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