Paul Theroux: Saint Jack

IN ANY MEMOIR it is usual for the first sentence to reveal as much as possible of your subject’s nature by illustrating it in a vivid and memorable motto, and with my own first sentence now drawing to a finish I see I have failed to do this! But writing is made with the fingers, and all writing, even the clumsy kind, exposes in its loops and slants a yearning deeper than an intention, the soul of the writer flapping on the clothespin of his exclamation mark. Including the sentence scribbled above: being slow to disclose my nature is characteristic of me. So I am not off to such a bad start after all. My mutters make me remember. Later, I will talk about my girls.

I was going to get under way with an exchange which took place one morning last year between Gopi and me. Gopi was our peon —pronounced “pyoon,” messenger, to distinguish him from “pee-on,” the slave. He was a Tamil and had a bad leg. He sidled into my cubicle. He showed me two large damp palms and two discolored eyes and said, “Mister Hing vaunting Mister Jack in a hurry- lah .”

That summons was the beginning. At the time I did not know enough to find it dramatic. In fact, it annoyed me. Though it seems an innocent request, when it is repeated practically every day for fourteen years it tends to swaddle one with oppression. That “hurry- lah ” stung me more than the summons. Mr. Hing, my towkay , my boss, was an impatient feller. I was a sitting duck for summonses.

“No one tells Jack Flowers to hurry,” I said, turning back to my blue desk diary. I was resolute. I entered a girl’s name beside a circled day. He can whistle and wait, I thought, the bugger. “Gopi, tell him I’m busy.”

Carrying that message made the peon liable to share the blame. I suspected that was why I said it — not a cheering thought. But I couldn’t go straight up to Mr. Hing. Gopi left slowly, dragging his bad leg after him. When he was gone I slammed my diary and then, as if stricken with grief, and sighing on each rung, I mounted the narrow stepladder to Mr. Hing’s office.

Mr. Hing, a clean tubby Cantonese, got brutal haircuts, one a week, the sort given to inmates of asylums, leaving him a bristly pelt of brush on top and the rest shaven white. He had high Chinese eyebrows and his smile, not really a smile, showed a carved treasure of gold teeth. His smile was anger. He was angry half the time, with the Chinese agony, an impulsive bellyaching Yin swimming against a cowardly Yang: the personality in deadlock. So the Chinese may gaze with waxen placidity into your face, or refuse to reply, or snort and fart when you want a word of encouragement. The secrecy is only half the story. In the other half they yell and fling themselves from rooftops, guzzle weed killer and caustic soda and die horribly to inconvenience their relatives, or gibber in the street with knives — Chinese fire drill. What kept Mr. Hing from suicide was perhaps the thought that he couldn’t kill himself by jumping from the crenelated roof of his low two-story shophouse. The two opposing parts of his nature made him a frugal but obsessive gambler, a tyrannical philanthropist, a tortured villain, almost my friend. He had a dog. He choked it with good food and kicked it for no reason — he may have kicked it because he fed it, the kindness making him cruel. When it ran away, which was often, Mr. Hing placed an expensive ad in the Straits Times to get the poor beast back. Mr. Hing was short, about my own age, and every morning he did exercises called burpees in his locked office. He had few pleasures. Until six in the evening, when he changed into striped pajamas and dandled his grandson on his knee, he wore an ordinary white shirt, an expensive watch, plain trousers, and cheap rubber sandals he kicked off when he sat cross-legged on his chair. He was seated that way the morning I entered his office.

He was slightly more agitated than usual, and the appearance of agitation was heightened by a black fan on a shelf moving its humming face from side to side very rapidly and disturbing the clutter of papers on his desk. Papers trembled and rose, and Mr. Hing clapped them flat as the fan turned away; then it happened again, another squall, another slap.

Mr. Hing’s brother perched beside him in a crouch, his knees drawn up, his arms folded into the trough of his lap. He was wearing a T-shirt, the collar stretched showing his hairless chest, and large khaki shorts. I thought of him as Little Hing; he was skinnier and younger, and his youthful hungry face made him seem to me most untrustworthy. Together, their faces eight inches apart, staring at me from behind the desk, they resembled the pair of fraternal faces you see fixed in two lozenge-shaped frames on a squareshouldered bottle of Chinese patent medicine, Tiger Tonic, Three Legs Brain Fluid, or (Mr. Hing’s favorite) Rhino Water. Big Hing was especially agitated and saying everything twice: “Sit down, sit down,” then, “We got a problem, got a problem.”

True Chinese speech is impossible to reproduce without distraction, and in this narrative I intend to avoid the conventional howlers. The “flied lice” and “No tickee, no shirtee” variety is really no closer to the real thing than the plain speech I have just put in Big Hing’s mouth. Chinese do more than transpose r and I , and v and b , and s and sh. They swallow most of their consonants and they seldom give a word an ending: a glottal stop amputates every final syllable. So what Big Hing really said was, “Shi’ duh’” and “We go’ a pro’luh’”; there is no point in being faithful to this yammering. Little Hing’s English was much better than Big’s, though Little spoke very fast; but when they were in the same room, Little didn’t open his trap, except to mutter in Cantonese. That morning he sat in silence, his teeth locked together, the lowers jutting out, fencing the uppers with yellow pickets.

The conversation, I knew, would be brief, and the only reason Big Hing asked me to sit down was that I towered over the desk like a sweaty bear, panting with annoyance, my tattoos showing. My size bothered them especially. I was a foot taller than Big Hing, and a foot and a half taller than Little — when they were standing. I sat and sank into a chair of plastic mesh, and as I was sinking Big Hing started to explain.

A month before, he had been told that a man was coming from Hong Kong to audit our books. There was another Hing in Hong Kong, a towkay bigger than Big Hing, and the auditing was an annual affair. It was also an annual humiliation because Big Hing didn’t like his accounts questioned. Still, it happened every year. At one time it was a sallow little man who always arrived ravaged from traveling deck class on a freighter; then, for a few years, a skeletal soul with a kindly smile and popping eyes, who hugged a briefcase — turned to suede by wear — to his starched smock with frog buttons. The auditors stayed for a week, snapping the abacus and thumbing the ledger; Big Hing sat close by, pouring tea, saying nothing. Last year it was a man called Lee, and he was the problem, though Big Hing didn’t say so. All he said was: meet this man at the airport.

It was why Hing was agitated. He assumed Lee was Cantonese or at least Chinese. But he discovered, I never learned how, that Lee was an ang moh , a redhead. The ang mohs were my department. It was the reason I was employed by Hing— Chop Hing Kheng Fatt: Ship Chandlers & Provisioned , as the shop sign read. Hing was peeved that he was mistaken about the name, and furious that his books were going to be scrutinized by an ang moh. He beamed with anger and banged his fist down upon the fluttering papers, repeating Lee’s name and my orders to meet him at the airport. I drew my own conclusions, and I was correct in every detail except the spelling, which was Leigh.