“I’ll give you a hand,” says my father.
“Oh, that’s okay.”
“But I want to.”
They go out to the kitchen and my nan and I watch a new kind of program where some people are exchanging blows because one of them has discovered that his girlfriend is really a man. I haven’t seen this kind of thing before. Even the rubbish is new.
From the kitchen I can hear the sound of laughter as my dad and Lena unload the dishwasher.
I have never in my life seen my father helping with the housework.
That’s new too.
3
I WALK AROUND CHINATOWN.
Since coming back to London, that’s what I do all day. I get a tube to the West End and I head for that tiny patch of London where the street names are in both English and Chinese. Then I walk.
Entering Chinatown by one of its three gates-Wardour Street on the west, Macclesfield Street on the north, Newport Court on the east-I make my way down those loud, busy streets until the place fills my senses, until it reminds me of that other place on the far side of the world.
In minutes I am back in Hong Kong. There are no spectacular views of skyline and harbor and peak. But many of the sights are the same as when I was in Kowloon or Wanchai.
Rows of laminated ducks in windows, good-looking girls with glossy hair talking into brightly colored mobile phones, old men with gold teeth pushing babies with eyes like brown jewels, young mothers with children dressed up to the nines, surly teenage boys with slicked-back hair hanging around outside the games arcade trying to look like gangsters, waitresses making their way to work in their monochrome uniforms or mopping the small square of pavement outside their restaurants, steam pouring from a tiny kitchen behind misty plate glass, men in filthy vests delivering boxes of iced fish.
Chinatown is the one place that I can be happy. It does more than remind me of Hong Kong. It reminds me of when Rose and I were still together.
There are shops, supermarkets and of course restaurants galore, but there are not really any places to stop and watch the world go by. Despite the proximity to the self-consciously Mediterranean street life of Soho, there are no little cafés or coffee shops or bars. If you want cappuccino and a quiet half-hour, then you are in the wrong place. That’s not a Cantonese thing. Yet I don’t care.
It means I keep moving-down the main artery of Gerrard Street, into Wardour Street where the western border of Chinatown shares space with pizza joints and nightclubs, then into dark, narrow Lisle Street, with its smell of roast duck and gas fumes, then maybe into Little Newport Street where you can see the huge head of a papier-mâché Chinese dragon in a martial arts shop called Shaolin Way, as if the dragon is guarding the punch bags and focus pads and cardboard boxes full of black Kung Fu trousers. Finally perhaps, after reaching the bookstores and theaters of Charing Cross Road, I’ll double-back on myself into Newport Court where you can buy Chinese magazines, Chinese CDs, Chinese anything you like.
As I haphazardly patrol the streets of Chinatown, a poem keeps coming back to me, a poem by Kipling that we studied when I was teaching English literature at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys.
“Mandalay” is about a discharged British soldier wandering around London after serving “somewheres east of Suez,” and as he roams the streets of Bank-is the ex-soldier now a messenger boy in the City? Does he make his living running errands for the ancestors of Josh?-he thinks of the wind in the palm trees and the elephants piling teak and the woman he left behind. Our ex-soldier should not be lonely-he tells us that, in the English drizzle, he steps out with fifty housemaids from “Chelsea to the Strand.” But he remembers when “dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay” and he remembers when she was by his side.
“So this is about his bitch, is it, sir?” one of my smarter, nastier students would enquire to guffaws of laughter from the back of the class. “Is it, like, a-what do you call it?-savage incitement of sexual tourism, sir? Not incitement, sir. What’s the word? Indictment, sir? Is it an indictment? Sir?”
“Mandalay” didn’t mean much to my pale thin charges with their Tommy gear and leering grins. It didn’t, in truth, mean much to me at the time. But now that I am back in London it runs around my head and will not let me go and makes me sick for my lost home, my lost wife.
For the temple-bells are callin,’ and it’s there that I would be-
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.
I like to get to Chinatown early, before the sauntering tourist crowds with their cameras and their blank looks and their paranoid rucksacks strapped on back to front. I like to arrive while the trucks are still unloading their produce and the old ladies are setting out their stalls and there are groups of men standing around gossiping in Cantonese, men who will later go to work in the restaurants or disappear into the basement gambling joints to play mah-jongg.
That’s when I like it best, when it is just the Chinese preparing for the day ahead. That’s when it reminds me most of Hong Kong.
I always eat my lunch here. Sometimes I eat early, usually dim sum at the New World on Gerrard Place, one of those old-fashioned dim sum restaurants, dying out now, where they still have the girls pushing trolleys loaded with steamed buns and barbecued pork and fried eggplant, the trolleys going slowly round and round the huge red and gold restaurant, and they let you choose straight from the trolleys rather than just giving you a menu the way most dim sum joints do these days.
Sometimes I eat late, maybe a bowl of noodle soup at one of the smaller restaurants on Gerrard Street, where they don’t mind if you ask for a table at four in the afternoon.
You can pretty much eat any time you like in Chinatown. That’s what I have always liked about the Cantonese. They let you get on with your life. They don’t make rules. They just don’t care.
There’s a lot to be said for not caring.
In my opinion, not caring is very underrated.
Ever since my time in Hong Kong, I have been a big fan of afternoon tea, that ritualized fix of sugar and caffeine just when your energy levels are starting to dip. Rose liked it too. She said that afternoon tea was the most indulgent of meals, because it was the one meal that happened when you were meant to be working.
Rose was always saying things like that-things that had a way of making your feelings understandable. I thought that I just liked stuffing my cake hole with scones and jam in the middle of the afternoon. Rose made me see that what I really liked was escaping from the Double Fortune Language School.
There’s a swanky hotel near Bond Street where they serve afternoon tea. The clientele are all tourists who are seeking a slice of ye olde authentic England in a pot of Earl Grey. Apart from me.
The room is ringing with a dozen foreign tongues when I walk in with my Evening Standard under my arm. The waiter looks at me as if I have wandered into the wrong place.
“Tea, sir? How many?”
“Tea for one.”
He brings me a pot of tea and a silver stand that looks like a wedding cake. The layers of the stand are loaded with chunky scones, pots of cream and ruby-red jam, and dainty little sandwiches.
The waiter is friendly. The tourists are not too noisy. The scones are still warm. The salmon and cucumber sandwiches have all had their crusts cut off. The tea is brewed from leaves not bags.
Everything is exactly as it should be.
But it just doesn’t taste the same over here.
The walk to the tube takes me through the shabby babble of Oxford Street.
Music that rattles my fillings pours from clothing stores, record shops, coffee bars. Once the cheap, vibrant glamour of this street seemed to be what London was all about. Now I feel out of place among the new music, the tired fashions, the acned mob. Now it just reminds me that I am getting old. Oxford Street has stayed the same while I have changed. I try to move quickly through the crowds but the rush hour has started and progress is slow.