by Paul Theroux
I had known Hing long before I jumped ship. The Allegro was registered in Panama, but her home port was Hong Kong. We were often in Singapore, and the only occasion in eleven months we left the Indian Ocean was to take a cargo of rubber to Vancouver. I thought of jumping ship there, and nearly did it, except that beyond Vancouver and the cold wastes of Canadian America I saw the United States, and that was the place I was fleeing.
Hing was the first person I thought of when I developed my plan for leaving the Allegro. At the time he seemed the kindest man. I always looked forward to our stops in Singapore, and Hing was glad of our business. Just a small-time provisioner, delivering corn flakes to housewives at the British bases and glad for the unexpected order of an extra pound of sausages, he worked out of his little shop on Beach Road; Gopi packed the cardboard cartons, and Little Hing took the groceries around in a beat-up van. We were not dealing with Hing then. Our ship chandler was a large firm, also on Beach Road, just down from Raffles Hotel. One day, checking over our crates of supplies, I saw some secondhand valves wrapped in newspaper that I felt were being palmed off on me.
“We didn’t order these,” I said.
The clerk took them out of the crate. He dropped them on the floor.
“Where are the ones we ordered?”
The clerk said nothing. The Chinese mouth is naturally grim; his was drawn down, his nether lip pouted; his head, too large for the rest of his body, had corners, and looked just like a skull, not a head fleshed out with an expression, but in contour and lightness, the sutures and jaw hinges visible, a bone with a flat skeletal crown. This feller’s head, ridiculously mounted on a scrawny neck, infuriated me.
“Where,” I repeated, “are the ones we ordered?”
He swallowed, setting his Adam’s apple in motion. “Out of stock.”
“I thought as much. So you gave us these. You’re always doing that!” I almost blew a gasket. “We’re going to be at sea for the next ten days. What if a valve goes? They aren’t going to be any good to us, are they?” I wanted him to reply. “Are they?”
Anger takes some responsive cooperation to fan blustering to rage. He would not play; the Chinese seldom did. Some fellers accused the Chinese of harboring a motiveless evil, but it was not so. Their blank look was disturbing because it did nothing to discourage the feeling that they meant us harm. The blankness was blankness, a facial void reflecting a mental one: confusion. If I had to name the look I would call it fear, the kind that can make the Chinese cower or be wild. The clerk cowered, withdrawing behind the counter.
I kicked the crate and stamped out of the shop. Next door Hing was smiling in the doorway of his shop. I was immediately well disposed to him; he was reliably fat and calm, and he had the prosperous, satisfying bulk, the easy grace of a trader with many employees.
“Yes?”
Apart from a few wooden stools, a calendar, an abacus, bills withering on a spike, and on the wall a red altar with a pot full of smoldering joss sticks, the shop was empty of merchandise. Little Hing was carrying groceries from the back room, Gopi was ramming them into a crate.
“I need some valves,” I said. Then, “Got?”
He thought I was saying “bulbs,” but we got that straight, and finally, after I described the size, he said, “Can get.”
“When?”
“Now,” he said, calling Little over. “You want tea? Cigarette? Here—” He shook a cigarette out of a can. “Plenty for you. Don’t mention. Come, I light. Thank you.”
He had the valves for me in twenty minutes, and that was how we started doing business with Hing. The next time the Allegro called at Singapore, Hing had put up his ship chandler’s sign. There was nothing he could not get; he had a genius for winkling out the scarcest supplies, confirming the claim he printed on his stationery, Provisions of Every Description Shall Be Supplied at Shortest Notice. And every time I called on him with my shopping list he took me out to dinner, a roast beef and Yorkshire pudding feed at the Elizabethan Grill, or a twelve-course Chinese dinner with everything but bears’ paws and fish lips on the table.
It was simple business courtesy, the ritual meal. I was buying a thousand dollars’ worth of provisions and supplies from him; for this he was paying for my dinner. I was an amateur. I thought I was doing very well, and always congratulated myself as, lamed by brandy, I staggered to the quay to catch a sampan back to the Allegro. I only understood the business logic of “Have a cigar—take two,” when it was too late; but as I say, I started out hissing, “Hey bud” from doorways along Robinson Road. I was old enough to know better.
