"Someone told me, when I arrived, with my two enormous trunks of law books to take up a position at Scott, McFarqhuar and Chan, that "people in Hong Kong don't have time for sex. It interferes with the money-making". A Filipina told me that. She was the first to grin at me and give me that gaze which you can only describe as penetrating. I knew the moment I saw here what she had in mind. Filipinas let you know. This is not always the case with women...
I did not come with sex on my mind. Far from it. I never had any urge for Asian women before I arrived. Not in the least. I always thought of them as, well, not quite what we should expect to call a woman if we came to describe the sex. There really was something missing, to my mind. There is nothing so subjective as love so please allow me my opinion. I think it was largely the face. I still believe that it is difficult to find an Oriental face which does not repel me slightly some of the time. I can't say that of European women, at least most European women. I have always been able to see my betrothed, a stunning Englishwoman (yes, there are such creatures) at any time the week sends us: at breakfast, on Sunday afternoon, getting out of a taxi in the rain, heaving on top of me in the heat of passion - I have always been able to regard her with delight if not, as you shall see, with desire...
When women find out they are lesbian, they don't wake up one morning and think: "Dykes are in! Let's go out and get one!" You don't decide to become a lecher overnight, not even if you have the sharpness of mind barristers normally possess. The myth put around by feminists and local xenophobes that the red-faced barbarian men get off at Tai Kak with lust in their groins is simply not true. For many, it is just another foreign posting and their minds are full of thoughts of mortgages, property prices, school fees - that sort of thing. They have usually brought a wife with them, salvaged from Latin America, India, Europe or - God help them - the USA. And there are a great many men who don't respond to the, well, exotic environment of East Asia. They are happily married and stay that way. As I said, sex is very subjective and some people just don't prize it. Good luck to them.
No, it begins as a sort of bewilderment, I would say. You see, candidly speaking, the real problem is that in Britain or the USA, pretty women, young women are so thin on the ground that you sort of become used to seeing something special only once or twice a day. And then so many Western women (no this is not a cliche) are so into defeminization these days (and the complementary emasculation when they get involved with a chap) that you have to have a pretty good imagination to get excited by just looking at them. (If you want to see what I mean, go and look at some of the women that get onto the Lamma ferry some evenings.)
Not that the women in Asia are necessarily prettier. They just show what they have a lot of more. They know how to dress. And there are so many young women, after all. I've always said - and this has got me into a lot of trouble - that Hong Kong has some of the ugliest women in the world as well as some of the most beautiful. You just don't see the ugly ones. Of course, some brutes in bars say that all the women in Hong Kong are ugly but I don't think they mean it. It's a kind of rationalisation. Often, they just can't get any...
You are never safe for long in Hong Kong. You are a man alone in a girls' school for one night, many nights and the ugly prefects are all sound asleep...
A rule that was to stay with me was the hand grip rule. The first time you reach for a girl's hand, what is her response? Does she hang on to you limply or does she grip you firmly? Or does she avoid you altogether? I think that's probably the make or break transaction and eveything that follows is just the unfolding of that moment.
Dorothy and I left the office one evening, just as dusk began to descend on the pencil towers of Central and the streets were becoming awash with pretty women. I remember Baudelaire used to devote a lot of writing time to dusk. I'm sure he would have loved sundown in Hong Kong: the night club hostesses scurrying to work, the office girls emerging from captivity, the expatriate lechers stalking Pedder Street...
What I actually said to girls on such occasions escapes me now. I suppose I gushed as usual about my past life, my travels, told them stories about how difficult it was to find the right girl, how European women had never really interested me, how Chinese girls were so pretty and all the other verbal armoury of the apprentice seducer I then was. Some girls were unbelievably gullible. Others nodded along as if the seduction were expected of one but was not believed for all that. Putting one's cards on the table, as I have done on occasion, is vastly gauche for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it makes the poor girl lose face. She may know that you are a playboy but she must not be confronted with the fact. Deviousness is expected of one. Of course, it may be that the deviousness was only in my mind. I still do not quite know whether Chinese people are naturally difficult and contorted in their thinking. They do appear to be so, making difficulty in relationships where there need not be any. On the other hand, I may have got it all wrong. Perhaps they are just too straightforward for Westerners to take...
As we sat in our underwear on the sofa afterwards, wet towels strewn on the sealed parquet floor before us, I became keenly aware of the disparity between Dorothy's general demeanor and her actual behaviour. My behaviour was merely deceptive. Dorothy's always verged on hypocrisy.
" Did you enjoy it?" I asked, reaching for my glass of now flat Carlsberg.
