Kowloon Tong

Paul Theroux

Description

In this “moody thriller,” a family business is targeted for takeover as control of Hong Kong shifts from the British to the Chinese (The New York Times).
 
Ninety-nine years of colonial rule are ending as the British prepare to hand over Hong Kong to China. Betty Mullard and her son, Bunt, have lived here for years, mostly keeping apart from their foreign surroundings, except for some indulgence in the local food, or in Bunt’s case, the local girls. The handover is not a concern for them—until the mysterious Mr. Hung from the mainland offers them a large sum for their family business.
 
They refuse. But they fail to realize that Mr. Hung is unlike the other Chinese people they’ve known: he will accept no refusals. When a young female employee whom Bunt has been dating vanishes, he is forced to make important decisions for the first time in his life—but his good intentions are pitted against the will of Mr. Hung, and the threat of the ultimate betrayal.
 
“A compact, provocative gem of a novel” (The Boston Globe), from an award-winning author acclaimed for both his fiction and his travel memoirs—including Deep South, The Great Railway Bazaar, and The Mosquito Coast—Kowloon Tong was praised by Bette Bao Lord in The Washington Post Book World as “a taut, illuminating story that transcends its timely subject.”

Sujets

• 1997
• Colonization
• England
• Colony
• Asia
• Asian
• British Empire
• People's Republic of China
• Colonialism
• English
• Far East
• Imperialism
• Politics
• Racism
• Sovereignty
• Taiwan
• Ethnic group
• Travel
• Kowloon Peninsula
• Expatriate
• Pearl River Delta
• Exotic

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 06 juillet 1998
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780547525884
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Afterword
About the Author
First Mariner Books edition 1998

Copyright © 1997 by Paul Theroux
Afterword copyright © 1998 by Paul Theroux
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Theroux, Paul. Kowloon Tong / Paul Theroux. p. cm.
ISBN 0-395-86029-6
ISBN 978-0-395-90141-0 (pbk.)
I. Title. PS 3570. H 4 K 68 1997 813'54—dc21 96-29717 CIP

e ISBN 978-0-547-52588-4 v2.0817
Mah jiu paau.
Mouh jiu tiuh.

The horses will go on running.
The dancing will continue.