During one of the large meals, Hing, who in the Chinese style watched me closely and heaped my plate with food every five minutes, leaned over and said, “You . . . wucking . . . me.” His English failed him and he began gabbing in Cantonese. The waitress was boning an awed steamed garupa that was stranded on a platter of vegetables. She translated shyly, without looking up.
“He say . . . he like you. He say . . . he want a young man . . .”
“Ang moh,” I heard Hing say. “Redhead.”
The waitress removed the elaborate comb of the fish’s spine and softened Hing’s slang to, “European man . . . do very good business for European ship. European people . . . not speak awkward like Chinese people. And he say . . .”
Hing implored with his eyes and his whole smooth face.
I was thirty-nine. At thirty-nine you’re in your thirties; at forty, or so I thought then, you’re in the shadow of middle age. It was as if he had whispered, “Brace yourself, Flowers. I’ve had my eye on you for a long time . . .” I was excited. The Chinese life in Singapore was mainly noodles and children in a single room, the noise of washing and hoicking. It could not have been duller, but because it was dull the Chinese had a gift for creating special occasions, a night out, a large banquet or festive gathering which sustained them through a year of yellow noodles. Hing communicated this festive singularity to me; I believed my magic had worked, my luck had changed with my age; not fortune, but the promise of it was spoken. I saw myself speeding forward in a wind like silk.
Three weeks later, I walked into Hing’s shop. He shook my hand, offered the can of cigarettes, and began clacking his lighter, saying, “Yes, Jack, yes.”
Little Hing came over and asked for the shopping list, the manifests and indents.
“No list,” I said, and grinned. “No ship, no list!” I had turned away to explain. “From now on I’m working for the towkay.”
Behind me, Big Hing was screwing the lid back on to the can of cigarettes, and that was the only sound; the tin lid caught and clicked and rasped in the metal grooves, and was finally silent.
Big Hing was grave, reflectively biting his upper lip with his lower teeth. He banged the cigarette tin onto the trestle table, making the beads on the abacus spin and tick. He became brisk. He led me to my cubicle, two beaverboard partitions, without a ceiling, narrow as a urinal, and he shot the curtain along its rod, jangling the chrome hoops. I climbed onto the stool and put my head down. I did not turn around. I knew the Allegro had sailed without me.
3
THE SECOND TIME I met Hing, when I was still buying for the Allegro and thought of him as a friend, he took me to an opium parlor, a tiny smoke-smeared attic room off North Bridge Road. It was one of the stories I told later in hotel bars to loosen up nervous fellers whom I had spotted as possible clients. I had expected the opium parlor to be something like a wang house filled with sleepy hookers relaxing on cushions; I was not prepared for the ghostly sight of five elderly addicts, dozing hollow-eyed in droopy wrinkled pajamas, and two equally decrepit “cooks” scraping dottle out of black pipes. The room was dark; a single shutter, half-open, gave the only light; the ceiling panels seemed kept in place by the cobwebs that were woven over the cracks between the panels and the beams they dangled from. The walls were marked with the cats’ paws of Chinese characters. There were some scarred wooden furniture, broken crates and stools, and low cots and string beds
with soiled pillows where the derelict men slept with their mouths open. A very old woman in wide silk trousers and red clogs drank coffee out of a condensed milk tin and watched me. It was an atmosphere only an opium trance could improve. I anxiously sucked one pipeful; none of the skinny dreamers acknowledged me, and we left. In front of the opium parlor, where Hing’s Riley sat, a parking attendant, a round-faced girl in a straw hat and gray jacket, was writing out a ticket. Hing saw the joke immediately, and we both laughed: the parking ticket at the opium den. I embellished it as a story by increasing the overtime parking fine and glamorizing the dingy room, giving it silk pillows and the addicts youth.
