Mr. Grump Goes to Hong Kong

Paul Theroux isn’t an easy man to shock, considering the fact that he’s more than a man about town--he’s a man about the globe, the premiere travel writer for tours of Armageddon.

This is what it takes to shock Theroux: a room full of people who look and sound suspiciously like Americans except for one little detail--their passports say they’re nationals of Belize. Or Tonga. Or Guinea Bissau. The expatriate circuit in Hong Kong was rife with them.

“Quite a few Americans have renounced their [citizenship],” he is saying. “I’m appalled by the Ku Klux Klan, but Americans who go into the American Embassy and say, ‘I give up my American passport, I’m now a Belizean.’ Or ‘I’m Irish.’ It’s amazing.”

And this from an American who has spent so much time abroad that his voice is tinged with the timbre of South London, where he spent 17 years, not the Boston suburbs where he was raised. Theroux is talking between bites of sandwich at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, the sort of luxe but remote hotel that doesn’t really provide a clear view of a place, in his eyes. Theroux, 56, often opts for cheap hotels, hostelries with windows onto the mean streets.

But today someone else is footing the bill because the prolific Theroux is starting a book tour to promote his 35th tome, “Kowloon Tong” (Houghton Mifflin). His latest novel--appearing on the 30th anniversary of his first, “Waldo” (Houghton Mifflin)--is set in a Hong Kong teetering on the precipice of its June 30th return to the motherland.

“Kowloon Tong” tells about archaic English colonial “Bunt” Mullard, who wears the apron strings of his overbearing mother, Betty. In their insular world, the Chinese are “chinky-chonks” and the hand-over is merely “Chinese take-away,” but the tide of change in Hong Kong drowns their placid life running a 50-year-old textile factory in Kowloon Tong.

“The situation in Hong Kong is very ambiguous politically, but with a human tragedy,” Theroux says. “The human scale is a little Monty Python-ish English woman knitting in her room, and her son’s running off with Filipino prostitutes.”

The novel is seen through the eyes of gwei-los, the ghost people, the foreign devils who will be strangers in a strange land when the British colony is handed back to the Chinese government.

But in the view of some, it’s the famously grumpy Theroux who is the foreign devil. For example, his novel, set to be excerpted

in the June issue of Playboy magazine, was pulled at the eleventh hour. In an interoffice memo, Playboy marketing officials had complained about “several points which are derogatory . . . toward the Chinese people,” such as a description of the Cantonese language as “not remotely resembl[ing] human speech.”

Theroux hoots at the magazine’s rationale for ditching the excerpt. The quote about Cantonese, for example, is not presented as a statement of fact; it comes from the mind of a character who’s a “middle-aged English twit.”

“Anyone who has done any reading at all understands that a story is told through the characters,” says Theroux, who lives in Cape Cod and Hawaii with his second wife, Sheila, a public relations consultant. “This is Albert Camus meets Monty Python.

“[Playboy’s action] shows that the most powerful open-minded country in the world is cringing, cringing at the thought that the Chinese might disapprove of something that they write and won’t buy their condoms, T-shirts and cigars with the bunny logo on them. It’s a very bad sign. This is the very thing that people are saying people in Hong Kong will be doing.”

Playboy Managing Editor Jonathan Black will publish the Theroux excerpt at a later date, says spokesman Bill Farley. He deferred the piece because Playboy ran a two-part James Bond excerpt this spring also set in Hong Kong, which happened to focus on such unflattering aspects of Chinese life as organized crime, Farley says.

“Kowloon Tong” also raised the hackles of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, which bristled at Theroux’s stereotypes. “Are the streets crawling with Chinese and Filipino call girls?” wrote reviewer Kevin Kwong. “Why bother writing a book that has nothing new or interesting to say, while there are hundreds more of these cheap thrillers about Hong Kong in airport book shops?”

Despite the equally unattractive portraits of its English protagonists, “Kowloon Tong” fared better among English critics. The Sunday Times of London lauded Theroux’s description of the “down-at-heel snobberies and dated Englishness of the expatriate niche” and “evocative concision he has honed to perfection as a travel writer.”

Theroux would hardly call himself the sort of travel writer who prettifies the great unknown--just the species of travel writer he detests. For that matter, one of the country’s most prominent travel writers hates most travel writing and most travel magazines.

“It’s not a grown-up way to write. There’s a kind of fake upbeatness about travel writing that I disapprove of which is just selling vacations. Travel writing is an arm of the tourist industry.”

That may help explain why article after article calls the politically incorrect Theroux irredeemably grumpy. “It’s because I’m contrary,” he says. “Everyone says, ‘Isn’t Fiji beautiful?’ I say Fiji is a place that’s been destroyed by racism between Indians and Fijians.

