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Nick Walker

The Monkey King 
by Timothy Mo (Random House)  
 While proving a tremendous success, it was notable that the recently concluded  Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival featured not one  world-beating Hongkonger on what was a generally illustrious programme. 
Which native son or daughter would you want topping such a bill? Timothy Mo  comes to mind, even though he would be a returnee - he was the star guest of the festival in  2000, its debut year.
Born here in 1950  to a Chinese father and British mother,   he was educated in Hong Kong and England. In early adulthood Mo turned out to be one of those high-fliers whose life seems supremely effortless and well-timed. 
After graduating from Oxford University, he worked in London for the leftist magazine the New Statesman,  during its groovy 1970s heyday, alongside Martin Amis and other hip young scribes on the cusp of greatness.
Then, when he decided it was time to turn his hand to fiction, he cranked out The Monkey King,  a  bi-cultural gem that glints with sharp humour and observations of colonial-era and Chinese-household social conventions. 
Published in 1978, this comedy-of-manners netted the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize  a year later.
Set in the Hong Kong of the 1950s, The Monkey King's hero is  Wallace  Nolasco, a young Macanese  who marries into big money. The trouble is his in-laws are  the  dysfunctional Poons, lorded over by a miserly patriarch, too stingy to provide his family with more than one full meal a day. Wallace  fights back, but is compromised when his father-in-law exploits and corrupts Wallace's civil service job. The hapless Wallace  lands in hot water and is cast out, wife May-ling in tow, to a rural village.
Akin to the mythical story of Sun  Wu-kong, the famous Monkey King of the classical Chinese epic, Journey to the West, Wallace employs cunning, stealth, and sleight of hand to get his mojo back. And when he prevails he is rewarded with control of the Poon business empire.
The Monkey King is crammed with insights into the ways of Chinese family politics, and observations on Confucianism  and the soul of a colonial city. And it's all manifested in a pleasing  blend of satire and social and psychological analysis. 
This sunny and deceptively simple tale was published when few English-language writers of ethnic provenance had entered the mainstream  and so Mo was something of a pioneering voice in 1978, as well as a stylish writer  whose time had come. 
His next three books were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The Monkey King's follow-up, 1982's Sour Sweet, was adapted for the big screen in 1988.



BOOK (1978)