The opium parlor was Hing’s idea. He had convinced me that I could ask anything of him; he said, “Singapore have everything,” and he wanted a chance to prove it. Faced by variety, my imagination was confounded; I chose simple pleasures, outings, walks, the Police Band concerts at the Botanical Gardens, fishing from the pier. Hing made suggestions. He introduced me to Madam Lum and her chief attraction, Mona, a girl with the oddest tastes, whom I used to describe truthfully to fellers, saying, “She’s not fooling—she really likes her work, and everyone comes back singing her praises!” Hing took me to the “Screw Inn,” a little bungalow of teen-age girls off Mountbatten Road, and he taught me that yellow-roofed taxis were the tip-off: more than two parked together in a residential area indicated a brothel close by. At Hing’s urging I had my first taste of the good life: a morning shave, flat on my back at the Indian barbershop on Orchard Road (Chinese barbers used dull razors—the sparse Chinese beard was easy to scrape off); a heavy lunch at the Great Shanghai, followed by a nap and a massage by a naked Chinese girl who sat astride me and kneaded my back and who afterward invited another girl into the room so that the three of us could fool for the whole afternoon. After tea, both girls gave me a bath and we went for a stroll; I walked them to a bar, had a last drink, then early to bed with a novel—the sequence of a lovely exhausting day, which gave me a stomach full of honey and the feeling that the skin I wore was brand new. Hing paid the bills. He had few pleasures himself, and he wasn’t a drinker. What he liked were big Australian girls in nightclubs who stripped to the buff and then got down on all fours and shook and howled like cats. He understood food; he taught me the fine points of ordering Szechwan meals, the fried eels in sauce, the hot-sour soup, poached sea slugs, steamed pomfret, and crisp duck skin that was eaten in a soft bun. He gave me bottles of ginseng wine, which he claimed was an aphrodisiac tonic, and on the appropriate festival, a whole moon cake wrapped in red paper. He said he was glad I wasn’t British, and why wasn’t I married, and how did I like Singapore?
All this time I was his customer; the ritual friendship ended when I became his employee, and at 600 Straits dollars a month I was treated as a difficult burden, crowding his shop with my bulk, wasting his time, eating his money. He stopped speaking to me directly, and if the two of us were in the shop alone he assumed a preoccupied busy air, rattling scraps of paper, pretending to look for things, banging doors, groaning, saying his commercial rosary on his abacus. He spoke to me through his dog; my mistakes and lapses got the dog a kick in the ribs. I thought I might be promoted, but I learned very early that no promotion would come my way. The job interested me enough so that I could do it without any encouragement from Hing. For Hing to thank me, something he never did, would have been an admission on his part of dependency, a loss of face: civility was a form of weakness for him. I understood this and took his rudeness to be the gratitude it was. We had no contract; after our verbal agreement Hing arranged a visa for me which allowed me to stay in Singapore as long as I worked for him. This was convenient (the bribe came out of his pocket), but limiting: if he fired me the visa would be canceled and I would be deported. He needed me too much to fire me, but I knew that to remind him of this would be to ask for a sacking, for that was the only way he could demonstrate I wasn’t needed.
But I was. A year on the Allegro and all the calls we had made at Singapore had acquainted me with most of the other vessels and skippers who called regularly, and I knew many of the fellers in the Maritime Building who managed the shipping lines. The advantage I had, which Hing had hinted at, only dawned on me later: I was white. The rest of the ship chandlers in Singapore were either Indian or Chinese. As a paleface in the late fifties in Singapore I drank in clubs and bars where “Asians,” as they were called, were not allowed. Largely, I drank in these places because I was not welcome in the Chinese clubs, and I didn’t like the toddy in the Indian ones. It offended me that I was forced to drink with my own race—later, I would not do otherwise: I couldn’t relax with fellers of other races—but in the end, this simple fact of racial exclusiveness landed Hing with many contracts for supplying European ships. I was learning the ropes: Chinese and Indians transacted all their business in offices, Europeans did it in clubs and used their offices as phone booths.
A club, even a so-called exclusive one, was easy to enter but hard to join. The doormen were Malays or Sikhs, and I had learned how to say “How’s every little thing, brother?” in Malay and Punjabi. In any case, they would not have dared to turn an ang moh away; and as for signing the drink chits, I had a number of match tricks and brain twisters that I’d spring on anyone drinking alone. The loser had to sign for the drink. I never lost.
