World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (8 page)

“Finish?” she inquired anxiously.

“You can hear it again if you like.”

“Yes—again.”

I reset the tape and once more our conversation began to unfold. Suzie sat on the edge of the bed clutching a pillow to stop herself giggling. However, it was too much for her: soon her giggles were out of control and she was rolling about on the bed with her face buried in the pillow, and I was laughing helplessly in sympathy.

The recording ended and she looked up from the pillow, pink with merriment.

“Again!”

“Let's do another, Suzie. Can you sing?”

“Yes, I know Pekin songs, Shanghai songs—plenty of songs.”

She became serious, required a private rehearsal, and scuttled out onto the balcony, shutting the door behind her so that I should not hear. Ten minutes later she reappeared.

“I sing you a Pekin country song,” she announced. “It's about a boy cloud who falls in love with a girl cloud. But the girl cloud says, ‘You're no good—you've not got a good heart. I wait for some boy with a good heart.' So the boy cloud feels very sad. He starts to cry, and his tears make rain—because that's all rain is, just a cloud crying. Well, down below sits an old man. He is very hungry, because there is no water for the rice paddy. The soil is hard like stone. The rice will not grow. Then he sees the rain falling down. He feels happy. So the girl cloud tells the boy cloud, ‘You did a good thing. Maybe you're not so bad as I thought.' So in the end they get married.”

She was nervous in front of the microphone, and after listening, head cocked critically, to the playback of her first attempt, she said “No good. I sing again.”

And the second time she sang charmingly, in a funny high-pitched little voice that went on and on, with that characteristic monotony of Mandarin songs. She listened to the playback, decided she could do no better, and promptly lost interest in the recorder. But it had done its job—the ice was broken.

We drank tea and chattered.

“I show you my room sometime,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed swinging her legs. “Then you can see my baby.”

“Your
baby?
”

“Yes, very nice baby.”

“But Suzie, don't be ridiculous!” I laughed. “It's not your
own?
”

“Yes—my baby. Half-caste.”

“Who was the father, Suzie?”

“My boy friend. English policeman—only he disappeared off to Borneo.”

“But is it a boy or a girl?”

“Boy—very good-looking. Soon one year old. I like him very much.”

“I'm sure you do.”

“Yes. Some girls don't like half-caste baby. They give away. But I like my baby. I will never give him away.”

“And who looks after him when you're working?”

“My amah. Oh yes, I pay her plenty of money, my amah.” She looked worried. “Only my baby coughs too much, you know. Cough-cough! Cough-cough! You think my amah leaves him in a draft?”

“I don't know, Suzie.”

“I think so. I think she leaves him in a draft.”

Presently I rang the bell for a fresh supply of tea, and Ah Tong came in with a new teapot. While he was exchanging it for the old teapot in the padded container I noticed Suzie stealing glances at me from the corner of her eye, as if estimating my state of readiness to bear something that she had to say. Ah Tong departed, closing the door. Suzie chattered inconsequentially for another minute or two, then broke off and fixed me with that level gaze. “You know why I come to your room?” she said.

“I've no idea, Suzie.”

“Then I will tell you. This evening I go upstairs with a sailor, come down again, say good-by in the hall. I come back into the bar. Another sailor pulls my arm. ‘Yum-yum,' he says. ‘Pretty girl! Come and sit on my knee.' I sit on his knee. ‘Yum-yum,' he says. ‘How much for short-time?' I say, ‘Hundred dollars.'”

“That was a bit steep!”

“Yes—steep. So he says, ‘Go to hell.' Good. I get off his knee. I go and sit down with Gwenny. ‘Suzie, what's the matter?' she says. ‘You unhappy?' I say, ‘Yes—unhappy.' I tell her I don't like sailor who says ‘Yum-yum.' I don't like short-time. I like a regular boy friend, like I had last week. Same boy every day. Then Gwenny says, ‘Suzie, you know something? I think Robert likes you. I think he likes you very much.' We begin to laugh. We ring you on the telephone. I come upstairs—and feel scared.”

“Why did you feel scared, Suzie?”

“I think, ‘This Robert, he's a big man. Important. He has nice hairbrush. Nice pyjama. Nice everything. He doesn't want dirty little yum-yum girl.' I want to run away. Then you play the machine. I laugh—stop feeling scared.”

“And stop feeling like a dirty little yum-yum girl?”

“No, still feel like dirty little yum-yum girl. Only I think, ‘If he likes me, good. If he doesn't like me, then nothing to do.' All right. You like me?”

“I like you very much, Suzie.”

“Then you like me for regular girl friend?”

I laughed. “If I had any girl friend, Suzie, I'd have you. But I can't afford one.”

