Her eyes widened. ‘I will not be angry with you, Simon. It is not permitted.’
‘Permission granted, Miss Lord. I’m surprised you’re not angry already. I’ve made a fool of myself and lost more face in my first hour in Singapore than I can possibly regain if I spend a lifetime in Asia.’
She clucked her tongue dismissively. ‘You will not see those people again. It will be okay. I will teach you the customs.’
‘Do I have the pleasure of your company until later in the evening? I’d very much like it if you’d have dinner with me. But first I need a clean-up, a shower and a change of clothes.’
‘No, first we go to the doctor, then we will go to the hotel, and if you are not so tired we can have dinner.’
‘Will you make a booking?’
She laughed. ‘There is no need, Simon. All the restaurants give Beatrice Fong squeeze. We will be welcome.’
I was surprised. While I didn’t know much, I knew from my mother that the Chinese seldom show affection in public, much less hug each other. ‘They hug her?’ I said as a polite, roundabout way of correcting her grammar. ‘They must really like her …’
Mercy B. Lord threw back her head and laughed. ‘I think I will explain later when you are feeling much better, Simon.’
If face is everything to the Chinese, nothing happens without ‘squeeze’ – that is to say, without a bribe or a percentage of every deal struck going to someone else. Mercy B. Lord’s employer, as the head of a foreign visitors agency, was in a position to bring in customers and, in return, received her percentage in the better Chinese restaurants.
If I’d made an unpropitious start in Singapore, the one piece of truly good joss was Mercy B. Lord. I should point out that she was always referred to by her full name, never as just plain Mercy or even Mercy B., although I never heard her insist on it. Now somewhat more in control and driving to the doctor or to Raffles Hotel, I said, ‘Mercy B. Lord, you well and truly saved me from a fate worse than death, but I hadn’t been told to expect you.’
She looked surprised. ‘But I have a telegram from Mr Arthur Grinds in New York. We know him here. He has visited many, many times when he was looking for an advertising agency. He is,’ she paused as if she wanted to be sure she got it right, ‘Senior Vice President International, Asia and South America. I have it here, the telegram.’ She retrieved it from her bag and handed it to me to read:
ATT BEATRICE FONG AGENCY STOP
SIMON KOO ARRIVING QANTAS FLIGHT 8 STOP
17TH SEPT STOP
PLEASE FACILITATE AS IF US CITIZEN STOP
ALL FACILITIES GRANTED STOP
ARTHUR GRINDS SNR VP INT A&SA STOP
NY OFFICE
I recalled that Arthur Grinds had been one of the signatories, along with the Wing brothers, on my contract. But there had been no mention of my being met at the airport. Charles Brickman may have had a low opinion of how the Americans operated in Asia but they’d just effectively saved my pseudo-Chinese backside in the very welcome and pretty form of Miss Mercy B. Lord.
‘What does “all facilities granted” entail, Mercy B. Lord?’ I asked mischievously.
Her quick glance told me that she understood but wasn’t going to go there. ‘I will be available for the next two weeks to familiarise you with Singapore and to find you suitable accommodation. That is, if you wish …’
‘Yes, yes, of course, thank you. When shall we meet, at night? I will be expected in the agency during the day.’
‘No, not at night,’ she said quickly. ‘It is only during the day. It is called familiarisation; I think you will need it.’
‘I agree, but I’m not sure the Wing brothers will approve.’
‘They have approved. It is the custom for American gwai-lo who come to work in Singapore. Now also you, Simon. We have the correct notification from New York. It is not easy if you do not know your way around. I will show you everything.’
I doubted that Mercy B. Lord’s ‘everything’ was the same everything I had been told about in the pub back home when everyone knew I was coming here. It seemed that three or four guys’ fathers each had a story about places such as the notorious Bugis Street with its transvestites, sleazy bars, nightclubs and brothels. Nevertheless, I was delighted to discover she would be my guide for my first fortnight in Singapore, though I couldn’t help wondering what the Wing brothers would think privately about the American initiative. But then again, they weren’t paying for it or me.
