Kowloon Tong (25 page)

Bunt was numb. He was sick, his stomach distended with fear, the terror that was no different from the worst runny tummy.

He whimpered but was almost unintelligible. He was holding his cellular phone. He was trying to say, "Mei-ping."

In and out of the dense clouds he saw the city in a dusty twilight in which Kowloon Tong with all its lighted signs was a massive grid of red streets. Then the plane cruised into a cloudscape of whiteness, like a sea of foam, a limitless Arctic.

"Mum," he said again, feeling like an infant. "Did you say anything to Mr. Hung?"

His mother's teeth always seemed to slip out of alignment when she was untruthful, and though she had not yet said a word, she was chewing her teeth, seeming to right them.

"We're well out of it," she finally said. She was smiling. Why? "You'll find someone else. It's true. They all look alike." Then she lowered her voice because she saw a Chinese woman in a uniform coming down the aisle. "Chinky-Chonks."

Tottering slightly in the banking plane, the flight attendant said to Bunt, "Do you want to turn that off for me?"

Working his thumb into the power switch, Bunt pressed and watched the lights blink and then fail, and the window faded and the little thing died in his hand with a gulp like a small peep of protest.

A
LL OF
Kowloon Tong trembled as the wrecking ball swung sideways from the crane, hit the sign
Imperial
Stitching,
and punched it from the roof of the building. The sign shattered as it fell. On the next swing a corner of the top floor went, shaped like a wedge of cake but made of brick. It came apart in a dumping of single bricks as it dropped to the ground. The solid hit on the rest of that floor exposed Miss Liu's office, Lily's cubicle, Mr. Cheung's office, the lavatory, the interior of Bunt's suite. The floor was soon on the ground in pieces. Still the wrecking ball swung, smacking the yielding brick. By degrees the cutting floor, the old underwear floor, Stitching, Packing, Storage, Labels, Shipping, all collapsed in a shower of dust and bricks. It was an old building. It went fast, many of the former employees watched, and some of them wept—wept harder than when they had been fired just a week before, harder than they had at Mr. Chuck's funeral.

No one spoke Mr. Hung's name. It seemed dangerous to do so. In any case, he was not present for the demolition.

It was a hot day in late May, the air thick with the morning's evaporated downpour, and the dust was vile, like another wicked aspect of the humidity.

And so it went on, the wrecking ball swinging back and forth, the dumb pockmarked thing suspended from a greasy cable that was worked by a small Chinese man in the dented cab of a Chinese-made crane. The ball brought down the old building and all its brackets and ornaments, its bricks, its beams, its red doors, its mirrors, its sewing machines—the parts of Imperial Stitching that represented the Five Elements and held the whole enterprise in balance: Earth, Wood, Fire, Water, Metal.

Soon everything that had been standing lay buried, and the Hong Kong people watching, sensing the
ch'i
whirling like gas, and feeling exposed and conspicuous with the building gone, tucked their heads down and hurried away. Then the site was empty, just broken stones with the junked and rubbly look of reclaimed land, and sitting on it was the long-necked crane, like a green dragon with a toy in its mouth.

O
NE DAY
early in those years of intense speculation that preceded the Hand-over of Hong Kong to China, I asked a man in Hong Kong what book I should read to understand the mood of the people. He suggested
On Death and Dying
by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. "We've gone through all those stages," he said. When I read the book, which
is
about coping with terminal illness, I saw what he meant: First Stage, Denial and Isolation; Second Stage, Anger; Third Stage, Bargaining; and so on, through Depression, Acceptance, and Hope. In much the same spirit Jan Morris wrote in her first Hong Kong book (1988) that reflecting on the colony before the Hand-over was like "contemplating the mysteries of death."

In this morbid way, a political death watch, the Hand-over was on people's minds. Some people found the suspense unbearable and emigrated to other countries; others stayed. It was unprecedented in the modern world for a colony to be handed back—especially to be handed back to a repressive, puritanical regime in which there were no democratic institutions. The contradiction, of course, was that as a colony Hong Kong had hardly any democracy either. On the eve of the Hand-over there were furious but futile debates.

Because the Hand-over was an absolute certainty, it fascinated me and many others, and we buzzed around it, knowing that after June 30,1997, Hong Kong would be a Chinese possession. Except for a hazy notion that stricter laws would be enforced and unsmiling rulers would be in power, I had no idea what would happen to Hong Kong after that. The train trip across the border to Shenzhen, a fifty-minute ride from the terminal in Kowloon to the gloomy Chinese city of ugly new buildings, gave some clues to the future, but any sensible person must concede that the future is unknowable. I concentrated on the present. Telling the truth is often like fortunetelling; more so in fiction—the imaginative truth can be prophetic.

Kowloon Tong
was a calculated novel. I wanted to write about Hong Kong as it was on the eve of the Hand-over. It did not percolate up from my past, the way most of my fiction has seemed to, but struck me suddenly one day in Hong Kong when I saw the story whole. I made notes, like a painter urgently sketching, and then back home I sat down and wrote it, confident that I was fulfilling an artistic as well as a political intention. I feel awkward using the word "artistic," though. All I mean is that I was guided by my imagination and being myself.

