World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (10 page)

And now Parry was full of enthusiastic talk about their future: about where they would live, about how contemptuously he would deal with anybody who tried to snub him for marrying a Chinese. This went on for three or four months. Then Suzie noticed that he was growing less communicative, that he was having those brooding spells again. One night she asked him when he intended to resign from the police, start looking round for another job. He replied impatiently that there was no hurry: he couldn't leave the police, anyhow, until he had completed another half-year. Then he said he was tired. He sent her home.

The next night he sent her home again; and a few nights later, after further brusque dismissals, she turned up at his flat to find it full of luggage and crates.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Borneo.” He looked at her as if she was a stranger. He took five hundred dollars out of his wallet and handed them to her. “Now get out.”

“How long you go to Borneo for?”

“How long? I'm being transferred to the Borneo police—I'm going for good.”

“What about getting married?”

“What's that?”

“Getting married.”

He stared at her with such a convincing show of bewilderment that Suzie wondered if he had really gone mad and forgotten.

“What the devil are you talking about?” he said.

“You said we get married at English church. Live North Point. Nice flat.”

His eyes blazed with anger. “What are you trying on? Blackmail?”

“No blackmail. You're father of my baby.”

“That's your story. But I know you dance-hall girls—you're just a bunch of dirty tarts. All right, I'll send you fifty dollars a month for maintenance. Only don't try any funny business, or you'll regret it. Now get out!”

The baby was born two months later. Shortly afterwards she received a money order for fifty dollars. The payment continued for another three months and then stopped. She never heard of Parry again.

Soon after the arrival of Suzie's baby Yu-lan left Hong Kong to take a dance-hall job in Japan. The heyday of the Hong Kong dance halls was passing as the wealthy refugees from New China drifted away to Formosa, and the girls were feeling the pinch; but in Tokyo there was always an opening for Chinese girls, who appealed to exotic tastes. Yu-lan had been recruited along with five other girls by a little Japanese gentleman with a toothbrush moustache, who had made arrangements for their transit by air; and Suzie, prevented by the baby from going herself, said a tearful farewell at the airfield.

Until this time Suzie, who had started work again at the Granada, had continued to share Yu-lan's room in Kowloon—for the obliging and easy-going Yu-lan had thought nothing of the addition of a baby and amah, which indeed by local standards had still left the room luxuriously underpopulated. However, now that Yu-lan had gone Suzie took a room on the Hong Kong side to save the endless ferry crossings. She consulted a fortuneteller about the best day for removal, and moved strictly according to advice. Nevertheless her tenancy of the new room began unluckily: the following day she fell ill with some sort of fever. She grew worse from week to week, and lost all her flesh. She became like a skeleton. She was bedridden for three months.

During this time her savings ran low, and before she had properly recovered she went out to find work again. She took a tram to the Central District to ask for her job back at the Granada. The dance hall was on the sixth floor above a department store. The lift was out of order and she had to walk up the stairs. She arrived feeling dizzy and sick. She noticed that there was a new sign outside the dance hall, although she could not read it. She went in. It had been turned into a restaurant.

After this outing she was in bed for another three weeks. Then the amah left because Suzie could not pay her. There was no food for the baby, no money, and Suzie decided that she would have to sell her only remaining piece of jewelry: the gold bangle given her by Alan Muir on the last occasion they had met. She looked for it, but it had vanished. The amah must have taken it in lieu of wages.

She felt very ill again; but the baby was crying. She went round to a girl friend's room to borrow some money. The girl was out. She returned to the street and hung about on the corner until she was picked up by a coolie from the docks. He paid her two dollars. She was so ashamed of this episode as a “street girl” that she had never told anybody about it before. She had not even told Gwenny.

The next day she found a job in another dance hall. But there was less money nowadays, and more girls; prices had dropped. She made scarcely enough to pay the rent and the new amah.

