World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (3 page)

We began to bicker at every meeting; and it was always the same arguments that were repeated, the same accusations, though each time a little more bitterly. And finally, one day on a picnic, came the showdown, after I had defiantly sketched three Malay women passing with jack fruit and the usual row had begun.

“What's the matter with me?” Stella demanded. “Am I so ugly or something?”

“No, of course not.”

“But it's so insulting—and so unnatural.”

“To paint Malays?”

“Yes, especially when nine times out of ten you pick on the girls. It's disgusting.”

“But they're so beautiful—they've got such grace.”

“My God, listen to you! And you pretend there's nothing in it!”

“Of course there's nothing in it.” We went at it hammer and tongs for another ten minutes, trying to hurt each other, then were silent. I began to feel ashamed of what I had said and presently tried to make amends, saying, “Anyhow, I'd like to sketch you now.”

“All right, wait a minute.” She reached for her handbag.

“No, don't move! Just as you are—it's marvelous!”

“Don't be a fool.”

And then, as she manipulated comb and cosmetics and began to preen herself, everything inside me exploded. “You silly bitch!” I wanted to shout. “You silly, vain, self-conscious bitch!
Now
can't you see why I paint Malay girls? Can't you see the difference? Can't you see they've got an innocence that you've lost?”

She arranged her skirt, and then herself, in a chocolate-box pose.

“All right, I'm ready now.”

“Fine,” I said, and sketched her. And the next day I told her I did not think I was the sort of husband she wanted, and we had better break it off.

She was very upset. “But what shall I tell people?” she kept saying. “What shall I tell people?” And although I despised her at the time for this characteristic concern with what other people would think, I came afterwards to judge her less harshly, for the fear to lose face was natural enough and among whom was it stronger than the oriental races themselves? And also in retrospect I came to realize that Stella's grievance about my painting, which I had so self-righteously dismissed as mere vanity on her part, had been perfectly justified. The creative impulse had its roots in sexuality, and it was no more chance that I enjoyed painting Malay women than that other artists enjoyed painting nudes. (For any painter who claimed that the female body only interested him as “abstract form” was talking rubbish—he might as well paint pillows.) They aroused in me feelings which, denied direct expression, had found expression in another form, and which gave to my pictures whatever merit they might possess; such feelings as Stella had never aroused. And of course she had known it. “If he paints Malay women and not me, he can't love me,” had been her instinctive reaction, and I had thought the argument unsubtle, only proving her abysmal ignorance of the higher motives of art. But of course she had been right. I had never loved her—never for a moment.

A few weeks after breaking with Stella I received a letter from London. It was from the Ullman Gallery, where I had sent my pictures, and contained a check for sixty-three pounds.

The letter itself was signed by Roy Ullman, Director, who apologized that the check was no larger owing to gallery fees and cost of framing. He gave no explanation for not having written before, but went on to say that he had included fourteen of my pictures in a group exhibition for the work of several new young painters—though only, he admitted, after some hesitation. However, as the attached clippings would show, the vigor and the intensity of feeling of my pictures had more than made up for the weakness of composition and the frequent clumsiness of technique. And he went on, “In fact one may say without exaggeration that they stole the show, and you may congratulate yourself on a magnificent triumph. However . . .” However, he now recommended that I should not exhibit again for another year, during which time I would undoubtedly develop beyond recognition. And he finished, “You have a really exciting and unusual talent, and I know we can expect great things of you.”

My first extravagant excitement at this letter was followed by the conviction of destiny and genius, and the natural acceptance of myself as a superior being. This period lasted a week, during which I not only felt myself to be taller but evidently, due to buoyancy of spirits, actually appeared to be so—for both George Wheeler and Tubby Penfold remarked independently, and in some puzzlement, that I seemed suddenly to be overtowering them. The next week, however, they were both remarking that I had shrunk back to normal. And I fancied myself that it was to even less than normal—for trying hard to live up to my inflated estimate of myself, I was finding myself altogether devoid of inspiration and talent. I could achieve nothing; my conviction was no longer of genius, but of mediocrity; I was plunged in despair. Even the phrasing of Ullman's letter, to which I resorted in the hope of encouragement, now seemed empty and insincere; what, after all, had he to lose? And what, at best, was the “triumph,” except a momentary stir among the culture snobs of Mayfair, before they moved on to the next stir, the next discovery, the next fashion? And as for the check, which in my initial surprise had seemed a fortune—it now dwindled to a mere pittance, as I thought of it in terms of time and effort and the elusiveness of inspiration.