" I don't want to talk about those things," she replied and meant it...
Local people always react to seeing a mixed couple. If the girl is attractive, local people may display hostility. If she is ugly, she is acceptable. Luckily, Dorothy was not quite stunning enough to call forth the most vehement of emotions yet the undercurrent of aggression towards us was nevertheless palpible. Groups of schoolgirls sporting their first clumsy application of lipstick would cease their helpless collective mirth as we walked by, their faces taking on a not unattractive pout of protest. Shopkeepers would look up from their tills and silently analyse the possible reasons for the unfortunate predicament the evidently respectable Chinese girl had placed herself in. Housewives eyed me, then Dorothy, with a look of soulful jealousy and outrage. Dorothy, I felt, was enjoying the notoriety. When we sat down in the restaurant, wincing at first in the fluoresence and cacophony, she insisted on ordering in English and explained to the waitress that I was quite skilful with chopsticks and did not need a knife and fork, thank you very much. She also saw to it that we were given the regular rather than the toned-down foreigner's menu. Already, I was being protected as well as being claimed. Suddenly, I felt less of a stranger, less on the sidelines. I always lost my foreigness with a local girl.
" You're very pretty now," I said as we attacked the array of gleaming dishes before us.
" Not for a Chinese girl."
" No, I think you are prettier than most Chinese girls. At least you don't have a figure like an ironing board."
" Yes. Some people say I have a nice figure. Some people think I am half-and-half, not Chinese at all."
" But you are Chinese?"
" Of course!"
" Is your family from the North? You're a bit taller than most Cantonese..."
" No, they're from Guangdong. I'm a local Chinese girl."
" And do local Chinese girls usually go with engaged foreigners?"
" I don't want to talk about those things."
And we didn't talk about those things...
I'd known Sam [my fiancee] for seven years. She's a stunning blonde girl, about five foot eleven, very slim and with an angelic face. In Britain, she was quite a prize. In Hong Kong, she slowly took on the status of an admirable separate species. My love for her became in the end almost purely abstract. Yet even when the Oriental women took over completely, I always respected the quality of her mind. There was nothing abstract about that. With the Chinese girls, I admired their bodies more than their minds. To be perfectly honest, their minds seldom entered into things...
Candy noticed everything with her sharp eyes, the most archetypally Chinese you can imagine. This was another reason why I fell hopelessly in love, I suppose. The epicanthic fold and the pupil lost in the iris. That is where the mystery really resides...
I think I smiled a sub-lecher smile tinged with little boy at the fairground. It seemed to work because Candy kept smiling after that and the dresses seemed to get shorter and tighter...
These were the days when the empire of legs descended upon me and seized me like a vice. Standing at the roadside at Central, waiting for the red to change to green, my eyes dismembered the crowd of women waiting opposite. Legs were, surprisingly, of every shape in Hong Kong: there were long, thin legs, smooth and elegant or verging towards the scrawny. When does elegance stop and scrawniness begin? I suppose it is in the ratio of muscle, or flesh, to bone. Some girls' bones shone white through their sensible panty hose which sagged a little at the knee. Their delicate blue veins could be discerned at their shin bone or bulging at their ankle. The elegant leg stretched the nylon, smoothed it into shape, suggested grace and rightness rather than deprivation and austerity. Other legs were a little too short, were pressed into the wrong shoes so often, so inelegantly, so charmlessly. The tendon at the heel was not distinct, there was no gathering of flesh above the knee.
There were also Japanese legs. I can usually recognise a Japanese girl just by her legs. At first I though such legs were misshapen, dumpy, truncated even but at last I saw their harmony, their charm, the contrast they so often presented to the grace and svelteness of Japanese girls' torsos. Many legs were set too low down, were hardly given opportunity to be legs at all. East Asian people are often not generously limbed. Yet... in Central at lunch time, in the MTR or watching pairs of legs alighting from taxis and trams, I knew I was in a favourable galaxy of legs, in a fertile plain so to speak.
In summer the braver girls threw away their torturing panty hose and exposed their skins to Hong Kong's urban rays of sunshine. Chinese girls are heliophobes, shielding themselves from ultra violet like sufferers of malignant disease. Leprous white is in, is sexually stimulating, is a prize of some kind of breeding. I often suspected some racial motivation in Asia aimed towards paleness. It had been suggested to me that Japanese women have operations in Harley Street to make their bodies produce less skin pigmentation. In Hong Kong, there were preparations in the beauty shops for "natural paling" and tubes of heavy make up which so many of the tai tais and pop stars smeared on themselves in thick unconvincing layers. Thankfully, this Elizebethanism did not usually extend to legs. In legs, I saw the true Hong Kong woman...
