Kowloon Tong

by Paul Theroux

  And there was the partner to consider: now, that woman knew a secret. It was not as though he had done something wrong alone. It was a conspiracy, but it was unequal. With the onset of desire he found himself pleading and promising. Afterward he was empty, with no memory of his lust but only an odd fishy smell on his fingers and a fleeting image of the ridiculous posture he had contrived, the amateur acrobatics, the thrashing legs, even the hoops—no wonder it never worked. He felt tricked and resentful. It was all her fault. And it seemed motiveless as well, because most of them hated it and only did it because he was a big, needy gweilo.

  Bunt had seen them gag and make faces too many times for him to imagine he was giving a woman pleasure. Before they parted, while the woman was still rumpled, her hair askew, her face rubbed and pink, her eyes glazed, he would think, She looks stuffed, and wonder whether he looked the same. Sex was their favor to him, who did them many favors. Usually they said, "You done?" And always, after sex, he hated himself for wanting to say "Sorry."

  It was wrong to keep an appointment afterward, like that one with Monty. He would have preferred a quiet pint of beer and a plate of chips in a darkened club, a little time to resume a calmer identity, an interval, like deliciously smoking a crafty fag between the acts. But the encounter at the Cricket Club, silly and meaningless at the time, had begun to antagonize him. Perhaps it was the presence of Wang, hovering here: Wang somewhat resembled that other man, Hung.

  I would like to discuss the purchase of your building was presumptuous and offensive. It was not a building, it was a business; it had products and employees. It was a large, busy place, a living thing, and it made a profit. So "building" rather missed the point.

  Bunt was not used to probing questions from strangers, and this stranger Hung was more foreign than most people he had met in Hong Kong, the local strangers. He had looked Bunt in the eye, as Singaporeans did, but his English was far better than that of any Hong Kong or Singapore Chinese, and from its precision and overcorrectness Bunt concluded that the man was from China. He had gone to a good school. He had been force-fed the English language in the brainwashing way of Chinese education, and he had learned it for a purpose, which was to con and cheat English-speaking people.

  All through dinner Bunt was disturbed. He could not tell his mother about Mei-ping. As for Hung's request, how could he tell his mother if he did not understand it himself?

  He had managed to change her tone from scolding to pity. "Where have you been?" she had said repeatedly to him long ago, when they had lived on Bowen Road and he had dawdled in the back alleys around Hollywood Road, looking in the rear windows of shops and rooms, hoping to see women in their underwear. In those days he would claim he had a fever, or say "I hurt my foot," and she would melt and become motherly and lose all interest in scolding.

  He felt so stifled, so possessed by her that he became childishly insistent on deceiving her any way he could. His mother knew so much about his life that he deliberately contrived to create secrets—the bar girls, the affairs with employees, Baby the Filipino girl on all fours ("Let we make fuppies"), and now Mei-ping. The deception was as important as the sex. He needed some room in his life, some space to which she was not admitted. So often he had lived in the space the lie had made for him. There was no truthful way that she would have allowed him this elbowroom. And the lie did not make him feel guilty, rather the opposite. He felt triumphantly cock-a-hoop because he had something of his own, no matter how small—it was entirely his secret. That was just one of the satisfactions of a lie. There were others: mastering the trick of deceit, manipulating his mother's mood. Lying was storytelling, ventriloquism, mimicry; it set him free.

  What made it especially uncomplicated for him to lie to his mother was his assurance that she had never been consistently truthful with him. He often reminded himself that she had taught him to lie—fibbing, she called it, telling whoppers. But he was grateful to her. It was such a consolation to him to have secrets.

  She was sorry for him now, sorry for all his work ("I've been flat-out"), and he was pleased that he had fooled her so thoroughly and put her in the wrong. He liked it when she was made to feel a bit of remorse. It was right that she, who had put him through so much, should endure a little spell of harmless suffering.

  What a waste it would have been to tell her everything. He would only be disgusting her or shaming himself by telling her about Mei-ping. "You filthy beast," she would have said. Yet what would her reaction have been to the impertinent offer of that Chinese man to buy the factory? Had he been able to guess it, he might have braved the discussion. It's their way, isn't it? Chinky-Chonks get their meddling fingers into everything, don't they?

