The Great Hong Kong Sex Novel (2)

"The next time I saw Phoebe was the evening we went to the cinema. A carefully positioned jacket over my loins enabled her to exhibit unusual facility in manual manipulation. Her own soft thighs were a tactile delight, virginal, puerile and willing. We left before the film ended. Of course, I wanted to go further but it was not to be. I had enjoyed the trial subscription, the lure to further rapture, the first free fix.

The next day or two I was occupied with other girls. I switched off my portable telephone and thought myself safe from intrusion. At about nine p.m., on a Sunday evening, Phoebe appeared at my door in Tsim Sha Tsui. I feigned absence but I think Phoebe heard some sounds of movement in the flat. The girl I was with - I do not recall her name - showed some sympathy for my story of a revengeful past love. I telephoned Phoebe later that evening. She was upset. Our affair was over.

I continued to call her. I sent flowers. Reconciliation came and we once more sat together one Saturday night in front of a particularly boring B or C movie, the kind which Hong Kong film distributors appear to have monopolised. We once again left early, largely because a repeat performance of our token physical intimacy was denied. Phoebe felt it was time to shop. She looked longingly in the shop windows of Nathan Road, Jordan at handbags in French and Italian leather. The implication was clear. I decided to call her bluff and bade her adieu.

Phoebe called me some weeks later. She was, again, " upset" as she put it. She wanted to see me for lunch. At her request, I brought her a take-away meal and we sat in a hideous rock garden in Hung Hom. She wept. I promised fidelity.

The last time I saw her, she had her mind set on dinner. In an attack of bloody-mindedness, I refused to take her. I had had enough of being led up the garden path, of being played within a game whose rules were so arbitrary and unclear. Phoebe eventually bought some fish balls and ate them with great gusto near the Star Ferry. The intention, I believe, was to shame me. She sulked until I took her home in a taxi. Then, surprisingly, she fondled me discreetly in the back of the cab. It appeared all was not entirely lost.

But it was.

I sometimes wake up on grey mornings and think of what life might have been if I had managed to hang on to Phoebe, if I had managed to play her games or got her to give up playing them with me. She has become one of those parallel life fantasies for me. Lots of men have these fantasies, particularly lawyers for some reason. I suppose it comes from their professional capacity for duplicity. I recall the story of that well-known bigamist barrister in Britain who had two complete homes in different parts of the country. Both his wives - one a blonde, the other a brunette - were devoted to him and completely baffled when they met for the first time at his funeral. They both knew different sides of him and each thought they knew everything. One was convinced he hated pork whilst the other cooked him a joint of the same every Sunday he was at home. I sometimes think I could be a bigamist, just for the fun of it. It is one way to avoid the awful problem of the pattern, the mould, the march and eventual triumph of Time...

At JD's I quickly discovered that the girls were often pretty desperate types, desperate for some kind of rich or fairly prosperous guy to take then by the hand and lead them somewhere. There were a lot of jokes about that and about the trolley dollies who sometimes congregated there. The trolley dollies from Dragon Pacific at that time were in a kind of transition. There were still a good number of nice girls of sub-model class (I now speak in their terms as there is nothing as ambitious as a trolley dolly) but now all that is gone. Anyone can be a Dragon Pacific girl.

The dollies arrived in groups of four or five, sometimes eight or ten, and caused quite a stir. The most noticeable thing about them was that they looked almost like European women. They had all the accoutrements and a lot of the build. They also wanted to be European I think. They always admired any European woman I happened to talk to. I think local women regard European women as models in some sense, as objects to emulate. The Japanese use Europeans in advertising in the same way, as models to look up to because they see them as good examples of what Japanese really look like. The Japanese, unlike the Chinese, regard themselves as Westerners not only in style but in substance...

Both had Form Four English, which means that it is slightly worse than a Form Five graduate. If you have ever met a Form Five graduate, you will know that nearly every conversation is an English lesson. The pain of speaking God's own language is severe as we all know but in Hong Kong, God's patience is tested. I managed to convey to the girls that it was a much better idea to leave JD's as there was no room on the dance floor after 11.45 anyway. They agreed and we left. Somewhere between leaving the disco and getting to a taxi it became clear to me that one of the girls had to go. I often see guys on dates with three women and think that no one's getting a good deal despite what Jan and Dean said about two girls for every boy...

Given such a scenario, rookie Western men, newcomers to Hong Kong, might think that a roll in the hay was on the cards. After all, she had got into a taxi and gone off to a night club with a complete stranger, hadn't she? The local girl thinks otherwise. We watched a floor show in which only the Thai and Philippines chorus girls removed their clothes (Chinese girls do not do such things, perhaps also why it is so difficult to get hold of good Chinese pornography)...