My despair and inability to work lasted for most of two months; then the pendulum settled back somewhere about the middle. I was neither a genius nor a mediocrity, but possessed a certain gift that only patience and hard work could bring to fruition. And thus chastened, I found my spirit stirring again, the creative impulse returning.

Then one weekend, a month or so later, I went down to Singapore. It was a year since I had been anywhere larger than Kuala Lumpur and the huge city strangely excited me. I roved through the Chinese street markets, dined and watched cabaret at the Cathay, then wandered for hours round one of the great, glittering, tawdry Chinese entertainment parks, where Cantonese opera rubbed shoulders with open-air boxing, Chinese strip tease with bumping cars; and I danced with a taxi girl in one of the dance halls. Two days later I returned north by train, dreading the thought of going back to those endless, monotonous acres of gray-trunked trees, and to the drudgery of work that claimed so much of my time and kept me from painting; and I began to toy with the notion of leaving Bukit Merah. I had saved nearly four hundred pounds since I had been in Malaya. If I was careful I could spin it out for a year—a year to do nothing but paint. And while I was turning this over in my mind an army major in my carriage suddenly sighed and said, “My word, I wish I was back in Hong Kong!”

“Why?” I asked him.

“Singapore's all right, only it's the sort of town you find anywhere. But Hong Kong's really China. Take a minute's stroll from the center and you won't see a European. And oh, my word, it's beautiful!”

“Yes, so I've heard.” And I remembered the gardener we'd had at home when I was a child, the gardener who had been no good at gardening because he was really a sailor, and on whose brown knotted arms had been tattooed, among the fading blue Chinese dragons, the word
Hongkong;
and who had been the unchallenged hero of my boyhood as he leaned on his spade and talked of opium dens, and gunboats, and firecrackers, and the Pearl (which was a river), and Chinese funerals with six brass bands and professional mourners in white hoods like the Ku Klux Klan, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth; and who sometimes, at the most exciting moment, would say, “But no more about that, or I'll be in trouble with your father”—oh, what realms of mystery lay beyond those words!

“Yes, my goodness,” the Major said. “When you get a fleet of junks coming into that harbor in full sail, proud as bloody schooners . . . Well, you've got to see it for yourself. Oh, yes, my word—you ought to see Hong Kong.”

“I shall,” I said; for I had suddenly made up my mind. “You'll go up for leave?”

“No, to live.”

I broke my news to George Wheeler as soon as I got back. He was not at all pleased, for he had paid me well to learn the job and had expected me to stay longer; but when he saw that I could not be shaken he put a good face on it, smiling grimly and saying, “Well, I suppose if you're going to be famous one day, I'd better be nice to you. Have a stengah?”

And when I was relaxed with the whisky, and he was as relaxed as his chronic inner tautness allowed, I laughed and said, “Anyhow, you've only yourself to blame. If it hadn't been for you I might never have started painting.”

“What do you mean?”

“That ban on miscegenation.”

He looked puzzled for a minute, trying to work out the connection, and then said, “Oh, nonsense. You'd never have gone with a native girl. You're not that sort.”

“Well, actually—” I had been going to tell him about the girl with the laughing eyes and provocative hips who had walked past my bungalow, but he interrupted.

“Of course you're not—you're too clean-minded. I'd know that just from your Everest picture. That's a beautiful piece of work. Only a decent clean-minded chap could have painted a picture like that.”

And then, since it would have ruined the picture for him to know the truth, I held my tongue after all, and just said, “Well, I'm glad you liked it.”

“It's a work of art.”

A new assistant was engaged locally. His name was Hewitt-Begg, and after his initial interview with Wheeler he told me, “This girl business doesn't really worry me, old man. I dabble in yoga.” And so he did, squatting cross-legged in a loincloth, his pink and white English torso stiff as a ramrod, his finger pressed to his nose, making the most alarming noises as he breathed in through one nostril and out through the other, timing each respiration by a watch placed in front of him on the floor.

