It was mid-afternoon in Tsimshatsui. It was 1976 and I was an air courier, staying in the Astor Hotel in the less expensive tourist section of Hong Kong, then still a British colony. The Astor was known in Chinese as "Langung Chowdin" or "White Palace Hotel." The name could be viewed as ironic for, as I later learned, the entire hotel had served as a whorehouse during the Vietnam War.
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(illustration by Victor Velez)
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I turned on the BBC station on the hotel radio and the British woman giving the weather report said, "It is currently 34 Celsius and the humidity is 100%." The idea of that much humidity took me aback, but I very much wanted to get out of the hotel room. Looking in the mirror before leaving, I saw a youngish man with a face and belly bloated from years of alcohol abuse. The hair atop this specter’s head, once a bright red, had faded already to a dull brown thanks to tropical sunlight, and his clothes were tattered. I shrugged at this figure and went out.
The toothless 83-year-old bellhop all in oyster white said, "Good morning, sir!" as I passed by, as he did no matter was it day or night. I saw Liz on the first floor near the elevator, in her little tour-arranging cubbyhole.
"I’ll be taking that water tour in a day or two, Liz."
"Okay," she said.
Liz was medium height, had wide, sensuous lips and a voluptuous figure, which she was showing off that day to best advantage. She wore a cheongsam, a traditional Chinese gown with slits up the sides. Liz was my friend. She gave me discounts on all the tours, and we could talk about anything.
As soon as I went out the door of the Astor I felt like I was in a barbershop chair and had just been hit in the face with a hot, wet towel. Less than a minute later the heavens opened up in a torrential downpour, but this lasted no more than three minutes, then disappeared down the gutters of Carnarvon Road. They’d been digging up the streets again, and the Crown Colony’s rich red clay filled the air with its pungent odor, ripe with fecundity. I turned left onto Nathan and headed for the Yue Hwa Chinese Products Emporium, junior to the bigger stores of the same name farther up Nathan.
Zhu was there as I came in. She said hello, warmly as always. Zhu was diminutive and quite dark, with sharply and beautifully defined features and long, raven hair.
"Listen, Zhu," I said. "A Taiwanese friend back in Hawaii is looking for a dictionary which defines simplified Chinese characters, traditional characters, their Romanization and the English translation. This has exactly what he’s looking for." I handed her a crumpled piece of paper.
"Yes, we have that. Just a minute." She brought the dictionary out and laid it before me with a concerned look.
"Oh, thanks, Zhu."
"Wait! Let me get something!" She ran off into the depths, such as they were, of the little store. Somewhat breathless, she came back a few minutes later with what looked like a smaller book. "This has the same number of characters, words and definitions in it, but see – "She pointed out that the larger book cost 65 Hong Kong dollars, while the smaller cost only 30.
"I’ll take the $30 one," I quickly said.
Zhu accepted the money and bagged the book for me, and we took leave of one another.
I headed up Nathan Road to Cameron, now a little self-conscious in the Mao jacket I always wore when in Hong Kong. Toward the midlength of Cameron Road stood the Waltzing Matilda Arms. This pub was owned by a Chinese man who used to be the accountant for the Australian who had opened it. The former accountant now watched his employees like a hawk as they entered every drink they served into a ledger. No sooner had I poked my head in the door when two off-duty British soldiers spotted me and sang, "Oh, Danny Boy." I must have the map of Ireland on my face, and they read it, no doubt, because British soldiers just done with duty in Northern Ireland were stationed in Hong Kong as a sort of R & R. I was incensed, considering it the height of ethnocentrism on their part, but I’ve never been the type for direct confrontations. After ordering and beginning to sip my San Mig (Hong Kong’s own beer, actually watered-down San Miguel), I searched for songs on the juke box calculated to drive the two Tommies out of the bar. I played "Rubber Bullets" by George Harrison, "Get Off My Cloud" by the Rolling Stones and Paul Simon’s "My Little Town." Not long after the third song started playing ("Nothing but the dead and dying left in my little town," making me, and probably making them, think of Belfast and Derry, but obviously not in the same way), they left the pub and their beers, with looks of consternation on their faces.
It was at the Waltzing Matilda Arms, around evening time, that I ran into my fellow courier, a Hawaiian, Ed Chase. "Had your ginseng yet?" I asked him. We sat down at the bar.
"Of course! Every day," he answered. "That stuff gives me the energy to keep going through this god-awful schedule of ours."
"Ed, you’ve been to the Crown Colony a lot, haven’t you?"
"Yep. Many times during my twenty years as a Merchant Seaman, let alone three times a month for these last three years, on this job."
"You really love Hong Kong, don’t you?"
"Yes. I know you do, too, but you don’t know it like I do. You should have been here during the Cultural Revolution riots in 1967," he said.
"Gee, Ed. That must have been exciting."
"Exciting? Exciting? I had to duck in a doorway to avoid a rampaging mob!"
After "talking story," as they say in the Islands, for a while longer, we decided to head back to Carnarvon Road and the sister pub, the Waltzing Matilda Inn. It was there that Ed and I talked of China. As I showed him my newly acquired Chinese dictionary, we were interrupted by two middle-aged British colonial bureaucrats.
"Where did you get that jacket?" asked the shorter, stouter one.
"In a bar in Honolulu, for five dollars," I said.
"What, may I ask, do you like about China?" He continued this interrogation as he reached for his pack of Dunhills.
"Well, I like that peasants are trained to be ‘barefoot doctors’ in the fields. I like the mass literacy campaigns. And I like the Little Red Soldiers, who make sure none of their classmates fall behind in school," I told him.
"How long have you studied China?" the taller, slimmer one asked, pointing to the dictionary.
"For six or seven years," I replied.
"And you’ve learned nothing yet?" Defiant, he held my gaze.
"Have you read, ‘The Emperor of the Blue Ants’?" the fat one asked.
"That’s a racist book. My grandmother is Chinese. She’d be more than willing to tell you just how racist it is," Ed interjected.
"Where are you from?" the slimmer one inquired of Ed.
"Hawaii," he replied.
"Was your grandfather, then, a witch doctor?" this same one asked.
Ed said, "Not quite. By the way, I see you’re smoking ‘Dunghills’. How do they taste in your mouth?"
"WELL!" huffed the Brit.
"Um-hmm. I guess we’d better get going." I slid the dictionary back into its bag. "Good night, gentlemen." I slid off the barstool and lined it back up against the bar, doing a half-decent job of concealing my anger at the way these two bureaucrats had treated Ed.
"Good night, then," they both said.
As Ed and I headed out the door, I turned to face them. Raising my fist, I shouted, "Up the IRA!" Their jaws dropped.
The toothless 83-year-old held the door for us as we came back into our "White Palace." He said, "Good morning, sirs!"
I re-entered my room, avoiding the mirror this time.
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