One Man’s Bible

After disembarking and leaving the wharf, some people get onto bicycles. There are no cars on the island. Dim streetlights. It’s a small town with narrow streets, shops and restaurants one after another, and it’s quite lively.

“If you had a tea room with music, or a bar, it would be easy to make a living here. You could write and paint during the day and open for business at night. What do you think?” Dongping, who comes to meet you, bearded and tall, is an artist who came from the Mainland a year or so ago.

“And if you felt weary, you could go to the beach any time for a swim.”

Dongping points to some small fishing boats and rowboats moored in the harbor at the bottom of the stone steps down the slope; he says a foreigner friend of his bought an old fishing boat and lives in it. Margarethe says she’s starting to like Hong Kong.

“You can work here; your Chinese is good and English is your mother tongue,” Dongping says.

“She’s German,” you say.

“Jewish,” she corrects you.

“Born in Italy,” you add.

“You know so many languages! What company would not pay a high salary to employ you? But you wouldn’t have to live here; Repulse Bay over on Hong Kong Island has many grand apartments on the mountains by the sea.”

“Margarethe doesn’t like living with bosses, she likes artists,” you say for her.

“Great, we can be neighbors,” Dongping says. “Do you paint? We’ve got a gang of artist friends here.”

“I used to paint because I liked it, but not professionally. It’s too late to start learning.”

You say you didn’t know she painted, and she immediately says in French there is a great deal you don’t know about her. At this point, she distances herself but still wants to maintain a secret language with you. Dongping says that he didn’t study in an art college and was not officially recognized as an artist: that was why he left the Mainland.

“In the West, artists don’t need official recognition and don’t need to have studied in an art college. Anyone can be an artist. The main thing is whether there is a market, whether one’s paintings can sell,” Margarethe says.

Dongping says there is no market for his paintings in Hong Kong. What the art entrepreneurs want are copies of impressionistic concoctions with a foreign signature for Western galleries, and these are bought at wholesale prices. He does a different signature each time and can’t remember how many names he has signed. Everyone laughs.

On the first floor, where Dongping lives, the sitting room adjoins the studio, and the residents are painters, photographers, poets, and columnists. The only person who is not an artist or writer is a foreigner, a good-looking young American. Dongping formally introduces the man. He is a critic, and the boyfriend of a woman poet from the Mainland.

Everyone has a paper plate and a pair of chopsticks, and they help themselves to the seafood hotpot. The seafood isn’t alive but it is very fresh. Dongping says he brought it all home just before you arrived, but now, in the bubbling hotpot, it’s curled up and no longer moving. The crowd is very casual. Some are walking about barefoot, and others are sitting on floor cushions. The music is turned on loud, it is a string quartet on big speakers, Vivaldi’s vibrant Four Seasons. Everyone is eating and drinking, talking all at once and not about anything in particular. Only Margarethe is reserved and dignified. Her fluent Chinese instantly makes the young American’s Western accent and intonation sound inferior, so he starts talking to Margarethe in English. He raves on to her and makes the young woman poet jealous. Margarethe later tells you that the guy doesn’t know anything, but he was taken by her and kept hovering around her.

One of the artists says that he had been uprooted from East Village or West Village—you don’t remember which—in the grounds of the Old Summer Palace. In the name of urban beautification and social security, the place was closed down by the police two years ago. He asks you about the new art trends in Paris, and you say that there are new trends every year. He says that he does art on the human body. You know that he had suffered a great deal in China because of his art, so it is best not to say that his sort of art is now history in the West.

In the course of things, people start talking about 1997. All the hotels have been fully booked for the day of the handover ceremony between Britain and China, the day the People’s Liberation Army would move in. There would be hordes of journalists from all over the world congregating here, some say seven thousand, and others eight thousand. On the morning of July 1, the birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, immediately after the handover ceremony, the British governor of Hong Kong would go to the naval base and leave on a ship.

“Why doesn’t he take a plane?” It is Margarethe who asks.

“On the day, there will be celebrations all along the road to the airport, and it would be too sad for him,” someone says. But no one is laughing.