She turned up for our next date looking like a Mong Kok night club girl. Everyone we passed thought I had bought her out for the night and that I hadn't paid much. The truth about her was that her salary was so low, she nearly always had to put on her disco wear as she didn't have that much else in the wardrobe. That was really pathetic. It's very hard for a good girl with a bad job to dress reasonably in Hong Kong. It's no wonder so many latch on to a sugar daddy boyfriend type or go one worse and take up part-time prostitution. It's so much more lucrative than earning four or five thousand a month as a sales assistant.

Unlike Vanessa, Carrie was not only poor in English, she was rather slow. Conversation lagged a lot before we made it into the comforting silence of the cinema. Now, being such a tactile lot, it's all right to touch local girls on a date, as long as it doesn't go as far as goosing or something similar. Even the latter activity is permissible, under certain circumstances. Fortunately, those circumstances prevailed that night. Just as Kowloon Park lovers avert their eyes from each others' intimacy, so cinema audiences are remarkably tolerant and understanding towards groping carried to the point of obvious obscenity. I have penetrated girls with my hand with people sat either side of me intently watching the screen, without anything to cover up my dastardly actions.

Carrie responded wildly. Her legs straddled my left thigh in the cinema as my lips found her soft, firm breasts. She moaned slightly and tossed back her head in pleasure. I was half expecting an usher with torchlight to appear or some member of the audience to cast a disapproving look. Nothing of the kind happened. It simply wasn't anyone else's business but Carrie's and my own.

If only the rest of the world could be as tolerant as the Chinese.

Because of her cooperation, I was on the brink of believing Carrie was a very lovely girl. We sat in the Hyatt coffee shop trying unsuccessfully to look inconspicuous. The real problem was that I drew attention to her and she drew attention to me. It's always like that. That's why we drew so much attention when we were together. We didn't look like a couple. We looked like a social experiment.

Then, suddenly, my mood changed. I found myself growing impatient with Carrie as I did with most girls. I couldn't understand why she could show so much passion in the cinema and not wish for instant consummation when the lights came on. As you can see, at that time I still had a lot to learn.

One of the ideas I played with was to lure girls with money. I had heard a lot about mistresses and what gold diggers Hong Kong women were. So I suggested "helping Carrie out". Carrie was miserable and underpaid. I suggested, once a few drinks were inside me, that I should give her pocket money. Carrie ignored me and changed the subject. I didn't see how much I had hurt her...

Vanessa did however manage to teach me an aspect of eroticism I had to then largely ignored. This was the eroticism of food.

Food, like sex, is an intimate expression of the personality...

The British rail sandwich tells us a lot about the British, the only people who can boil vegetables into submission and cover perfectly good beef with pork fat before they roast it. The British are not in touch with their senses because they don't really have any. Sex is an aberration and vitamins come in bottles. The British definition of health is that someone can sit in front of the TV eating chips unaided. When the Brits carried out their first heart transplant, we knew the patient was picking up when he was able to sit in front of the television, smoking himself to death like everyone else. Attitudes to food indicates attitudes to sensuality. The British are prudes because they have no health and no real contact with life. The British have thus produced a whole lot of fundamentally miserable and hung-up writers - Maugham, Lawrence, Forster, Larkin, Auden to name but a few. The British have also exported miserable writers to other lands, the most notable being Patrick White, and attracted others to their shores like T.S. Eliot. The British love being pale. They love being miserable. They don't know how to eat because they don't know how to live.

The Chinese people know how to live. In their eyes, food and sex are celebrations of life. Although intensely active in copulation like everyone else, they're still very much hung up about sex for some reason. The same can't be said about eating. You can be as self-indulgent as you like when you ingest.

I used to watch Vanessa eat. Her lips sucked at crab claws and her tongue dipped into the crevices of lobsters and clams. In her ecstasy, slime clung from her mouth and overflowed onto her lips. Her mouth slowly swallowed a branch of choi sum and lovingly caressed a penis-shaped mushroom. Her throat held the luscious oysters for a moment to feel their slightly pulsating tickle. Her teeth cracked through bones and gnawed the last fragment of meat from a chicken wing. She slurped, gurgled, munched, chomped, sipped, crunched, licked, oozed. She probed, prodded, turned, dug, snapped, stabbed, decapitated, eviscerated, deveined, skinned. She belched, sighed, laughed, giggled, choked, coughed, spat, regurgitated. She would pick her teeth and investigate her nose. All was noise, action, enjoyment.