  "You're awfully quiet," she said.

  All this time over dinner he had said nothing.

  "All right?" she said.

  At times like these, when he was so sunk in his secrets, she had a matron's way of querying him.

  "I'm fine, Mum. Just tired."

  "Course you are. Factory all right?"

  "Busy. So many muddles."

  No muddles at all! He had sat watching Mel-ping's pretty hair. He could not recall whether they had kissed. He was not happy being touched, but in this case he was reckless. It was as though she had performed first aid on him, the Boy Scout handbook's emergency method for snakebite. Before she had come to his office he had felt ill—irregular heartbeat, tremulous hands, hot sticky palms, dry mouth. Then she had cured him. She had sucked out the venom from his throbbing wound.

  "I hate it when you work late, Bunt."

  "Someone's got to do it."

  Ha! Lunch at the Pussy Cat, sex in his office with the blinds drawn, a pint of brain damage at the Cricket Club with Monty, the pushy Chinese Hung with his probing questions. The sex and the beer had given Bunt a weary, overworked look.

  Wang was back in the room again, clearing the plates, and Bunt saw Hung in him. It had given him a sense of power to say no to the man—more than a simple no, Bunt had jeered at him. He would never have been able to do that before Mr. Chuck died. He would have had to go to the old man's house and repeat the question, seeking his permission to say no, knowing in advance that Mr. Chuck, who hated the People's Republic, would never say yes. Perhaps it was not only the People's Republic that Mr. Chuck hated, but the Chinese, all of them.

  In addition to his excellent English, what was also disconcerting about Mr. Hung was his manner. Bunt liked to think that the Chinese were predictable. Bunt could understand them because he understood Mr. Chuck and Wang. It bothered him to think that these two men might not be typical, that they might be unlike any other Chinese. It would be so inconvenient. Certainly Mr. Chuck's will was an indication of something. Bunt never would have thought the old man wanted him as his heir. He felt he understood Mr. Chuck completely, but what about the rest of them?

  "Nice bit of beef," his mother was saying.

  Over tea in the lounge she was reminiscing about the meal they had just eaten.

  "Smashing," Bunt said.

  "The sprouts were fresh. From the New Territories. Wang got them today at the market."

  Bunt sipped his tea. Yes, he thought, it was as though Mei-ping had given him first aid for snakebite, as though a creature had left fang marks and poison in his goolies.

  "And I saved you some dripping for breakfast."

  "Ta."

  "The news will be on the wireless. It's five and twenty past nine."

  "Don't, Mum. You know what it's going to be."

  They both knew—the Hand-over. It was the only topic and it was torture, because what could you do about it? Long ago they had reconciled themselves to it. It only confused them to hear more.

  His mother said nothing. She watched him as always, with a pained smile, having shifted her false teeth in her mouth, which gave her an odd, bulldog-like grimace. But her expression said nothing. Her mind was crowded with sharp regrets and old sorrows.

  Bunt dozed, and on his eyelids were images o
f Mei-ping's head, her narrow shoulders between his knees, of the mama-san saying "horse trainer" and "anything." And that other disturbing thing, the shocking item in the paper, Your face belongs to me. Then he was asleep in his chair, his hand on his head, his head on a purple knitted antimacassar.

  At ten-thirty his mother tapped his arm and said, "Bunt, off you go then." He woke and yawned and scowled in the lamplight, and they each stumbled to their separate rooms, mother and son muttering, "'Night."

  The following day he was on the stitching floor, doing his rounds, when Miss Liu's voice came over the loudspeaker: "Mr. Mullard, wanted on line one."

  His name pronounced by a Chinese person sounded unfamiliar and Irish, and he disliked that. It made him reluctant to go to the phone.

  And he also thought, without being able to account for its occurrence just then, that he would never marry anyone to whom he was sexually attracted. He chose women for sex because they were unsuitable for marriage. He had had sex only once with a woman who was neither Chinese nor Filipino, and she was a tart in Macao. He thought of the Portuguese as borderline cases. The tart told him her name was Rosa Coelho, a common name which he discovered—feeling pity—meant "rabbit." Rosa Rabbit was hairy, and when she was naked she gave off a shipboard odor of salt and grease. But that was Macao, over the horizon, and did not count. Why was this all coursing restlessly through his head as he approached the telephone on the stitching floor? He did not know.

