World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399)

by Mason, Richard

  She studied the bill in her hand. Then after a minute she looked up at me with that bold, level gaze that meant she had something difficult to say and I would have to take it or leave it.

  “There’s something I never told you before, because I felt too ashamed,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I can’t read.”

  “What?”

  “No. I can’t read—can’t write.”

  “Not at all, Suzie?”

  “No.”

  I was flabbergasted. This possibility had never even occurred to me. I knew that most of the girls in the bar were literate or semi-literate, and I had taken for granted that Suzie was the same; moreover her manners, her mentality, her very appearance and style, had suggested something more than a humble upbringing. But perhaps I had left out of account that heritage of a great civilization that was shared in some measure by all Chinese alike.

  “But I’ve seen you write your name, Suzie,” I said. I remembered her writing it in both Chinese characters and Roman alphabet—inscribing “Suzie” in the latter very laboriously, with the Z disjointed, outsize, and back-to-front.

  “Yes, just my name,” Suzie said. “Gwenny taught me to write my name.”

  “But what about that message I wrote you on the bank slip? I suppose Gwenny read that for you, too?”

  “Yes. You mean this?” She opened her bag and took out the piece of paper.

  “Good Lord, you’ve still got it!”

  “Yes, I keep.”

  “But what for, Suzie?”

  “Because of what you wrote to me. You wrote something beautiful. ‘I am very unhappy without you. I miss you.’ That’s what Gwenny said you wrote.” She looked uncertain. “Only perhaps she just made it up.”

  “No, she didn’t, Suzie.”

  “That’s really what you wrote?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Nobody ever wrote to me like that before.”

  “Well, I meant it. I did miss you.”

  “Perhaps you feel different now. Perhaps you won’t care about dirty little yum-yum girl who can’t read, can’t write.”

  “Suzie, what rubbish!”

  “I tried once to learn writing. Two years ago. Only too many thousand characters—too difficult.”

  “Didn’t you ever go to school, Suzie?”

  “No, my uncle never sent me to school. He was no good, you know.”

  And then she began to tell me about her childhood, her life; about how she had come to Hong Kong, how she had started to work at the Nam Kok. Her own father had been quite prosperous, a Shanghai junk owner and trader with business interests in the Philippines, and her only memory of him was saying good-by before his departure for Manila in one of his own junks. Suzie’s mother, following the Chinese habit of consulting a fortuneteller before taking any major decision or making a journey, had previously consulted one on his behalf, and the fortuneteller had declared the day inauspicious for him to set sail. She had begged him not to go; but his business interests had outweighed his superstitions, and he had disregarded her pleas. He had never been seen or heard of again. The junk had never reached Manila; it had simply disappeared. It had probably struck a typhoon.

  A year later her mother had died in some epidemic. Suzie, then five years old, had been taken into the household of her paternal uncle.

  This uncle, a drunkard and good-for-nothing, already had two daughters of his own at school. According to Chinese family tradition he should have treated her equally; but proposing to keep her as servant, he considered education to be superfluous. He had also taken control of her father’s business, but must either have sold it or let it go to seed: it had certainly no longer been in his hands when Suzie was grown-up.

  Suzie’s life in the household was only made tolerable by her uncle’s second daughter, a good-natured, easy-going, rather lazy girl called Yu-lan. She was very kind to Suzie, and Suzie adored her. She became the ideal that Suzie longed to emulate.

  At the time of the communist revolution in China, Yu-lan was twenty and Suzie four years younger. Soon Yu-lan was drafted into a factory; but finding the work too arduous, she obtained a permit to visit fictitious relatives in Hong Kong. Her departure was a catastrophe for Suzie, who cried for a week.

  One day her uncle sent for her and asked her why she was crying.

  “Because I love Second Daughter, and miss her now she is gone,” Suzie said.

  “You should not cry,” her uncle said. “You are now grown-up. I did not notice this myself until recently, but it has begun to strike me with some force.”

  “I do not feel grown-up yet,” Suzie said.

  “Then I will make it clear to you,” her uncle said. “Follow me.”

  She followed him into another room, where he seduced her, threatening to turn her out of the house if she uttered a sound. She was then sixteen. Her uncle was not drunk at the time.

  She was ordered to her uncle’s room again the next day, and then at unpredictable intervals. She was too frightened to resist. Meanwhile not only letters but also monthly remittances of fifty dollars were arriving from Yu-lan in Hong Kong. She had found work in a shop and was earning four hundred Hong Kong dollars a month.

  Suzie yearned for Yu-lan and her head filled with impossible plans for running away to join her. Then one day her uncle sent for her.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Have you ever thought of going to join Second Daughter in Hong Kong?”

  “Never,” Suzie said, terrified. She thought he must have been reading her mind. “Such an idea has never entered my head.”

  “Then let it enter your head now,” her uncle said. “Second Daughter says in this letter that she can get you a job in the same shop as herself, at four hundred Hong Kong dollars a month. And since that is excessive for your own needs, you will doubtless remember your obligation to the relatives who took you in as an orphan, and send home one hundred dollars a month through the Bank of China. This idea appeals to you?”

