Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

I believed that I would marry a tall young Chinese girl, with a boy’s hips and long crow-black hair and a shining face; and I’d take her away, the hopeful mutual rescue that was the aim of every white bachelor then in the East. I did not give up the idea until later, when I saw one of these marriages, the radiant Chinese girl, shyly secretive, easily embarrassed, transformed into a crass suburban wife, nagging through her nose about prices in a monotonous voice, with thick unadventurous thighs, a complaining face, and at her most boring and suburban, saying to exhausted listeners in perfect English, “Well, we Chinese—” I had the idea of marriage; as long as I postponed the action, romance was possible for me, and I was happy. Any day, I expected to get the letter beginning, “ Dear Mr. Flowers, It gives me great pleasure to be writing to you today, and I know my news will please you —” Or perhaps the other one, starting, “ My darling —”

My brief, unrewarding enterprises, evenings calling out “Hey bud” to startled residents walking their dogs, afternoons sailing two fruit flies dressed as scrubwomen (greasy overalls covering silk cheongsams) to rusty freighters — these were over. The Richard Everett episode and the notoriety that followed it singled me out. Fellers rang me up at all hours of the night, asking me to get them a girl, and one of my replies — delivered at four in the morning to an importuning caller who said he hoped he hadn’t got me out of bed — became famous: “No,” I had said, “I was up combing my hair.” In the harbor bars I was “Jack” to everyone, and I knew every confiding barman by name. What pleasure it gave me, knocking off early at Hing’s, to go home and put on my white shoes and a clean flowered shirt and then to make my rounds in a trishaw, a freshly lit cheroot in my teeth, dropping in on the girls, in bars or massage parlors, to see how many I could count on for the evening. The wiry trishaw driver pumped away; I sat comfortably in the seat with my feet up as we wound through the traffic. The sun at five o’clock was dazzling, but the bars I entered were dark and cool as caves. I would stick my head in and say in a jaunty greeting to the darkness, “Hi girls!”

“ Jaaaack! ” They would materialize out of booths, hobble over to me on high heels, and favoring their clawlike fingernails, hug my big belly and give me genial tickling pinches in the crotch. “Come, Jack, I give you good time.” “Me, Jack, you like?” “Touch me, baby.”

“You’re all flawless,” I’d say, and play a hand of cards, buy them all a drink, and move on to a new bar. Many of the girls were independent, not paying any secret society protection money. I called them “floaters” because when they weren’t floating around looking for a pickup I was literally floating them by the dozen out to ships in the harbor. A great number of them who hung around the bars on Anson Road — The Gold Anchor, Big South Sea, Captain’s Table, Champagne Club, Chang’s — came to depend on me for customers. They were using me in the same way as Hing, to get Europeans, who didn’t haggle and who would pay a few dollars more. The Chinese were after the ang moh trade, and it seemed as if I was the only supplier. I could get white tourists and sailors for the girls as easily as I got the club members who were in the shipping business for Hing. The floaters along Anson Road and the Hing brothers were not the only ones who depended on me; the British servicemen at Changi, the sailors from H.M.S. Terror , the club members and tourists depended on me as well: the Chinese who sought the ang mohs were in turn being sought by the ang mohs , and both, ignorant of the others’ hunting, came to me for introductions — finding me they found each other.

But the girls in the wharf-area bars forfeited all their Chinese trade when they were seen holding hands with a paleface. After that, they were tainted, and no Chinese would touch them or notice them except to bark a singular Cantonese or Hokkien obscenity, usually an exaggeration of my virility (“So the redhead’s got a big doo-dah!”), meant as a slur on the girls for being lustful, and on me for a deformity not in the least resembling the little dark bathplug most Chinese consider the size of the normal male organ.

I was resented by most of the Chinese men in the bars; they accused me, in the oblique way Hing had, of spoiling the girls. The occupation of a prostitute they saw as a customary traditional role, an essential skill. But pairing up with red-haired devils made the girls vicious — it was an abnormality, something perverse, and the Chinese men considered these girls of mine as little better than the demon-women in folk stories who coupled with dogs and bore hairy babies. And that was not all. The men also had that little-country grievance, a point of view Yardley and the old-timers shared, about rich foreigners butting in and sending the prices up. Neither accusation was justified: the girls (who nearly always hated the men they slept with) were improved by their contact with Europeans, quiet undemanding men, unlike their sadistic woman-hating counterparts in the States. The men were instructive, curious, and kind, and wanted little more than to sail home and boast that they had spent the night with a Chinese whore in Singapore. And as for the prices going up — after a decade of inflation, when the price of a haircut doubled, cigarettes increased five times, and some house rents — my own, for example — went up by 200 per cent, the price of a short time with massage stayed the same, and an all-nighter cost only an extra three-fifty. Until Japanese cameras flooded the market, a night in bed with one of my girls was the only bargain a feller could find in Singapore.

The Chinese men would not listen to reason. “ Boochakong just now cost twenty-over dollar- lah ” they complained. I felt loathed and large. Some simply didn’t like my face or the fact that I was so pally with Chinese girls. I have already mentioned the secret-society member, the Three Dot in the Tai-Hwa who asked me threateningly, “Where you does wuck?” Another brute, late one night, took a swing at me in the parking lot of the Prince’s Hotel. He came at me from behind as I was unlocking my car — Providence made him stumble; and later the Prince’s manager, who to a Chinese eye might have looked like me — they can’t tell ang mohs apart, they say, and don’t find it funny — was found in a back alley with his throat cut and his flowered shirt smeared with blood. Karim, the barman, said his eyes had been ritually gouged. I had to choose my bars carefully, and I made sure my trishaw driver was a big feller.

Still, I was making money, and it delighted me on sunny afternoons to have a cold shower, then make my rounds in a well-upholstered trishaw, chirping into dark interiors, “Hi girls!” and to say to a stranger in a confident whisper, “If there’s anything you want— anything at all —” and be perfectly certain I could supply whatever he named.

Being American was part of my uniqueness. There were few Americans in Singapore, and though it was the last thing I wanted to be — after all, I had left the place for a good reason — the glad-hander, the ham with the loud jokes and big feet and flashy shirts, saying “It figures” and “Come off it” and “Who’s your friend?” and “This I gotta see,” it was the only role open to me because it was the only one the people I dealt with accepted. It alerted them when I behaved untypically; it looked as though I was concealing something and intended to defraud them by playing down the Yankee. In such a small place, an island with no natives, everyone a visitor, the foreigner made himself a resident by emphasizing his foreignness. Yardley, who was from Leeds, but had been in Singapore since the war — he married one of these sleek Chinese girls who turned into a suburban dragon named Mildred — had softened his Leeds accent by listening to the BBC Overseas Service. He put burnt matches back into the box (muttering, “These are threppence in U.K.”) and cigarette ash in his trouser cuffs and poured milk in his cup before the tea. The one time I made a reference to the photograph in the Bandung of the Queen and Duke (“Liz and Phil, I know them well — nice to see them around, broo-rehah!”), Yardley called Eisenhower — President at the time—“A bald fucker, a stupid general, and half the time he doesn’t know whether he wants a shit or a haircut.” Consequently, but against my will, I was made an American, or rather “The Yank.” When America was mentioned, fellers said, “Ask Jack.” I exaggerated my accent and dropped my Allegro pretense of being Italian. I tried to give the impression of a cheerful rascal, someone gently ignorant; I claimed I had no education and said, “If you say so” or “That’s really interesting” to anything remotely intelligent.