With all that oral gratification, Vanessa had no need for sex. She was a very cold fish indeed and she wasn't being coy...

It is my contention that no sane or biologically viable man can remain faithful to his girlfriend in Hong Kong except perhaps with the aid of religion. The reason is that he is exposed to so many suggestions of alternative female forms within the course of a day that he must have release. As if everyday experience in Hong Kong did not offer enough stimulation, the population consumes pornography in enormous quantities. Much of the pornography in Hong Kong emanates from Japan.

I was sitting at home one afternoon thinking about Japanese girls simply because Japanese pornography is so imaginative. I prefer it to the Chinese variety for a number of reasons. First of all, the girls are exquisite with high voices and beautiful faces. Japanese girls don't seem to be so hung up about flashing their bodies before the camera and actually appear to enjoy it, as much as they are allowed to enjoy it that is. The second reason for my preference for Japanese pornography is that it uses suggestion more than gynaecology. The Japanese pornographer likes lingerie, vaseline on the lens, lighting effects, uniforms (especially schoolgirls') and white panties. Removing the pristine white panties is something which takes quite a lot of time in Japanese skin flicks not only because of the censors. It's also quite a tease (and probably hygienic into the bargain)...

Japanese porn, I should add does have its absurdities and drawbacks. For a start it is often as predictable as the Western product: tying up the girl, staged rape, violent deaths and a soundtrack that sounds like a Bill and Ben children's show (high pitched girls and low pitched grunting man). The porn produced in Japan up to about 1980 is so boring you have to have a kind of kinky brain to find it interesting. The stuff produced in recent years focuses on a single girl usually and doesn't really have much of a plot. It's great to watch if you are not opposed to consumerism in a big way. It's also not recommended if you are a bra burner or something approaching it.

Well, in the end I just had to have a Japanese girl. The problem was where to find one. Every day there are lots of tourists in town and some of them turn up at JD,s. Some, I know, are just yearning for sexual adventure, just like the Japanese men. The clue to Japanese interest in sex is in the silk panties which are offered in the shops of Tsim Sha Tsui with only yen prices attached to them. Hong Kong traders know the Japanese predilection for neatness and tearing silk...

I think I was on the leather sofa one afternoon recovering from a more than tedious morning in court when a slightly breathless girl's voice asked for me. It was Michiyo inviting me for tea in Wanchai. I was reasonably staggered. Were Japanese girls so passive after all?

She was pretty much the Japanese girl at tea, simpering every now and again, avoiding eye contact and not giving much away. She was however quite graceful, charmingly submissive and kind...

We found our way to the cinema but we didn't stay long. She took my suggestion of going back to her place willingly if not quite eagerly...

I'll spare you the details of how I eventually got her into the bedroom and removed her underwear. She was fairly coy and difficult about the whole thing, as I had expected. Eric definitely didn't approve of events and had to be locked out of the bedroom. I heard him scratching the door during the performance. Michiyo was very passive and, frankly, as tight as a budgie's backside. I now knew why Japanese men did a lot of grunting in the porno films. It needs quite a lot of work to find fulfillment with a budgie.

I will always remember the way Michiyo looked at me afterwards - as if I had performed some slightly tedious but necessary surgical procedure - and how she morosely slipped on her underwear. She needed a post-coital cigarette urgently or perhaps it was just to catch up with the two or three she had missed during the love-making. She sat on the leather sofa amongst her magazines and old panty hose watching some Japanese soap opera she had on video. For all the interest she showed, she could have been an Amsterdam whore.

Eric, on the other hand, was delighted. He sat on his mistress's lap smirking.

" Interesting cat," I said, trying my damnedest to be nice.

" I love him," Michiyo replied and meant it.

I thought then that she would never do. People who like cats are loners essentially and often egoists into the bargain. A dog can pine for its dead or absent master. A cat just looks for another source of food and warmth...

I came a little closer to Michiyo, in a sort of cuddle-up manoeuvre, and the cat swung out at my hand. It left one little scratch, below the epidermis, as a kind of warning.

" What are you watching?" I asked to chase thoughts of animal strangulation from my mind.

" It's from Japan. It's about an office. The men are very bad. They all want to behave badly with the secretaries"

" I see. Sexual harassment."

" Oh yes.  Sekuhara . It is the same in Japanese." " I don't think you could see this kind of thing in Britain."

" Why not?"

" Well. The women might object."

