At thirty-four you know a few things about yourself that you don’t in your twenties. I am, I discovered to my own surprise, a man’s woman. To me this doesn’t feel like it’s my fault: men like and trust me, whereas women don’t, or not quite in the same way. These things tend to be mutual. I have only one real girlfriend, Jenny. She was a contemporary at Durham. She looks the same as she did then – short, dark, clever-looking – and is now a theatrical agent. I once looked in her fridge and found nothing but a single portion of Lean Cuisine lemon chicken, a month past its sell-by, a smelly pint of milk, and a half-empty, corkless bottle of Rosemount Chardonnay that had long since turned to vinegar. I told her about Berkowitz’s offer the day after he made it, over lunch in a Thai restaurant.
‘But what about Michael?’ she said.
I had given her the reasons for being interested in Berkowitz’s job offer, which were, in order, a complete change of scene, the inherent interest of the job itself, money, and the effect on my future – specifically, the idea that whatever happened, I could get a book out of it. I would go to Hong Kong a features hack who’d been around for a while, a known quantity, and come back eighteen months later a thirty-something femme sérieuse with an important book about Asia under her frock. In fact, the book would be so easy to write it was almost a pity I’d have to go out there to do it. Tiger Pit: A Young Woman’s Look at Asia. Time of the Tigers. When
Tigers Awake. View from the Tiger. That’s Enough Fucking Tigers. How many photogenic young female Asia experts can there be?
‘But what about Michael?’ Jenny said again. I said:
‘I know, I know.’
But the truth was, I didn’t know. Michael and I had fallen into that limbo which overtakes young(ish) couples when they don’t marry at a reasonably early point and instead drift into the condition of being with each other open-endedly, with no plans for children.
‘Maybe it’ll give him a kick up the bum,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if there won’t be plenty of things to take pictures of in Hong Kong. He’ll have to choose. We can’t just potter along indefinitely. We can’t stay together out of inertia. He either wants to stay with me or he doesn’t.’
In another mood I would have marked that ‘inertia’ comment down for Count the Lies. Of course you can stay together out of inertia; staying together out of inertia is exactly what most couples do.
‘Do you want him to come? If you imagine him coming or not, which makes you feel better?’
‘I don’t know, Jen.’
She did a long exhale after drawing on what must have been about her twentieth cigarette of the lunch. It was by now after three, and the single member of staff left on the premises was beginning to give off disconsolate-waiter vibrations. Jenny made a waggling wristy gesture at him and he happily scuttled off to get the bill.
‘What you’re saying is, it’s more interesting, it’s more challenging, it’s much better money, it’s a chance to live abroad, which is something you’ve always wanted to do, failure has no real consequences, and it gives Mike a much-needed reality check.’ Jenny stubbed the cigarette out in a back-to-work gesture. ‘I’d say go for it.’
So I did.
*
Heathrow airport when you’re leaving the country and don’t know when and on what basis you’ll be coming back is a different place from Heathrow when you’re going to Ibiza for two weeks.
Michael gave me a lift. He had taken my decision well, with just enough upset so that I wasn’t upset by his lack of upset. The official plan was that he would come out between three and six months later, when it was clear what the fallout from his big exhibition was like, and he’d sorted out his backlog of outstanding commissions, and so on. It was apparent to both of us that we were waiting to see how we felt. I think he may have thought that Berkowitz and/or the place would wear me down, and I would come back home keen to resume things on their former basis – which would naturally be a significant moral victory for him. I was determined that wasn’t going to happen. I sent a boxed crate of things off to Hong Kong by sea – projected journey time six weeks – and was travelling, if not light, then not heavy: clothes, survival essentials, Premier League frocks, laptop, a few books and CDs. My plan was to restock my wardrobe in the Shopping Capital of the World. Berkowitz had fixed me up somewhere to live in Mid-Levels, wherever or whatever that was.