  “It would be hard to leave home,” Suzie said, still suspecting a trap.

  “It will also be hard to lose you. I shall be sorry in many ways. But it would be selfish to stand in your path when you could be sending your family one hundred Hong Kong dollars a month.”

  Six months later, after a permit had eventually been obtained for her to leave China, Suzie set off from Shanghai by train. It was the first time in her life that she had been more than a few miles outside the city. She traveled south to Canton, where she changed trains, and a day later arrived at the frontier. She alighted and carried her bag across a suspension bridge. She had left New China behind. She was now in the British colony of Hong Kong.

  Another train stood waiting. She squeezed into a carriage that was bursting with men, women, children, and pigs in baskets, feeling like a foreigner, for all her traveling companions gabbled in incomprehensible Cantonese. The train traveled through hilly country that differed little from the country on the other side of the border, with tombs dotted over the slopes and villages and paddy fields in the valleys, and presently pulled into Kowloon. She saw Yu-lan waiting on the station platform, and pushing her way through the crowds and the pigs, and forgetting that restraint was the mark of good manners, she threw herself into Yu-lan’s arms with tears of joy. Then Yu-lan, always inclined to extravagance, insisted on taking a taxi, and ten minutes later they were climbing the stairs to her room in Kowloon—a small room, but her own.

  Yu-lan spread herself comfortably on the bed and picked at a saucer of melon seeds. Suzie, too excited to sit down, stood looking out of the window at the bustling street. It could almost have been Shanghai.

  “How far is the shop where you work?” she asked Yu-lan. “Is it in this street?”

  Yu-lan laughed and nibbled at a melon seed. She dropped
the shell into the spittoon. She had grown much plumper, though was prettier than ever. She was wearing a cheongsam of pure silk.

  “I don’t really work in a shop,” she said. “I just invented that for the benefit of the family. Actually I did work in a shop for a week, but it was worse than the factory. I was expected to work all day and half the night for a hundred and fifty dollars a month. You can’t possibly manage on that—not unless you’re prepared to live in a bed-space, in a room with twenty other people. Besides, the shopkeepers don’t like Shanghai girls who can’t speak their barbarous Cantonese. They treat us like dirt. Luckily I met another Shanghai girl who was working in a dance hall and she introduced me to the manager, and I’ve been working there ever since. I have spoken to him about you. He was delighted when I told him you were only sixteen—I know you’re seventeen now, but I exaggerated a bit—because young girls are popular in the dance halls, and most girls don’t start until they’re older.”

  “What is a dance hall?” Suzie asked.

  “Like the places they had in Shanghai before the wretched communists closed them down. It’s very smart and there’s a Filipino band. Only rich men can afford to go. But Hong Kong’s full of rich people nowadays. They pay eight dollars an hour for a partner, and the partner gets half. Four dollars an hour—just for dancing!”

  “You must make a lot of money in one evening,” Suzie said.

  “Well, actually it doesn’t always work out like that,” Yu-lan said. “There are so many girls, and some evenings you don’t get picked. You make the real money when you’re bought out.”

  “‘Bought out’? What does that mean?”

  “Well, if a man likes you and wants to take you out, he pays eight dollars an hour for every hour before the dance hall closes, and of course you get half. Then he gives you dinner, and what he pays you is a private arrangement. It is usually about sixty dollars.”

  “You mean he pays you sixty dollars just for going out to dinner?”

  “You are innocent, aren’t you!” Yu-lan laughed good-naturedly. “Oh, no, you have to spend the night with him at a hotel. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. The men are usually very nice—especially the northerners, and there are heaps of northerners here since the revolution. I was terrified at first. I hated making love. But now I quite enjoy it. And it always makes me laugh to think I’m getting paid for enjoying myself!”

  Suzie said, “I don’t think I would ever enjoy making love, Yu-lan.” And then, since she could not keep a secret from so dear a friend, she told Yu-lan about her horrible experience with her uncle, who was Yu-lan’s father.

  Yu-lan was less shocked than Suzie had expected. She seemed to take it almost as a matter of course.

  “Oh, my father was always rather a gay dog,” she said. “Didn’t you know? He spent more money on girls than on drink. You should really blame the Reds for closing down the brothels. I suppose he didn’t know where to find a girl and got desperate. Still, it’s an awful pity the old brute couldn’t contain himself, because virginity’s worth a packet if you play your cards right. It’s a thousand dollars down the drain.”

  Suzie said, “Yu-lan, I think I would rather work in a shop.”

  “You’d soon change your mind if you tried living in Hong Kong on a hundred and fifty dollars a month,” Yu-lan said. “And I was forgetting—you don’t read or write, so you might not even get a hundred and fifty.”

  “Couldn’t I work in the dance hall but not go and stay with men in hotels?”

  “No, that’s impossible. It’s not supposed to be a pick-up place but of course it is, and the manager would throw you out if he found you weren’t obliging the customers.” Then she looked anxious. “But I don’t want to influence you, Mee-ling. Honestly, I’d hate to feel responsible for you doing something you might regret. You can certainly try working in a shop. And at least you won’t have to live in a room with a lot of smelly Cantonese. You can stay here as long as you like. Rent free.”