“Just in from Bangkok,” I’d say. “Feller up there showed me a cute gimmick. You’ve probably seen it. No? Well, you put six matches down like this, make a little sort of circle with them. There. Now—I wonder if I’ve got that right? I’m a real jerk when it comes to these tricky things. What you’re supposed to do is rearrange five matches without disturbing—”
After I explained, I’d say, “Loser signs, okay?” and the drink would be as good as mine. That was a British con. Americans were easier. “Bet you can’t name the twelve apostles,” or “Whose picture’s on the hundred?” or “What’s the capital of Maine?” secured my drinks with Americans, and with a drink in my hand I could stay in a club bar for hours, making up stories, chatting, or telling jokes that appealed to the listener’s prejudices by confirming them. There were not many Chinese jokes, apart from the funny names, of which I had a long list, culled from the Singapore telephone directory (“Pass me the phone book, Ali; my friend here doesn’t believe Fook Yew and Wun Fatt Joo really live in Singapore”). There were many good Indian jokes, and these always went down well. I told Englishmen the joke about the Texan who’s accused of sodomizing animals. “Cows, pigs, mules,” says his accuser, a girl he wants to take home. She goes on, “Sheep, dogs, cats, chickens—” The Texan interrupts in annoyance: “What do you mean, chickens?”
Americans were always bowled over by the story of the Englishman whose pecker is accidentally cut off. After a painful month he finally decides to see a doctor, who says he knows how to sew the thing back on. “Just hand it over and I’ll see to it straightway.” The Englishman slaps his pockets, says, “I’ve got the damned thing here somewhere,” and gives the doctor a huge cigar. “This is a cigar,” says the perplexed doctor, and “My word,” says the Englishman, “I must have smoked my cock!”
Sometimes I clowned around, like making a great show of ordering cherries in brandy, simply to say, “To tell the truth, I hate these cherries, but I like the spirit in which they’re given!” So, even without the match tricks and brain twisters, someone was always buying me a drink and saying, “You’re a card.” And in clubs where I was not a member, fellers said, “We haven’t seen you lately—missed you at the film show,” and “Don’t forget the A.G.M. next week, about time we tackled that gatecrashers’ clause”; eventually, a feller would ask, “Say, Jack, what’s your line of work?”
“Me? I’m in ship chandling.” I never said I was a water clerk.
“Odd, that,” would be the reply.
“I know exactly what you mean,” I’d say. “But the way I figure it, this business could use a little streamlining. Methods haven’t changed since Raffles’s ti
me, and by God neither have some of the groceries they’re flogging, from the taste of them! Shops haven’t been swept in years, bread’s as hard as old Harry, weevils in the rice—mind you, I’ve got nothing against our Asiatic brothers. It’s just as you say, they work like dogs. On the other hand, your Indian is never really happy handling meat—but you can’t hold their religion against them, can you?”
“One can’t, I suppose. But still—”
“And your Chinese ship chandler—he’ll give you a turd and tell you it’s an orchid. Shall I tell you what I saw one day in a Chinese shop? This’ll kill you—”
The feller would be agreeing with me and putting his oar in from time to time. I’d tell my valve story and he’d cap it with a better and terrifying one about defective life jackets or wormy provisions, all the while working up the indignation to change ship chandlers.
My most effective selling ploy, which I used just before mealtimes, when conversations always got around to food, was my English breakfast. This never failed. The English, I had discovered, had a weakness for large breakfasts; it might have had a literary source—a Dickens character having a beefsteak with his tea—or a tradition begun on those cold mornings when the Thames used to freeze over, or war rationing. Whatever the reason, it was an inspired way of getting a contract.
I hit on this a few months after I began ship chandling in Singapore, with a feller from the Victoria Shipping Lines. It was on the verandah of the Singapore Cricket Club, on a Saturday just before tiffin. The feller was sitting beside me in a wicker chair and we were watching some ladies bowling on the grass. This form of bowling was exactly like the Italian game bocce, which my father played in an alley in the North End every Sunday afternoon. It was the only game I knew well, and I was commenting on the ladies’ match to the feller on my right. “Gotta have more left-hand side . . . Not enough legs on that one . . . Kissed it . . . Never make it . . . She’s out for blood—it’s going like a demon—” The ladies took a rest. I turned to the feller and said, “Seems there was this Texan—”
