Kowloon Tong Read Online Free PDF Page A

wisdom. By then he was frequenting the chicken houses and karaoke lounges in Mong Kok, where
gweilos
never went. The encounters were brief, frantic, hurried, mostly silent, because he had to get back to the office or back to his mother. And though they were experienced in not showing it, the girls were in a great hurry too.
    One day in Kowloon Tong, in the Pussy Cat, Bunt saw Mr. Chuck in a back booth, his reflection in a mirror. The girl beside him looked familiar too—she was almost certainly one he himself had been with. Bunt understood the old man better that day. You could say anything to these girls, or nothing. Down at the Cricket Club he had heard men speaking of bar girls and complaining, "They have no feelings." Precisely. That was their greatest virtue, that they made no claims, no demands, had no hopes. They were the happy hello-goodbye of urgent sex. It was not about them, but about your own pleas
ure. They reserved their feelings for other matters. The workers at Imperial Stitching and Labels—say, one of those pretty girls, Mei-ping or Ah Fu—never said they didn't like the job, nor did they say they liked it; they simply sat down and did it. They were paid, they performed, they were gone, like the girls in the bars. They did their work, and they would do almost anything that was asked of them. Their greatest skill was in vanishing at the end and leaving Bunt to himself. He preferred the simplest, most silent girls. He hated all talk. Humor he felt to be out of place in any sexual encounter. It made him feel self-conscious and silly. He disliked the Filipino girls—whose English was usually good—for attempting jokes.
    Mei-ping was so pretty. She was a good worker too. One day she was in his office past quitting time, going over a badge pattern. "I don't want to keep you." She had lingered. "It's okay, mister." She was seated on his sofa. He left his desk and sat beside her. He touched her, he kissed her. "Do you like that?" She had said nothing. Nothing meant yes. In that Hong Kong way, Mei-ping became one of his lovers.
    He succeeded with Mei-ping by treating her like a chicken, like a phoenix. He expected only that she cooperate, and at the end of it he rewarded her, with money or with a present. She said she preferred presents; he suspected her preference to be money. He tried to keep the other girls in the factory from knowing, but they probably knew—they knew everything. Mei-ping had no family. She said she had come from China some years ago. She lived in a room with the other one, Ah Fu, who was similarly alone. He wanted to make love to Ah Fu too,
but he knew it would complicate matters. They would not say when or how they had come from China. They were probably eye-eyes, illegal immigrants, though what did it matter? This was not China, it was a British colony, with the Union Jack flying over the whorehouses and factories and bars and banks and police stations and Government House.
    They were afternoon and early evening affairs, in the hours between work and home, between his factory and his mother. Nearly every day of his life he had spent under her roof. They ate every night at Albion Cottage. They rarely went out—they disliked Chinese food and indeed made a point of never eating it. In the years before television they had listened to Armed Forces Radio, and often still did, on the green radio that was as big as a breadbox, that got hot when it was left on.
    Betty gambled at Happy Valley and Sha Tin, but never recklessly. "Just a flutter." She hedged her bets with what was known at the Hong Kong racecourses as a quinella, choosing the first and second horse in the same race. She liked sitting in the members' enclosure on race days with a plate of chips and her binoculars. Bunt was a member of the Hong Kong Club, by virtue of his father's membership, and the Cricket Club, not for the cricket but the lawn bowling. He went to St. John's Cathedral. He saw Mr. Chuck less and