A Fool's Alphabet (16 page)

Dear Harry

Here are the notes for the Hong Kong book. I have kept them very personal and anecdotal, as requested. I hope you can make something of them for your text. I'm not sure what I saw is really much good for the ‘Last Outpost' theme of the series, but I hope the pictures will be all right anyway.

Obviously you'll throw away some of the purely anecdotal stuff, but I haven't had time to sift through it all myself because I'll have to post this from Colombo in the morning. I still think you ought really to have visited Hong Kong yourself before you write it. But I leave that to you.

I went up inside a glass bubble on a monorail lift. We looked down into the atrium with its gravelled gardens and silver fountains. The bellboy was a very small Chinese who called me sir every second word and wouldn't let me help him with the cases. On the top floor we went into another vast lounge and he put the cases down. I assumed he was tired. He said, ‘Sitting room, sir.' I said, ‘Yes, but where's my room?' He said, ‘This your room, sir. This your sitting room. Bedroom upstairs.' This place I thought was some sort of public lounge turned out to be my own sitting room. Upstairs was a vast bedroom. The place is ridiculous. It has two bathrooms, a bar and a dressing room. It is about twice the size of my entire flat in London. There are two televisions, two stereos and God knows what. The long windows overlook the harbour, and there is Hong Kong island on the other side, a sort of greyish pile with advertising signs illuminated on top of the skyscrapers. SEIKO. It is both exotic and rather prosaic. Which travel company gave you this? It is extraordinary.

In the afternoon a young Chinese woman called Polly came round. She is very helpful, so helpful in fact that it's difficult to concentrate. She's pretty in a traditional way, though with quite large eyes. Some European ancestry? She was keen to show me all the other hotels and all the shopping. I couldn't see the point of this but didn't want to seem churlish. So we looked at lots of other places. None of them is as flash as this one.

The next day I told Polly I had to go off on my own. I hired a car and drove up from Kowloon through the New Territories to the Chinese border. There's a British military post there and I introduced myself to the man in charge, a major. He took me up the tower, to the top of the observation post, and we gazed over into China. It looked green. Watery green. Temperate, distant, large. The hills make you think of bamboo shoots and pandas. It's pale and insipid, a bit like Cantonese cooking. There was a light mist over the trees. The temperature was cool but sticky, like an April day in England. Maybe if I hadn't known it was China it wouldn't have looked so exotic. I took a lot of pictures, some of them with the major, who had a limp, in the foreground.

He seemed a bit bashful and made a few excuses about not having his ‘best bib and tucker' on, but he didn't seem to mind. He spends a lot of time trying to keep Chinese illegal immigrants from crossing the border. It seems a bit of a game. They just round up the odd one or two and throw them back. This is not a high-security job. In fact he just sits there staring into China. He spoke very respectfully of the Chinese government and the Governor-General of Hong Kong. I offered to take him out to dinner in Hong Kong and he agreed.

It was odd to see this man here, on the rim of China. Those Scotsmen in the nineteenth century who decided to come over here in the first place. That was a strange move. From Motherwell to the South China Sea. It must have seemed a daunting distance in those days. I admire their daring. I suppose many were already out here, running drugs out of China et cetera.

The next day I persuaded Polly that I had seen enough shopping arcades and hotel bedrooms. I asked her to show me what she thought was the worst side of life here. She took me to the camps where the refugees from Vietnam were kept. It reminded me of the time I worked on a chicken farm in Wisconsin. They were like hen runs, nailed up with wire netting, cardboard and bottle tops. It was a parody of a village. No work, no economy, no jobs. Feed shoved into cages, people lying almost on top of each other. It was worse than somewhere like Madras where people just lie in the
street. At least there you feel they could walk away, they can beg, they have freedom of movement, even if they are starving. But these people were also imprisoned. The camps are policed by officers of the Correctional Services Department. I don't know how people remain human when what separates them from animals is taken away.

We went to a restaurant on the way to some water project in the New Territories. It was like a vast canteen with surly Chinese (they aren't at all friendly) wheeling trolleys round with battered metal dishes. You didn't know what was inside, there was no menu. I just had what Polly picked off for me. It was disgusting. But I couldn't complain. I'd asked her to show me the other side of life; but the odd thing was that although the refugee camp was supposed to be the worst, I don't think the restaurant was part of the low-life excursion.