  "Bunt, just a word—"

  "Mum?"

  "Dinner tonight at Fatty's," she said.

  Fatty's Chophouse in Causeway Bay was his mother's favorite restaurant: spit and sawdust, horse brasses and football pennants, fake beams, a row of pewter tankards on hooks, oak tables, and in the summer "serving wenches," so the advertising said. They were most of them illegal immigrants, Vietnamese women who had arrived in Hong Kong as boat people.

  "There's someone I want you to meet," she said.

  Long ago, at Fatty's, Bunt had said, "I imagine London to be full of places like this, except with better food and no Chinese waiters," and his mother had laughed and said, "There's a few like it in London, but the food's worse and all the waiters are Chinky-Chonks." She often told the story.

  Bunt arrived early, but even so, his mother was already at the table.

  "He let me choose it," she said, and smiled at her companion.

  It was Mr. Hung, in a new suit with the manufacturer's label still attached to the sleeve in an ostentatious way, thought by the mainland Chinese to be the height of fashion.

  Bunt smiled insincerely and felt discouraged. The sight of Mr. Hung was bad enough, but just as bad was the sight of his mother dressed up. Her formal clothes—stiff-beaded, ill-fitting—were cheap and made her look vulgar. Her everyday clothes were sturdy, if plain, and made her seem sensible. Tonight she looked like a mama-san.

  "My son, Neville."

  "And you are?" Bunt said.

  He made a point of not shaking Mr. Hung's hand and decided not to acknowledge that he had met the man before. He had kept it from his mother yesterday. Anyway, apparently Mr. Hung did not want to let on either.

  "My name is Hung, Mr. Mullard" he said. Even though he was fluent in English, here was another Chinese person giving him an Irish name.

  Although Bunt was relieved that Mr. Hung was going along with the deception of never having met before, it made him trust the man even less.

  "Mr. Hung wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant," his mother said. "I had to tell him, 'Not a chance. I don't eat that muck.'"

  As Mr. Hung fixed his lips in a smile, his eyes retreated into his head and his face went unreadable.

  "It's adulterated, you know."

  Mr. Hung smiled more broadly. Bunt wanted to believe that the man was silent because he did not know the word.

  "And I twigged you might be happier here."

  That meant that she did not want him to see her as selfish for choosing Fatty's for herself, which was exactly what she had done.

  "Bunt loves a bit of beef," she said. "We're beef eaters—very English in that respect. But they have all sorts here. Steaks and chops, and they do a lovely sausage and pud. Proper toad-in-the-hole. English-type bangers with bread. None of your continental kind."

  Mr. Hung was still smiling and tapping a Fatty's Chophouse match cover through his fingers.

  "I have to laugh," Betty said, and she laughed and began to tell the story of the time Bunt had said, "I imagine London to be full of places like this."

  "Mum," Bunt said, and she stopped.

  But a moment later, winking at Bunt, she started to tell the story of the time at the beach on Silver Mine Bay, one Sunday while George was still alive, and Bunt had farted—

  "Mum," Bunt said, stopping her again.

  The punch line of that story was Bunt turning to look at his own bum and saying, "Quiet, botty!"

  From his fixed smile and his silence and his nervous finger-tapping, it was clear that Mr. Hung had not the slightest idea of what the woman was saying. Bunt could tell that, however good the man's ear for English might be, it did not extend to peculiarities such as food, or his mother's south London accent, or her mumbling drawl caused by her loose dentures. Those childhood stories were dreadful, but he liked his mother better for her being a challenge to Hung's English.

  "Here I am chin-wagging and I fancy you want your beer, Mr. Hung. I know Bunt wants his beer."

  "I will have a cup," Mr. Hung said.

  "Of tea?"

  "Of beer," Mr. Hung said.

  That was very Chinese, his getting his containers muddled.

  "A cup of beer for Mr. Hung," Bunt said, to mock him.

