Please Enjoy Your Happiness (22 page)

16

Hall of Flowers

The
Shangri-La
was finally at anchor in the Fragrant Harbour, which is a generous English translation of Hong Kong. I stuck my hand in the bucket held by the officer of the deck and pulled out a required Durex condom, which stared like the eye of a large dead fish from the cellophane wrapping. I expected to rip open the wrapping in joyful ecstasy, and thus be struck from the list of virgin men maintained by God and His Angels. Oscar and Gunther were determined to have an adventure they would not be able to forget for the rest of their lives. We clutched our
condoms as if they were gold sovereigns. Only after we hopped aboard a waiting sampan skippered by a cheerful pirate with a mouthful of twenty-four-carat teeth did we stash the condoms in our pockets.

We looked at each other and grinned. Excitement was turning the blood in our veins into fizzing soda pop. I had not really thought this out. I was acting on a mix of impulse and impatience, Yuki. We had ironed and starched our white cotton summer uniforms and had used lots of spit and bacon grease from our breakfast trays to put an astonishing sheen on our black leather shoes. We had had our flat-tops trimmed. I had remembered the advice given to me in boot camp by the chief petty officer in charge of recruits to make sure every millimetre of my genital gifts was scrubbed and pure. My new friends were roughly the same age as I was. They would therefore be around seventy-five years old now. Do Gunther and Oscar remember, I wonder, that day in Wan Chai, where the fable of Suzie Wong – the goddess with the slit skirt and golden legs – began?

‘You like nice girl?’ the pirate asked. We nodded yes.

‘Wan Chai have very nice girl. You go to the Hall of Flowers. Very nice. Many, many nice girls there. You drink, you go to Mermaid Bar. Very nice. You very nice young men. Many girls like you, for sure!’

We looked at each other and grinned again, Yuki. ‘I just know this will be such a wonderful day,’ Oscar said gleefully. He checked to make sure his rubber was still in his pocket. It was. He reached in, pulled it out, and gave it to me. ‘Souvenir,’ he said. ‘You may need this. Me, I don’t want it.’

Gunther was still looking over his shoulder. We were not being pursued. Then he looked at the Hong Kong skyline. In those days there were only a few high-rise buildings. A haze
heavy with heat and moisture made the tops of the tallest buildings invisible. He was nervous, or spooked, or something. He looked again over his shoulder. Maybe he wanted to swim back to the ship. ‘I guess we going to make it, yah?’ he asked, in his uncertain English. ‘I don’t know how to swim!’

‘I can’t swim either,’ I said. ‘They told me in boot camp I had a large head and heavy bones. The only way I could pass the swimming test was to do it on my back, half underwater, round the pool. And then they had to pull me out with a long pole with a hook at the end as if I was a tuna.’

We were about ten minutes away from the landing at Wan Chai. I could already see the frenzied neon signs of the bars and saloons and dance halls on the waterfront. Bar Neptune. Bar Mermaid. Bar Lucky. Bar Happy. In one of those places, I thought, a beautiful and accomplished girl – a university student of cello or of ballet, I hoped – was going to take my virginity on this day of destiny. The girl was probably already feeling the first thrill of arousal and anticipation. Should I let her know, I wondered awkwardly, that this was my first time? Maybe not. But maybe I should.

‘Oscar,’ I said, ‘do you think . . . ?’ And then I stopped. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’

Oscar looked at me confidently, like any gang member would, I guess, when it came to backing up his
compañeros
. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Not to worry.’

I looked down into the water, where refuse of all kinds bobbed and floated. Fishtails. Bits of noodles. Scraps of Chinese-language newspapers.

We were only yards away from the shore. I saw a smile on your face reflected in the water, Yukiko. Or maybe it was not really a smile. If it was a smile, it was the type that appears on
the face of a Cambodian
apsara
, carved many centuries ago to be enjoyed by men forever. You were smiling, and then you looked as if you were going to ask me a question. You wanted to know whether I had remembered to write to you. Yes, excited though I was about going ashore, I had scribbled a short note. I said something like: ‘We have arrived in Hong Kong. I have liberty today so I will go ashore with some friends. I will be careful about the robbers you mentioned. I am sure I will have a good time.’ I had signed it, ‘Love from Paul’. In earlier letters I had just signed my name. But now I added the word ‘love’. I did so not knowing whether I should be truthful or whether I should be polite, and I did not know whether you were my ‘only’ and whether the loyalty I felt to you was supposed to be complete, or whether our relationship somehow strangely permitted sex with someone other than you, given the fact we had not kissed or had sex, even though there was desire. Thus perplexed, and with no one to turn to for advice on a matter as confusing and personal as this, I enclosed another of my poems with the letter, which I hoped would reassure you that I was thinking about you all the time, even when I was about to step ashore with a rubber plus a souvenir rubber at Wan Chai.

It was just after one o’clock in the afternoon. There was an incredible barrage of loud Cantonese exclamations from the wharf, where rickshaw men were jostling to give sailors rides. We three headed straight for the Mermaid Bar, which was jammed with sailors and Marines from several nations, mostly in good humour, but sometimes not. I felt an arm sliding round my waist and I turned to look into the eyes of a small girl in pigtails and blue jeans, who would not let go of me even when I wanted to sit down. I could not hear what she was telling me at first. There was too much noise in the bar, and the jukebox was cranked up so loud the floor was shaking. I don’t know what it is like now for sailors, Yuki, but back then we were not conscious of or even privy to the notion that this was female slavery and that sex with women for money was exploitation. The girl with a python embrace was calling me ‘my honey’. She was trying to drag me into a dark corner. Oscar and Gunther were laughing at me. She was laughing too. ‘Come, my honey. Come!’ she said. ‘I know you like me.’

