AH, the wonderful world of Hong Kong fiction. Paul Theroux came to Hong Kong to write another novel. While here he also managed to find time to write a 'handover piece' for The New Yorker.
It opens like this: ' 'Here comes the ghost-man,' someone mutters in Dr Gwai the herbalist's waiting room on Sugar Street, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong Island, as I limp in, foot swollen, toe joints inflamed. The office, piled high with trays containing bark and twigs and leaves, smells like a hamster cage. The mutter goes round round the room. 'Go gor gweilo lay la [the ghost-man is coming].' ' Paul. Fiction or fact, mate? We're confused.
'... Now that Hong Kong has begun to seem haunted and foreigners [especially the British] have become less and less visible,' he continues. 'Gweilo has become a particularly apt word for white folk during these last imperial days ... 'Gweilo used to be our secret word for white people,' a woman in Dr Gwai's waiting room tells me, 'but since the Joint Declaration it has been used in a sort of friendly way.' Like chinky-chonk, gweilo has become a term of affection.' Indeed Paul.
agent provocateurs IT SEEMS a few recruitment agents working over the border in Shenzhen can spin a taller tale than even Paul Theroux. 'Chinese workers' writes Andrew Higgins in The Guardian, 'have been heading for the hills in recent weeks to escape an Armaggedon rumoured for Monday night.
'While the rest of the world has hailed Britains sometimes grumpy but never violent retreat from Hong Kong as a model of peaceful democracy, across the border in China they know better: no one ever gives up territory without a fight. Especially a territory with so much cash and so many dim sum restaurants.' The rumour of a bloody British last stand apparently came from recruitment agencies taking commissions from factories for hiring or rehiring workers. As Higgins says, 'Exoduses are good for business.' The local government in Shenzhen is said to have officially denied and denounced reports about 'China and England waging war in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and the surrounding areas'. As did the departing imperialists. 'British officials,' concludes Higgins, 'said they had no plans for a war with China on Monday.' sink the pitcher BRITAIN would never go to war over Hong Kong. Why not? Because, according to the drier than dry George Pitcher in The Observer, 'so few people care about the future of Hong Kong that I'm surprised the Tories didn't make it a key election issue'.
The few that do care, states Pitcher, tend to be the rich and the powerful. 'In the royal enclosure at Ascot last week, I overheard a lady saying it was 'such a shame Hong Kong is going - a whole British way of life is ending,' ' he wrote. Pitcher certainly doesn't care about Hong Kong. According to him it's 'the cheap, package-tour end of the colonial industry - a sort of Torremolinos of empire.' It gets worse.