Friday May 10, 2013
Walk the mean streets on Hong Kong
Review by NICK WALKER
star2@thestar.com.my
Dive into this unique perspective on a hard-boiled city.
Hong Kong Noir
Author: Feng Chi-shun
Publisher: Blacksmith Books, 216 pages
THE after-dark shot into a Kowloon City street from the lobby of a dilapidated old apartment block looks like a still from a 1970s grindhouse movie. Gratifyingly, Hong Kong Noir delivers on its cover’s promise of pulpish thrills and chills. And much more – this collection of true-life yarns is written with verve and some very dark humour. Indeed, its most powerful sections recalls mid-period Stephen King.
Through these “15 true tales from the dark side of the city”, Feng Chi-shun demonstrates a keen sense of the macabre and a strong command of pacing, akin to the New England horror meister, and with more than a nod to the “dirty realism” and visceral intensity of another American-writer legend, the late short storyist Raymond Carver. In fact, Feng explained in a recent interview that he’d read a number of Carver titles in preparation for undertaking the writing of this collection.
Hong Kong Noir has been a permanent resident of Hong Kong’s top five bestsellers list of English-language titles since its December release, and so represents a second triumph for the writer, a native son of the city he depicts so vividly.
Feng’s previous bestseller was the marvellous Diamond Hill, a warm, sepia-tinted memoir of his formative years in a New Territories shanty town, where, in his words, “people were poor but life was rich”. With his latest release, Feng has altered tonality – more shadow, less light in the chiaroscuro mix – without losing his story-telling chops or mastery of the confluence of time, place and mood.
The writer is well-qualified to delve into the murk, and into the realm of real-life gore, having served for many years as one of the city’s most senior pathologists. Overdose cases, murders, suicides, tragic accidents – he’s seen it all. His current post-retirement occupation – he’s a self-confessed bar fly – also clearly provided inspiration, insights and authenticity for this work.
The common thread of Hong Kong Noir is failure – often so interesting in other people’s lives, not so much in one’s own – and Feng is evidently a keen observer of those spiralling downwards. Moreover he is adept at illuminating the factors that lead to the luckless – or just plain evil – low lifes, as they crash and burn, often inflicting horrific collateral damage on their way straight to hell.
The stories here are divided into three sections: “Losers And Boozers”, “Beyond Villains And Victims” and “Sex And The City”. Some, as Feng explains in the Foreword, concern people he has personally known, others involve nefarious individuals whose crimes received such sensational and extensive local coverage that, with some informed conjecture, Feng is able to present plausible “how it probably unfolded”-style narratives.
An example of the former is also one of the most moving. “Leaving Chungking Mansions” is the real story of “Clive” (not his real name), who was one of Hong Kong’s expat pre-Handover civil servants. He enjoyed a pampered, moneyed lifestyle before Beijing replaced London in the scheme of things in 1997, but who swiftly afterwards went into an unstoppable decline – financially, medically, and spiritually.
Feng gives the reader plenty of food for thought as he explains how Clive’s mid-life decisions were his unmaking and how they ultimately led him to a Tsim Sha Tsui flophouse where “he checked in, and he never checked out”. It’s a morality tale of reduced circumstances, perhaps too close to home for many of Hong Kong’s ageing Brits going to seed in the sub-tropics.
“The World According To Ron” concerns another Hard-Luck Club member, whose life that could have unfolded rather less messily, again with some half-decent planning. The trouble with the perennially needy Ron is that he never really makes it out of adolescence. Although lazy, feckless, and irresponsible, however, there’s something about the guy that keeps on making people want to help him. We’ve all known a Ron, and that’s the beauty of this yarn.
The real-crime narratives, such as “The Taxi-Diver From Hell”, are truly nightmarish, reflecting the reality of the cases revisited. But they’re treated in a manner that provides at least blurry insights into the banality of evil. Feng has conducted some deft connecting of the dots where there were gaps in the media coverage and public-domain records.
It’s also worth praising the neat sequencing of yarns. The stories of Hong Kong Noir ebb and flow and surge like the tracks on a classic 1960s rock’n’roll album. If Diamond Hill was Feng’s Rubber Soul, this is his Let It Bleed.
Finally: what an excellent title for this intriguing collection. Malaysia’s cinematic neighbour across the South China Sea is one hard-boiled city. The rewards are magnificent as long as you don’t lose the plot. But if you do, it’s as suffocating as the Kowloon petrochemical smog during a heatwave.
> Nick Walker is a Hong Kong-based author, literary critic and travel writer who covers this part of the world extensively.
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