Then one day in the street she ran into a Shanghai girl she had known at the Granada. The girl, who looked very prosperous, told her that she was now working in a hotel catering for European sailors. She much preferred it to the dance hall. There was no bossy manager to push you around, no time wasted dancing with a man all evening only to find he didn't want you. No messing about at all. You just took the boy upstairs and got on with it.

Suzie asked how long you spent upstairs.

“Oh, just a short-time,” the girl said. “Sometimes you go for all night, but you really make more money with several short-times.”

Suzie shook her head. She despised the girl for sinking so low. It was really prostituting oneself. The dance-hall girls did not consider themselves to be prostitutes; they were dance partners who were prepared, if they liked a man enough, to extend their favors to the bed for a gift of money. The transaction was performed decorously, with dinner as a preliminary, and was sanctified by the length of time it took: a whole night was the minimum requirement of decency. The dance girls looked down on bar girls, with their unceremonious short-times, just as bar girls looked down on street girls who picked up coolies on corners.

“I don't know how you could bring yourself to do it,” Suzie said, conveniently forgetting her own shameful experience in the street.

The girl, who as it happened was Little Alice, giggled unabashed.

“I like it. The sailors are nice and young. Not old dodderers like we used to get at the Granada. I like them young.” She glanced down appreciatively at the new pair of shoes that she had just bought herself. “Well, I've got to get on. There are two American ships in this morning. In case you're interested, the hotel's on the water front near the ferry.”

Suzie watched her go with a mixture of pity and contempt. However, that night, after hanging about for five hours in the dance hall, she returned to her room with an empty purse. The time had again arrived to face facts. And the next day she consulted a fortuneteller about a favorable day for changing jobs.

The fortuneteller advised against the next few days, the last of the First Moon. He recommended an early day thereafter, reciting to her from his almanac that this day would be good for traveling, starting new studies, putting in doors, buying livestock, burying female relatives, and commencing new business. The luckiest period was between 3
P.M.
and 6
P.M.
He thought that if she followed this advice she was bound to prosper and attain success in her chosen career.

And thus a week later, on the Third Day of the Second Moon, in the afternoon, Suzie started work at the Nam Kok.

II

She picked absently at the blanket between her crossed legs. “I hated this place at first, you know,” she said. “It was very hard. Sometimes I told sailors, ‘You find some other girl! You're too dirty for me! Too drunk! Too bad-manners!' So the other girls told me, ‘Suzie, you're stuck-up!'”

But she had got used to it. One got used to anything. One started by thinking, “Circumstances may have pitchforked me into this life—but I'm not like the others who belong to it naturally. I shall always be a stranger here. I'm different.” Then the life embraced one; became one's world. One became a stranger to the worlds one had left behind.

“Yes, I suppose one can get used to anything,” I said, and I thought: like the war. Like all the people who had found themselves in situations that a year or two before would have been unthinkable: living under a sky that had once been so safe, and that now rained bombs; machine-gunning those boys you had drunk beer with at Heidelberg, the brothers of the girls you had kissed at Bonn; cleaning the lavatories you had only expected to have to use. Oh, you could get used to anything, even being a sailor's whore. It would surprise the nice girls how easily they could get used to it if it came to the push; how soon they'd be chattering about positions and prices; how quickly they'd know a sailor who was out for a free fumble from a sailor good for a short-time. How quickly it became their world.

I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes ago Ah Tong had come in for Suzie. Her boy friend had waked up and demanded her return.

“Suzie, hadn't you better go?” I said.

“Soon.” She leaned without uncrossing her legs to reach the teapot on the bedside table, and refilled her glass. She sipped the tea, frowning. “My baby still coughs, you know. I get worried.”

“Haven't you seen a doctor about him, Suzie?”

“Yes, I took him to hospital. The hospital doctor said, ‘Nothing the matter—fine baby!' But he still coughs. Cough-cough! Cough-cough!”

The telephone rang and I picked it up. It was Ah Tong speaking from his desk on the landing. He said that the sailor had been asking for Suzie again, and though he had been very polite and restrained, Ah Tong counseled her return.

