Seymour Totti’s Foreign Policy

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Tracking down this classic Hong Kong novel, even in Hong Kong, was something of a chore. I finally picked a copy up at the Star Ferry pier. Not the one where Robert Lomax first met Suzie, a recreation of the original Central pier which is now in what would have been the middle of the harbour back in the 1950s when the book was written.

In the twenty years since I first read it Hong Kong has changed dramatically. It would be unrecognisable to Lomax and Suzie. There are still pockets of old Hong Kong but they are few and far between and diminishing every year. Squeezed out by soulless steel and glass that the HK government likes to call urban renewal.

That said, characters that populated Richard Mason’s novel are still very familiar. Their names, complexions and the range of languages they speak have changed but their business in Wanchai is flourishing.

The book has won considerable acclaim, not for the love story between a British painter and a prostitute, but for the authors keen observation of a place that was about to transform itself from a small trading post into the vibrant commercial hub that it is today. And of the hypocracy and rascism that was characteristic of of the era.

What makes the book special for me is the richness and depth of Mason’s characters, not just of Lomax and Suzie who have been widely recognised, but of the entire cast. In particular the other girls that worked the bar of the Nam Kok Hotel.

In the years since I first read this book I have spent more than my fair share of time in the company of their sisters in the real world. Reading it again I realise just how beautifully delineated their characters are:

“I could not help liking old Lily Lou. She reminded me of an old theatre pro, who had grown up in a narrow professional world, took pride in the old fashioned thoroughness of her technique, and looked down on on the present-day youngsters for skimping their job. She remembered her own training at a smart brothel in Shanghai - oh, in those days you’d got to know how to please a man, you’d got to take trouble and time. It had been a real vocation; none of these modern girls would have lasted a minute. “They’ve got no mystery dear,” she would whisper huskily, confidentially, patting my hand. “And that’s what a man likes - mystery.” And she would smile her carefully enigmatic smile that, despite the old whore’s shabbiness and over-rouged cheeks, could still just pass for mystery in the low diffused light of the bar.”

Into all the girls the author breathes a life so convincing that, in most of them, I can see the faces of counterparts that I have actually met. Rather than stocking the bar with one dimensional background characters he has crafted, with a great deal of affection, each individual person. It is this empathy, the warts and all humanity, that brings the bar of the Nam Kok hotel to life.

Only Suzie herself remains elusive, the one character you reach for but can’t quite grasp. Mason always maintained that Suzie was not based on any particular girl but was a composite of several. And while she has her own very human frailties she remains the dream-girl. The mystery that still draws men to places like Hong Kong in search of a Suzie of their own.

*The cover shown is the 1994 edition published by Pegasus Books featuring Nancy Kwan who played Suzie in the 1960 Paramount movie

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