“You got plenty cheek, taking sailors’ money,” Typhoo said. “You enjoy make-lovey so much, why you don’t pay sailors?”
Just then there was an influx of matelots through the door from the quay, fifteen or twenty in a bunch. The girls fell silent, watching them. The matelots sat down at three or four empty tables, ordering San Migs from the waiters and casting sideways glances at the girls, but not letting their glances linger or catching the girls’ eyes in case they should get landed with girls they did not want. Presently all the girls except Gwenny drifted away from my table, hovering round the sailors, asking politely if they could join them, then sitting down rather stiffly in their high-necked cheongsams, demure and attentive, lighting the sailors’ cigarettes and pouring their beer. The sailors were awkward for a bit and then began to unbend.
“Gwenny, aren’t I keeping you?” I said.
“Oh, no,” she said quickly, dropping her eyes to her knitting.
“Oughtn’t you to be making some money?” I had already told her that I would not be having a girl, because although I thought several of them very attractive, I did not see how it would work out if I was living among them.
“Well, perhaps I should really go and work,” Gwenny said, relieved that I had suggested it. “Only it seems rude to leave you.”
“Of course it isn’t.”
“Anyhow, I may not have any luck.”
However, half an hour later I saw her rise from a table with a big, clumsy, tow-haired matelot. She led the way to the door, looking rather delicate and skinny, though very neat and poised; so poised that you might have thought she was going in to dinner at Government House. The matelot shambled after her. They went through into the hall and the door swung to and fro behind them. The juke box was playing “Seven Lonely Days.” The record came to an end and a matelot went over, put in a coin, and pressed a button. It was for the same record over again. He left the juke box to its manipulations and went back to his table. I caught the waiter’s eye and tapped my glass, and he went off to fetch me another beer.
III
I did no serious work in the bar for the first few days, because as soon as I started to sketch the girls would cluster round to watch, leaving me scarcely room to breathe. I amused them with quick portraits of themselves and of a few favorite boy friends. Then the novelty wore off and they began to take my presence for granted, and no longer became self-conscious if they knew I was sketching them. I usually went down to the bar about eleven or twelve in the morning, when the girls were starting to arrive, and they would sit round my table and talk until business warmed up. I also ate all my meals in the bar. I could get a dish of fried rice, with meat or prawns, for a dollar or so, and it was all I needed to keep me going. The tea served with meals did not cost anything. Tea was always served free in China.
The Nam Kok was not technically a brothel, for brothels were illegal in Hong Kong, and it made its profit only from the rooms, which were sometimes let several times over in the course of twenty-four hours. The girls lived outside, made their own prices with the sailors, and kept what they earned; but they provided the hotel with its lifeblood, in the form of occupants for the rooms, and the bar was placed at their disposal as a hunting ground, on condition that they did not take their pickups elsewhere. This was sometimes a temptation, since the Nam Kok rooms were expensive, costing ten dollars a night with no reduction for shorter periods, and if a sailor was short of cash a girl might suggest slipping off to one of the many hotels in the neighborhood that charged only five dollars a night, or three dollars an hour. This would require leaving the bar separately and meeting again outside on the quay, in order not to arouse the suspicion of the manager. Nevertheless a girl would sometimes be caught, and punished by rustication from the bar—a week for her first offense, a fortnight for her second, and total expulsion for her third.
Once, before the war, there had been proper brothels in Hong Kong, and it was said that the police had approved of them, since they had enabled prostitution to be controlled and a check kept on disease. Then a certain lady politician at home, hearing that licensed immorality still existed in the Empire, had raised her scandalized voice in the House; and soon word had been hurried out from Westminster, and the brothels shut down. And so the girls had gone out into the streets, just as in London itself, and had taken their men up alleyways and into back rooms, and disease had spread uncontrolled. But now that licenses were no longer formally issued we could pretend it did not happen, wash our hands of it. Morality had been saved.