" Why?"

" Well, you know, it's not very nice. Men chasing women at work. I do it all the time but not in the office. I would get into a lot of trouble."

" But where can a man meet a girl? You can only do it at work."

That put things in a different perspective.

" But what about discos, bars, night clubs?"

" Sorry?"

" I mean, you could meet people in the street if you wanted. Like we did almost. Don't you meet men in discos?"

" Oh no. That is too dangerous. I only go to a disco with my friends. When you are abroad, things are a little different perhaps. I don't know."

Michiyo had very little time to see me and to ask ask questions about other women in my life. I saw her once a week and then only when she wasn't entertaining clients. She never found out about Sam until she was posted on to New York. I told her as a kind of going away present. I'm nice that way. But I didn't feel so bad about deceiving Michiyo as I felt she was also in a deeper relationship. With Eric.

It is hard having a cat as a rival but I learned to live with it. I was happy if I could have an hour alone with Michiyo and Eric not scratching at the door. My harassment of Michiyo gained in intensity as a result and I would suggest taking her on top of restaurant tables and in shop doorways. In her flat, I would chase her into the bedroom as soon as we arrived. She would submit in the usual way and was never really content until Eric was sitting on her lap afterwards, savouring her warmth, her odours...

Her histrionic pose, the pose all Cantonese girls learn from TV together with pouting and tantrums, expressed recent rejection. Her boyfriend had walked out on her. I vividly sensed that even before she told me, before I could even start my own spiel. My actual openers hit upon the sort of communication problem that would later make me lose patience and wish I lived in a territory English-medium education had produced communicative competence in more than a bare minimum of the population...

Of course, it was also a lot easier to keep a girl in the dark if you could cover things up with incomprehension and confusion. That technique is used a lot by the locals. Attacks of incomprehension frequently descend on them whenever respons- ibility, sex or guilt enter the conversation. There is also the "accidental" wrong digit in the telephone number they give you. You see, I quickly gained a lot of experience of deliberate miscommunication. I did nothing but pass on what I had learnt from people I met in Hong Kong. Although we should always rise above the evil and the wretchedness which surrounds us, we are tainted more readily than we can imagine by a wicked environment...

Love and sex are censored without rhyme or reason. I remember watching a TV version of a film called Working Girl. One of the key scenes is when the girl walks in and finds her boyfriend in bed with another girl. In the original, it's actually quite harmless and you don't see much - maybe a girl in a pair of panties and a satin slip. The boy's lying in bed, covered up. In the cut version for local TV you don't see the boyfriend two-timing his girlfriend at all. The incensed girlfriend just walks into her boyfriend's bedroom then walks out again without any explanation. Such ham-fisted censorship seriously interferes with the plot. Strangely, it's quite all right to show oral sex after the event. That is no longer erotic, it's just revolting and thus quite acceptable to the censors...

For some reason, local girls don't trust men an inch and like to know where they stand before removing the undergarments. I suppose that's a result of the renowned promiscuity of local guys. All the local men I met seemed to have mistresses and girlfriends besides the wife. It was their way of doing things. Americans and Europeans just dump the wife. The locals look around for a girlfriend...

People are looking at me and then the child and then again at Shirley. Perhaps, I conclude, you aren't allowed in the unwritten law to have foreign friends of the family in Hong Kong. I also feel embarrassed because I'm not used to conducting love affairs with a baby present. It's almost sacrilegious...

It's a talking dictionary and translator.

I tap the word babysitter and sure enough the machine finds some Chinese translation. Reviewing the index of key words, I find it rather unfair that the rude words are there but are only pronounced in Mandarin. It would be nice to have such a device, with appropriate amplifier, for certain taxi rides and shopping trips in Hong Kong...

I used to meet a lot of guys in Hong Kong who would try and sell me the "never marry a local" line. They chopped and changed their girlfriends with the weather. That sort of thing's all right for a while but in the end it's very wearing on the soul. Hong Kong is at the present time a little like a sweet shop for pretty girls. It isn't difficult to find a whole pile of girls who can be an emotional stop gap. In the end, though, you're alone and looking around for another one. It's very easy to see why you need a local girl in Hong Kong. You can't be part of the local scene without a strong link with your emotions. You're an outcast otherwise. That's why I think all that talk from those guys was sheer nonsense. They were stranded in the same useless game as me but they just wouldn't admit it.

I wonder how the Governor copes without a mistress or two.

--- The Great Hong Kong Sex Novel / George Adams

The Great Hong Kong Sex Novel (1)

"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