Michael and I said goodbye at the kerb, by prior arrangement, rather than have a Brief Encounter moment in the terminal.
Chapter Three
I lost my virginity that day. It was my first time in business class.
‘You’ll be turning left, of course,’ Berkowitz – who had a case of Harrods champagne delivered to my flat when I told him I was accepting his offer – said.
‘Of course,’ I said, not having a clue what was meant, until the actual moment when, as I clutched my business-class Cathay Pacific boarding card, the Chinese stewardess beamed at me and gestured to her right, my left, towards the front of the 747. Of course: turning left. This was not something I had done before. A Chinese man in a suit nodded politely at me as I sat on the armchair beside him after jamming my scruffy carry-on bag into the overhead locker. Another stewardess presented me with a valise of variably useful gifts (socks, goggles, distilled-water face spray, comb, tiny toothpaste and toothbrush, compact mirror, miniature parachute – though perhaps my memory errs on this last point) and followed it up with a glass of champagne. There is no other way to fly. I had not realised before that this was no more than the literal truth. Only a few feet away were the unimaginable splendours of First Class. What could be going on in there? Colleagues who had been upgraded by the random benifices of airline press departments spoke tearfully of the experience, which spoiled them permanently for terrorist class in the back.
‘You’d don’t understand,’ tubby Rory said, after BA had upgraded him to and from the Oscars. (He had filed a borderline anti-Semitic piece about the backstage workings of The Industry. Headcase loved it.) ‘It’s ruined me.’ And I had thought he was joking.
Once we were in the air, the Chinese man, who had kept his eyes closed during take-off, opened them, looked across at me, and smiled.
‘That is my favourite part,’ he said in impeccable English. He went back to his copy of Business Week. I settled down to watch Legends of the Fall. It was a crock. Then I had a meal and some wine and tried to sleep. The thing about sleeping on planes, I find, is that you get only one crack at it. Unconsciousness visits just once. It’s always a nerve-racking moment when you come round and sneak a peek at your watch: is it six hours later, or fifteen minutes? On this occasion, I didn’t do too badly. We were about halfway through the flight. The Chinese guy was playing a computer game on his laptop. When he saw me watching, he turned it off.
‘I hope I did not wake you.’
‘Absolutely not.’
We chatted for a bit – not, I now know, something one often does in business class. I’ve since flown many thousands of miles without speaking to the man in the seat next to me. This guy had a pleasant, mobile face, and perfect English. His name was Matthew Ho and he ran a company which made air conditioners in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, with plans to expand into China and generally take over the world. The parent company was German, but the subsidiary company with which he mainly dealt was based near Luton.
‘You must spend a lot of time on aeroplanes.’
‘It’s called astronaut syndrome. The idea is you spend so much time in the air it’s the same as being an astronaut.’ He fished a thin leather wallet out of his pocket and took out a photo of a small fat baby. ‘My daughter Mei-Lin,’ he said. He didn’t ask me if I had children.
All babies look alike to me.
‘She’s lovely,’ I said.
*
I had heard about the landing at Kai Tak airport, but I still couldn’t believe my eyes. We flew in over the archipelago of small islands, 235 of which – my guidebook told me – make up the territory of Hong Kong. A
s we came in lower you could see the boat-wakes, looking weirdly like jet contrails, then the boats themselves.
‘That’s where they’re building the new airport,’ Matthew said as we passed over Lantau island. ‘They made your Prime Minister come out for the signing ceremony, the first Western leader to visit China after Tiananmen.’
There was anger in his voice, though not in his expression.
‘Don’t look at me, look out there,’ he said. ‘That’s the harbour.’
We were now at a couple of thousand feet, coming in over the busiest harbour I had ever seen. The plane banked right over the city, and we began descending lower and lower. You could see laundry on people’s balconies; you could all but smell the traffic. You could more or less look into people’s flats. The air was not calm. It was as if we were flying right down into the city and the pilot was planning to attempt a landing in one of the canyons between the manically crowded buildings.