“I'd work for you very cheap. One month—six hundred dollars.”

“But Suzie, that's a fortune!”

“I'd work very hard—come any time you want. Never go with other boy friends.”

“I know, but I couldn't nearly afford it.”

She looked thoughtful, making some calculation on her fingers. “All right—I come for five hundred dollars.”

“Suzie, I'll tell you the truth,” I said. “I'm not really a big man at all. I'm terribly poor—I've only got six hundred dollars a month to live on altogether.”

She stared at me. “Six hundred? A month?”

“Yes, a month.”

“That all?”

“That's all.”

“For room? Chow? Everything?”

“Everything.”

“Then no good.”

“No.”

“No.” And she sat looking crestfallen, picking disconsolately at her nails. A minute went by. Then she looked up. “All right. You like me to stay tonight?”

“I can't afford even that, Suzie.” My budget had not yet recovered from the lunch with Doris.

“I like you,” she said. “You're good man. I stay for nothing.”

“Suzie, it's terribly sweet of you,” I said. “And I'm very tempted. But I'd only make myself miserable. I couldn't bear it tomorrow, when I'd have to sit and watch you going upstairs with sailors.”

“Then I go now.”

She got up. I went with her to the door.

“You're not going down to the bar again, Suzie?” I said.

“No.”

“Where are you going?”

“Home—see my baby. I get worried about his cough.”

She went off down the corridor. The lift gate clanked open and Typhoo came out, fumbling in her bag for her clinic card. A matelot came out behind her. He stood waiting while Ah Tong inspected Typhoo's card, making an entry in his ledger. He watched Suzie approaching, a cigarette drooping from his mouth, his eyes narrowed against the smoke. His eyes roved up and down her figure; he was comparing her with Typhoo, wondering if she might have suited him better. Suzie disappeared into the lift. The gates clanked behind her. The matelot turned back to Typhoo.

I went back into my room. I heard Typhoo and the matelot come down the corridor and enter the room opposite. The door banged shut. I could still hear their muffled chatter through the slatted ventilators in the walls. I started the tape recorder. Suzie's high-pitched monotonous little voice began to sing the Mandarin song.

“The boy cloud feels very sad, so he starts to cry. That's all rain is, just a cloud crying. . . . So in the end they get married.”

I got into bed. I was glad she had not gone back to the bar. I would have to get used to it, of course. But I was glad she had not gone tonight.

Chapter Five

S
uzie thereafter would drop in at my room at all hours of the day and night—and when she was not dropping in she would be telephoning.

The telephone calls were made for no reason at all, except that she had a passion for telephones and could not see one without itching to use it. She would ring me from all over Hong Kong.

“Hello! This is Molly!” The Molly joke was perennial and growing increasingly vulgar.

“Hello, Molly.”

“You gave me a bad time last night!” (She always shouted on the telephone, and I had to hold the instrument six inches from my ear.) “You're too big for a little Chinese girl! Yes! You nearly killed me!”

“Really, Molly? I noticed you didn't complain last night.”

“You kept me too busy!” She giggled, then abruptly abandoned Molly and became Suzie again. “I just been to the Roxy with my boy friend. He's waiting outside the shop. All right. I go now.”

In the bar she claimed me as her “No. 1 boy friend” and was inclined to monopolize me; and (shades of Stella!) she would regard with deep suspicion any girl whom I appeared to favor in my sketching. The other girls naturally supposed, from her visits to my room, that our relationship was more than platonic, and this was the source of much gratification to her pride. She begged me not to disillusion them, and was very hurt when I would not promise. But I did not care to live under false pretenses; and moreover I wanted to remain on friendly terms with them all. I began to find her possessiveness a little irksome.

Then a new girl called Betty Lau came to work in the bar. Betty was Cantonese, though very westernized, and had modeled herself very obviously on an American film star who was famous for her waggling behind. She had achieved her object with considerable success: as she teetered along on her too high heels, her posterior undulated in so striking a manner that it drew whistles, catcalls, and hilarious remarks from the sailors, and provoked the comedienne Fifi into comical imitations. It was hypnotic. One stared in fascination, wondering how it was done: how she always managed to maintain that rhythmical slow-motion.

One day, after Betty's behind had just waggled past our table, Suzie asked me what I thought of this most unorthodox manner of progression. And failing to take warning from her watchful look, I told her that although it was so exaggerated as to be almost grotesque, my baser nature found it distinctly provocative.

Suzie was silent. And for a chatterbox like Suzie this foreboded ill. Betty had clearly fallen under suspicion.