And then there had sprung up places like the Nam Kok, satisfying the letter of the law if not its spirit; and the police, one supposed, turned a blind eye, for the sailors would find the girls somehow, and the girls the sailors, and here at least there could be control of a sort. This, of course, had to remain invisible, since there could be no conditions officially laid down for an activity that was not supposed to occur at all; there could be no ordinance about it, no direct communication between police and hotel. But the Nam Kok itself, only too aware of its equivocal status, expediently toed what it supposed to be the invisible line; which entailed, in particular, obliging the girls to attend the Wanchai Female Hygiene Clinic for weekly examinations, and to satisfy the floor boys, before being allowed into any of the rooms, that their clinic cards were stamped up to date. And if this house rule had been allowed to lapse, with a consequent increase of casualties among sailors, I have no doubt that, for all the invisibility of control, the hotel would have found itself promptly and unceremoniously placed out of bounds, or otherwise caused to shut down.
The girls, on the whole, gave the sailors their money’s worth, and often much more. There was a code of honor among them according to which, once a sailor had committed himself by taking a girl upstairs, he thereafter became her property, to be reclaimed by her on his subsequent visits to the bar, and eschewed by the rest. They despised the “butterfly” who liked a change of girl at each visit, and only the less scrupulous girls would contravene the code to oblige him. And their greatest pride and delight was to have a “regular” boy friend, which meant the same boy friend for three or four days, or for whatever period his ship was in port; and a girl thus engaged would usually go far beyond her commercial obligations, providing not only sex but something like affection, besides all those little feminine attentions which were the lonely sailor’s need. And she would boast of him to her girl friends, become jealous of rivals, and bestow presents on him—if not actually shed tears—when he left.
They were mostly generous, loyal to one another, and easily amused; though like all social outcasts they suffered from over-sensitive pride, and were touchy about slights. And if a sailor showed lack of respect, a girl would retort, “What do you think I am? A street girl?” For a bar girl considered herself as superior, socially, to a street girl, as a respectable woman would consider herself superior to a whore.
The girls originated in about equal numbers from Canton and Shanghai, and most of the quarrels or jealousies arising in the bar were between girls of these two factions. Language itself divided them, for their provincial dialects were like different tongues; and since few knew Mandarin, the lingua franca of the bar was English. (Though if this proved inadequate to convey some fine point they could always fall back on writing, since the Chinese written characters, at least, were universal.) Each faction was equally convinced of its own natural superiority, and despised what it supposed to be the provincial characteristics of the other. However, the day-to-day intercourse of the two factions was quite amiable, and it was only in a crisis that enmity would come out.
The girls I came to know best, apart from Gwenny and Typhoo, were Wednesday Lulu, Minnie Ho, and Jeannie Chen. Jeannie was a luscious-looking little creature with chalk-white face, crimson splodge of a mouth, and great masses of black hair about her shoulders. She wore a black split skirt stretched tautly over undulating hips, black stockings, and
enormously high heels—the only girl who dressed the part, for none of the others, if met out in the street, would have given a hint of their profession. Across the room, one gasped at Jeannie’s voluptuousness. However, at close quarters—and each time I found myself at her side it came with a fresh little shock—she turned out to be so incredibly tiny that she no longer seemed quite real, but only a scale model that was not meant to be touched. Nor was her nature what, from first appearances, one might have expected, for despite the dress and crushed-strawberry mouth, which looked ill-tempered and pouting, she was one of the shyest and most sweet-natured of the girls in the bar.
And Minnie Ho, whom on my first evening I had seen snuggling in the arms of the middle-aged matelot, was the most cuddlesome and kittenish. She could not even cross the bar without flinging her arms round a sailor or two en passant and briefly nuzzling in their necks; and once ensconced with a man she could not bear to break away even to go upstairs. She could not live without cuddling, and in the absence of sailors would simply cuddle up with another girl. She would also cuddle up with me if I happened to be handy: enfolding herself round my arm, rubbing her cheek against my shoulder, and looking up at me with such pathetic appeal, such helpless adoration, that in order to keep my head I had to remind myself sternly that the same treatment was meted out indiscriminately to a dozen sailors a day.
