KOWLOON, FEBRUARY 1988
I’m a-walking down Nathan Road with a strut in my legs like I’m dancing, crowds thick as steam off the paving, cars pressed cheek to cheek and blowing fury, shop sign neons stretching,
into the middle of the road, competing, elbowing the other side, and hissing sparks, red and orange. In a hurry, I swift turn onto a street stall alleyway, and I’m on my toes, alive with the noise rattling in my ears, the clatter of kettle drums and disco beats, the high-pitched Canton screams, noodle sucks and slurps, the bloody slice of a gaggling chicken throat.
This is my Hong Kong and, like the rusty yolk spilled from the sharp crack of an egg on the bowl, it’s spun and shredded, reassembled, turned upside down, and inside out.
I’d flown in two days earlier on Cathay Pacific, a skip and a hop from Bangkok with purple lights, elevator jazz, and red-skirted slim-fit attendants. And while gliding across a green so fluorescent, in over Vietnam and across the Macau Peninsula, there came an amazing calm shining up at me, out of the blue of the South China Seas; and it was a religious thing, because I already knew, the green turning to blue, the blue turning to neon, that I was in love with Hong Kong; before the plane had struggled down onto the melting tarmac of Kai Tak; before Baby would arrive.
I rode the airport bus into Kowloon, and the speaker announced the stops like magic rippling drops on an ocean bay. Tsim Shat Tsui, what a name—Zim! Shaa! Sway!—a staccato puncturing the head, each syllable only correct when spat fast and hard, tongue working the saliva from the roof of the mouth; and all this, coupled with the strange counterpoint of pure Englishness the length of Queen Street and Nathan Road (who was Nathan, anyway?) and the impossibility of their equivalent names in hanzi characters underneath. At the end of the line is the terminal where the Star Ferry begins its leisurely piping gurgling route to Hong Kong Island, where the tourist board is located. The tourist board—a nondescript building with a traditional Chinese junk for a logo, no matter that there are no junks left, except for those in Aberdeen (another name reminiscent of empire) and Aberdeen is on the other side of the island.
It was at the terminal where I retraced my route and walked towards the maze of neons in search of Chung King Mansions. Chung King Mansions? Now that’s a name!
My hotel’s on the top floor, the sixteenth, in building one of five, and the receptionist is a surly kind of bastard, more busy playing noughts and crosses by himself than anything else, and when I ask for a dormitory bed, the guy doesn’t even look up but leans sideways to a couch next to his desk and picks me a neatly folded white bed sheet.
“Seven dollar,” he says, and his eyes are still fixed on the O’s and X’s. I hand him the money, and he barely glances at it as he slides the notes into a side drawer.
Well, I find the room by myself, and in there, I find a brotherhood of Nigerians in the middle of a self-expression group. One of them plays guitar, gives it a few strums, and another says in a sing-song way, “Brother Jacob, confess those sins that you have committed that we may pray for your forgiveness.” Strum!
Brother Jacob goes, “Brother Samuel and my fellow companions, I confess that I went to a club and met with a Filipino woman who persuaded me into her bed,” his head bowed in repentance while Brother Jake at the far end of the room is accelerating the guitar strings.
Now I think I might have the wrong room like I’ve hit the confessional or something, but I check the number outside, and it’s correct, so I go right back in, and Brother Samuel and his strummers say to me, “Do you believe in God, my son?”
The travellers or English teachers or buskers or nurses or hostesses or whatever else they are when they get to Hong Kong, they’ve all turned to something else, because Hong Kong makes you a bit mad, like you don’t fit in, you not being Chinese but you being just a gwai-lou. And as gwai-lous you are so overwhelmed, that you don’t know where you belong in the scheme of things, everywhere else being a place to pass through, but Hong Kong being just a place to hang out.