At that moment, an older sailor cut his way through the crowd and yelled, ‘Cynthia. It’s me. Your honey. Your money honey!’ She threw herself into his open arms and curled up against his chest. A look of incredible contentment spread across the sailor’s face as if he had just been admitted to paradise.

I zigzagged back to my friends and got in the back of the booth they had secured so I could watch the action but not be hauled off into the shadows again.

Oscar was talking to two squirming girls who looked as if
they were trying to escape his clutches. ‘You gotta love the navy,’ he said. ‘They told me once that the navy is nothing but a bunch of rum, sodomy, and the lash.’ Many years later I came across that exact expression again, spoken by none other than Winston S. Churchill in a biography about his younger years when he was First Lord of the Admiralty.

I really wanted to see the Hall of Flowers. I had heard about this place before. What a beautiful name for a whorehouse, I thought. Beautiful. In fact, the name was so in keeping with the kind of language used in the sex instruction book given to me by Chaplain Peeples that I wondered whether a clergyman had given this establishment that name in gratitude (for who knows what). The Hall of Flowers. The Hall of Flowers. It was so exquisitely suggestive of a carnal paradise. I made a mental note to tell you all about this in ten days, when the
Shangri-La
dropped anchor for the last time in Yokosuka.

So we left the Mermaid Bar and passed in front of the grimy little Luk Kwok Hotel on Gloucester Road, where location crews were already filming street scenes for
The World of Suzie Wong
. (The hotel was redubbed the Nam Kwok in the film.) A tall Englishman, dressed in a rumpled light tropical suit, was talking to one of the members of the film crew. He had a long sombre face shaped like the figure 8. The fingers of his right hand were stained brown with nicotine. I heard a murmur going through the crowd of spectators, some of whom were pink-faced British residents of Hong Kong who had been drinking heavily.

‘That’s him,’ I heard a voice say. ‘Yes, that’s him. Ian Fleming. Mr James Bond. He’s been doing one of his books here. Nice chap. Really nice chap. He drinks one bottle of the best gin
every day! Holds the world record for drinking consecutive vodka martinis. Fourteen. Just like that.’

We continued on until finally, up a wet, dank alley near the Wah Hong Healthy Center Spa and lots of other businesses stacked on top of each other five and six stories high and painted pink and gold and red, with names like ‘High Class Beauty Parlour’ or ‘Romance Club’ or ‘Model Dancers’, we came across the Hall of Flowers. It was not easy to see the small painted sign because of the dense arrays of laundry drying on bamboo poles projecting from each balcony. But this was indeed the Hall of Flowers, Yuki. I knew it was because I had been told by the same chief petty officer who strongly recommended clean genitals that a giant Sikh would be standing at the doorway with an elephant gun. Of course, I did not believe him at the time. But sure enough, there was the Sikh wearing a dark blue turban and khaki shorts and holding a massive shotgun in his hands. He gave us the glance of an eagle about to kill a rat or a mongoose about to bite into the neck of a cobra. His terrifying eyes were set impossibly deep in his face, and his skin had the patina of copper.

‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ he said in an unexpectedly soft and gentle voice. ‘You will be wanting to see the young ladies?’

We nodded, vigorously.

‘You have the required condoms?’

Gunther and I pulled condoms from our pockets and waved them. In fact, I pulled out two condoms. I hastily handed the souvenir rubber to Oscar, who was still staring up at the man as if he was never going to move a muscle again.

‘Yes. I see you have come equipped,’ the Sikh said. ‘You are gentlemen. Very good. Very good.’

He turned and whistled sharply.

Out from the shadows popped a tiny child about eleven or twelve years old. She wore cotton pyjamas with a pattern of forget-me-nots on them. She had bare feet. She took my hand.

‘I will show the way,’ she said in precise, British-accented English.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked, as we began to ascend the stairs in the vast antique building with whitewashed walls clad in moulds of many colours.

‘I am Cloudlet,’ she said.

I did not quite understand what she said. ‘You are what?’ I asked. ‘Claudette?’

‘No. I am Cloudlet. You know, like a tiny cloud floating across the sea.’

‘Really? Your name is Cloudlet? But why? How did you get that name?’

‘I am not a sing-song girl,’ she said. ‘I am much too young. I am your guide. But all girls in the Hall of Flowers have special names. For example: Pine. Simplicity. Bright Pearl. Green Fragrance. White Fragrance . . . When we start working here the owner gives us a name from his favourite book.’

‘Oh. And what book is that?’

‘It is
The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai
,’ the little voice said. ‘The owner says it is a very famous book much loved by men. But I am too young to read it and also I am a girl. Good girls should not read those kind of books. But a young man like you
should
read that book, I think . . . Maybe it is not in English. Do you read Chinese?’

‘Read Chinese! Oh, no. I am sorry. No. I wish I could.’

‘That is very good,’ Cloudlet said, shaking my hand. ‘Very good. Yes, please learn Chinese right away.’

She told us, now that we had climbed three sets of stairs to a hallway heavily perfumed with jasmine and patchouli, that there were ten doors ahead of us, each with a large black number appearing on a white enamelled plaque. Behind each door was a ‘one-woman brothel’, so named because although whorehouses were illegal, it was not illegal for individual women to sell sex.

This was the kind of story I could not tell you back then, Yuki. You told me I needed to grow up and I suppose I thought that this was one way of doing it. Did you know I was a virgin? I feel embarrassed now because I do not know the answer.

Gunther was assigned to number 4. Oscar was given number 6.

The child turned to me. ‘You,’ she said, ‘will have a very special room. It is number 10. I decide which number goes with which customer. I have been trained. I look at the man’s face. I read the face. You have a number 10 face. Come with me, please.’