There isn’t a lot more to say about my first late afternoon and evening. Mercy B. Lord insisted on my seeing a doctor, who pronounced each wound ‘superficial’, dabbed a little iodine on my neck and cheek and told me to expect a very black eye for the next few days. My room at Raffles was small and, although not airconditioned, was perfectly adequate. I showered and changed while Mercy B. Lord waited downstairs, and then I joined her for a cold beer in the famous Long Bar while she had a martini. Then she took me to a Chinese restaurant where we had dinner. I’d declared myself, after my flow of excess adrenalin at the airport, to be positively starving and she’d insisted on a small banquet with all the trimmings. Faced with a different dish seemingly every few minutes, I tried to imagine that first banquet for Ah Koo in Sydney in the late nineteenth century, although things had changed. For example, a beautiful woman was sharing this one with me, while the closest Little Sparrow got to being present at a banquet was to earn an exceedingly sore bum while crouched behind the screen interpreting her dream for the Dragon Master. Now, eighty years later, I wondered to myself how much had really changed – they were country bumpkins in a strange city, and I had already demonstrated that I was no more sophisticated here in an equally strange Singapore.
My learning curve would need to be a bloody steep one. They’d managed theirs well enough to create a dynasty. I wondered just what lay ahead for me. Would I make a cock-up of things or be a success? But at least for the moment I had the pretty and charming Mercy B. Lord to smooth my path. I told myself things couldn’t be all bad over the next two weeks.
Tired from the long flight and with several more beers in me than I customarily consumed, I was forward enough to ask Mercy B. Lord about her, as I put it, ‘simply wonderful name’. When she hesitated I added, ‘If you don’t tell me, it’s going to drive me crazy all night and I won’t get any sleep. It will be your fault if I arrive at Samuel Oswald Wing a broken and battered man.’ I pointed to my eye, now virtually closed. ‘I’m already looking pretty crook.’
‘Crook? I hope you are not a crook, Simon,’ she exclaimed.
‘It’s an Australian word; it means feeling poorly, sick, in bad shape, hung-over, unwell.’
Mercy B. Lord giggled. ‘You have a funny English language, Simon. Like Americans, you say things that mean other things. How will I learn this?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll teach you Australian, but first you have to explain your name.’
‘It was given to me by Sister Charity at the St Thomas Aquinas Catholic Mission Orphanage. You see I am an orphan.’
Mercy B. Lord then went on to tell me how, as a day-old baby, she had been left on the doorstep of the orphanage. Sister Charity, the oldest Irish nun, had discovered her, almost tripping over the tiny bundle on the kitchen doorstep. ‘Mercy be, Lord!’ she’d exclaimed. ‘What have You sent us?’ It was as easy as that. She had always been known, not as Mercy, but as Mercy B. Lord, there being, predictably enough, an orphan named Mercy already. She’d never been given any other identity, such as a Chinese name. But later in life when she’d sought to have it translated, it came out as Child of Guanshiyin – the one who hears the cries of the world.
‘I was born in March 1946 and was lucky my mother took me to the nuns, who had just returned to the orphanage after the Japanese occupation.’ She paused. ‘There were a lot of Chinese murdered by the Japanese, so if I was Chinese pure-blood, she would have kept me. To be a Chinese child then, so soon after the war, was good, even a girl child with an unmarried mother,
so the nuns knew I was a half-caste.’
‘But you don’t seem to have any pronounced European features; your dad’s genes must have been swamped,’ I laughed. ‘I should know. My family are all half-castes; I just happen to be a throwback, a return of the irrepressible Chinese genes. I have cousins and an uncle with fair skin and blue eyes. That’s okay in Australia but not growing up amongst the Chinese, I guess.’
Mercy B. Lord looked down at her plate. ‘Not European, Simon – Japanese. My mother would have been raped by a Japanese soldier. It was common and is the only reason she would have given me up. The people in her kampong would have known this and killed me at birth. Bad rice.’
‘But how would you know that?’
‘Almost all the children in the orphanage were one of two things. If they were above the age of four, then they were orphans, whose parents had been killed by the Japanese. If they were babies, then their mothers had been raped by Japanese soldiers. My mother, the nuns explained, wanted to confess her shame, to explain why she would give up her baby and leave me at the orphanage, so she swaddled me in a Japanese soldier’s shirt. The nuns kept the shirt and I have it now; one of the sleeves has been cut off.’
I was silent for a few moments then said quietly, ‘That’s tough.’
‘No, nobody could really tell once I got a little older, and people have forgotten.’ She paused before continuing. ‘But sometimes, I don’t know why, I just feel different.’
‘Yeah, I know what you mean, only with me the outside contradicts the inside.’
‘I know it’s ridiculous, but walking down the street I sometimes think people look at me in a different way, that somehow they realise.’