She was understandably much in demand and could have done very well for herself; but she had no head for business. Once, wrapped round my arm after returning from a short-time with a matelot, she suddenly put her hand to her mouth and exclaimed, “Oh, I am stupid!”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I forgot to ask him for any money.”
I laughed, finding this charming. But Minnie was so ashamed of the mental lapse that she begged me to tell nobody, afraid that the other girls would make fun of her for being so foolish.
Wednesday Lulu was the only girl in the bar not wholly Chinese: her father had been Japanese, her mother a Chinese prostitute in Shanghai. She adored her mother, whom she now supported with remittances sent to Shanghai through the Bank of China, and while telling me about this the tears had begun to roll out of her long, black, rimless Sino-Japanese eyes. She was worried that the money was not getting through, and was in a dilemma about whether to stay in Hong Kong, or return to China to be near her mother, and accept a decent though less remunerative job under the communists.
Wednesday Lulu, despite her unpromising origin, was the most stubbornly honest and high-principled of the girls, and nothing in the world would have induced her to act against conscience. One night an American from the Station Ship, whose regular girl friend was otherwise engaged, had wanted her to go upstairs, offering her staggering financial reward. The regular girl friend was one of the least popular Cantonese and herself unscrupulous in such matters, and the other Shanghai girls had urged Lulu to accept. But it would have been unethical. She had refused.
Wednesday Lulu’s curious name had been devised to distinguish her from another Lulu in the bar—a rather garrulous, quarrelsome, and unpopular Cantonese, masochistically inclined, to whom the other girls would refer any sailors making those sadistic demands which to all of them except the Cantonese Lulu were anathema. The similar names had been confusing, especially over requests for “Lulu” on the bar telephone, and various frivolous and unsatisfactory epithets had been suggested—like Sit-down Lulu and Stand-up Lulu, which drew attention a little maliciously to the Cantonese girl’s reluctance, after a vigorous session upstairs, to be seated. Finally they had consulted Fifi Chan, a rather big-boned, heavily built girl with Rabelaisian vulgarity and wide, generous grin, who was a natural mimic and the bar’s acknowledged wit and comedienne. Fifi had thought for a moment, then asked the two girls on what days they went to the Wanchai Clinic for their weekly medical inspections. They had told her.
“All right,” Fifi said. “Call yourselves Wednesday Lulu and Saturday Lulu.”
And thus they had been known ever since.
There were also two Alices in the bar, but here the choice of distinguishing epithets had presented no difficulty owing to the difference in their heights, which had made them automatically Big and Little.
Big Alice, who was only twenty-four, was a heavy heroin smoker, and like most addicts had become sluttish, usually appearing in the bar in a grubby man’s shirt with untidily rolled sleeves, and with her unhealthy pasty face devoid of make-up. However, sometimes she would go to the opposite extreme, turning up in some fussily patterned cheongsam in which she looked absurdly overdressed, and with her face now plastered too thickly with powder and rouge, her eyes grotesquely blackened, and her lips smeared carelessly with lipstick beyond their natural outline. Curiously, though, she enjoyed considerable success with the sailors, some of whom perhaps, intimidated by the smarter girls, found her sluttishness more homely. She also had a seduction technique of her own: instead of joining the sailors at their tables she would sit alone, choose a victim, and fix him steadily with her eyes. And her eyes could be extraordinarily disturbing; they had a quality of their own which was a mixture of the hypnotic and sexy. The sailor who found himself held by them would grow uneasy; he would try and ignore her, then find himself drawn; and presently, no matter that he was with another girl, he would get up on the pretext of going to the lavatory, and stop as if accidentally at Big Alice’s table; and in five minutes they would be on their way upstairs.
It was thus hardly surprising that Big Alice, who at one time or another had stolen boy friends from nearly every girl, should have been unpopular with the Shanghai faction and her fellow Cantonese alike.