  However, that night in bed, when Yu-lan was out at the dance hall, Suzie did some realistic thinking. She considered the blunt fact that she had lost her virginity, that she could never marry. No amount of drudgery in a shop could restore what her uncle had taken from her. Very well, if she was denied the fruits of respectability it was pointless to try and cling to it. There was only one consideration: which was the lesser of the two evils? The drudgery of working in a shop, or the drudgery of making love?

  Meanwhile at the dance hall Yu-lan was pleading a headache to a Shanghai businessman in pebble glasses who had made a fortune in Hong Kong putting up jerry-built blocks of flats. He increased his offer from eighty to eighty-five dollars. However, Yu-lan felt she could not abandon the little Mee-ling on her first night in Hong Kong, and fobbed him off with an arrangement for the following Friday. She took a rickshaw back to the room.

  She found the little Mee-ling out of bed, gazing into the cheap rickety wardrobe which so unostentatiously housed her collection of beautiful clothes. There were at least a dozen silk cheongsams, several brocade jackets, a reversible jacket that could be worn either with the white lamb’s wool outside and the gold-embroidered brocade inside or vice versa, and some Western-style dresses skillfully copied by a Chinese tailor from pictures in an old edition of the magazine Vogue.

  The little Mee-ling looked boldly into her eyes and said:

  “I have made up my mind. I shall work in the dance hall.”

  Yu-lan regarded her anxiously. “Are you sure? I’m so worried now that it won’t suit you. You know, you’ve got to make love with all sorts of people—even old men, and Cantonese.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And you don’t care?”

  “Not if that’s how the silly old fools want to spend their money,” Mee-ling said. “I’ll just close my eyes and think, ‘What a nice easy way to get a new dress.’”

  Chapter Six

  “Suzie, it’s three o’clock,” I said. “What about your boy friend?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t think he’ll make trouble if he wakes up and finds you gone?”

  “No, he was passed out, that boy, you know. He just made love once, then he was finished.” She was sitting cross-legged on the bed in her jeans. The table by the bed was scattered with the remnants of our Chinese meal: it had been too chilly tonight to eat out on the balcony. “All right. I tell you how I got fired from the dance hall.”

  “Fired? You didn’t really, Suzie? What for?”

  “I stole money.”

  “Good Lord, whose?”

  “Oh, lots of people’s—I stole everybody’s money.”

  She had entered the new life, it appeared, with violent abandon—burying once and for all her romantic girlhood dreams. She had hated and despised men and thought only of exploiting them. Nevertheless she had been a great success at the dance hall: she had been even more popular than Yu-lan, and seldom spent a night at home; and soon she had acquired several wealthy and regular patrons, including a young Chinese playboy and a Cantonese restaurateur. And one night, observing the restaurateur’s wallet sticking out of a pocket of his jacket beside the bed, and her companion to be soundly sleeping, she had stolen six hundred dollars and concealed them in her shoe.

  The restaurateur had suspected her of the theft and withdrawn his patronage; but his place had promptly been taken by an ex-minister of Chiang Kai-shek, a sixty-year-old Pekinese. And soon she was robbing her patrons whenever the opportunity occurred. Curiously, however, she had seemed to care more about the actual stealing than about the money itself. The problem of how to pick a companion’s wallet would obsess her, she would lie awake all night planning subtle strategies, and perhaps in the end take some absurd and unjustifiable risk—only to tuck the gleanings into some pocket and forget all about them. She had always been coming across such wad
s of money among her clothes: but for all her pleasure in their discovery they might have been worthless bits of paper.

  But if she had been popular with the men at the dance hall, she had been far from popular with the other girls—for at first she had been a little horror. She had flaunted her success, put on airs, considered nobody but herself; she had overdressed, and hung herself with jewelry until she looked like a Christmas tree. She had only been tolerated at all because she was still a baby, still only seventeen: several of them remembered that they themselves had started by going overboard in the same way. Then one night she had relieved the ex-minister of four hundred dollars. It was her second foray into his wallet in less than a week. He had not been able to prove anything, but he had dropped a word into the ear of the dance-hall manager. Suzie had been dismissed.

  She had found another job without difficulty—this time on the Hong Kong side, in a dance hall called the Granada. Nevertheless the experience had been salutary. She had been shaken; she had been reminded that not even pretty girls of seventeen could have everything their own way. Her passion for expensive dresses and jewelry had vanished almost as suddenly as it had come. She had settled down to the job as though to any other. It had become mechanical routine.

  And then something else had happened to assist the change in her. One night she had been bought out from the dance hall by an Englishman. His name was Alan Muir: he worked in a chemical firm, had a soft, burry, gentle voice, and spoke a smattering of Chinese. He took her to dinner at a restaurant before going to a hotel. However, halfway through the meal he said suddenly, “I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to spend the night with you after all.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because you’re too much of the little businesswoman,” he smiled. “You wouldn’t enjoy it—so nor should I.”

  The gentleness of his tone was at such variance with his words that it was a moment or two before the insult struck home. Then Suzie’s anger flared. She accused him of going back on their agreement, of trying to cheat her of the money.