‘I know the feeling well. But in your case you are misinterpreting their looks. What they are staring at is – as we would say in Australia – a grouse-looking sheila with the latest in Mary Quant clothes and a Vidal Sassoon five-point hairstyle.’
She looked briefly taken aback. ‘Simon, I don’t understand. A grouse is a bird, is it not, but who is Sheila?’
‘No, “grouse” means really good, terrific – in your case extremely beautiful – and “sheila” is Australian for a girl or woman.’
Mercy B. Lord laughed. ‘That is a very strange language, Simon.’
The following day, I put on the second of my three suits, a light tropical-weight khaki gabardine. I had two like this and a lightweight wool, ‘for more formal occasions when you meet the prime minister’, my mother, who’d had them tailor-made, had said with a laugh. So, suited, brushed and polished and looking the part of a hot new creative director in a light blue Brooks Brothers shirt with a button-down collar, one of three I’d ordered through Jonas from America, and the tie I had never returned to my dad, I entered the premises of Samuel Oswald Wing. I had taken the precaution of phoning at five minutes past nine to make an appointment. I felt sure they knew of my arrival but I didn’t want to lob in unexpectedly.
‘My name is Simon Koo. May I speak with Mr Wing, please?’ I asked when the switch answered.
‘Which Mr Wing do you want?’ a pleasant voice answered.
‘Mr Sidney Wing?’
‘One moment, I’ll put you through to his secretary.’
Sidney Wing’s secretary offered only her first name. ‘Sally, hello?’
‘Hello, Sally, this is Simon Koo.’
‘Yes, Mr Koo, what can we do for you?’ It was friendly enough, but not the reaction I’d expected.
‘Simon Koo from Australia … I think I’m expected. I’m the new creative director.’
There was a moment’s awkward silence. ‘Creative director? I do not understand, sir.’
‘From Australia. I was with Samuel Oswald Brickman. New York has sent me.’ I tried to sound cheery. ‘I am to be your new creative director.’
‘Oh, I see.’ More silence, then, ‘New creative director?’ It was obviously an unfamiliar term that she was struggling to understand.
Sidney Wing was one of the signatories on my contract and I was dumbfounded that his secretary didn’t even know that the biggest change about to happen to the agency was to its creative component. This, I was to learn, was very Chinese, where if a personal secretary isn’t a family member, she doesn’t always know what’s going on, especially if something is confidential, although it was hard to think of my appointment as confidential. Perhaps it just wasn’t considered sufficiently important for her to know about. It wasn’t a good beginning, but then perhaps I was being paranoid as usual.
‘Do you have a department that produces the newspaper advertisements, with people who draw the pictures?’ I’d been told that creative was pretty primitive, and it would be my job to change all that, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. I guess the word ‘creative’ was a new one for Sally. But then she suddenly came alive.
‘Oh, yes, Mr Koo, you got the wrong Mister Wing, you want Mr Ronnie Wing. When you come he will be your boss. I will put you back to switch and they will put you through.’
I felt a sudden frisson of anger. It’s weird how your mind can suddenly do an about-turn. I’ve got news for you, lady. Mr Ronnie Wing will not be running creative. What’s more, it will be an honest operation, no more corruption. What was it Mercy B. Lord called it? ‘Squeeze.’ There will be no more squeeze.
As I waited for the phone to be answered, I recalled dinner the previous night when Mercy B. Lord had explained ‘squeeze’ to me: the all-pervading system of bribery, inducements, cuts and percentages that was so endemic in Asia it wasn’t even questioned. ‘Simon, nothing among the Chinese or in Chinese business is done without squeeze; advertising could not be the exception.’ (Charles Brickman had also warned me never to accept things at face value.) She’d leaned forward across the restaurant table for emphasis. ‘There are no exceptions!’ She sat back in her chair and added, ‘It’s not a part of the system. It is the system.’
‘Ah, things may be changing,’ I replied confidently. ‘Asia is being invaded by the West.’
‘What, capitalism?’
‘Well, business; big business, anyway.’
Mercy B. Lord laughed. ‘The Chinese have been capitalists for thousands of years, Simon. The action all happens under the table; above the table everyone nods and agrees and is very polite.’