Little Alice, the plump little giggler, was one of the girls most in demand in the bar, though her nature was less agreeable than I had supposed at first encounter: she was, in fact, shallow, irresponsible, and mean. She had had three babies, and for this her parsimony had mainly accounted; for while other girls who found themselves pregnant would go to a Chinese doctor for an illegal injection, regarding the four hundred dollars’ expenditure as an overhead expense of their trade, Little Alice had always resisted making the painful disbursement until too late. Yet unlike the others, and untypical of the Chinese who as a rule adored children, she had no use for babies, and had given away two for adoption. The third had died before she had got round to making arrangements—no doubt from neglect.
Little Alice’s three passions were eating cream-filled chocolates, going to the cinema, and buying new clothes. Every day she would appear with some new item of clothing or jewelry, and she would discard clothes that she did not like after a single wearing; but she gave nothing away and once, when Gwenny had offered to buy a month-old brocade jacket from her, Little Alice had charged her the full shop price.
Her selfishness was unique among the girls. And almost unique, too, was her taste in sailors: for while most of the girls preferred older men, who were kinder and less trouble, Little Alice liked boys of twenty, or if possible under. Herself twenty-six, she would put up her price for men much her senior, and offend middle-aged matelots by making it clear, with giggles at their expense, that she only took them on sufferance. On the other hand if a sailor was sufficiently callow, and was out of funds, she would oblige him for nothing.
The girls were all in their early or mid-twenties except for two; and both of these, Doris and old Lily Lou, were on the wrong side of forty.
Lily Lou claimed to be only forty-one, and would whisper this figure huskily into my ear, adding, “But the girls think I’m only thirty-seven—you won’t tell them my secret, will you?” She would wink conspiratorially, and pat my hand. “Good boy! Good boy!” In fact the girls knew perfectly well, and so did I, that she was not a day under fifty.
I could not help liking old Lily Lou. She reminded me of an old theater pro, who had grown up in a narrow professional world, took pride in the old-fashioned thoroughness of her technique, and looked
down on the present-day youngsters for skimping their job. She remembered her own training in a smart brothel in Shanghai—oh, in those days you’d got to know how to please a man, you’d got to take trouble and time. It had been a real vocation; none of these modern girls would have lasted a minute. “They’ve got no mystery, dear,” she would whisper huskily, confidentially, patting my hand. “And that’s what a man likes—mystery.” And she would smile her carefully enigmatic smile that, despite the old whore’s shabbiness and over-rouged cheeks, could still just pass for mystery in the low diffused light of the bar.
Lily Lou was the only girl besides Little Alice who sought out younger men; though in her case it was from expedience, since she appeared to succeed with them most. Doubtless she was more skilled than the younger girls with the inexperienced and shy, and more cozy; and in addition, of course, she appealed to the pocket, for as you grew older, mystery or no mystery, your prices had to drop. She would tell the other girls that she never took less than ten dollars. But they all exaggerated themselves, out of pride, about their minimum prices; and they knew perfectly well that old Lily Lou, at a pinch, would go upstairs for five.
And then Doris . . . Doris Woo was a little over forty, with a remarkably smooth complexion for her age and not bad-looking, but with the misfortune to wear glasses. She favored the rimless kind, presumably in the belief that these were more easily overlooked.
She was also hard—hard in the calculating, commercial way that was characteristic of some Chinese women. She was much harder than old Lily Lou, although she had only been at the game for a few years since she had come as a refugee from Pekin. She had no friends in the bar and always chose a table by herself—sitting very erectly, and turning her head with abrupt little movements as she surveyed the room for likely business, looking like a schoolmistress watching for notes being passed under desks. She had little success, and would sometimes sit for twelve hours in the bar, from noon till midnight, and go home without having made a cent—and poorer by the cost of her meals. She probably found, on the average, four or five clients a week. These were usually sailors who were too polite, too weak-willed, or too drunk to turn her down, or who, on a busy night, found themselves left with no alternative; though occasionally some sailor with a fetish about schoolmistresses or glasses would take her for choice.
World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) Page 5
