Quotes of the Day
On Martin Booth's first day in Hong Kong in 1952, his parents took him to lunch at the British naval base where his father was about to start work. There the 7-year-old was confronted with a frightening plateful of leggy crustaceans unknown back in England. As he recounts in Gweilo (Doubleday; 342 pages), a memoir of his first three years in the former crown colony, a kindly naval officer briefed him on local customs: "Whenever someone offers you something to eat, accept it. That's being polite."
Booth followed the advice, inhaling more exotic food, culture and adventure in those three years than most people manage in a lifetime. He eventually returned to Britain, worked as a truck driver, legal clerk, wine steward, English teacher and, only after he turned 40, a writer. But that boyhood hunger for discovery would help shape 13 novels, six books of children's fiction and 10 nonfiction works of history, biography, criticism and reportage. Add his mountain of articles, television scripts and poems, plus the 400 books by other poets (Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney) that he produced at his small publishing house Sceptre Press, and Booth must rank as a giant of modern English letters. So why haven't more people heard of him?
Many kids will appreciate his Music on the Bamboo Radio, about a boy stranded in Hong Kong by the 1941 Japanese invasion. Conservationists value Booth's many books and TV documentaries on African wildlife (he spent a few years in Kenya). There's also a small chance you saw a copy of his 1985 adult novel Hiroshima Joe, the tale of a captured British soldier who survives the first atomic bombing, which was an international best seller. And Booth's Industry of Souls was short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize in 1998. But even that estimable Holocaust novel was rejected by major publishers before a small imprint picked it up for a pitiful $1,500 advance.
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Gweilo should rescue Booth from relative obscurity, if only for the story behind it. Two years ago, as the author was battling brain cancer, his children asked him to set down an account of his formative years while he still could. Booth finished just before dying in February. He was buried in his favorite cowboy boots — he had developed a fondness for the American southwest.
Don't look for anything morose here. Gweilo is sometimes a bit novelistic for a memoir, but it is alive with delight in the new. The boy's golden hair is considered good luck by the Chinese, who cannot resist touching it. "I was a walking talking talisman," he writes. This, plus his status as a gweilo ("white devil," or foreigner), allows him to walk undeterred into Hong Kong's brothels and opium dens to befriend coolies, Triad gangsters and the real-life model for Hiroshima Joe. Perhaps Booth's biggest coup is talking his way into Kowloon Walled City, a notorious no-go area of vice and violence, where he watches old men smoke opium and prostitutes while away the afternoon waiting for business. Afterward, his guide, a young Triad member named Lau, gestures toward a pig in a nearby butcher shop. "A man in a pair of bloodied shorts stepped up to it, grabbed one ear and yanked it back," writes Booth. "The pig squealed, an eerie, unearthly sound. The butcher ran a sharp knife under its neck and slit its throat, stepping smartly backwards. The pig fell on its side, thrashing about and gurgling obscenely. Blood sprayed from its neck. Lau put his hands on my shoulder in an affable manner and said, 'You talk [about what Booth had seen in the Walled City], maybe you [end up] like this.'"
He also sees a glitzier side of Hong Kong, the shopping paradise. "I knew I could not just walk into one of these shops so I worked the obvious ploy, waiting until a tourist couple entered and tagging along camouflaged as their child," Booth reports. "It worked time and again and I got to study — close up — such marvels as Audemars Piguet, Longines and Vacheron et Constantin gold watches, emeralds as green as still water and as big as peas, and Rolliflex and Leica cameras with a shutter movement so silent you could not hear it. All of these I gazed at with the avidity of a magpie. At times, the palms of my hands actually itched with temptation and desire."
He encounters a woman with bound feet, a waiter whose tongue was cut out by the Japanese as a punishment, a dentist whose recollections of wartime internment are so gruesome that Booth endures the drill without novocaine or complaint. He learns how to eat boiled beetles, chew sugarcane stalks, polish ancestral bones on "hungry ghosts" day, and speak rudimentary Cantonese. He spends long afternoons wandering around what was then a quiet city of green hills and mysterious alleys, catching geckos and digging up spent bullets — and, one scary day, the skeleton of a Japanese soldier. Watching a sailor pinch a bar girl on the bottom, he tries out that sign of affection on his family's elderly Chinese maid, with disastrous results. When his father gets into a minor road accident, an angry mob gathers — until Martin, then 9, stuns everyone into silence with a burst of newly acquired Cantonese obscenities.
Yet the innocent idyll has a villain: Booth's father, a stiff, cocktail-swilling prig who denigrates the locals and mocks the boy's affection for "going native." The elder Booth "was a natural-born bully," writes his ever-upbeat son. "On the other hand, I did grow up mixing a mean cocktail." The heroine is his mother — spunky, intelligent and curious about all things Chinese. Dad, a civilian employee of the navy, wants to go home; Mum wants to stay. As the family heads for the ship that will return them to England, she impulsively grabs Martin and leaps from the car. Gweilo is artfully shy of detail about what comes next, and sadly there will be no sequel. So this sunny, luminous account of a very special time and place will have to serve as an epitaph, along with the three forthcoming children's books the dying Booth also completed, ensuring that he will remain forever young.
- DONALD MORRISON
- Martin Booth's posthumously published mving memoir of an exotic childhood in the 1950s British colony