by Chan Ho-Kei
‘There’s something in it for you too.’
‘For me?’
‘I told them I had a good little brother, a capable guy who I could guarantee would do a great job. So if you’re agreeable, we could be working in the same office.’
Working alongside Elder Brother? Excellent, that sounded much better than that nonsense police job.
‘All right! What’s the company?’
‘Have you heard of the Fung Hoi Plastic Goods Factory? The boss is Mr Yue. He’s preparing to move into the property and real-estate markets. We’d only be probationary clerks, but the prospects for promotion aren’t bad! Young Tong, your surname’s Wong and mine’s Yuen, but all these years I’ve thought of you like my own brother. I’ve shared all my good fortune with you, and we’ve faced adversity together. Now let’s move ahead together. This job is just the beginning. We’ll achieve great things.’
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Afterword
About Chan Ho-Kei
About the Translator
An Invitation from the Publisher
Afterword
I HADN’T INITIALLY planned to write an introduction or afterword for this novel. I believe that once a work has been ‘birthed’ by its writer, the text takes on its own life, and readers are free to see and receive whatever they want from it, each person embarking on a unique journey. Rather than having the author go on at length about what is or isn’t there, why not allow the reader to experience it in person? When I submitted the novel to my publisher, however, I included a summary and explanations of some of my creative choices, breezily scrawling a few thousand words, and my editor later said to me, ‘You should turn this into an afterword! People are interested in that sort of thing.’
Let’s start from the beginning.
In the autumn of 2011, I was fortunate enough to win the Soji Shimada Mystery Award, and immediately began thinking of the subject of my next book. Nothing came to mind. Then the Mystery Writers of Taiwan held a short story competition for its members with the topic ‘Armchair Detectives’, that is, detectives who have to base their deductions only on reported evidence, without being able to visit the scene of the crime for themselves. I decided to push the idea further, creating a situation where an armchair detective could only answer yes/no questions, and wrote ‘The Truth Between Black and White’. I completely failed to keep the length under control, however, and exceeded the word limit. In the end, I decided to keep this piece as the basis for a longer work, and submitted something else to the competition – a detective story with science fiction elements.
After that, I started thinking how to expand the story of Kwan Chun-dok and Sonny Lok. My first idea was very simple: to write another two stories of about thirty thousand Chinese characters (‘Black and White’ was thirty-three thousand characters long), and get them published together. I’d decided from the start to use reverse chronology, though in the beginning I was considering this book purely as a detective novel, driven by its plot.
As I continued writing an outline and creating the mysteries, however, I grew more and more uneasy.
I was born in the 1970s and grew up in the 1980s. During this time, many Hong Kong children thought of policemen as akin to superheroes in American cartoons: strong, selfless, righteous, brave, honest, serving the people. Even as we grew up and began to understand that the world is a complex place, we maintained a mostly positive image of the police. In 2012, however, this view was shaken again and again by incidents and news items concerning the Hong Kong police. I began to suspect that my police detective novel was growing to resemble propaganda.
With even the author feeling this uncertain about his story, how could any reader trust in it?
And so this novel underwent a complete change in direction. I no longer wanted to simply describe criminal cases, but the story of a personality, a city and an era.
The book expanded vastly, more than I could ever have expected.
If you’re familiar with detective novels (particularly Japanese ones), you probably know about the split between the classic and social genres. The former rely on mysteries and plots, placing their emphasis on solving clues and logical deduction, while the latter are more concerned with reflecting the state of society, focusing on character and situation. I’d started out planning to write a classic detective novel, but now I’d pivoted towards writing a social one. These two varieties aren’t necessarily at odds with each other, but it wouldn’t be easy to mix them together – the flavour of one would easily overpower the other. In order to solve (or avoid) this problem, I chose the structure of six stand-alone novellas, each one fuelled by mysteries and clues, but all six fitting together to form a complete portrait of society. The idea was to create a book in which every part felt like a classic detective story, but looking at the big picture, you’d see it was actually a social realist novel.
Each story is set during a crucial year for Hong Kong, though these historical events might play an important part in the story, or might only be mentioned in passing. The only exception is the first story, which is set at a point after I’d finished the book. I’m no Nostradamus, and had no way of knowing the future. Still, with the public’s trust in the police eroding as we moved from 2012 into 2013, it seemed like a reasonable bet that this trend would continue.
I don’t intend to go into the background of each story, the meaning of each character, the symbolism of each detail, or the broader intellectual context for the novel – these are best left for each reader to discover in person. There are just two things I want to talk about. Readers unfamiliar with Hong Kong might not realize that we keep revisiting the same locations throughout these stories. For instance, the playground where Sonny Lok and Kwan Chun-dok meet in Chapter 2 is close to Chapter 5’s Nairn House – both are near Argyle Street. Kwun Lung Lau in Chapter 3, where the sighting of a suspicious individual wastes a great deal of police time, is next door to Kennedy Town Swimming Pool in Chapter 5. The West Kowloon reclamation project, where Candy Ton is attacked in Chapter 2, was previously Jordan Ferry Terminal, where Cop 7 and the narrator of the final chapter wait for the Man Bong ferry. Graham Street Market in Chapter 3, the restaurant where Kwan Chun-dok and Benedict Lau have lunch in Chapter 4, and the ‘Snake Pit’, Lok Heung Yuen, in Chapter 5 are all around Wellington Street in Central (Lok Heung Yuen is no longer in business, but an establishment of a similar name is currently trading there). If some readers were inspired to visit these places after reading the novel, I’d be delighted.
The other point I wanted to mention was that Hong Kong today is in just as strange a state as in 1967.
We’ve come full circle, back to the beginning.
I have no idea whether Hong Kong after 2013 will be able to recover as it did after 1967, pulling itself onto the right path, step by step.
And I don’t know whether we’ll ever recover the image of the police as strong, selfless, righteous, brave, honest, serving the people – so the small children of Hong Kong can once more be proud of them.
CHAN HO-KEI,
30 April 2014
About Chan Ho-Kei
CHAN HO-KEI was born and raised in Hong Kong, where he still lives. He has worked as a software engineer, a game designer, a manga editor, and a lecturer. Chan’s short stories have won the Mystery Writers of Taiwan Award and his debut novel, The Man Who Sold the World, won the top Chinese-language mystery award, the Soji Shimada. The Borrowed has now been published in eight countries, and the film rights have been bought by director Wong Kar-wai.
About the Translator
JEREMY TIANG is an author, playwright and translator. His short story collection It Never Rains on National Day is published by Epigram Books, and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, Esquire, Ambit and Litro among others. He has translated more than ten books from Chinese, including work by Yeng Pway Ngon and Zhang Yueran. He lives in New York.
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p; An Invitation from the Publisher
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First published in Chinese in 2014 by Crown Publishing Company, Taiwan.
This translation first published in the UK in 2016 by Head of Zeus, Ltd.
Copyright © 2014, Chan Ho-Kei
Translation Copyright © 2016, Jeremy Tiang
The moral right of Chan Ho-Kei to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781784971519
ISBN (TPB): 9781784971526
ISBN (E): 9781784971502
Cover photograph: Fan Ho (1931–2016). Woman With Umbrella, 1961.
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