Two days later I was drinking a San Mig before lunch when Betty, to whom I had never spoken before, sat down at my table. She fluttered her big curled eyelashes, laid a hand caressingly on my arm, and purred that she had heard of my reputation for aiding girls in trouble. I wondered in alarm what was coming next. Was she going to ask for money? Or for my help in procuring an abortion? And I muttered that my reputation had been acquired by nothing more than handing out codeine tablets for headaches.

However, my fears were at once dispelled; the big vamp act had been a steam hammer for driving in a nail. Her trouble was nothing more serious than a Northern Irish five-pound note, which she had accepted from a sailor only to find that the moneychangers would not change it. Could I help?

I offered to try my own bank, which duly obliged me the next day by exchanging the note for seventy-six dollars. I handed these over to Betty in the bar, taking care to do so while Suzie was absent, since I had already foreseen how easily this transaction might be misconstrued. However, the precaution was not enough, for a few hours later my telephone rang.

“Hello. This is Suzie.”

Not Molly—that was bad.

“Hello, Suzie.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Nothing.”

“All right. I come and see you.”

And for five minutes after entering the room she made trivial conversation, watching me from the corner of her eye. Then the direct, level look.

“You go with that Canton girl. I know everything.”

“What Canton girl?” I asked innocently.

“That girl with the show-off walk. You give her seventy-six dollars.”

It was typical of Suzie's careful mind that she should know the exact amount. News of the payment, I gathered, had spread round the bar, and Betty, who was a mischief-maker, had no doubt been only too delighted to let it give a wrong impression. I told Suzie the truth but she refused to believe me.

“You lie! You make love to that Canton girl!”

Her anger unbottled itself and she became a little tornado, abusing me with words picked up from sailors that I had never heard her use before. I continued to deny the accusation, and she hurled a glass at me. It exploded on the wall over the bed, scattering the bed with fragments.

“You lie! I thought you were a big man—important! But I made mistake! You're just butterfly—no good!”

“Suzie, this is ridiculous,” I said. “I'm not even your proper boy friend, and you've no right to behave as if you owned me. I don't like it.”

“Now you speak truth—you don't want me! You think me dirty little yum-yum girl! All right—finish! I go!” And she went.

That night she cut me in the bar. The next morning, meeting her on the quay as she was coming to the Nam Kok, I started to speak to her, but she averted her face and stalked past. This went on for several days and I found myself missing her telephone calls and visits. I realized how fond of her I had grown.

Then one morning, turning out a pocket, I came across a slip of paper from the bank recording the transaction with the five-pound note. I had forgotten ever receiving it. I rang for Ah Tong and asked him to write me some Chinese characters, which I copied onto the back of the bank slip. They meant “I miss you very much.” And that evening I gave the slip to Gwenny, to pass on to Suzie.

An hour later my telephone rang.

“Hello, this is Suzie.”

“Hello, Suzie.”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“All right. I come and see you.”

And once more there were the five minutes of preliminaries, followed by the straight, frank look.

“You're a good man. No lie. I make mistake.”

I laughed and said that I could not care less about Betty Lau. Then she explained solemnly why she had been so upset: after she had claimed me as her boy friend, my apparent liaison with Betty had caused her serious loss of face.

“I felt scared to go inside the bar, you know,” she said. “I felt too much shame. I thought, ‘Except for my baby, I'd kill myself!'”

“Suzie, you didn't!”

“Yes, I was so ashamed.”

“Well, come and look what I've been doing.”

And I showed her the oil painting of her that I was making from a sketch. The size of the canvas impressed her, and the prospect of bringing her girl friends to see it made up for the humiliation she had undergone. She became herself again. She gave a sudden mischievous giggle as she remembered throwing the glass at me.

“I nearly hit you! Whoosh!”

“Yes, and I've been pulling splinters out of myself ever since.”

The giggles overcame her. She rolled about on the bed in delight.

“I bet you were chokka! You still chokka with me?”

“Yes, you little devil—thoroughly chokka,” I said.

II

Sometimes in the mornings she brought her baby to see me. It was rather a puny, pathetic little infant, with something quite heart-rending about its sallow Chinese-English face; and it looked not young but middle-aged, with an expression, in repose, of bewildered despair. It was as if it knew that it was a half-caste and had nothing to look forward to except a lifetime of not-belonging.

But Suzie was marvelous with it. She would hold it on her crooked arm with a practiced and motherly ease that never failed to astonish me; it was so incongruous with her unmotherly appearance. The baby would splutter ecstatically, waving a tin rice bowl at the end of its outstretched arm, while Suzie chattered to it adoringly.

“Hey, why you still cough? Why you so naughty? Yes, naughty boy! Only you're so beautiful, I got to forgive you! Oh, yes, you're beautiful baby! Good-looking! Maybe some day you make a film star!”

