World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (29 page)

“Leave it to us, eh?”

“Yes—you bury.” She turned away again.

I hurried after her. I said, “Suzie, you needn't worry about the cost of a proper funeral. I'll look after that for you.”

She shook her head. “No. Finish.”

“Are you sure, Suzie? You're sure it's not just a question of money?” I could not make her out. I knew that Chinese babies were never accorded the adult privilege of a funeral procession with white-cloaked mourners and brass bands, and that even well-to-do Chinese parents would simply give somebody a few dollars to cart off their dead infant; but after all Suzie's anxiety to wait and see the corpse, I had not expected her to abandon it so unceremoniously.

However, she still shook her head. “No, not money.”

“I hope not, Suzie,” I said. “Because it's no use feeling scruples about borrowing from me now. I must see you on your feet again.”

She glanced at her hands, as if looking for her handbag, but remembered that even that had gone. She stopped. “You don't mind lending me just ten dollars?”

“Of course not, Suzie. But you're going to need much more than that.”

“I only need ten dollars now, to buy something for my baby.” She saw that I looked puzzled, and said carefully, “My baby is not dead, you know. That is not my baby we saw there. That is just his body. My baby has gone somewhere else to live, and I must still look after him. I must send him presents.”

I began to understand. “You mean paper presents?”

“Yes, paper. Because he will need many things in that new place where he has gone.”

There were dozens of paper shops in the neighborhood, but all were shuttered and locked. Presently we found one with spaced wooden bars in place of a door. We peered inside. An oil lamp burned in front of a wall shrine with a dim yellow light. Under the shrine a man lay asleep on a wooden bed. He wore a pair of blue running shorts and a white singlet in holes. We knocked until he woke. He slipped his feet into wooden sandals and clopped across the shop. He removed one of the wooden bars to admit us. The shop was stacked with joss sticks, firecrackers, pictures of gods for household shrines, and all the paraphernalia of Chinese religious observance, with a few shelves devoted to ball-point pens, airmail envelopes, and toilet rolls. The ceiling was hung with paper models, and as Suzie made her selection the shopkeeper unhooked them with his stick. She chose a bridge to facilitate the crossing into the next world, three suits in different sizes, a bundle of dummy million-dollar notes, and a junk—since even if her baby did not wish to become a seafarer himself, he could always let out a junk very profitably on hire. She also bought a paper house about the size of a parrot cage, because if he owned his own house he could insure that it was kept in a proper state of repair and would not fall down in the rain. Only one article that she wanted was out of stock; however, at her request the shopkeeper set to work with a pair of scissors and a pot of paste to make up the deficiency, sticking oblong sheafs of yellow tissue paper into red paper covers.

“What are those, Suzie?” I asked. “Books?”

“Yes, teaching books. Those books will teach my baby to read and write, so he doesn't grow up a coolie boy.” And she told the shopkeeper what title to write on the outside of each.

We were both chilled through to the bones by the time we left the shop. We walked through the silent empty streets festooned with Suzie's purchases.

I said, “Suzie, do you want to come to the Nam Kok, or would you rather find another hotel?”

“I will come to the Nam Kok,” she said.

“All right, there's sure to be a room.”

She was silent for a bit, and then said doubtfully, “All right.”

I said, “Suzie, you can come to my room if you like. I only thought that tonight you might rather be alone.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“You mean you'd rather come to my room?”

“Yes, but only if you want me.”

“Of course I want you.”

It was half-past four when we got back to the Nam Kok. Ah Tong was asleep behind his desk. I woke him and he brought clean towels and we rubbed ourselves down until the chill had gone and our bodies glowed, and then we sat on the bed drinking hot tea. Suzie fell silent again, her eyes stricken. She looked at the bedraggled cheongsam over the back of the chair, the torn mud-spattered stockings, the ruined shoes—all that was left of her life. She turned as if for relief to the array of paper articles on the dressing table. She got up.

“All right, I send my baby his presents now. You have matches, please?”

“I've a lighter.”

She took the paper models out onto the balcony and laid them down on the concrete floor. She came back into the doorway.

“I had better shut the door, or the smoke will make you cough,” she said.

I got into bed. Through the glass doors I could see her squatting on her haunches, arranging the paper models in two rows in the order she intended to burn them, working very carefully and deliberately, and sometimes changing two models round to make the order right. She wore a pair of my pyjama trousers, and one of my shirts on top because I had thrown away the jacket which had gone into holes. She experimented with the lighter, then held up the first article and set it alight. She waited until the flames licked her fingers, and then dropped it, and watched between her spread knees as it burned on the floor. When the flames had died, she recovered a fragment of unburned paper the size of a postage stamp and applied the lighter to it again. The breeze on the balcony began to swirl the paper ash against the glass. She burned some bank notes and a paper suit, then returned to the room holding the lighter.

