Review
I am twice your age, Suzie," says William Holden's Robert Lomax in The World of Suzie Wong, the celebrated story of an artist and a prostitute, an east-west relationship and Hong Kong exploitation. Actress Nancy Kwan was 19 when she starred opposite Holden, a somewhat weathered 41, in the iconic film based on the novel by Richard Mason. Despite Lomax's protestations of being middle-aged and ancient, they continued their relationship and Kwan and Holden walked hand in hand into the Asian sunset, were paid and went on to their next movie contracts. But what happened to Wong and Lomax? In the movie they're heading for the sunset; in the book Lomax has bought tickets for a fresh start in Japan, aware that Suzie will not be able to escape her past unless they move elsewhere. With most novels, it's there, it's finished, now don't mess with it. It was someone else's creation. The idea, for example, that one author recently had the audacity to write a follow-up novel on what happened to Jane Austen's Emma and her Mr Knightley after they were sprinkled with confetti at the village church is horrifying. Suzie Wong, however, is open for discussion; Richard Mason invited it before he died in 1997. . . . For Goodness Sake, subtitled A Novel of the Afterlife of Suzie Wong and named with a nod to her pidgin English, may or may not be about Robert and Suzie back in Hong Kong. It is set in the first person, with protagonist American academic Marco Podesta . . . a professor of urbanism and arrives at a time of flux: the handover [and] falls in love with local Chinese girl Lily. His obsession with finding Suzie starts when he catches sight of a painting in the window of a gallery in Sheung Wan: it is of a young Chinese woman in a ponytail and cheongsam who, he is convinced, is Suzie Wong. One thing is clear: it is not for sale. The quest for the hidden tale behind the painting is the core around which the rest of the plot meanders, with a neat twist at the end. . . . There are three key Chinese women in the book: Lily, Podesta's on again/off again girlfriend; Grace, a younger friend whom Podesta sees as a sister; and Grace's aunt. There is also an artist and dealer called Robert Lomax, who owns the painting; he could be the Robert Lomax. He also could be deranged. Mason wrote in a preface in a 1994 reprint of The World of Suzie Wong that Suzie would be long since divorced or dead, which is not necessarily what readers or film-goers want to hear about such a heroine. Ever the urbanist, [Gerard] lets his love of the cityscape shine through. He even compares the city to a prostitute that has to please many customers. After his protagonist falls out with his girlfriend he stands in his melancholy by the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront clock. An image of the city accentuates his loneliness. "It's a harsh axiom: you can love a city, writes [Gerard] ;but don't expect it to love you back." --South China Morning Post, April 6, 2008
I found Sebastian Gerard s book FOR GOODNESS SAKE: THE AFTERLIFE OF SUZIE WONG to be quite splendid! It is both thoughtful and engrossing. Gerard captures the multifaceted culture of Hong Kong-the essence of the ever-changing city of commerce. It is a story of loyalty, betrayal, sex, politics and enduring love, all neatly woven into the modern Hong Kong of today. Suzie Wong said to Robert Lomax in the film, The World of Suzie Wong, You are the first man I ever loved...and the world has only just begun... Nancy Kwan, Suzie Wong in the 1960 feature film, "The World of Suzie Wong" (Paramount Pictures) --Nancy Kwan (Preface)
Suzie Wong has led a convoluted existence. The Wan Chai girl who falls in love with an Englishman was born into a novel by Richard Mason: The World of Suzie Wong, published in 1957. A year later, Suzie was resurrected on stage, with France Nuyen playing opposite William Shatner, of all people. Suzie then boldly went where no Wan Chai girl had gone before and became a star of the silver screen thanks to Chinese actress Nancy Kwan. James Clapp, writing as Sebastian Gerard, was clearly not satisfied with the story in all its incarnations, for he has constructed an absorbing novel about obsession, love, art and politics that pushes Suzie towards the 21st century. It is 1997 and Hong Kong is on the verge of the handover. Professor Marco Podesta is researching the ramifications of the social and political change when he steps aboard a Star Ferry. While his eye is stopped by a woman with a "silky, raven-black pony-tail", his heart drifts to Suzie Wong. Podesta's fascination with Suzie's back story grows when he chances upon another beautiful girl, this time in a painting by Fong So. Mixing fact and fiction, flashbacks to Vietnam and atmospheric descriptions of Hong Kong, Gerard's novel is a romantic puzzle, a political meditation and largely a triumph. --South China Morning Post, April 11, 200
