dancing with a man all evening only to find he didn’t want you. No messing about at all. You just took the boy upstairs and got on with it.

  Suzie asked how long you spent upstairs.

  “Oh, just a short-time,” the girl said. “Sometimes you go for all night, but you really make more money with several short-times.”

  Suzie shook her head. She despised the girl for sinking so low. It was really prostituting oneself. The dance-hall girls did not consider themselves to be prostitutes; they were dance partners who were prepared, if they liked a man enough, to extend their favors to the bed for a gift of money. The transaction was performed decorously, with dinner as a preliminary, and was sanctified by the length of time it took: a whole night was the minimum requirement of decency. The dance girls looked down on bar girls, with their unceremonious short-times, just as bar girls looked down on street girls who picked up coolies on corners.

  “I don’t know how you could bring yourself to do it,” Suzie said, conveniently forgetting her own shameful experience in the
street.

  The girl, who as it happened was Little Alice, giggled unabashed.

  “I like it. The sailors are nice and young. Not old dodderers like we used to get at the Granada. I like them young.” She glanced down appreciatively at the new pair of shoes that she had just bought herself. “Well, I’ve got to get on. There are two American ships in this morning. In case you’re interested, the hotel’s on the water front near the ferry.”

  Suzie watched her go with a mixture of pity and contempt. However, that night, after hanging about for five hours in the dance hall, she returned to her room with an empty purse. The time had again arrived to face facts. And the next day she consulted a fortuneteller about a favorable day for changing jobs.

  The fortuneteller advised against the next few days, the last of the First Moon. He recommended an early day thereafter, reciting to her from his almanac that this day would be good for traveling, starting new studies, putting in doors, buying livestock, burying female relatives, and commencing new business. The luckiest period was between 3 P.M. and 6 P.M. He thought that if she followed this advice she was bound to prosper and attain success in her chosen career.

  And thus a week later, on the Third Day of the Second Moon, in the afternoon, Suzie started work at the Nam Kok.

  II

  She picked absently at the blanket between her crossed legs. “I hated this place at first, you know,” she said. “It was very hard. Sometimes I told sailors, ‘You find some other girl! You’re too dirty for me! Too drunk! Too bad-manners!’ So the other girls told me, ‘Suzie, you’re stuck-up!’”

  But she had got used to it. One got used to anything. One started by thinking, “Circumstances may have pitchforked me into this life—but I’m not like the others who belong to it naturally. I shall always be a stranger here. I’m different.” Then the life embraced one; became one’s world. One became a stranger to the worlds one had left behind.

  “Yes, I suppose one can get used to anything,” I said, and I thought: like the war. Like all the people who had found themselves in situations that a year or two before would have been unthinkable: living under a sky that had once been so safe, and that now rained bombs; machine-gunning those boys you had drunk beer with at Heidelberg, the brothers of the girls you had kissed at Bonn; cleaning the lavatories you had only expected to have to use. Oh, you could get used to anything, even being a sailor’s whore. It would surprise the nice girls how easily they could get used to it if it came to the push; how soon they’d be chattering about positions and prices; how quickly they’d know a sailor who was out for a free fumble from a sailor good for a short-time. How quickly it became their world.