“Petrol finish,” she said.

I refilled the lighter for her and she went out to the balcony and closed the door again. Ten minutes later there was only the house left. She set a light to it on the floor. The flames leaped up to twice the height of the balustrade and quickly died. She burned the few remaining fragments of paper and bamboo frame, then came back inside, hooking the door open. There was a smell of paper ash. Her eyes were now quite calm. She took off her clothes and got into bed, and I turned off the light. I could feel her lying awake in the darkness. After a time there was a soft movement and she rolled against me, and I could taste tears on her face and on her eyes. She cried for a while without making any sound. Then the tremor of her crying died and she lay quite still, and after a while she said in a little desolate voice, “You know something, Robert? I don't really believe about those presents. I don't really believe my baby will get them.”

“Don't you, Suzie? But you believed when you were burning them, didn't you?”

“Half,” she said. “I half-believed. You see, when I saw my baby all smashed up like that, I thought, ‘If I believe that my baby is finished, I shall feel so much pain that my heart will burst. I will go mad with so much pain. So I must pretend that he is not really smashed up, but still alive somewhere, and that I must still look after him.' You understand?”

“Yes, I understand.” And I remembered our first meeting on the ferry, when she had pretended to be the rich little virgin—knowing exactly what she was doing, and yet believing in the invention enough to make it work. Believing—and not believing. She had always been good at that.

“Now I have nobody to look after—only you.” She clung to me tightly, burying her face in my neck. “You would like me to stay and look after you?”

“Of course I would, Suzie. You can stay as long as you like.”

“I will never leave you now. Not unless you tell me, ‘Suzie, go away.'”

“But I still can't afford to keep you.”

“I don't want any money. It's different now. I only wanted money for my baby.”

“You'll need a bit of money. You'll need clothes.”

“Just one dress, that's all.”

“I think I could just afford a dress.”

“But I don't mind if you can't. I can just wear your shirt and stay in this room. I needn't go out.”

“You'll get awfully bored.”

“No, I shall be so busy looking after you. I shall sew on your buttons, and clean your shoes, and brush your hair—you like to have your hair brushed?”

“I don't know, I never tried it.”

“I can shave you, too, and knit your socks. What color would you like socks?”

“I think yellow.”

“Yes, I shall knit yellow socks, and do everything for you. I shall make you the best girl friend you ever had.”

“I never had a girl friend like that before.”

“But you want me? You're not just pretending?”

“No, I'm not pretending.” She switched on the light and I said, “What's the matter, Suzie?”

“I want to see if you are pretending.”

“And am I?”

She switched off the light again and lay softly against me. “No, I don't think you're pretending,” she said.

Chapter Two

T
he days that followed were wonderfully happy, and I worked better than I had ever worked before.

Once I had been incapable of serious work with another person in the room, for I would feel self-conscious; but I found Suzie's presence comforting, and indeed it had soon become so much a habit that I could hardly work if she was not there. Her patience was infinite, and while I worked she would sit cross-legged on the bed, often for hours at a time, looking through a picture book or else simply engrossed in her own thoughts; for she had a natural aptitude for contemplation. And from time to time she would break the silence to ask a question about whatever matter was on her mind, and afterwards would sum up her conclusions.

“I think the Nam Kok must make God feel very happy,” she said once, after a long cogitation about religion. “You see, I don't think God cares whether men and women get married. He doesn't make animals get married, or fish, or flowers—and there are man and woman flowers just like us, you know.”

I said, “And you think we're just the same to God as animals or flowers?”

“Yes, we have got a better brain, that's all. I have got a better brain than a cat, but we have both got life inside us just the same, and maybe God likes the cat better than me. I don't see how anybody knows. We just know that he puts life inside us, and makes us want to make love, so that after we're finished there'll be plenty more cats and flowers and people to carry on. That's all he cares about, that the world is carried on. So when he looks down and sees the Nam Kok bar very busy, because the sailors all want to make love with a girl, he must rub his hands and think, ‘I did a good job with those sailors. They're more interested in girls than anything.'”

I laughed. “And what about when he sees the girls going off to get injections—do you think he rubs his hands then?”

“No, I don't think he likes girls getting rid of babies. I think those injections must make God very chokka.”

