“Like I knew Suzie / Oh, oh, oh what a gal.”
So the song goes, although I doubt very much that lyric was written for a Wanchai yum yum girl. Quite a gal, that Suzie, Suzie Wong, to have lodged herself so deeply in my subconscious from my first encounter with her forty five years earlier such that she seems to haunt my every step in Hong Kong.
If you knew Suzie, you didn’t forget her. Suzie Wong is the heroine of Richard Mason’s book, The World of Suzie Wong , and the bar girl played by Nancy Kwan in the 1960 film with the same title. Uncounted are how many other impressionable young men she captivated from print or celluloid as an icon of Asian female beauty, grace, and exotic eroticism.
According to her “bio,” Suzie is reputed to have “known” at least two thousand men, mostly sailors, before she finally walked away from her trade hand in hand with Robert Lomax,, an architect turned painter in Hong Kong, who was an Englishman or an American depending upon whether you met him in the book or the movie played by William Holden. Many more have enjoyed the now-fabled Wanchai enchantress in their imagination.
Legions of American servicemen took their R & R in Wanchai bars. Like much of Hong Kong, which changes as fitfully as the stock quotes and currency rates that run through its veins and arteries, Wanchai has changed; it is no longer the hub of licentiousness. Real estate profit rules Hong Kong, a form of civic prostitution devoid of nostalgia for the city Suzie knew. For that matter, contemporary successors to Suzie’s trade have changed and relocated. They are more likely to be found across Victoria Harbour in Mongkok in Kowloon, and be Filippina, Malay, Thai, or girls from the People’s Republic of China.
But a fictional prostitute endures. While I am approaching an age no longer worthy of her good offices, she remains the twenty-year-old Shanghainese girl who took up her trade in Wanchai’s Namkok Hotel. She’s still the Suzie who, after two thousand clients, can claim convincingly that she is still a virgin in her heart, and she can still delude herself that one day she will marry and have a proper Chinese family even though that, by custom, was ruled out from the day her uncle forcibly took her virginity way back in Shanghai.
From Messalina to Irma La Douce to Suzie, the whore with a heart of gold is a literary and cinematic staple. She remains capable of capturing the hearts, and even souls, of her admirers because while her charms may be purchased, her love can only be bought in a dearer currency.
I first came to HK rather late in my own life, although my infatuation with Suzie began at age nineteen in a movie theatre back in New York, it resided, dormant and patient, like a virus, awaiting my immune-compromised middle years.
It is best to board a Star Ferry, those redoubtable fixtures of Victoria Harbour to explain the return of Suzie to the forefront of my consciousness.
The Star Ferry, and that ponytail
In real life the most powerful mnemonic trigger is usually olfactory; in reel life it is ocular. The first time I boarded a Star Ferry, there was a vague familiarity. Their forest green and cream color scheme, the sloping wooden deck planks, the quaint seats, that bluntly-efficient double-ender, lozenge hull, all produced a sense of déjà vu . I seemed to know from some subconscious record that the reversible seat backs could be set to the direction in which the ferry was headed. I was headed from the Kowloon-side of Tsim Sha Tsui to the Hong Kong-side landing at Central.
Ahead of me, a few rows up a silky raven-black pony-tail bounced above the collar of a Burberry trenchcoat, suspended jauntily from a perfectly formed head. Her back was to me, and it seemed unseemly for me to get up and re-seat myself for a better view from the side or the front. Other riders settled into the seats, the loading ramps were hoisted, and the ferry lumbered away from the pier and out into the chop of Victoria Harbour.
In the periphery of my vision, I could see the highrise silver and gold commercial buildings of Central rising against the still higher, and still largely verdant backdrop of Victoria Peak. But my main focus remained on that tantalizing ponytail. While the rest of the passengers were animated with their conversations, arranging their shopping bags, or snapping their tourist photos, Suzie—yes, I think I can call her that, so sure am I that anyone, at least any guy who has seen the opening sequence of The World of Suzie Wong,would agree, must certainly be Suzie—remained motionless. It was indeed as though she had been transported from some other time, as though with some cinematic trick she had been pasted into the scene before me, and maybe only for (by?) me, and no one else, an anachronism summoned by my subconscious past to my conscious present. She herself seemed separate from the others, slightly out of focus in her own space and plane, her hues, if I can say it, “Technicolor”. Others seemed to take no special notice of her.