I remained a couple of weeks to show him the ropes, then Wheeler ran me in his car to Port Swettenham, where I embarked on a tramp. It was called the
Nigger Minstrel,
and was bound for Malacca, Singapore, Manila—and Hong Kong.

Chapter Three

I
had no idea, when I first discovered it, that there was anything odd about the Nam Kok.

It was my fifth week in Hong Kong, and I had been to call at a house on the escarpment behind Wanchai, following up an advertisement for a room to let. The advertiser had been a Mrs. Ma, and I had found her flat on the second floor; but the moment she had opened the door, and I had glimpsed behind her, in the small living room, the usual abundance of children, grandparents, cousins, aunts—they must have numbered nearly a dozen souls—I had known that it would be no use, that there would be no privacy for me to paint; and I had been relieved when Mrs. Ma had told me that the room had already been taken by a Chinese. She had been sorry: she had wished she had known I was coming, for she would have liked an English guest so that she and her husband could have improved their English. She had insisted, anyhow, on rewarding my wasted journey with a cup of tea, which I had drunk while sitting stiffly on a hard, straight-backed chair, my presence scarcely noticed by the relatives seated about the room.

“Well, perhaps I can get something down in Wanchai,” I said. “It's one of the few districts I haven't tried yet.”

Mrs. Ma, who was very neat and bird-like, tittered with merriment as if I had made a joke. “You wouldn't like Wanchai,” she said.

“Why not?”

“It's very noisy. . . . No Europeans live in Wanchai—only Chinese.”

“That's what I want,” I said. “The trouble with my present place is that there are only English.” I told her about Sunset Lodge, which was at the lowest contour of the Peak at which a European could respectably live, and where I had been living until now—not for respectability, but because I had not been able to find anywhere cheaper. And I told her about the other residents: about the bridge players whose sessions began at eleven o'clock every morning in the lounge and continued all day; about the sad wistful wives who said, “Of course we're spoiled out here,” but really wished themselves back in Sutton; about the feuding middle-aged ladies, and about the garrulous ladies who laid in wait for you, trapped you, and then turned their flow of talk onto you like a hose; and about how I had taken to entering by the kitchens to reach my room without being caught. It sounded quite funny when I told it, but really wasn't. I had become almost desperate; for by now a whole month of my year had gone by and I had still not settled to work, I had done nothing. At first Hong Kong, with its teeming, jostling populace, its atmosphere tingling with activity and excitement, had been too stimulating, too confusing; the impressions had whirled in my head too swiftly to record. “I must let it take shape,” I had thought. “I'll be all right in a week or two.” But nothing had taken shape; I had been able to find no center of interest, no point of beginning; and I had begun to wonder in dismay if I should have chucked up rubber planting at all. Then I had begun to understand. My work had always depended on sympathetic feeling, on a sense of identity with the people I sketched or drew; and here I was a mere spectator in the streets, making my occasional sorties from another world. A great wall divided me from the Chinese—how could it be otherwise, living in Sunset Lodge? And thus I had begun another room hunt—for I had given up once in despair—and again taken trams from district to district, trudged from street to street, only to be reminded again everywhere, by the swarming pedestrians, by the quantities of washing hung out overhead, that this was the most overcrowded city in the world. Only a few years ago, at the end of the war, the population had been barely half a million; but since the revolution in China, from which the refugees had come flocking across the border in their hordes, it had swollen to two and a half million, and some thought to three million by now—who could tell? And when the first corners had packed themselves into every available room—each divided into ten, fifteen, twenty “bed-spaces”—there had been nothing left for the remainder but the empty sites and the hillsides, and such shanties as they could build from threadbare sacking, flattened tins, and treasured gleanings of wood. And if indeed any room did become vacant now it would be let at an inflated rental that no legislation could restrain. And so for a second time I had found nothing within my means, and dispirited and footsore had once more given up; and it was only Mrs. Ma's advertisement that had brought me out again this afternoon.

I put down the little decorated cup and said, “It was delicious tea. You were very kind.”