I had been in Hong Kong for an extended period, devising the story for Wayne Wang's film
Chinese Box
(released in 1998). I spent my afternoons walking the back streets. One day I was walking through Kowloon in a cold spring drizzle, going north from Mong Kok up Lai Chi Kok Road, just prowling. Not knowing what I was looking for, I looked at everything. A Union Jack flapping on a tall pole at the Sham Shui Po police station caught my eye. Soon after, a red van sped by, on its side the British crest and the gold letters
Royal Mail
A large truckload of doomed squealing pigs was driven into the slaughterhouse on Fat Tseung Street. Nearby, on the western side of Kowloon, an enormous land reclamation project was under way, and the bridge to the new airport was being finished. Moody Mong Kok and its bird market were scheduled for demolition. All the newspapers were full of stories about the coming of the Chinese, and in the bookstores were dire titles:
The Fall of Hong Kong, The Last Colony, The Last Days of Hong Kong.

And people were talking. They were thinking out loud in the most un-Chinese way. In this interim period, while the British government was being ineffectual, and the People's Republic was quietly maneuvering, and it was business as usual in Hong Kong, people were behaving somewhat out of character. Great events bring people together and make them talkative, just as, with the dire forecast of a storm, people chatter, comparing what they know, which is usually very little. Their sense of being ignorant and vulnerable makes for intimacy.

I was not interviewing people, for such formal questions, with my taking notes, made for self-consciousness and equivocation—on both my part and theirs. The way to the truth was the humbler route of anonymity, faceless me striking up conversations with strangers. I did it all the time in Hong Kong, and nearly always the person said:
It's all right for rich people here, they can go anywhere, but I have to stay, and I am worried I am afraid for my family, I don't know what will happen, the Chinese will not be like the British.

Shop clerks, taxi drivers, people at the herbalist's, the women at the fresh-squeezed-juice stand, newspaper vendors, schoolchildren, the pimps in the karaoke lounges, the mama-sans in the girlie bars, the shoeshine boys, the camera dealers. They didn't know who I was.

I think it will be bad when the Chinese take over,
they said.
The Chinese are not clever. With the Chinese it is just money, money, money,
which was exactly what a woman from Beijing said to me about these Hong Kong critics, adding,
They are refugees. They live in the present, they are politically naive, and very few of them are interested in democracy.

It had been that way in Hong Kong for the past year, and if anything people had become more garrulous as the wind had begun to rise. The Hong Kongers were worried, and they giggled with apprehension. I had the feeling that on July 1,1997, their voices would be stilled.

Looking ahead, I realized that this would be gone: not just the Union Jacks and the mail vans and the old buildings—indeed, whole districts—but also this revealing talk, the apprehension, and all the maneuvering. In the Hong Kong Club the businessmen seemed hearty; many had grown rich on joint ventures with China. I wanted to capture all those feelings, and the landscape, before they were lost forever.

The Hand-over, with its rituals and pyrotechnics, happened on schedule. It spectacularly demonstrated the British genius for putting on a parade and the Chinese gusto for ñreworks. At midnight, the Union Jack was run down the pole and the governor-general, Christopher Patten, sailed into the darkness with Prince Charles, on the royal yacht
Britannia.

Now that some time has passed, what has happened in Hong Kong in its first year as a Chinese Special Administrative Region? In the beginning I had a personal experience of change. An excerpt from
Kowloon Tong
that was bought and paid for by
Playboy
was ultimately not included in the magazine. When I looked for reasons, I was candidly told that
Playboy's
marketing department had been hoping to sell T-shirts, cigars, and condoms in the People's Republic, and it was felt that some of the odious-seeming Chinese in my novel would offend the commissars, who would hold
Playboy
responsible for my book.
Playboy's
Hong Kong licensee, Chaifa Holdings, had more than five hundred outlets in China, which generated revenue in the tens of millions of U.S. dollars. Fearing China's wrath,
Playboy
kowtowed by scrapping my "anti-Chinese" story.

I heard of many examples of this sort of self-censorship. Some months later, Christopher Patten wrote a book based on his experiences as Hong Kong's last governor-general. He had a contract with HarperCollins. His finished manuscript—in which he spoke his mind—was rejected and his contract withdrawn. Behind all this was the figure of Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon, owner of HarperCollins, who hoped to make a cable-TV deal with China. More kowtowing.

It is clear that if China can intimidate wealthy Western publishing interests that had previously boasted of their commitment to independent thought, there should be no serious problem whipping the people of Hong Kong into shape. In Hong Kong itself, the Chinese authorities (who had promised they would leave the colony to its own system for fifty years) have been loudly criticizing its broadcasting service, RTHK, which is modeled on the BBC and celebrated for its excellent unbiased reporting and its variety of arts programs. A pro-Chinese bureaucrat in Hong Kong slandered RTHK by calling it a "remnant of colonial rule." The chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, showed considerable sympathy for this view. These ominous noises were drowned out by public opinion in Hong Kong: 90 percent of the people were in favor of keeping broadcasting independent of the government.

But another ominous noise was made in March 1998 by Mr. Tung when he spoke of putting off the date for democratic elections. Everyone agrees that universal suffrage, as practiced in Malawi and Mozambique, is a long way off. The Hong Kong stock market has fared pretty badly; the Hang Seng index has Men. There has been a dramatic slide in property values. Tourists, who went to Hong Kong to get a glimpse of the colony wrapped in the Union Jack, have been less eager to visit it as a Chinese Special Administrative Region. It is now one of the most expensive cities in the world. It has ceased to be a sweatshop. It was always a Chinese city in an ethnic sense; it is more and more Chinese in a political sense, but less a horror than a bore.

"Albion Cottage" still exists on the Peak, under another name—a friend of mine lives in it. After I finished the novel, I went back to Hong Kong and saw this friend and said, "By the way, I put your house in my novel." She laughed sadly and told me that she had just been asked to vacate it. It is on valuable land; the cottage will soon be torn down. A tall apartment block is scheduled to be built where Betty and Bunt had tea, with their backs turned to China.

APRIL
1998