Every day we went out for a walk; and each walk was a new adventure, for happiness sharpens perception, and even the most familiar streets would continually yield fresh crops of discoveries. We explored alleyways and sat at street stalls eating nameless entrails, and pored over the windows of Chinese druggists with their displays of twisted roots, dried sea horses, powdered pearls, and big glass jars of pickled snakes. We spent a day in a fishing junk, went up the Peak, and giggled at the delicious concrete vulgarities of the Tiger Balm Pagoda, commemorating the successful promoter of that universal panacea. And we made a collection of characteristic Hong Kong sounds: the massage man's rattle announcing his passage down the street; the spoon seller's clatter as he manipulated a dozen porcelain spoons in his hand like a fan; the clop-clop-clop of wooden sandals echoing down an empty street at night; and of course the noise of the mah-jongg rooms. And then the noise we forgot about until the morning we were woken by ear-shattering explosions that sounded like a barrage of machine-guns, and I was convinced for a moment that the communists had crossed the border and war had begun, and then we both looked at each other and laughed and exclaimed together, “Firecrackers!”

The source of this early jubilation turned out to be three flag-bedecked junks crossing the harbor with cargoes of roistering holiday makers; and we learned presently from Ah Tong that it was the festival of Tien Hou, the patron goddess of the boat people. And provoked by the firecrackers into a festival mood ourselves, we took a bus out to a fishing village and watched the portable shrines and roasted pigs and trays of pink dumplings carried past in long processions led by lion dancers in masks; and we lit joss sticks in the temple, burned paper gifts for Tien Hou, and ate a huge lunch of roast pork, while those pernicious firecrackers continued to explode round us all day, splitting our ear drums and scorching our clothes.

I would also read to Suzie for at least an hour every day. I borrowed books from the British Counsel Library, and I got the knack of simplifying difficult words as I went along. Suzie's curiosity was voracious, and she enjoyed fiction, biography, or travel; but the greatest success of all was de Maupassant's “Boule de Suif,” the story of the patriotic little French prostitute whose bourgeois traveling companions, after first scorning her, proceed to use her for their own ends, and persuade her against her own will to sleep with a Prussian officer. Suzie hung on every word. She wanted the story read again and again, and at each reading was freshly moved; and she asked endless questions about the characters as if they had been real. How had Boule de Suif started in her trade? How many clients had she had a day, and what had she charged? And what had become of her? Had she never got married?

She told the story to the other girls down in the bar, where it also achieved such a success that she was obliged to repeat it many times. But whereas de Maupassant had ended his story with the little courtesan once more scorned and in tears, Suzie eschewed such cynicism and added a romantic ending of her own; and this went further at each telling, until Boule de Suif had not only been happily married, but also blessed with a family. And here a note of tragedy crept in, for identifying herself with Boule de Suif, she related that the first child, a boy, had been involved in a coach accident, and his mother had found him dead by the roadside—mutilated, and without an arm. However, another baby was on the way, and it might have surprised de Maupassant to know that eventually his heroine became the happy mother of six.

The story impressed the girls deeply and they always crowded round when Suzie began her narrations; and it was not long before little Jeannie, with her lusciously rounded curves, was nicknamed
Wun Tun,
which meant boiled dumpling, and was the nearest equivalent to
boule de suif
in the Chinese cuisine.

Suzie now presided in the bar like a queen, conscious of the dignity and position that she had acquired by virtue of our established liaison; for such a permanent arrangement was the girls' romantic ideal, and she appeared to her old girl friends as the embodiment of success. My own fall from grace had been forgotten now that I had taken Suzie back, and the girls treated us with all the respect due a married couple. They paid social visits to our room, brought us little gifts, and tactfully withdrew when they thought we wanted to be alone. Our most frequent visitors were Gwenny Ching and a new girl called Mary Kee, who was very shy and inexperienced. Suzie had taken Mary under her wing, giving her solemn advice and worrying endlessly over the problems of her initiation. And I would watch the two girls in conclave on my balcony: Suzie very protective and motherly, and Mary slightly awed by the older girl who had made good. And I would smile to myself, thinking that they resembled nothing more than a prefect and a new girl at school.

And now Suzie, when she spoke of me to the other girls, no longer called me “my boy friend” but “my husband.” She confessed this to me herself, a little ashamed of herself for taking such a liberty, saying, “I think ‘my husband' sounds much nicer—only I'm sorry I didn't ask you first.”

“I couldn't care less what you call me, Suzie.”

“But I tell them that we will never really get married. I tell them, ‘My husband is a big man. One day he will be famous. You will see his picture in the newspapers, and at the cinema in the newsreel. So he can't marry me. He will have to go off and marry an English girl.'”

“I don't know, Suzie. I haven't thought much about the future.” It was the afternoon, and we were lying on the bed after making love. I was filled with that infinite tenderness for her that always came at such times; for Suzie made love with a range and maturity of feeling that was in strange contrast to the deceptive childishness of her manner, and that touched depths in me that had never been touched before, and left me with a deeper satisfaction. We lay in silence for a long time. And then Suzie said, “What does goss-something mean?”

“Gossamer?” I remembered the word in the book that I had been reading to her at lunch.

“Yes, gossamer.”