The mind plays tricks, and I think mine wanted to be a willing participant in the illusion. I looked down at myself. Was I wearing a trenchcoat as well, Robert Lomax’s (he the romantic lead played by William Holden) trenchcoat? Did I have a leather suitcase beside my seat as he did when he first encountered Suzie on the Star Ferry? No, I was still me. But that girl with the ponytail; I wasn’t so sure. I needed to see her face. There would be a chance when we arrived at Central. She was ahead of me and when she got up to leave would be facing in my direction.
Soon enough the Star Ferry was alongside the pier at Central. The trip was shorter now than in Suzie’s day back in the 1950s. Since then there has been more filling in of the harbor and the piers might one-day form a bridge if the relentless pursuit of commercial building space does not abate. But time was of no consequence this day, it seemed undirected and distorted. In a moment I would see what was on the other side of that taunting ponytail.
But when Suzie got up from here seat so did the large Australian guy who was sitting behind her. He completely blotted her out! And then, as if to frustrate me all the more, they seemed to move in unison, with only slight flicks of that ponytail to indicate that she was still there.
There would still be a chance to see her full on when she got to the gangway. If I went around the elliptical housing for the smokestack in the center of the ferry she would be coming from the other side and be facing me. Then I could check to see that face, the face I would know instantly and without a shred of doubt would be Suzie’s face. Rather, Nancy Kwan’s face, the face that played Suzie and will forever be associated with Suzie. There would be that telltale little apostrophe of hair descending from her brow. That little lick of hair, but also the large eyes, Kwan’s Eurasian eyes, a touch rounder than the typical almond Asian eyes. How expressive they were in the film: flirting with sidelong glances, scolding with a dark frown, they could plead, come to tears, express innocence or ecstasy. I’d know in a flash, in a flashback.
If I could only get around to the other side of the stack housing. But other passengers had rushed toward the gangway (rushing is the default speed for all locomotion in Hong Kong) and clogged the way around while the gangplank was being lowered. The clog broke loose when the gangway was open. In a second I would see her. Except that an elderly Chinese man decided that it was time for him to stop and spit, right below the sign that says in Chinese and English that one should not spit on the ferry. At least he chose to spit in the trash receptacle. But that second was gone, and so was Suzie. I caught a glimpse of her coat and a flash of the ponytail as she ascended the ramp toward the exit, obscured by other passengers and the struts and columns of the pier.
I rushed after her, dodging and weaving through the passengers hoping to catch up with her in the terminal, hoping to get that one, brief, confirming look at her. To prove to myself that she was indeed Suzie. Just one confirming look!
She had melted into the throng. Gone. Disappeared as effectively as she had disappeared from Robert Lomax in the movie’s first scene; melted into the mystery of Hong Kong.
In my remaining few days of this first visit, I would find myself looking for her among the city’s sights and landmarks. There are thousands of pretty Chinese girls with ponytails in Hong Kong. It’s a very common way for them to wear their hair here, their raven-black hair, which should never be, although sadly increasingly is, dyed or bleached to another color. In the coming days I would see scores of them, and the faces that preceded them. They were often attractive and beautiful girls, but none of them proved to be Suzie. They were everywhere and pretty young women in ponytails soon multiplied like objects in a funhouse infinity of mirrors.
A few days later when my plane rose over the harbor from Tai Kok I was no closer to the solving the mystery. But before we reached cruising altitude I has resolved to return to Hong Kong, next time for an extended stay, one in which I would take up residence in Suzie Wong’s city. I would search for Suzie, but I would also discover Hong Kong.
Hong Kong and Suzie Wong; they’re alike in many ways: beautiful, self-assured yet vulnerable, determined and self-deluding. Except that Suzie never changes. What a city, and “Oh, oh, oh what a gal!”
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 4.13.2004)