I found Sebastian Gerard s book FOR GOODNESS SAKE: THE AFTERLIFE OF SUZIE WONG to be quite splendid! It is both thoughtful and engrossing. Gerard captures the multifaceted culture of Hong Kong-the essence of the ever-changing city of commerce. It is a story of loyalty, betrayal, sex, politics and enduring love, all neatly woven into the modern Hong Kong of today. Suzie Wong said to Robert Lomax in the film, The World of Suzie Wong, You are the first man I ever loved...and the world has only just begun... Nancy Kwan, Suzie Wong in the 1960 feature film, "The World of Suzie Wong" (Paramount Pictures) --Nancy Kwan (Preface)
Suzie Wong has led a convoluted existence. The Wan Chai girl who falls in love with an Englishman was born into a novel by Richard Mason: The World of Suzie Wong, published in 1957. A year later, Suzie was resurrected on stage, with France Nuyen playing opposite William Shatner, of all people. Suzie then boldly went where no Wan Chai girl had gone before and became a star of the silver screen thanks to Chinese actress Nancy Kwan. James Clapp, writing as Sebastian Gerard, was clearly not satisfied with the story in all its incarnations, for he has constructed an absorbing novel about obsession, love, art and politics that pushes Suzie towards the 21st century. It is 1997 and Hong Kong is on the verge of the handover. Professor Marco Podesta is researching the ramifications of the social and political change when he steps aboard a Star Ferry. While his eye is stopped by a woman with a "silky, raven-black pony-tail", his heart drifts to Suzie Wong. Podesta's fascination with Suzie's back story grows when he chances upon another beautiful girl, this time in a painting by Fong So. Mixing fact and fiction, flashbacks to Vietnam and atmospheric descriptions of Hong Kong, Gerard's novel is a romantic puzzle, a political meditation and largely a triumph. --South China Morning Post, April 11, 200
Product Description
Movies, it is often said, require of their audiences a willing suspension of disbelief. They are, at least where pure fiction is concerned, the domain of the romantic, not the rationalist. Movies are about life as we might wish it to be, or even wish it were not; but they are life reconstituted life first analyzed, synthesized, and imagined into art. So says Marco Podesta, an American professor of Urban Studies and movie aficionado visiting Hong Kong, whose boyhood infatuation with a beautiful Chinese movie actress is unexpectedly reawakened when he steps aboard a harbor ferry. Thus begins an experience that causes him to ponder the relationship between life and movies. If real life is the necessary precondition to reel life, then what happens to that life after the movie is over, after the couple that meets and falls in love on screen walks hand in hand into the sunset as the music comes up and the credits begin to roll. That s what happened when William Holden and Nancy Kwan completed their roles as Robert Lomax and Suzie Wong in the 1960 film, The World of Suzie Wong. Holden and Kwan went on to other roles as other characters; but Robert and Suzie faded into the landscape of our suspended disbelief, forever walking hand in hand into that Asian sunset. But what were the afterlives of the Robert and Suzie who were their inspiration? That ferry ride might have just been another déjàvu, had not Podesta stumbled upon a mysterious painting of a captivating girl in a gallery window in old Hong Kong. It is a painting by a man who calls himself, who thinks he is, or who might even be, Robert Lomax, ; a painting that obsesses Podesta and threatens his own newfound cross-cultural love, and brings new friendship from unlikeliest of sources. Podesta s search leads us from the inner sanctum of the Hong Kong Club, to the politics of the university, from the glitter of Central to the gritty streets and lanes of Sheung Wan and the gaudy bars of Wanchai. It is a quest that brings a reverie of his bloody days in Vietnam, revives a capacity for love that was tragically stilled in the streets of Paris, and puts his own East-West romance to the test. Beneath the reflections and refractions that are the neon-illuminated surfaces of Hong Kong are exposed the meanings of the city through the lenses of an urbanist. But it is also the perspective of a man who loves a city that will not requite that love, a city that, on the eve of its handover, is pledged to another. Yet it remains for him the urban expression of Suzie Wong, the captivating captive of her fate, self-deluding, enchanting, and never quite what she seems. This is a story that is as mysterious as a narrow Hong Kong lane that leads to courtyard, to a murky staircase. It is a story that is eventually unraveled by a woman who learned that not just movies, but life, too, sometimes requires a willing suspension of disbelief. For Goodness Sake is the story of a iconic movie, an exotic city, an enchanting girl, and a man who fell in love with all of them.