—Deng Xiaoping’s pledge, in Cantonese, to Hong Kong
1
S OME DAYS Hong Kong seemed no different from the London suburb she had lived in before the war. Today, for example, the cold early morning with fragments of fog at the windows, she was back in Balham. The gray sky was falling in big soft wisps of tumbled stuffing, like a cushion torn open—but not one of those stinky straw-filled Chinese cushions. When the wind gusted, the drops of rain, as though flushed from just above her, plopped harder on the roof, which was also the ceiling of the parlor at Albion Cottage. The sky, the roof, the ceiling—on a wet day like this they were one thing.
Betty Mullard sat in what she called the lounge waiting for her son, Bunt, to come in to breakfast.
“Fancy that,” she said softly to the plip-plop of the rain. “Chinky-Chonks.”
And she went on thinking: Chinese relatives? What Chinese relatives?
She had just put the phone down after speaking to Monty, who was Mr. Chuck’s solicitor, and also hers—theirs, the firm’s, everyone trusted Monty Brittain. He was a Londoner too, a lad, sported a bowler hat, and he just laughed and looked at her with dead eyes when she said, “I trust you because you’re a Jewboy.”
Mr. Chuck had never mentioned Chinese relatives.
The question was, How to tell Bunt?
Hearing another sudden clatter of raindrops, she was back in Balham again. She looked up and saw the Queen, the portrait over the mahogany sideboard, a larger photograph than that of Betty’s late husband, George, in his RAF uniform on the same wall. The portrait had been part of the room, as permanent a fixture as the lamps and candle brackets, but lately Betty had begun to look closely at the Queen’s face, querying it. The Queen was practically a goddess, but she was also a mother, and a ruler. Her kingdom was established and serene and orderly. “She works so hard” was all Betty had ever said, a kind of benediction.
The greatest change Betty had known in her life, keener than the death of her father, worse than the war but with the same unexpected surprises and hurts (all her sighs of “Whatever next!”), was the seismic shift in the domestic life of the royal family. Her father had been old and sick: his time had come. The war had been won. But in these past years Betty had felt a sense of overwhelming disillusionment—loss and grief and bewilderment of an almost blaspheming sort that had very nearly unhinged her—at the news of divorces and muddles and adulteries and scandals and secrets of the royal family. Her Majesty excepted, they were human and horrible, and they were naked, exposed for all the world to see. For the first time in her life she saw their flesh, the common freckles on Fergie’s moo-cow face, Diana’s skinny arms, even Charles, his white legs. To Bunt, who had no idea of the majesty of the Queen and how much had changed, his mother said, “And the youngest—just a shame—he’s a nancy boy, no question.”
The rain shaken from the overhanging trees fell noisily on the cobbles out front and on the crazy paving that George and Wang had put in. Betty looked in that direction too when she heard the loud dribbling spatter of the drizzle, and she saw the lily cluster, big leaves hit by the falling rain, and, nodding, the blossoms seemed to grieve like girls in white bonnets, to share her sorrow.
In her purple woolly sweater Betty matched the tea cozy that lay thick on the contours of the teapot before her, and the egg cozies, two of them, that sat on the soft-boiled eggs like bobble hats. On mornings like this Wang always fitted the items with these accessories that Betty had made. The color was unfortunate but the wool had been cheap, bought in bulk through one of the company’s wholesalers, which explained the amount of yarn. There were also purple coasters for the souvenir glasses on the sideboard, where they stood with the souvenir saucers and the letter holder and the sturdy thermos flask and the tiny ceramic wine barrel from Spain, with its clutch of toothpicks, and the various items (brass jar, crystal bear, enamel ashtray) she had bought in the gift shops of transit lounges on her London flights.
With the same wool she had made cuffs for the chairs and collars for the lamps, and the pictures too—of George and Ivy in Carshalton, of Reeny and Ken, of Bunt in his pram at Southend, and of an odd foursome, mothers and sons on the beach at Silver Mine Bay in Lantau: Betty and little Bunt with Jia-Jia and her small son Wang—the frames had purple knitted sleeves. They held the damp and filled the bungalow’s lounge with the smell of clammy wool. And cold toast and bacon fat and the savory sourness of just-sliced papaya—Wang had left the kitchen door ajar.
Albion Cottage was off Lugard Road, on a bluff above the Peak fire station. The fire brigade was inside today with the windows and doors shut. No voices, no music, no sirens. Everything in the bungalow on a morning like this had a film of dampness, and the dampness seemed to liven the mildew and gave the interior the ripe cheesy odor of a mortuary. Varnished wood was affected: a dampness dulled the case of the wind-up clock with its ponderous ticking and its iffy mainspring, caused a slick on the oak box of silver cutlery with its small silver plate, engraved George and Betty, 1946. There was damp on the newly twisted mechanical calendar that needed a turn every day, reading THU 7 MAR 96; on the sofa and the needlepoint cushion covers; on the leather footstool (still showing George’s heel marks), the jam jars, the tea tray, the old magazines stacked beside the armchair, and the armchair itself—it all ponged.
Yet on a clear morning, like a hallucination from the east facing windows, where heavy with blackflies and aphids there were nasturtiums tumbling from a window box, Betty could see China—Red China, as they used to call it. Shum Chun was an hour by train from the factory in Kowloon Tong across the harbor. In forty-five years she had never visited, nor had George when he was alive, nor had Bunt, for—near or far—what was the point in going to China?

Bunt came in blowing his nose, saying, “Did you hear the phone ring at six o’clock? Imagine a twit calling that early!”
Wang hurried after him with the toast rack and a plate of bacon, the papaya she had smelled, and a napkin bundle.
Bunt folded his handkerchief into his pocket and went to the table and hesitated. He was forty-three and balding, and he touched his scalp lightly with Braille-reading taps and tracings of his fingertips, as though for luck, or searching for hair—or was it perhaps a reflex from the time he had had hair?
“Wang made some fresh oaties. Have an oatie, Bunt. Give him an oatie, Wang, there’s a good chap.”
There was an element of pride in Betty’s encouragement. It was not really Wang’s food. She had taught the man her own recipes and so it was her food.
Wang was tall—taller than Bunt, with a broad north China face, a flattish head, and wide-apart eyes that gave him a snake’s features. He looked even more snake-like when he smiled, but that was seldom. His laughter was more frequent but even more sinister, since it never indicated pleasure, only anxiety and fear. He seemed to be on the verge of laughing this morning. Had he heard anything of the phone call?
Wang said nothing. He put the food on the table and withdrew. He had a sloping sideways walk which Betty blamed on his height. He was solitary. He was not mysterious. He jogged.
Bunt also said nothing. He was dealing with his egg, his mouth was full, a fleck of egg clung to his cheek.
“There’s a wee scrap of bacon going spare,” Betty said.
“If it’s going spare.” Bunt motioned with his spoon.
“I’ll do the honors.”
His mother slid the three stiff rashers onto his plate and then switched on the radio. It was green-painted bakelite with a yellow illuminated dial, as big as a breadbox, and it crackled. George had bought the radio. “It’s a pup,” Betty always said, and Bunt still boasted about it for its not being Japanese. It was a Roberts. Like the sturdy John Bull thermos flask on the sideboard it was English-made. “We manufactured radios once!” The TV was a Bush. The gramophone was a Bush. The toaster was a Dualite. The bathroom porcelain, basin, bath, and hopper were all Twyford Adamants. &