Yes, you can tell how long you’ve been in Hong Kong by how crazy you are, like the American woman of ill-defined income who’s been to Vietnam and back and knows the guys in the Pentagon by the colour of their underpants because she had some undercover dealings of one sort or another; or the French philosopher with the tie back hairdo and a quick quote from Sartre; or the kilted Canadian with a sporran full of weed, who busks Hare Krishna mantras under the arches of Hong Kong Central; or the Norwegian woman who has a scam for everything—for instance, she found a flat smack in the centre of Oslo, and she can tease a meal out of any man of a night, and she can get a free flight to London whenever she wants; she’s not attractive, but she can still get all that.
Ultimately, we’re in Hong Kong to decompress before going into China, because China’s a bitch to travel around and you need time to get your energy up. And if at first you are not going into China, then you must be in Hong Kong to earn cash with teaching or milk runs or the rest. Except you’re still on the outside looking in, while the hanzi characters on the billboards keeps you out, while the ‘Saving Face’ keeps you out, while the language keeps you out with its incomprehensible noodle suck slurp.
After walking the length of Nathan Road, I go to the Bottoms Up Club because Brother Jacob mentioned that there’s a deal on the drinks on a Wednesday night, and once there, I twirl to the mirror lights as the glaze balls spin the ceiling.
The club is bloated with Westerners as well as locals, but I find I’m lonely dancing there on my own without Baby—Baby, whose name is actually Yán Hai, who anglicized it to Jan, who actually comes from Sydney, though she was born in Hong Kong. Really, she’s more Australian than Chinese, but she speaks Cantonese and I am thinking to myself it will be great, once she gets here, to be with her, in her home town, especially now that I’ve grown fond of her despite the brief time we’d spent in a backpacker hostel on Khao San Road in Bangkok.
I won’t ask anyone for a dance because in England, even if you do ask, all you ever get is a no. So, I don’t ask, and I don’t stay for longer than one drink.
I leave the building, and the sweat of my dancing mingles with a light rain that has just arrived to cool the afternoon heat. The rain makes puddles of the hanzi neons, and the road is quiet, the noise abated in a steaming mist, with Kowloon a little dead now. And the rain is both humid and cooling at the same time, like being in a warm shower, and though it feels good, I start to run, splashing through glowing pavement pools back to the hotel, left onto Nathan Road, through the gutters that are draining the day’s silt and garbage, then across the road to the beep of a stray taxi and right into the cold hard white neon sanatorium of Chung King, block one.
Along the narrow corridor of the ground floor, a stall is still open, a selection of mags in plastic bags and the usual odds and ends: toenail clippers, toothpicks, throwaway razors, the sort of thing you might need for an evening with nothing to do; so, I buy a pack of Marlboro Reds before I saunter back to the lift for the long flight to the sixteenth.
Herein, I insert a note about this building, this wonder of human debris and filth, this Chung King Mansions, blocks one to five.
Go up in the lift of any one of these blocks, and you are likely to miss the essence, and it is only if you take the stairs that you will see it for what it is: for in an expanse of Rabelaisian proportions, you will stumble upon hotels, travel agents, quick fit visa services, quick buck black market Trans-Siberian tickets, second-hand book shops, camera shops, doctors, dentists, solicitors, solicitors for the dentists, gamblers and gambling dens, opium dens, curry houses, noodle shops, cake shops, Vietnamese tea houses, refugees and more, it’s there.
Yet this seething mess of merchants and merchandise is situated in a building that is crumbling and rotting away and a fire hazard and a health hazard and whatever else, but it’s throbbing like it has a human—if decaying—front, and it’s complete with heart, central nervous system, brain, and tentacles to draw in all and sundry within its grasp.
It was only when there was a fire alert that I found all this out, descending as I did all sixteen of those bitch-bastard floors.
Later on, the kilted Canadian and I watched the replay on the news that evening, all of it glowing in technicolour with a ribbon of green smoke wafting from the fourteenth floor from some dick’s burnt toast that caused a bunch of fire engines to come around, their ladders reaching the sky like Chung King is the tower of Babel or something, to come round, and blast their sirens and flash their red lights in amongst all the noise and bustle on Nathan Road.
And as a matter of note, the event had some tragedy too because some panicky traveller afeared for his life and well-being must have been unable to face the long descent by stairwell so he threw himself out of the window, eighth floor, without letting the fire chiefs down below get ready their trampoline. When he landed, his body made a smack in the middle of the street that scattered the onlookers and, temporarily at least, reduced the whole of Nathan Road to a silent murmur.