‘Jesus,’ I said.
‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Matthew.
Then suddenly we were over the airport runway and bumping down on it and the engines were roaring backwards as we headed out into the harbour. By the time we had stopped and turned off towards the terminal buildings, I could speak again.
‘Do planes ever end up in the harbour?’
‘Of course,’ smiled Matthew. ‘All the time.’
I found out later that wasn’t true. He gave me his business card, which, having swotted up on my Asian etiquette, I took with both hands. You never know when contacts will come in handy; as it happens, I used him for a piece I did about astronaut syndrome a few months later.
We got off the plane comfortably before the proles at the back of the 747. The air was close. It was hot, but more than that it was lethally muggy and humid. It was as if your whole body was wrapped in warm wet muslin. Kai Tak was older and scruffier than I had expected, and both more Chinese – in the fact that 98 per cent of the people all around were Chinese, the script and the language were everywhere – and also, in that odd colonial way, more English, in details like the weird khaki safari-suit uniform of the policemen. Berkowitz was supposed to meet me, and although I had been cool and if-you-insist about it over the phone, I was now feeling distinctly glad that I wouldn’t have to make my own way. It wasn’t so much culture shock as what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here shock.
In those days, summer of 1995, British citizens did not need a visa to waltz into Hong Kong and stay for as long as they liked. (The reverse, needless to say, did not apply.) Within about ninety seconds of my bags coming off the carousel I was pushing into the arrivals hall, looking and being looked at by a wall of Chinese faces. It’s always a self-conscious moment, getting off a plane and running the reception gauntlet. Then I saw Berkowitz, standing with his arms crossed at the far end of the throng, marginally fatter and balder but essentially the same. Beside him stood a Chinese man in a uniform and peaked cap. People were surprisingly dressed up; many more suits and ties than you’d see in an equivalent line-up at Heathrow. I was suddenly glad that I’d nipped into the ladies and combed my hair, checked my face. My shoes were, after twelve and a half hours at an altitude equivalent to 7,000 feet, too tight for my puffy hooves. My luggage trolley was pulling hard to the left.
Berkowitz came towards me and gave me, rather than the prepared line I might have expected, a hug.
‘Dawn,’ he said.
‘I think so. At least I was when I left. It’s good to see you, Bob.’
‘Let Ronnie take your bags. Dawn, this is Ronnie Lee, my driver and translator and all-round Man Friday. Ronnie, this is Dawn Stone.’ At close range, I could see that what I had taken to be a uniform was in fact an unusually smart high-buttoned Italian suit (or good copy thereof). Ronnie was about five foot eight and had an intelligent face framed with the invincible jet-black hair of the Cantonese. He nodded at me, swung the two bags off the cart and began walking away towards the lift.
Berkowitz kept up a running commentary all the way from Kai Tak.
‘See that stone wall around the airport perimeter? That used to be the Walled City of Kowloon. During the war the Japanese tore down the walls and made POWs build the perimeter of the airport. The city stayed where it was, a total no-go area to the cops thanks to some ancient row over jurisdiction between the Chinese and the Brits. Literally swarming with Triads, junkies, sweatshops, whorehouses, you name it. More edifyingly, if you look out at the back window you can catch a glimpse of the mountains around Kowloon. They’re in the New Territories, which is the last bit of mainland before China proper. The Chinese said the hills were dragons. There were eight of them. Then the last of the Sung emperors came here in the thirteenth century, fleeing the Mongols, Kubla Khan among them, he of the stately pleasure-dome where Alph the sacred river ran. I remember the first time I heard that line thinking Alf was a weird name for a river. Anyway. The boy emperor looked up at the hills, said, look, there are eight dragons. His courtiers said, but sir, you are a dragon too – which the emperor traditionally was. He had dragon status in his own right. So he said, okay, let’s call this place nine dragons – gau lung – which became Kowloon. Not that it did the boy-emperor any good, since the Mongols caught him and killed him and ruled the whole of China for a couple of hundred years. Notice anything odd about these neon signs?’