“People were saying I’m grumpy about Albania. Look at Albania now--complete anarchic nightmare. So people who read my books say you’d understand Albania better from Mr. Grumpy than from someone saying Albania’s rising from the ashes of dictatorship.”

Indeed, Mr. Grumpy’s Hong Kong is a place where people simply disappear the way they do in South American nightmares, where Chinese people keep the toilet lids down to keep ch’i (life force) from rushing out of the buildings, and where some British expatriates may live all their lives in Asia and yet refuse to eat Chinese food, sneering at it as “that muck.”

*

The colonial mind-set is no invention, although that’s one aspect of Hong Kong life that really is disappearing, which is why Theroux zeroed in on it. And yet little serious English-language literature has explored the soul of Hong Kong. Somerset Maugham, John Le Carre, James Clavell and Timothy Mo have weighed in with novels set in the crown colony, and now Robert Elegant has written a new book about a love affair between an American expatriate and a Eurasian civil engineer, “Last Year in Hong Kong” (William Morrow).

Other new thrillers set against the hand-over include “Hong Kong, China” (Forge) by Ralph Arnote, and “The Last Six Million Seconds” (William Morrow) by attorney-author John Burdett.

Theroux hopes that fiction will glaze his record of the colony’s final days with immortality. “It’s interesting how we remember the novels of a place but not the political books or the documentaries,” he says. “People still talk about the Graham Greene book set in Vietnam, ‘The Quiet American.’ But think of all the books that have been written about Vietnam. And his book was written before the Vietnam War.”

Theroux has made many trips to Asia since he served on the faculty of the University of Singapore in the late ‘60s, which led to the novel and film “Saint Jack” (Houghton, 1973). And he tackled the Chinese worldview in his best-selling travel book “Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China” (Putnam, 1988).

He first conceived of “Kowloon Tong” a year and a half ago when he was in Hong Kong working on an upcoming film with director Wayne Wang, a love story tentatively titled “Chinese Box.” He was sniffing out an anomaly in the history of the world.

“This sort of thing has never happened, that a highly developed colony with $60 billion in assets is being handed over. One of the 10 greatest cities in the world is being handed over to the Chinese because in 1898 the imperial mandarin signed a paper saying you can have Kowloon and the New Territories on a 99-year lease.

“And they were humiliated by that, humiliated also by losing the Opium War, and defeated people have a long memory. The Chinese think, ‘The British humiliated us. We’re going to stick it to them.’ ”

Of course, the fractiousness of it all appeals greatly to Mr. Grumpy. He’s delighted by the Chinese practice of calling Hong Kong Gov. Chris Patten names for his attempts at democratic reforms. “They call him, ‘strutting prostitute,’ ‘peacock,’ ‘pompous ass,’ probably worse things too, but they love doing it. It’s fascinating to see two great countries a) behaving like children; b) scrambling around and trying to make deals.”

To spend as much time on the road as Theroux does takes a certain focused sort of personality and, for the record, not a grumpy one, he says. “If you’re ironic, people think you’re aggressive because they don’t see that irony is basically humor. It’s nudge, nudge. It’s veiled sarcasm. I think I’m humorous and easy-going. Travelers have to be optimistic to think that by going onward, they’re going to find something better. Pessimists stay at home.”

In fact, it was Theroux’s, shall we say, optimism that set him on his itinerant course in the first place. He hit the road to escape life in a large family with seven children; every day his leather-salesman father would read aloud the work of Dickens and Melville to his brood. One of Theroux’s brothers lives in Long Beach, younger sibling Peter who’s an Arabic scholar and Buzz magazine “cool person.”

In a big family, Theroux says, “they’re all talking, they’re all competing with each other for attention. The answer is leave. Go far away. And the farther the better.”

But there weren’t enough miles to prevent his older brother from attacking him viciously in the pages of Boston magazine last year on the publication of Paul’s autobiographical novel, “My Other Life” (Houghton Mifflin). Not only was Alexander Theroux in the minority of reviewers who trashed the book, branding it “a failure,” he described the novel as Paul’s attempt “to seek absolution for 30 years of wayward, unfair bitchery and to come out--even if only for the space of a story--into the sunlight from the cruel, carious shadows which, like a crab, he has so long chosen to inhabit.”

The brothers used to sing each other’s praises to interviewers. Paul once called Alexander the living writer he most admired. But now he snickers at the mention of his estranged literary brother.

“He’s a piece of work, actually. In literary history, there are no instances at all of one brother reviewing another brother’s book. Someone said it looks like Cain and Abel. I said, ‘No. It’s like Tom and Jerry.’ ”