Now, a couple of other late-night stragglers and I cramp the lift up to the top floor, and once we are there, we part company, me to my dormitory, them to theirs, and I’m expecting everyone to be asleep, but I’m early, and there’s only one other guy there, and he’s complaining that the Nigerian brotherhood has detuned his guitar so bad that he can’t get it back into shape again without one of those guitar tuner things you blow into.
He’s another of those Hong Kong hang-out characters, say in his middle twenties going on middle thirties because he’s balding badly, and the hair he has he keeps long, and he’s pasty-faced like he’s been doing a term, and he has these sores on his lips that would make any girl shudder to have to kiss him, though he says that the main problem with the sores is that they hurt to play the harmonica with. To show me what he means, he slides an A Major into a grip that goes like a neck brace across his shoulders, and he suspends the thing up against his mouth and starts huffing at the tubes while strumming the still tuneless guitar with chords that remind me of an old Simon and Garfunkel tune.
Yes, I have to agree, but only to myself. It is bad!
He and I get to talking, and maybe he’s all right because he’s different with the things he’s done, and believable, like he’s been to Gibraltar doing a stint as a bricklayer and now he’s looking for work in Hong Kong because he loves it here, and loves the ‘Little Orientals’ as he calls them, and hell, he’ll be making good money anyway with his busking as long as these fool Chinese keep throwing the Lucky Money envelopes into his cap.
We go to bed after another song—it’s the Beatles this time, I think—and just when I’m drifting off into slumber, in comes Brother Jacob after another evening’s sinning with the Filipino women.
I’m lying awake on the top bunk until all of the Brothers come in, until the last staggers to his bed and slips under the blankets below me; then, just as I’m thinking, At last! what happens, but the same drunk starts snoring like you cannot believe like the bed is swinging to his rhythm like the iron bed stand is clanking against the wall and chipping at the plaster that I can hear it cracking and peeling away and coming down in a shower of dandruff, that I’m having to lean out and jab my pillow at the bastard so that he’ll turn over and unblock his passages or have them readjusted by the disturbance. As I poke him, I’m thinking to myself that tomorrow it will be just me and Baby in our own little room, all alone, and in the altogether, and keeping everyone else awake because I haven’t seen her since she left to do the week thing in Burma.
THE NEW TERRITORIES AND HONG KONG ISLAND
The next day, I’ve not much to do until my rendezvous in the evening, so I tag along with the Kilted Canadian, and we go on up to Lok Ma Chau (I love these names) in the New Territories (even that has a ring to it) because he wants to smoke some in the hills and away from the crowds. We are standing up at this viewpoint atop a hill, and I decide to put a dollar into the telescope and stare across the border at this barge winding its way along the Yangtze River.
It’s real slow doing its journey, as if the telescope camera is at half speed, and there’s the faint patter of rain here. I guess from my close-up image, the rain is in China, too, and that seems to slow everything down even more. I get this kind of sad feeling looking at the barge and the brown and green fields and the distant factories piping their grey soot into the grey clouds above, like what I’m looking at is not China at all but that neither is it Hong Kong, like there’s this bit of land in between—a no man’s land—that keeps them separate, that will always keep them separate, that the whole idea that they can become one and the same seems to me a nonsense and a stupidity that no one in their right mind can possibly conceive.
I begin to feel a sense of fatalism in Hong Kongers, which explains them all being in so much of a hurry making their big bucks, which explains them being so hard and such awkward fuckers. It’s not that they are being awkward; they’re just they’re in a hurry to get things done, what with the handover ten years from now.
When the Kilted Canadian’s finished his baggie, I suggest to him that we get out of there fast, there being no other reason to stay, that we get back to the subway; and soon enough, we’re rattling our way back to town, all the way until the skyscrapers leer up against the skyline, until we disappear into the tunnels, and already I’m feeling happier and perking up a bit and coming out with the usual bullshit and back chat to my companion who is, by now, thoroughly stoned.