I’d done my mental arithmetic: if she was born in 1946, then she was twenty, and she worked as a guide for a business agency, which was hardly at the cutting edge of business action. ‘How do you know all this?’ I asked. I thought of my sisters, all within a couple of years of her age. Although they were all bright, they were still largely preoccupied with how short a miniskirt could be without being indecent, so as to pass the Phyllis Koo test. This also went for the bunnies in the agency, where I suspected that the subject of nail polish could take up half the lunch hour. The blokes weren’t any better. If I hadn’t majored in economics, I’d probably have been the same.
Mercy B. Lord gave me a straight look. ‘To the Chinese, squeeze is like breathing; you don’t think about it, you just do it to stay alive. I’m a Catholic,’ she said quietly. ‘I have been taught that bribery and corruption are both sins.’ She spread her hands, her nails long and perfectly manicured. ‘But I also know that it is not a sin in the eyes of a different god, and the Chinese have a god for everything, as you would know.’
‘Ch’ao Kung-ming, the god of wealth. My mum told us as kids that he rode a black tiger and used pearls as hand grenades.’
Mercy B. Lord laughed. ‘Yes, we know him, but the wealth god around here is Ts’ai Shen Yeh. His shrine is to be found in nearly every home. I was forgetting you’re Chinese.’
It must have been the first time ever that my Chinese face had been overlooked in favour of my European mind. ‘Be careful, remember what happened at the airport. I told you it’s only skin-deep. Inside I’m a dumb gwai-lo. Okay, this dinner is on me. When I pay the bill, does Miss Beatrice Fong get squeeze?’
Mercy B. Lord thought for a moment. ‘We have two pr
oblems here, Mr Koo. You have invited me to dinner. If I offer to pay, then you will lose face. This must never happen. Please remember that.’
‘But it’s out of the question – of course I’ll pay.’
Mercy B. Lord brought her fingers to her lips, but again the giggle managed to slip through. ‘That is the second problem. You see, this banquet is squeeze.’
The phone had rung for some time in what I hoped was the production department. Then, at last, a male voice answered. ‘Hello?’
‘Mr Wing … Ronnie Wing?’
‘I fetch him. Who you, sir? I tell him.’
‘Simon Koo from Australia.’
‘You call from Australia?’
‘No, no, I’m at Raffles Hotel, here in Singapore.’ I was getting decidedly irritable, but told myself it was a reasonable mistake – bad phrasing on my part.
‘Yes, I know this hotel, sir. But I am not going there, not once. Only I am going past when I am going Beach Road. I will tell him, sir. You wait, please.’
What seemed like another interminable wait followed, in the middle of which came a knock on my hotel-room door. ‘I’m on the phone. Please come in,’ I called. It was the hotel dhobi, or laundry man. Overnight, my suit had been cleaned and pressed, my shirt starched, my socks and underpants washed, and each delivered on a separate hanger covered in clear plastic. I pointed to the wardrobe, reached for my wallet and extracted an overly generous tip, but was forced to hold it out using only one hand. He thanked me with a large smile and a nod, accepting it with both hands then backing away towards the door.
‘Hello, Ronnie Wing here. Welcome to Singapore, Simon. I’m greatly looking forward to meeting you. When can we press the flesh?’
I was to learn that Ronnie Wing was in love with the advertising business, the ‘run it up the flagpole and see if it salutes’ Hollywood clichéd version. He’d bought the whole package. He talked, praised and encouraged using the jargon, invented his own metaphors and probably knew more about the sleazy side of Singapore nightlife than anyone else on the island. He walked the walk and talked the talk as if born to meet, greet and treat. He was the original glad-hander, joker, and brothel or bargirl negotiator. He never forgot a name and laughed uproariously at anyone’s corny jokes. He wanted more than anything in the world to be a creative hotshot, and collected all the art-director annuals and ‘how to make effective advertising’ books, and was the first in the office every month to read Advertising Age, the magazine that reported on the American ad scene. Ronnie read it from cover to cover and knew more current New York, Chicago and West Coast gossip than its editor. He seemed to believe that the big American names in advertising, such as David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach, were the new free-enterprise celestial gods. Ronnie was a complete walking, talking and cavorting parody of a sixties American ad man. He even wore blue seersucker suits for official occasions when a jacket might be required. In Singapore he was accepted as a member of the expat advertising group that came mostly from Jackson Wain, an Australian-owned ad agency, and Cathay Advertising, a Hong Kong outfit with agencies throughout the region and owned by a woman named Elma Kelly, where they would gossip, drink and play liar dice. Unfortunately, Ronnie didn’t have a creative bone in his body and I was to be stuck with him.
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