She insisted I go shopping for radios and cameras and electronic things. Each shop is like the floor of a stock exchange, people shouting and trading. They have no embarrassment about greed. I tried to bargain over a camera, but he wouldn't let me try it out and I thought I'd rather wait and get one back in London where I might pay more but at least I'd know what I was getting. I did buy you a little portable cassette thing, on the other hand. I'll bring it back with me. I don't know if I can resist the temptation of using it myself in the mean time. The thing that strikes you about Hong Kong is how naked the pursuit of money is. I suppose it's prudish to object. A little hypocrisy wouldn't be out of place, though. The Chinese are amazing. They work very hard for it. And the British and the businessmen, it's all they talk about. Whether it's multi-million deals and bonds or twenty-quid cameras, it's just barter and push all the time.

Relations between the nationalities. There are none, as far as I can see. The English are completely ignorant of Chinese culture and languages and see nothing odd in this. The Chinese ignore the foreign devils. I walked through the roughest, most Chinese parts of Kowloon, down dark side streets, and no one paid me the slightest attention. You could send a tribe of Zulu albinos down here and no one would look up from their work unless they represented a business
opportunity. The English and the Chinese are bonded by mutual disregard. It is odd. They are brothers in money.

I was introduced to a Scotsman who is organising the forthcoming arts festival. I asked him about local artists and he hummed and hahed for a time. Eventually he said, ‘Well, there's a local jewellery designer. She's a bit unstable, I think. But her designs have become very popular. I believe she is beginning to penetrate world markets.'

Your friend Jerry was tied up but he put me in touch with some lawyers. We went to a restaurant and met a lot of other young Englishmen. They all called each other by their surnames and shouted at the waiters, who didn't seem to mind. We ate dim sum, which is bits of feet and head and bladder. They liked it a lot and made jokes about things called ‘sick bags' which are flabby parcels that you prong with your chopstick. They were all very friendly and insisted I drank beer and whisky with them. I wondered how many of them would have done so well ‘back in UK', as they say. They have an odd way of talking about it. They are very dismissive, talk about strikes and the inflation and how you can't afford a decent house. Yet I think they are also a bit in awe of it.

That night I insisted Polly let me take her out. She wanted her company to take me to another of its international cuisine restaurants, but I was firm. She brought a lot of brochures about a new building development in the middle of central Hong Kong island. I don't know how they are going to manage to slip another building in. It'll have to be about three feet wide and a mile high. I think she was a bit worried about having shown me the refugee places, so she was finishing off with a strong emphasis on the good life.

I tried to get her off the subjects of hotels and service. I asked about her family and her life and if she had a boyfriend. She wasn't affronted by this question but gave me to understand that a young woman must put her career first and there was not much chance of that with the dead weight of a boyfriend in the background.

We went to a Szechuan restaurant recommended by the major. I teased her a bit about her seriousness and her English name. Afterwards we went to a bar I'd been to with the major
where women with no tops on sit in the middle of tables to serve drinks. It was very unerotic. It must be the best-known tourist trap in the place, I suppose, but Polly wanted to go there. The light was dingy and the women all looked old and uninterested. It was as if they had just taken their tops off for a medical.

The red-light district used to be in Wan Chai, though this is very tame now. Everyone mentions a film about a Wan Chai prostitute called Suzie Wong, though no one seems to have seen it. It is brought up with a certain local pride. In fact there is a bit of a local newspaper subculture here altogether. The Hong Kong
Tatler
, an exact imitation of the London one, seems somehow unreal. There is that feeling of the place pushing itself, so that an aircrash in which three hundred people died might be reported as ‘Hong Kong man injured in air disaster'. This cultural thing is odd when you come to think how dauntingly big and important the place is financially. It could treat itself more grandly, less parochially, as the equal of the other great financial centres. Then again you could say that American papers are inward-looking also.

Anyway, the red-light action is now centred, as luck would have it, near my hotel in Kowloon. On Nathan Road the signs advertising sex shows run one after the other up the hill. No moving lights are permitted in Hong Kong because they would confuse the aircraft, which come in to land on a narrow causeway perilously close to the residential area. So, just as the big signs on top of the skyscrapers in Hong Kong Central are still, so the signs in the Nathan Road saying ‘Strip Show' or ‘Live Sex' are also motionless. There is something odd about looking at a sign saying ‘Live Sex' that does not flash or glitter. It makes it seem a cool and prosaic transaction. I took a photograph of it, though I'm not sure the reason for this will be clear in the finished print.