It was by now starting to go dark, and lights were coming on everywhere. The neon was the only colour in this part of town, and the buildings seemed aggressively drab – duns, browns, greys, no-colours. The streets were crowded and enclosed and very, very Asian. And the traffic – what I had thought, in London, was a Ph.D. experience of shitty traffic, was now being exposed as more like a GCSE all-must-have-prizes pass grade. This was shitty traffic.
‘You mean apart from the fact they’re in Chinese?’
‘Very droll. No, it’s the fact that none of them blink. There’s no flashing neon in Hong Kong owing to restrictions about the proximity of the airport. They’re worried that if too many lights wink you’ll have planes taking a wrong turn and crash-landing into girlie bars in Wanchai, with all the resultant expense and negative publicity. My point is merely that although this looks like an unfettered capitalist mêlée, the “purest free-market economy in the world” in the words of the Heritage Foundation in Washington – don’t you love that “purest”? – in fact Hong Kong is a closely regulated and legally supervised society. Zoning laws and building restrictions are extremely strict. Although everyone here talks non-stop about the free market and gases on about the place as a capitalist success story without equal, not least thanks to the 15 per cent top-rate tax which I believe I’ve had occasion to mention to you, they don’t point out that Hong Kong also has the largest public housing programme in the world, with over half of the population living in public housing built since the fifties, when bad publicity shamed the Brits into clearing the shanty towns. So Hong Kong can be described in the exact opposite of the usual way, as a triumph of legislation, planning, and socialistic policy – I speak as the only bona fide socialist within about five thousand kilometres of here, isn’t that right, Ronnie?’
‘Whatever you say, Mr B.’
We were now in the queue to pay for entry to the cross-harbour tunnel. Above the entrance, over the water, I could see Hong Kong Island, a jam-packed cityscape with a hill or mountain rising straight up behind it. Usually when you arrive at an airport you come through some emptyish country or at least a stretch of motorway through suburbs, before you arrive in the built-up big city you’re headed for. There was none of that here. It was super-urban all the way.
‘Don’t be deceived by the appearance of the buildings, by the way – they look like blocks of flats but a lot of them will also house factories, tiny restaurants, brothels, gambling dens, you name it. Also sweatshops. Especially sweatshops.’
We started crawling through the tunnel.
‘Have you learned Chinese yet?’ I asked.
‘Certainly not. For all practical
purposes it’s impossible to learn Cantonese – which, by the way, is the language spoken here. On the mainland the official language is what used to be called Mandarin and is now known as Putonghua, because that’s what the Chinese government says it should be called. The Hong Kong Chinese speak Cantonese, which is the dialect of the province of Guangdong. It’s easy to tell the difference because Mandarin sounds like someone chewing a brandy glass full of wasps and Cantonese sounds like people having an argument. The written language of both dialects incidentally is the same. You’ll manage just fine.’
We had emerged from the tunnel on the Hong Kong side and were moving along a raised highway, past skyscrapers and office blocks, some very new-looking, others still being built. Berkowitz pointed across to a plot of newly reclaimed land jutting out into the harbour.
‘That’s the site of the new convention centre, where the handover to the soi-disant Communists will happen in 1997. The building straight across the harbour with the blank wall facing it is the new cultural centre, opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales. You’ll notice that despite facing one of the ten great vistas of the world it has no windows. Some of us like to think that’s a joke about the state of culture in the territory. Territory, by the way, is the mandatory euphemism – never “colony”. The C-word is completely verboten. Calling it a territory doesn’t affect the fact that our beloved Governor Patten, “Fat Pang”, as the locals call him, is a legally self-sufficient entity who can do whatever the hell he likes, but it offends the Chinese less and has the supreme virtue of not meaning anything.’
Fragrant Harbour Page 3