That afternoon I get the Star Ferry across to Hong Kong Island. I’m supposed to be meeting up with Baby outside the main post office at eight o’clock—a stupid time, I admit, because by then it will be dark—and that leaves me three hours or so to go up the top of Victoria Peak and look out at the harbour while the sun sets.
The Star Ferry chugs the bay with the tall scrapers in front of me, high and mighty, and the sun is now sinking low and bouncing off the mirrored columns. I’m just thinking how beautiful it looks when I’m arrested in my dreaming by a big Chinese junk passing my bows with its sails aloft and puffed like Chinese crackers or creaking oyster shells. The junk passes its lonesome way in front of the great scrapers of the sky as though it’s saying, “Stop and look! This is the other side of Hong Kong in case you didn’t see it behind all the camera shops and electrical outlets and high finance shenanigans!”
After the junk floats on by, I start scanning the decks of my ferry instead, and I’m like a little child chasing around from port to starboard and back again. I slide past the little old men settled in for the ride, Confucian stoics with their grey old beards long enough to stroke with a craggy, bony hand. On the top deck, the LV chicks are dolled-up in short skirts, black stockings, and thick-soled shoes. They point their eyes out aft, straight as dice and unflinching. Lower deck, and the businessmen in pinstripes and monogrammed leather briefcases stand ready at the exit to leap off.
I love the boat so much that it’s a pain that it only takes a few minutes before we dock; and I yearn to stay on and do the ride again and again it’s so much fun.
On Hong Kong Island, I climb up the hill along Kennedy Road to the trolley stop for Victoria Peak, and when the trolley finally arrives, I cram in behind a group of Japanese tourists and push the doors shut before the trolley creaks on up the steep slope with an ear-piercing whirr. It’s a weird sensation, me standing on the horizontal and the trolley climbing at a precarious angle, as if one of us is crooked and the other needs straightening out (but that would leave the other crooked). We trolley up above the roofs of the skyscrapers until the harbour comes into view with the sun dipping over the western end of Kowloon, with the water shimmering like the stars are bouncing off it.
The trolley makes a couple of stops, because it’s not really a tourist attraction, but like everything else in Hong Kong, it has a purpose, like people actually live up on the hill; they get off, the rich men in suits and the women in fancy cheongsams, gold inlaid with fire breathing dragons, orchids wrapped around their tails; and some of them are in Western dress but all them are rich, with the ones higher up richer still. I think, Where else can you live in the world with such a view? And how fantastic would commuting be, taking the ferry across Hong Kong harbour to swanny up the crooked trolley bus for a whisky on the veranda, with the sun disappearing over the horizon, with the sky pinker than a Singapore Sling and the lights of Kowloon flickering into life across the water below you.
At the top of Victoria Peak, I take the lift to the restaurant bar of the Peak Tower, and there I do just that—drink myself a whisky while watching the sun put itself to slumber, while watching the lights Kowloon-side burst into radiant neons that spill into the cool dark harbour in rippling shafts that glow like myriad multi-coloured moons tracing the water. I sit there sipping the whisky real slow because of the ludicrous expense of watching the sun snuff itself over Hong Kong harbour, and when I next look at my watch, I see that it is seven thirty, so I rush and run to the trolley car and find myself having to will it faster, so that I’ll get back down to the bottom, so that I’ll get to the post office on time.
I arrive five minutes after the hour, but Baby’s not there, so I hang around, casual-like, although there is nobody around. The place is totally deserted, and the only thing for company are the spot lamps on the buildings, and the lights freeze shadows of the window frames and the awkward projections and limpet structures in the architecture. To the left of me, I spy a couple of rickshaw drivers asleep, hidden in the cabins of their rickshaws because only the tourists use the rickshaws nowadays, and the tourists are all off rocking it down Nathan Road or the little side streets of Lan Kwai Fong.
A loneliness comes over me in the shadows of the spot lamps, and above me, the buildings reach up into skies that have turned black with an imposing rain. I walk up and down—up to the rickshaw drivers and up to a drunk who looks at me with irritation at the disturbance, and then I walk back again, to the deserted street and my imaginary meeting.