“Not at all, not at all,” she tittered politely. “The tea was very poor.”

“No, it was delicious.” I rose to go.

“I hope you are not really going down to Wanchai?” she said anxiously, coming to the door. “It is too noisy—too dirty. The people in Wanchai are so poor, you will get such a bad impression of the Chinese. You won't go?”

“Well, perhaps not.”

But I did go nevertheless—descending the escarpment by the long steep flights of steps that dropped straight down into the oldest part of Wanchai: into the teeming alleyways with the litter-filled gutters, the pavement vendors, the street stalls, the excitement and bustle. The sun slanted brilliantly down, making deeply contrasting patterns of light and shade and giving the overhead washing the gaiety of bunting. I saw a post office and went in, thinking the clerk would speak English; but when I asked him about rooms he shook his head and said, “No, sorry. No sell.”

“I don't want to buy anything,” I said. “I'm just looking for a room.”

“Sorry. Only sell stamp.”

I crossed Hennessy Road, with its clattering trams and its two huge modernesque cinemas showing American films, and came out on the water front by the Mission to Seamen. Next to the Mission was a big hotel called the Luk Kwok, famous for Chinese wedding receptions and obviously too expensive for me even to try. Further along the quay shirtless, barefoot coolies were unloading junks, filing back and forth along the gangplanks like trails of ants. Sampans tied up among the junks tossed sickeningly in the wash of passing boats. Across the road from the quay were narrow open-fronted shops, between which dark staircases led up to crowded tenement rooms; and along the pavement children played hopscotch while shoveling rice into their mouths from bowls, for all Chinese children seemed to eat on the move.

I sat at the top of a flight of steps leading down to the water. A month gone, I thought. A whole month gone, and I've done nothing. I must take myself in hand. I must bully myself.

But no, that's no use, I thought. I've already been bullying myself and it doesn't work. You can't bully yourself to paint. It's like bullying yourself not to hear a ticking clock. The harder you try, the more the sound fastens itself into your ears.

Sometimes will power is its own enemy, I thought. You can't paint by will power.

Yes, relax, I thought. It's only when you relax, when you're not trying to grab what you want, that you suddenly find it's there. . . . I leaned on the sun-warmed stone. A rickshaw went by, the coolie's broad grimy feet making a slapping sound on the road. Then my eyes fell on an illuminated sign among the shops. The blue neon tubes were twisted into the complicated, decorative shapes of Chinese characters. I recognized the last two. They meant hotel.

Well, that's more my cup of tea, I thought. And right on the water front. Of course, it would be perfect. So perfect that there must be a snag. Still, there's no harm in trying.

I got up and crossed the quay, and turned into the entrance under the blue neon. And still not a suspicion passed my mind. Indeed the hall gave the impression of such solid respectability, with the middle-aged clerk behind the reception counter, the old-fashioned rope-operated lift, the potted palms at the foot of the stairs, that I was reminded of some old family hotel in Bloomsbury, and felt discouraged. It was all wrong for the water front of Wanchai—and anyhow would probably be too expensive after all.

I approached the desk and asked the clerk, “How much are rooms by the month?”

“Month?”

The clerk's fingers paused over the beads of his abacus: he had been making calculations from figures in his ledger, as though playing some musical instrument from a score. His Chinese gown, like a gray priest's cassock, gave him an old-fashioned appearance in keeping with the potted palms, the antiquated lift. His head was shaven, and he had several silver teeth.

“Month?” he repeated.

“Yes, don't you have monthly terms?”

“How long you want to stay?”

“Well, it would be a month at least. . . .”

He gave me an odd look, then dubiously began a new calculation on the abacus. The beads clicked up and down under his finger tips.

“Two hundred and seventy dollars,” he announced at last. “A month?”

“Yes—month.”