We would spread a blanket on the balcony and it would crawl about in its red corduroy rompers, which had animals on the front with “Gee-gee,” “Moo-cow,” stitched underneath in English. And Suzie, crawling behind in her jeans, would pretend to chase it; and when she finally caught it and tickled its ribs, it would nearly choke with delight. Then she would take it down to the old blue-trousered amah waiting outside on the quay, and place it in the sling on the amah's back, where it would fall promptly asleep. She would watch the amah shuffling off, calling, “Good-by, mind you be a good baby! Yes, mind you behave!” And then she would turn and go into the bar.

She would also bring her girl friends up to see me; and with a good deal of showing off would treat them to a conducted tour of my room, showing them my pictures and possessions with emphasis on their imagined value. “This hairbrush—it's real silver, you know.” (It wasn't.) “Now I show you my boy friend's cuff links—real gold. Maybe worth three hundred dollars. . . .” And pulling open a drawer, “No, don't worry, my boy friend doesn't mind . . .”

Finally there was the
pièce de résistance,
the tape recorder, on which she had fixed the fictitious price of two thousand dollars rather than admit that it was only hired; and I would be called upon to make a recording of the girl friend's voice while Suzie, behaving as if the machine had been her own invention, stage-managed the performance. Then before the girl friend had begun to feel too much at home in my room Suzie would usher her out, explaining that I had work to do; and as they went off down the corridor I would hear her saying importantly, “My boy friend's a big man, you know. One day he will get five thousand dollars for those pictures. . . . Oh, no, each!”

And even boy friends would be brought along—usually to break the tedium when she had been engaged for “all night.” Thus some unfortunate young matelot with tattooed arms and untidy hair, dragged unwillingly out of bed and dressed only in a singlet, would stand there blinking and bewildered while Suzie gave him the conducted tour, wondering nervously if I was a policeman working under cover. Then she would lose interest in him and start chattering to me, until eventually I would feel so sorry for the matelot, for whom the night had cost half a week's pay packet, that I would pack them off back to their room. On one occasion, however, I became so engrossed in argument with a young American intellectual, a law student on naval service, that we were still talking at five o'clock in the morning. Suzie had long since grown bored and retired to sleep. Finally, after nearly losing our tempers, we shook hands, both confessing that we had been vastly overstating our views. I apologized for keeping him so long away from Suzie.

“It doesn't matter,” he said. “I'm not interested in her that way—if you know what I mean.”

“No?” I said, astonished. “Then what on earth are you doing with her?”

“Well, it's like this. The boys on the ship think I'm a bit of a prig. So I came along with them tonight, and took a girl just to show them I was a ‘regular guy.'”

“Then you'd better not tell them you sat up all night discussing communism,” I said.

“You bet I won't. I'll tell them I beat all their records.”

But more often, when Suzie had an all-night boy friend, she would simply abandon him and come along by herself for a chat; and if we happened to be hungry she would pick up the telephone and call a near-by restaurant. Fifteen minutes later, notwithstanding that it was two o'clock in the morning, a coolie would arrive at my door with a bamboo carrying pole over his shoulder, from which trays, as on an old-fashioned weighing scale, would be hanging fore and aft; and piled on each tray, in diminishing sizes like the weighing-scale weights, would be anything up to a dozen covered dishes, containing chicken, pork, fish, and innumerable other delicacies of which I never learned either the ingredients or the names; and the coolie would unload them on the veranda table. This delivery of meals to the door, at all hours of the day or night, was a commonplace with the Chinese, and the bill would be fantastically small considering the magnificence of the spread. Suzie would try and pay, since she was gravely concerned over my budget, and sometimes succeeded. If, however, I managed to pay myself, she would always ask me how much I had tipped the coolie.

“Fifty cents,” I would have to admit. It was only about seven-pence.

“Too much. I told you before!”

“But he looks so poor, Suzie.”

“Yes, and if you give fifty cents to the coolie, that's how you will look soon! You give him twenty cents next time. That'll make him plenty happy.”

And it was on one of these late-night visits that I made an astonishing discovery about Suzie. I had received a laundry bill, written in Chinese, the total of which I thought excessive, and I showed it to her and asked her to read out the various items. She glanced at it only briefly.

“Nothing wrong.”

“But you don't even know what I sent yet,” I said.

“This laundryman is very honest. He never makes mistake.”

“Well, I'm sure he's made one this time.” She was usually so anxious to see that I was not cheated or overcharged for anything that her indifference puzzled me. “Anyhow, how many shirts has he charged for? And what are all those other items?”

She studied the bill in her hand. Then after a minute she looked up at me with that bold, level gaze that meant she had something difficult to say and I would have to take it or leave it.

“There's something I never told you before, because I felt too ashamed,” she said.

“What's that?”