BOOK REVIEW Living (and dying) in the shadows Hong Kong Noir by Feng Chi-shun
Reviewed by Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - To casual observers, this city is a fast-paced and efficient center for shopping and international finance with a world-beating skyline and harbor magnificently illuminated every night for their visual pleasure.
In addition, despite its cheek-by-jowl congestion, Hong Kong is known as one of the safest cities on the planet, but some gruesome events transpire in its shadows, where the garish lights never shine. Feng Chi-shun has chosen to shed some light of his
own on the city's dark side with 15 tales of "losers and boozers" and "villains and victims" in his most recent book, Hong Kong Noir.
With his first book, Diamond Hill, published three years ago, Feng, a retired pathologist, resurrected the lost Hong Kong squatter village in which he grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. For Feng, writing is more of an avocation than a profession - that clearly shows in his uneven prose - but his authorial debut won praise for its vivid portrayal of the grinding poverty of Hong Kong's recent past and for his colorful depiction of the cast of characters - thugs and their "teddy girls", gamblers, movie stars and many more - who surrounded him during his childhood and adolescent years.
As a whole, Hong Kong Noir is not as successful as Diamond Hill - indeed several of the stories read more like summaries than narratives - but it nevertheless can make for fascinating (if also unsettling) reading, whether or not you live in the city. For example, who can resist a story told by a pathologist about a hemophiliac, Ah Fai, who chooses to join the notorious 14K triad at the tender age of 15 and enjoys nothing more than the bloodletting of a full-on, violent street fight?
As you might guess, Ah Fai spends a lot of time in the intensive care unit of hospitals, where his striking good looks and unusual charm make him something of a celebrity to the doctors and nurses who treat him. Their affection for the reckless gangster spurs them to work especially hard to save him every time he shows up awash in his own blood at an emergency ward.
In the end, however, it turns out there is only so much anyone can do for a hemophiliac who has made such a poor career choice.
In "The Taxi Driver from Hell," Feng introduces readers to the world's most perverse and lethal man behind the wheel since Robert De Niro played Travis Bickle in the legendary 1976 paragon of film noir, Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorcese.
"Every major city has a serial killer among its citizens," Feng writes, "and Hong Kong is no exception. We had our counterpart of Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer.
"Hong Kong's monster was named Lam Kor-wan, a taxi driver from hell."
Unlike De Niro's irredeemably damaged Vietnam War veteran, Lam was a real-life Hong Kong driver who in 1982 and 1983 murdered and subsequently chopped up four of his female passengers, keeping their body parts in Tupperware containers stored beneath his bed. The deranged killer no doubt would have claimed and chopped more victims if an employee at a photo shop had not gone to the police with film of the carnage that Lam had left with him for processing.
All of Feng's 15 tales are, he maintains, factual, although he writes in the foreword to the book that he has created composite characters for some familiar Hong Kong stories such as "The Millionaire Street Sleeper" and "The Girl with the Eagle Tattoo" and embellished others where factual details were lacking.
The author has also included accounts of the bizarre lives of some of his friends, changing the names of those still living. The most interesting of these include "Mommy's Boy" - the story of Stephen, a steadfastly loyal son who never abandons the grossly negligent, drug-addicted mother who has brought him up on a diet of instant noodles and revolving boyfriends - and "The World According to Ron," which relates the sad life of an intermittently brilliant man whose brazen outspokenness and obsession with the wrong women lead him to ruin.
In another story, "The Kindest Cut of All," Feng combines the publicly known and the personal in a yarn that he says is about a friend of his but is also evocative of Hong Kong's most sensational transgender marriage case, which involves a legal quest by man who became a woman through sex-changing surgery to marry the man he/she now loves.
The case is currently being heard in the city's Court of Final Appeal. A decision by the marriage registrar to deny the couple a marriage license on the grounds that Hong Kong does not recognize same-sex marriage was upheld in a lower court.
Feng's story also focuses on a man who became a woman but offers a lot more detail about the people involved: An Englishman named Charles becomes a successful Hong Kong businessman, loving husband and responsible father of three children before waking up one day and deciding to chuck it all for a sex change and a new name, Cynthia.
But there is a plot twist that the city's judges do not have to consider when Cynthia then falls in love not with a man but with another woman, whom she seeks to marry. Her argument to the marriage registrar: The gender-changing surgery she received in Hong Kong notwithstanding, she remains a man as that is what is stated on her birth certificate, which she produces as evidence.
It is difficult to say which of Feng's tales is the oddest or most ghoulish, but certainly "Inside Hello Kitty's Head" is hovering around the top of both lists. Here Feng recounts another of Hong Kong's most gruesome murders in a story once again involving triads and chopping instruments. This time, however, there is an additional creepy prop: the popular Japanese doll that is widely loved as the epitome of cuteness and innocence.
As Feng tells the story, after three young thugs have tortured to death a prostitute who owed one on them money and then chopped up her body, they wonder how to hide the evidence:
"Someone came up with the idea of hiding Ah Map's cooked head inside a Hello Kitty stuffed doll. Lok Tsai's girlfriend Ah Pui lived there occasionally, and she left numerous Hello Kitty items in the flat, including a human-sized stuffed doll. They cut off the Hello Kitty head, excavated its cotton filling, and stuffed Ah Map's head in its place. Then they called Ah Pui in to sew the head back onto the doll."
Depending on whether you find that passage more compelling than repulsive, you should read this book, but be warned: Hong Kong Noir is not for the squeamish.
Hong Kong Noir by Feng Chi-shun. Blacksmith Books (December 2012). ISBN: 978-988-16139-6-7. Price US$13.95, HK$108. 216 pages.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at kewing56@gmail.com Follow him on Twitter: @KentEwing1
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