I’m waiting in the black corners of Central Post Office, so quiet that I can hear the hum of the air conditioning unit inside, and other than that, there is a deathly silence that awakens a sick feeling in my stomach; I feel as though I recognise it but cannot do anything about it. It is a kind of melancholy that calmly eats away at the lining of my belly, a kind of self-pitying sorrow because it’s just me, two rickshaw drivers and a drunk, and they don’t care. It’s a feeling that I hate, but it’s a feeling that always hits me when I’ve been having a good time, until suddenly, the good time goes away, and I am helpless and alone.
I get to thinking that it’s approaching a quarter to nine, and Baby is not going to show up because realistically I only met her in Bangkok, and yes, we spent three weeks around Thailand together, but that is now in the past and thinking in the past is not what I’m about. It’s the present I’m living in, it’s only the present I like, because the past no longer exists, and the future never happens so we are bound in this ever-eternal present that not even time can define.
So here we are, in the present, with me sitting on the steps of the Central God Damned Post Office, with Hong Kong Island’s big faceless iron cast and concrete scrapers of a blackened sky staring down at me, their lurid spotlights distorting the shadows while I’m crouched in the void. The bile is churning my stomach, I have a desperate need for the joint that I did not partake of earlier on, and I’m thinking, You fucking bitch for not showing up.
I take the subway back to Kowloon, and it’s not as interesting as the ferry, it being nearly empty and having nothing of import to see. I get off at Nathan Road and walk through the filtering crowds with my eyes shut to it all because it’s too much and too noisy, and I’m getting a headache and wanting to mellow out in my dormitory.
And I’ve come to the conclusion that my little episode with Baby was just a passing thing, just one of those excursions on a backpacker’s nascent fuck trail, and that her telling me that it would be a good idea to meet again was just a load of bull even though she’d suggested it, not like it was an idea, but like it was a certainty and a fact.
By the time I get back to Chung King, the shock of being upstaged has turned to anger, and unexpectedly, I feel tired, although it’s only ten o’clock, and I’m thinking it is better to sleep on the disappointment than mope.
And if I get to bed before Brother Jacob, Brother Samuel, old Harmonica Lips, and the others get in, I think, I might actually get enough sleep of the night to start afresh the next day.
HONG KONG ISLAND AND KOWLOON
In the morning, I’m feeling bright and well rested, the memory of last night’s fiasco a dim hangover in my mind, and I notice that the snorer’s disappearance from the bunk below must have contributed to my well-being, so I think it will be a good day despite the throbbing on my temples. And I’m told that the snorer has gone off to Macau, lured as he was by the wicked and evil sin of the gambling halls there.
All this according to the viewpoint of Brother Jacob who stares at me pointedly, before he quizzes me on why Harmonica Lips is no longer lending Brother Jake his guitar. In the room, I notice a stale but sweet smell in the air, like somebody has been partaking of the weed in our room; and while he’s speaking to me, I’m suspecting its Brother Jacob, but it’s only when he goes off for his teaching appointment that Harmonica Lips opens a cautious eye and notifies that last night he met some strange Canadian dude with a kilt. He can’t understand my laughter, but no matter—in the event of nothing better to do, we, all three of us go down the underpass, Hong Kong side, to do some busking.
The Kilted Canadian has a new idea he says and we sit down plump against the wall, and Harmonica Lips doesn’t blow on his harmonica, his lips are so pitted and rutted with wear, and doesn’t pluck at the strings like normal but he knocks the box of the guitar with the flat of his palm while Canada bashes tablas or something he’s bought down in Stanley Market.
“Sing ‘Om Diddy Om Dom Diddy,’” yells the Canadian, some Hare Krishna mantra he maintains, while the smart-suited Chinese walk their umbrellas and swing their briefcases off to their high finance in the city.
We do this for three hours or so, just ‘Om Diddy Om Dom Diddy’ for a full three hundred and sixty minutes or some ten thousand seconds, and we figure that the locals must have a sense of humour, the number of capfuls of Lucky Money we’re receiving. Afterwards we go down to the McDonald’s, Kowloon side, to open up the little bright envelopes to check what’s inside, and well, by the end of it, we’re toasting ourselves with vanilla milkshakes, and Harmonica Lips is saying he’s going to ditch his guitar and harmonica, the take has been so good.
