| Chapter : | Introduction |
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an explicit prospect/retrospect, this time overtly geographical: “The hotel at the corner of Des Voeux Rd and Pedder St in Hong Kong used to be called the Gloucester. (It has now been remodelled, I believe, and is no longer a hotel)” (42). The narrator goes on to describe the vantage point over the chaotic traffic, which serves metonymically to orient the speaking voice in relation to larger shifting postwar geographies: “Little black English cars, outnumbered, fought for their rights with bright new American ones. (Studebakers, which formed the taxi population, were a great joke to the British colony, being as long in back as in front and giving the appearance of going both ways)” (42).
The colonial complications of the story are signalled in its title, a phrase drawn from the absurd verbal repertoire of the narrator’s British colleague, filing clerk, Mr Crackenthorpe, defined by his colonial insularity and incapacity:
He uttered few words of his own language and knew no word of any other. His maximum effort toward bridging the language gap was made each morning when he gave his hearty greeting in pidgin English to the pair of Amahs who cleaned our offices. Astonishing expressions then fell from his lips, such as “Catchem top-side cleanee by and by” or “Wipem deskee chop-chop,” or that wistful and irrelevant pronouncement on the greenness of far fields, “Canton more far.”
Tik, on the other hand, was fluent in various languages. He worked in both Mandarin and Cantonese, but his mother tongue was Hakka, a dialect of the hill people in the coastal areas opposite Hong Kong. (43)
Expressive language, here suggested through competence and diversity, is at odds with colonial authority, the latter subject to the complications of deception, and target of the satirical insights of youth and ignorance:
My occupation was in a place of authority—of high and confidential authority—an office concerned with the colony’s security. Regarding my own task there, however, there need be no secrecy.