I explained, and we went on to talk about spiders and how they made their webs; for spiders had always fascinated me, and in Malaya I had spent hours studying their methods of web-spinning and trying to solve the mystery of how they managed to stretch the first strand of a web between two trees. (I had discovered that they would hang suspended from the branch of one tree until the wind swung them across to the other, whereupon they would haul in the loose thread and anchor it tight; and with this aerial bridge once established, they could run back and forth at will.) Suzie listened intently and asked questions, and I fetched a piece of paper and pencil to show her the different patterns of web made by different species; and we marveled together at the nature of instinct, which enabled young spiders to spin perfect webs without teaching. Suzie's hunger for knowledge had always been a sheer delight to me, and I experienced the creative satisfaction of a pedagogue who watches a pupil's mind opening under his guidance. Her lack of education and her illiteracy were one of her greatest charms for me, and I would not for the world have had her otherwise. And so it was that suddenly, in the midst of this discussion about spiders, I thought: I am happier with Suzie than I have been with anybody before. I would like to marry her.

Until that moment I had taken for granted that marriage was out of the question—I had not even considered it. One might live with water-front girls, but one didn't marry them. But why shouldn't I marry Suzie? I didn't care tuppence about her past—indeed it now seemed so remote from our present life that I was able to discuss her former experiences with her with complete frankness, as if we had been discussing another woman. Besides, it made her out of the ordinary, more interesting; and it made what was good and innocent in her all the better because of what it had survived.

And I was so carried away by the notion of marrying her that I was on the point of interrupting the talk about spiders and proposing to her impulsively there and then—but at that moment a voice inside me nagged, “Don't be a fool—you know you'll regret it! You only want to marry her because her ignorance inflates your ego—because she makes you feel like a god.”

“Well, what's wrong with that?” I asked the inner voice defiantly. “Why shouldn't I enjoy feeling like a god? Anyhow, sometimes she makes me feel the opposite. Sometimes she makes me feel very humble, because her own vision is so much more innocent, so much fresher than mine. I learn as much from her as she learns from me. I am learning from her all the time—seeing life freshly through her eyes.”

Inner voice: “All right, it might be all very fine being married to her out here—but you could never take her back to England. Your friends wouldn't have her in the house.”

Me: “Then they could go to hell. But I bet some would.”

Inner voice: “Yes, and treat her as a prize exhibit. ‘My dear, I've the most
fascinating
couple coming to dinner. The wife was a water-front tart in Hong Kong. Yes, honestly, cross my heart . . . No, don't dress. As George said, she's probably more used to
undressing
.'”

Me: “Then I won't take her back to England. I much prefer living out East.”

Inner voice: “Even out East she'll be a social handicap.”

Me: “You talk as if I had social ambitions. I'm not in the colonial service. I'm a painter. And I won't be the first painter to marry his favorite model.”

Inner voice: “Well, if you can't restrain your impetuosity for your own sake, restrain it for Suzie's. Don't say anything to her until you're absolutely sure. You know what you are with your sudden enthusiasms—by this time next week you'll have come to your senses.”

However, during the next few days the enthusiasm, so far from abating, increasingly possessed me. Yes, I shall marry her, I thought happily; and I had just decided that at the first suitable opportunity I would ask her, when something happened that for the time being put the notion out of my head.

It was something as wonderful as it was unexpected. It was eleven o'clock in the morning, and I was busy painting at the easel when there was a knock on the door. Suzie was out on the balcony with Gwenny and Mary Kee, and she came hurrying through the room to see who it was, for she took very seriously her duty to protect me from interruption. I heard her whispering to Ah Tong. Then she closed the door again and came over to me, looking very self-important. She held out an envelope.

“This cable just came for you.”

“Be an angel and open it for me, Suzie,” I said, guessing how much she would enjoy performing this service in front of Gwenny and Mary.

She glowed with pride. She took good care to open the envelope in full sight of her audience. She handed me the contents. It was the longest cable I had ever seen, and I thought for a moment that it could not be meant for me at all. Then I saw that it was from Mitford's in New York. It ran to twelve lines, and the gist of it was that a well-known American pictorial magazine, with international circulation, had made an offer for my Hong Kong paintings and pastels to display as a feature. Furthermore they wanted to commission me to follow it with a “Japanese sketchbook” for which, in addition to the fee, they would pay my air passage to Japan and expenses for two months.

The combined fee for the Hong Kong work and the work to be done in Japan was stated in American dollars, and was so large that I felt sure it must have acquired a couple of extra naughts in transmission. It would have been sufficient as it stood to keep Suzie and myself at our present standard of living for over a year.

The last three lines of the cable urged me not to scorn this commercial debut in the States, since it would greatly enhance interest in any gallery exhibition that I might give later.