The Hong Kong dollar was worth one shilling and threepence, so that was about seventeen pounds—a little dearer than Sunset Lodge, but with cheap meals I could just afford it. I asked to see a room, and the clerk called one of the floor boys on the telephone while I went to the lift. The liftman lounged inside against the mirror reading a Chinese newspaper. He folded the newspaper, crashed the gate shut, yanked on the rope, and we rumbled upward, our passage punctuated at each landing by a loud metallic clank. On the third and topmost landing, where I alighted, a miniature radio on the floor boy's desk was emitting the falsetto screeches of Cantonese opera. The floor boy, a smiling fresh-faced youth of about twenty, dressed in a white jacket, wide-legged cotton trousers, and felt slippers, led me down the corridor and unlocked the door of the end room.

“Very pretty room, sir,” he grinned.

It was not pretty, but it was clean and perfectly adequate, with a wide hard bed, a cheap dressing table and wardrobe, and the inevitable enamel spittoon on the floor. There was also a telephone and a padded basket for a teapot: I remembered hearing that in Chinese hotels a constant supply of green tea was provided free of charge. I could almost live on tea; it would be a great saving.

“And a pretty view, sir.”

He opened the doors onto the balcony, which was roofed over but beautifully light: a perfect studio. And the view was indeed superb, for the balcony was on a corner and commanded an immense panorama. On one side it looked out over the roof tops of Wanchai, behind which rose the skyscrapers of Hong Kong and the Peak, while in front was the harbor scattered with ships of every shape and size: cargo boats, liners, warships, ferryboats, tramps, junks, sampans, walla-wallas, and numberless comic, graceless, rusting mongrels—some lying at anchor, some in ponderous movement, some bustling about busily, crisscrossing the harbor with their wakes. And across the harbor, so close that I could count the windows of the Peninsula Hotel, was the water front of Kowloon, with a backdrop of tall bare hills stretching away into China.

I said, “This'll do fine.”

“My name is Tong Kwok-tai, sir,” the floor boy grinned deferentially. “Will you please correct my bad English?”

“There's nothing to correct, Ah Tong.”

“You are too kind, sir.” And as we turned back into the room he said, “You have a girl here, sir?”

“A girl? No.”

I supposed that by “here” he meant Hong Kong and still did not realize. I went down again in the rumbling lift, and paid the clerk a deposit to make sure of the room. He wrote out a receipt in Chinese. I could hear the muffled sound of dance music coming from a swing door leading off the hall. I nodded to the door, asking the clerk, “What's in there?”

“Bar.”

“Good, I'll have a beer.”

I turned away across the hall, and just then the door swung open and a Royal Navy matelot came out. He was small, wiry, and darkly tanned by the sun. He wore a hat with H.M.S.
Pallas
in gold letters round the brim.

He cocked his head at me in casual salutation.

“Good Lord, the Navy!” I laughed. “The last thing I expected to meet here!”

He gave me an odd look like the clerk. “Well, you won't meet much else here, mate,” he said. “Not at the Nam Kok.”

“No? You mean there aren't any Chinese here?”

“Only the girls,” he said. “The girls are all Chinese.”

The door swung open again at this moment and a Chinese girl came scurrying out, laughing and saying to the matelot, “Hey, you left me.” She wore high heels and a cheongsam with tall collar and split skirt. She was very pretty.

“And they're a decent lot, too, if you treat them proper,” the matelot said proprietorially. “Eh, Nelly? Isn't that right?”

“Sure, we're plenty nice,” the girl acceded cheerfully, tugging at his hand. “Come on, you talk too much. You make me chokka.”

“No, you won't do better than this place nowhere, mate,” the matelot said. They went off, the matelot swaggering a little, the girl balancing on her high heels.

I watched them cross the hall, grinning to myself. Well, I am an idiot, I thought. I ought to have guessed from the clerk's face when I asked for a room. A room for a month! I suppose he's only used to letting rooms by the hour. And I turned and went through the swing door into the bar.

Inside it was dim after the daylight of the hall. The windows were curtained and the room lit like a night club with rosy diffused light. I paused while my eyes adjusted themselves. Then the scene began to take shape: the bar counter in the corner; the huge walnut-and-chromium juke box playing “Seven Lonely Days”; the Chinese waiters carrying trays of beer among the tables; and the sailors at the tables; and the girls.

Yes, that sailor was right, I thought. I won't do better than here.

Yes, this is what I've been waiting for. This is the point of contact. This is where I'll be able to start.

And I went across to an empty table, and ordered a beer.

II