I talked of my past, my dreams, my likes, my hates, my future. Candy smiled, laughed when it was appropriate, looked serious when I frowned.
" What are your dreams?" I asked, suddenly aware that I might be boring her.
" My dreams? I have no time for dreams."
I decided to pursue the question.
" I used to dream a lot when I was younger," she said at last with a smile.
" What about?"
" Many things."
" Such as?"
" Oh. I liked animals a lot. Do you like animals?"
" Some. Dogs especially."
The theme of the conversation reverted to me again as it did so often though the evening. I was filled with frustration. I had not told her the whole truth but I had told her a lot about myself. I had no idea what she wanted from me or whether she wanted anything at all.
Fortunately, I soon lost interest in conversation.
We were side by side on the Kowloon harbour walkway in front of the hotels. It was really a very busy lovers' lane and we were lucky to find a pitch. Some couples stood against the railing engaged in petting so intimate as to be embarrassing. I wondered why they didn't go home to relieve their tension. I said as much to Candy. She turned towards me. My hand brushed against her leg. She looked up to me, into my eyes. I kissed her, slightly against her will at first but she quickly responded. We kissed for some minutes. Each time, she withdrew from me nervously with a slight laugh as if she had been surprised by my impetuosity. She leant against me and my hand gripped her thigh. It was a wonderful thigh. Even through the stocking it gave sensuously in the most remarkable places. Candy sat down on a bench, hoisting up her dress a little as she did so. In the lights of the harbour and the hotel windows behind us, her knees shone luminously, round and alluring like giant pearls in her white stockings. I put a hand on one of them. Candy did not resist. My hand proceeded up her thigh. She protested. A point had been made and I did not pursue the matter.
" I think I really must go, " she said, pulling out a small lipstick case and hair brush from her handbag as she spoke. " You are a very dangerous man."...
All next morning I thought I had blown it with Candy but when I called her just before lunch she was as friendly as ever. Walking together through the lunch time crowds, I was conscious that we had reached a turning point, that point in a relationship when people become just friends or take their clothes off. I don't like platonic relationships with women so I was hoping to get some sign from Candy that intimacy was just around the corner. It didn't come that lunch time. Candy was as poised and as distance as ever...
I suppose it's really quite easy for small Asian people to make love in cars but you can count me out. I was just trying to secure my trousers and underpants around my ankles whilst lowering the driver's seat when my arse caught the horn for a moment. Candy, whose knickers had been successfully removed after some token protests, sniggered wildly. I don't know whether it was the sound of the horn or the sight of me trying to roll a condom onto a half-mast penis which caused the greatest hilarity. At any rate, when she had stopped laughing and an air of seriousness necessary to sex had returned, I was surprised to find not only that Candy wasn't a virgin but that sex with a condom can be fun. But all the fun couldn't quite cancel out the technical inhibitions of our situation. At one point, I had to press the window open to give Candy's leg more room. It jutted out of the window only an inch or two but I think it was my abiding impression of the afternoon: white, shapely, with the smallest of feet waggling loosely in rhythm with the pounding movements lower down.
When I had disentangled my trousers from the clutch and accelerator and thrown away my condom into the undergrowth already strewn with lovers' debris - an act necessitating my naked exposure to the elements as I opened the driver's door to pull up my pants - I looked over to Candy. She had readjusted herself with remarkable speed and was applying lipstick using the rear-view mirror as her guide.
" You've done this sort of thing before," I said.
She pouted at me for a moment.
" Bad man." ...
" How did you feel when we were making love?"
Candy thought for a moment and put down her chopsticks delib- erately.
" It was very nice."
" Nice?" I exclaimed incredulously." Cups of tea are nice."
" You want a cup of tea?"
" No. I don't want a cup of tea. I want to know what you keep hidden inside. What are your thoughts, your passions, your dreams, your reason for living?"
I really was laying it on a bit thick, as you can see.
Candy thought for some moments as a new dish of boiled crab arrived. Then she looked at me for the first time with a look of real sadness.
" I know nothing."...
When I thought I was coming it a little too much with the outside love interest I simply bought [my fiancee] something. Amazingly, it worked most times. Of course, I'd heard all about things like that - appeasing the wife, guilt presents and so on. But it really is amazing how typical some people - especially women - actually are.
I didn't call Candy again. It was just too much hard work trying to get to first base with her, on an intellectual or spiritual level, I mean. Surprisingly, you may think, that sort of thing means a lot to me after, that is, certain physical needs have been met...