After all this, I’ve all but forgotten about Baby, or I’ve tried to forget her with my pocket full of cash bulging obscenely in my trousers. We head on up to the hotel for a respite of our ‘Om Diddy Om’ throats, and I go back to my dorm to find it deserted except for a large piece of paper on my bed scrawled with the words,
Sorry I couldn’t get the flight out on time. I’ll explain later. Love, Jan.
My heart goes leap, and the pocket of cash gives a little jangle, and I think to myself, yes, but where the fuck are you?
I’m sitting in the kitchen that evening and Brother Jacob and Brother Samuel and Harmonica Lips and the kilted Canadian are there; and Brother Joshua, who I’ve just been introduced to, is preparing a genuine Nigerian meal, goat head stew and a huge saucepan of rice cooked to a mush so that it’s all stuck together, much like the Chinese way of doing rice I suppose.
Now, who should walk in but Jan, my Baby, standing in the doorway and leaning against the frame with arms crossed and giving me this smile. She says, “You didn’t think I’d make it, eh sport?” (She puts on the Australianess when she’s being flirty) and I rush around the table and I want desperately to wrap my arms around her, to lift her up, to give her a big hug, and a big kiss, but instead, I step back to get a good look at her, and, before I can let loose with emotion, she says to me, “Burma was a bit shithouse with bother!”
Brother Jacob invites her to sit down, and before I know it, Brother Joshua has planted this huge casserole on the table next to the rice, and we’re digging with our fingers into both saucepans and cupping handfuls of rice and meat into our mouths.
Our fingers are covered over with thick brown sauce and dripping it everywhere, over the table, over the floor, in our laps, the non-Nigerians amongst us being not so good at the hand eating thing, and Baby is telling me that I was easy to find, me being the sort of person who’d always stay in the cheapest most low-down, flea-bitten shithole that you could find.
After the meal, Baby assures me that she’s already booked us a double room, no dormitory drama, no unstifled snorers, no Beatles tunes on tuneless guitars, no Brotherhood and the Confessors, although they were good to listen to on an uneventful evening, and we go on down to our room to make our own music and sin to dance and feel guilty about.
The following afternoon, we’re walking down Nathan Road, strutting like we’re dancing, our feet an inch off the ground, and Baby is taking me down all the side streets and showing me where she used to hang out as a kid; where the mahjong tiles rattle on the tables like a hundred castanets; where makeshift stalls hang newly plucked chickens, and the oval and pink squids from great hooks swing leering shadows from bare bulbs; where a soft slippered man loops noodles and pincers bean curd in splintered sticks; where the steam sizzles off the burners and the noise of the cooks creates the restaurant atmosphere; where the liquor is sticky sweet and beats a drum of our temples. And where we can relax, a park by the water, an oasis in the concrete, no one around, with only a paperbark tree sprinkling and a-rustling on the backs of our necks.
The harbour and the dark scrapers of Hong Kong Island lie in front of us with the advertising hoardings bouncing cool and radiant off the water and I’m telling her, “Come the day when I’m over with this travelling bullshit and this eternal running around lark I will come here to work and will earn myself a living doing some big buck thing so I too can live up the top of Victoria Peak and sip a whisky on the veranda while the sun’s going down on the west.”
Then Baby turns to me, and she laughs loud and raucous in that real un-Chinese Australian way of hers. “Oh yes,” she replies as she taps an index finger against her temple, “and I think you’ve gone a bit mad.”
An engineer by trade, a Tai Chi sword practitioner for fun, Mel Christie has spent forty years writing short stories while working and traveling in Asia, Europe and North America. Originally from London, he is now settled in the D.C. metro area, though he regularly escapes to find new stories to write—when not attending writer workshops and public events at the Bethesda Writer’s Center. His debut short story collection, in development, is viewable here: https://flyingcormorant.com.
Euphony Journal 