  There was a stack of presents beside Betty's placemat: a bottle of red wine, a box of chocolates, a leather coin purse, a flower sealed in clear plastic. Bunt did not ask about them; he knew the answer.

  Betty had a shandy, Bunt guzzled his beer, Mr. Hung sipped but did not drink. They ordered their meal. Betty tried to tell another story ("We're on a tram and Bunt looks up and says, 'Mum, why that man has his mouf open?'"), but Bunt stopped her again. The food was served and, this being Fatty's, it was piled on trenchers and pewter platters. Now, eating, no one spoke for a minute or more.

  "Lovely bit of beef," Betty said.

  Mr. Hung cleared his throat and said, "Will you tell him, please?"

  Bunt smirked at the man's lack of subtlety, but he was grateful, too. He would be just as forthright in his reply as the presumptuous man had been in his question.

  Betty chewed her meat and with her mouth full she said, "Mr. Hung has got a proposition for us."

  Bunt was still trying to suppress his smirk, knowing what was coming.

  Swallowing her meat and dabbing at the juices on her lips, she went on, "He wants to buy the factory."

  "And I hope you told him we're not interested in his proposition."

  Now his mother was smiling. She said, "Hang on, that's not the proposition, is it?"

  Mr. Hung beamed, seeming to approve of the way the mother was sparring with the son, like an old lioness swinging her broad paw and batting an unruly cub, pleased that her effort was on his behalf.

  "Bunt, what do you reckon that old factory is worth?"

  "If by 'old factory' you mean Imperial Stitching, I haven't a clue," he said. He was thoroughly disgusted. How had Hung found her? Bunt added, "A packet, no question. But it's not a factory. It's a business. We have many employees, we make things, we earn a substantial profit. It is more than a livelihood. It is a living thing."

  "Four or five million?"

  "I wouldn't be surprised."

  But truly he had no idea, and these sums did surprise him. He had never thought of Imperial Stitching in terms of dollars or pounds. It was his life, and a life had no monetary value. He and his mother had always had a half-share in Imperial. It had hardly sunk in that they now owned Mr. Chuck's half as well.

  "He's offering us twice that," Betty said. "Top whack. A mill
ion quid."

  Bunt had resumed eating so as to seem uninterested, and he was beginning to choke from the effort of it. How he hated holding this conversation about the factory and money in the presence of this intrusive Chinese man who was a perfect stranger. His mother's saying A million quid made him cringe in just the same way he had cringed when his father used an obscenity.

  "And you think that's an attractive proposition?" Bunt said at last.

  Betty glanced at Mr. Hung, who was gloating at her as though urging her to defy her son.

  "That's the price," his mother said. She had shoved her chair back and was getting to her feet. "That's not the proposition. You tell him, Mr. Hung, while I spend a penny."

  Mr. Hung smiled at her. "When I am through," he said, "you will be able to spend more than a penny."

  Bunt was squinting. He said, "Pardon?"

  5

  "YOU MADE IT plain as day you didn't want to know. But why bite his nose off like that?"

  As she spoke, Betty interrupted herself by puffing out her downy cheeks and blowing on her cup of Milo. They were back home at Albion Cottage on the fog-smothered Peak, having one of Wang's hot drinks before taking turns in the bathroom and removing their pajamas from the airing cupboard (each had a shelf)—nighttime rituals that Bunt found more unsettling on days he spent with Baby or Mei-ping. Not that he felt dissolute or sinful, merely unfaithful, as though he were neglecting his mother. When a woman was tearing off his sweater he sometimes reflected, My mother knitted this jumper.

  Bunt said, "I wasn't interested in his proposition."

  "If only you'd listened a titch more."

  "I heard what I wanted to."

  At times like this he was reminded uncomfortably of sounding like his father, and even felt like a little old man being henpecked by a bossy wife. He loved his mother and sometimes sorrowed for her lack of education—the poor woman had not gone past form four. Yet he needed to be selfish so as not to be overwhelmed by his pity for her in her early bereavement—the loss of Bunt the First—and by her ignorant and suffocating attention. He often sensed that her bullying warnings about local women, all of them self-serving, had made him overeager and reckless. That had apparently been the case with his father, if the mama-san could be believed.