My sexual experiences in cars and in private apartments in remoter parts of the territory soon became inconvenient and made necessary an urgent solution to the problem of where to take the girls. The obvious solution of kicking out the girlfriend and running a bachelor flat did not occur to me. For someone of my profession and character, such a step is too explicit, too direct. Instead, I preferred to look to the bourgeoisie of eighteenth century France for inspiration and set up a petite maison - what people today call a love nest.
It was all quickly arranged and I became the proud tenant of a five hundred square foot flat in Tsim Sha Tsui complete with bed one foot short and walls that seemed to move slightly in on each other with each passing day. I would disappear there in the afternoon whilst Sam was doing her calisthenics or persuading new arrivals that thirty thousand per month was quite reasonable for a Mid-Levels cupboard with a view.
At the same time as I took the flat, I also bought the other weapon required by a Hong Kong lecher, the portable phone. Always in reach and always able to telephone girls with batteries of numbers stored in its prodigious memory, my portable telephone became an extension of my endocrine system, a kind of electronic phallus.
Shortly after acquiring my flat, I began to spend more and more time in Kowloon, sweeping the bars and discotheques for girls. I quickly discovered that although there is no such thing as the typical Hong Kong female, there is such a thing as typical Hong Kong female behaviour...
Phoebe was a buyer in an electronics firm based in Hung Hom. I suppose you could describe her as an up-and-coming girl and maybe getting a gwailo boyfriend somehow fitted in with the change. I'm not suggesting that Chinese girls regard Western men as a step up. On the contrary, it is often seen as a step down, maybe as a last resort. More and more these days I think it doesn't matter whether you're Western or Chinese for the local girls. The most important thing is to be loyal and have lots of money. Maybe also another important quality is the ability to be trained. I didn't have that ability.
Hanging onto a boyfriend is quite difficult for a local girl given the preternatural tendency of local men to fool around. The whole dynamics of men and women in Hong Kong suggest cheating looms large. Girls like to know where they stand before they remove their underwear, unless they're girls like Dorothy who just like men for one thing. They are a real find in Hong Kong.
The second date with Phoebe included that obligatory walk along the harbour after dinner, obligatory because I had found it the quickest way of getting somewhere with the girls. As usual, An awful lot of the locals had had the same idea that evening and it was difficult to find a snogging pitch along the waterfront in front of the New World Centre. In the end, I was content to prop myself against the wall of a raised flower bed and drew Phoebe towards me. She surrendered to Gallic oral probings and an increasingly obscene groin. Then suddenly, some penny dropped. The moment arrived when this local girl - perhaps out of a sense of primeval wariness brought about by centuries of distrustful intersexual dynamic - thought she should be getting something out of all this free love. It was time to turn off the endocrine system and take stock.
"I want to know where you live," said Phoebe, her lip gloss shimmering in the moonlight, her legs recoiling from my groin and her body suddenly becoming rigid with perceived opportunity.
"Take me there now."
Normally, I would have been delighted to have a girl insist on me taking her to my flatlet. My most reasonable self knew there was nothing going but something kept me hoping a seduction scene and a valiant surrender was on the cards. We all, as you know, live in hope. I made some banal suggestions about getting to know each other better, the kind aged conventioneers make to bar girls in Hawaii after too much Jack Daniels. I was definitely losing control.
The walk to the flat was like a lot of walks I've done in Hong Kong and the shiver you get down your spine is probably akin to the gallows walk or the walk I made to find out about the letter from Cambridge some time after my entrance examination. It's electric and what it's all about. Life for me at that time was about those walks and little else.
At the junction outside the New World Centre, I lifted Phoebe over the fence, partially exposing the opaque tops of her black panty hose in the process. She also scuffed one of her velvet high heels. Strangely, she expressed no resentment at all this. Dodging traffic, we hurried along Chatham Road towards the petite maison . The flat was untidy and I had to explain that it was unserviced because it was only a part-time residence. Phoebe sat motionless on the sofa for some time in deep reflection.
" Only one person?" she asked at length.
" Yes, just one," I replied.
" It's not so big. How much you pay?"
" About eighteen thousand."
" Wah. Chee-sy."
Cheesy is the Cantonese word for "crazy" and was the epithet reserved for much of my impractical, extravagant or impetuous behaviour by local women. It was the word which again came to Phoebe's lips as I leant over to her and tried to remove her upper garments. It was not to be. Phoebe's work of the evening was done."
--- The Great Hong Kong Sex Novel / George Adams