“Otherwise, sir,” he said, “it will give our house a bad reputation.”

“That would never do, Ah Tong,” I said.

Suzie rose reluctantly and went to the door.

“I go now.”

“He sounds a nice boy, anyhow,” I said.

Suzie shrugged indifferently. “Suzie, you're so pretty,” she said like a sailor.

“Is that what he told you?”

“All sailors tell me.”

“Well, don't you like it?”

“I don't care. Suzie, you're so pretty.' Then he goes away—new sailor comes. ‘Suzie, you're so pretty.' What good? I want same man to say that every day, ‘Suzie, you're so pretty.' Yes, same man!”

“I say it most days.”

“No good. You're not proper boy friend. Don't go to bed.”

“Is that so important?”

“Yes—important.”

“Well, it's no use thinking about it when I can't afford it.”

“I told you before. I don't want money. I go to bed for nothing. But you think, ‘No good—she's just come from sailor.'”

“But surely you can understand, Suzie?”

“No. I go with sailor for job. No love. No feeling. Just like holding somebody for dance. Only take off clothes, lie down.”

“It's not really the same.”

“Yes, same.”

“If I made love to you, I'd want to feel you belonged to me. And you wouldn't belong.”

“Yes—belong. Go to bed with sailor—nothing happens inside. Nothing happens in heart. Go to bed with you—everything happens. I love. I feel beautiful. I think, ‘My man.' You think, ‘My girl.' We belong.”

“It's not as easy as that.”

“Yes, easy. So easy you don't understand.” She started to go.

“Suzie, listen—”

“No listen. No good talking—your talk is more clever than dirty little yum-yum girl's. Only dirty little yum-yum girl understands love. You don't understand.”

“Suzie, sit down again for a minute.”

“No. I go back to sailor. Take off clothes. Give one short-time before ship sails.”

“Suzie—”

“No.”

And the door slammed and she was gone.

III

And after that I could not sleep but lay awake in the dark, seeing her standing there at the door and hearing her voice in my ears.

“I love. I feel beautiful. I think, ‘My man.' You think, ‘My girl.' We belong.”

The simplicity of it, I thought; the beautiful simplicity. The simplicity of the girl who can't read, who can't write. The simplicity of the uncluttered mind, clean-cutting as a diamond.

And indestructible as a diamond. Undestroyed by two thousand or however-many-it-was men. The part of her they'd never touched. The virginity they'd never taken.

Virginity of heart.

“I love. I feel beautiful. We belong.”

And I was so moved by the words that I could have cried. I could be happy with her, I thought; and my head began to fill with all those wild and fantastic notions of the sleepless dreamer in the dark. I would rescue her from the Nam Kok; I would marry her; we would go and live cheaply on one of the neighboring islands—on Cheung Chow, where the bustle and chatter of black-trousered women filled the cobbled village street, and where every evening the fishing junks with billowing sepia sails came gliding one behind the other into the arms of the harbor, and you could go away and return after half an hour and find them still coming in, and they would go on coming in until it was dark and the harbor packed solid. Or we would go and live on the monastery island of Lantao where the leisurely donging of the monastery prayer bell would sound in my ears as I painted, and where we would grow paddy and keep pigs and exchange pleasantries with the Buddhist monks, and where I would think “My girl” and she would think “My man.” . . . And I was still awake, the romantic idyl still unfolding itself before me, when the amplified voice from an American warship came echoing across the silent harbor.

“Now hear this. Now hear this.”

It was dawn. The stars went out over the mainland. The gray light crept into my room.

“Now hear this.”

And like the images on a cinema screen when the light is let in, my idyllic fancies began to fade. I watched the cheap wardrobe, the dressing table, the remnants of our Chinese meal, take shape. Daylight, reality. And I knew that after all I would just carry on with Suzie as before: unless perhaps I tried to overcome my squeamishness about the sailors, and made love to her.