The Manth's New Reading

With Judy Tudor

Mirage And Materialism In The Far East

Even those people who don’t like reading Colin Simpson probably enjoy looking at his books—which are about the glossiest and brightest examples of the Australian publisher’s art. Asia’s Bright Balconies, the latest of the Simpson travel books, has 16 pages of colour plates, a similar number of black and white and innumerable drawings and “decorations” by the author’s wife.

IN presentation, it has all the sophisticated aplomb of a high circulation American magazine and is artfully designed as a natural for gift-giving to arm-chair adventurers and to the increasing thousands of Australians who visit the Far East each year.

In it he covers Hongkong, Macao, and the Philippines and it is a com panion-piece to his earlier Country Upstairs, which was about Japan.

Whether the customer finds the present book as entertaining as the Japanese story is probably a matter of taste, although it appears to your reviewer that Simpson himself obvi ously found Hongkong, etc., much less to his fastidious taste than Japan, and this is reflected in the book itself.

The poverty, overcrowding and the stinks worried him, and it shows. He is inclined at times to get a bit precious about these things and about some other Old Chinese Customs.

And in this I can sympathise, up to a point, being one of the only half dozen people in the world who didn’t fall flat on their faces with wild sur mise the moment my eyes lighted on the place.

Nonetheless, in spite of Simpson and your reviewer, Hongkong is one of the few places on earth that really merits the vogue-term “fabulous”: In its small size and teeming popula tion; in its beauty and its squalor; in its people; its political present and future; in its skyscrapers and squatters’ hovels; but most of all be cause it exists at all.

In size, a tiny pimple on the broad face of China; economically, a mirage of materialism that would make no sense at all in any but an Eastern context. But if it is some old Chinese illusion that holds it in place, up to date at any rate, it is an illu sion that works.

Simpson captures some of this atmosphere of fantasy as he conducts his reader-tourists around the human ant-heap of the Colony of Hongkong, where by the very restrictions of the size of the place there is no getting off the well-worn track and where variation can come only in personal experience and reaction to the fixed environment.

It is calculated that about a quar ter of a million tourists visit Hong kong each year. Yet apart from the shops who live by selling merchan dise to tourists, it doesn’t feel like a touristy place—partly because the “sights” are restricted, but mostly because the Chinese themselves are small worlds to themselves, in the exterior sense giving nothing, obvi ously unfeeling for the stranger within their midst.

That's China!

With Simpson, the reader does “the tour” of the New Territories—which is probably as close to China as he is ever likely to come. He will en dure the stench of the human manured fields, see duck farms (and wonder how he will ever eat duck again), visit the walled village and drive to the top of the knoll where he will gaze out over rice fields to what the guide will tell him is Red China. All Western visitors, and especially Americans, get some awe some sort of esoteric pleasure out of this act, as though scarlet dragons might be seen disporting themselves there in fumes of sulphur. In reality it is disappointing—the country “over there” looking no different from that near at hand; and in some respects it is better because it is too far away to smell.

He takes you also to Repulse Bay, which is on the other side of Hong kong Island from Victoria, and is unashamedly Mediterranean where

Kowloon and the New Territories on the mainland side are unashamedly China. He discusses food, jade, poli tics, history and, of course, shopping; and takes you on a long excursion to Macao, which if Hongkong is a materialistic fantasy, is pure 20th century anachronism.

Portuguese - Asian, smaller and poorer than the British Colony, it occupies a tiny appendix of land in south China across the Pearl River Estuary from HK. It lives by its wits, its vice that is slightly more vicious than the British HK variety, the gold trade, and provides the gate way through which the majority of HK’s illegal refugees reach the Colony.

With all this, Colin Simpson does not neglect research on the Suzie Wong element of the Fascinating Far East or of night-life. Later, in the Philippines, he finds that there are day-clubs as well as night-clubs, especially for men who find it easier to get away from business in the day than from their wives at night.

Good Entertainment Most readers will find Asia’s Bright Balconies good entertainment value—but just one word of warning to the Maestro himself before we quit this review, lest he ultimately de generate into some sort of Clune with-coloured-pictures!

We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that Cathay Pacific just happens to be his favourite airline.

But the manner in which he drags the name of the airline irrelevantly into the narrative, smacks of Frank dune at his worst —although Simpson spared us a Clune catalogue of the horsepower of each of the four turbo prop engines and the biographies of all the air-crew, whom Frank would have been calling by their first names.

We have nothing against Cathay Pacific—to the contrary, they are from the same stable as some very good friends of ours; but the tedious repetitious mention of the name makes the whole thing sound as though Simpson were on the staff, bent on doing a good public relations job.

It seems a better plan to make acknowledgement in the proper place in the front of the book and be done with it, instead of dragging it in throughout the story, like so many commercial reader-advts.

(Asia’S Bright Balconies. Pub

lished by Angus and Robertson Ltd.

Price. 37/6.1