Worlds Elsewhere (75 page)

As we walked towards the university gates, through lines of students streaming out of lectures, Kanjanavanit hesitated. ‘You will write
about this? In the paper? You never know, it might help.' She smiled apologetically. ‘International coverage.'

Months later, long after the article had come out, I emailed her from London. The coup had indeed happened, just five days after we met. Military rule had been imposed and a sinisterly named National Peace and Order Committee had taken control of the government. Everyone in Bangkok was waiting to see how it would play out.

Shakespeare Must Die
was on hold, but there was happier news about
Censor Must Die
: it had just won a documentary award in Beirut. She was still working on
Bangkok Joyride.
She wouldn't be submitting that one to the censors, she said.

The conference was nearly done. Final speeches were given, votes of thanks proffered and received. An elderly professor from Taipei was presented with a lifetime-achievement award (of shower gel, for reasons I never fathomed). In the humid fug outside the lecture hall we nipped at warm, sweet wine and made small talk. The inaugural meeting of the Asian Shakespeare Association was proclaimed a triumph. We raised our glasses. ‘For Asia, for Shakespeare, together we're writing a new page in history,' someone declared. We swapped business cards and, flushed and a little unsteady on our feet, promised to be in touch.

For me, it was not quite the end: I was booked on a flight to Hong Kong first thing the following day. But the farewell party, I was solemnly informed, was compulsory. All serious Shakespearians must attend. Anxious to be considered a serious Shakespearian, I agreed.

Boarding a fleet of minibuses, we were deposited at the doors of a large nightclub in the centre of Taipei, a vast black hall lined with strobes and spotlights and with what appeared to be a pole-dancing platform at one end.

It was empty; the ASA had booked the place out. The lights flashed woozily pink and purple. The music thudded heavily. There was spirited talk of karaoke. The Filipino contingent, first at the bar, commandeered the dance floor. A senior Taiwanese academic, who had surreptitiously changed into a miniskirt, was in earnest conference with the DJ. The British and American scholars hung back, looking ill at ease. I gathered that karaoke was not a regular feature of the Shakespeare Association of America.

It took me three luminous vodka-tonics and two shouted conversations to realise that I had to make an exit. I couldn't see straight, my head felt as though it was being assaulted by a piledriver and I had to be up in five hours to make check-in.

As I was leaving, I heard a 1980s power ballad kick in. I had the haziest of senses that the song was by Def Leppard. The Taiwanese academic in the miniskirt was standing on the platform, in worrying proximity to the pole. Team Filipino were cheering her on. Anxious about what worlds Asian Shakespeare might explore next, I made myself scarce.

IN A TINY, SHORT-LET STUDIO APARTMENT,
twelve floors above the clamorous, fish-smelling streets of Sheung Wan, I squinted at a map of Hong Kong, trying to get my head around how so much could be crammed into so little. Over 3 million people lived on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon; this was one of the most densely populated territories on earth. On the island side, where I was, the city was squeezed into a narrow smear of flat-ish land that ran around the coast, less than a kilometre wide. Most of it was plainly not flat at all – there were so many levels that the lanes leading up to Victoria Peak resembled the squiggled and looping curves on the surface of a human brain.

On all sides, through the greasy windows of the apartment, protruded tower blocks, yellow and dirty white, so slim and tall and close that I felt I could lean across and topple them. Through the narrowest of gaps I could see the roaring elevated road that circumnavigated the island and a few silvery millimetres of Victoria Harbour.

In the apartment directly opposite – equally tiny, it looked – a middle-aged woman was unconcernedly laying the table for lunch. She was twenty-five feet away at most. I could almost have jumped across, levered myself in and joined her.

So this was Hong Kong: the gateway to Asia as well as the British Empire's last stand; still, despite stiff competition from Shanghai, the city of the Chinese future. A ‘Special Administrative Region', the goose that laid the golden eggs, and politically and economically the freest place in China, Hong Kong was a cautious experiment for Beijing – an attempt to see if ‘one country, two systems' could hold together. Despite tectonic rumbles, recently activated by the pro-democracy
Occupy Central movement, so far it had. It seemed an appropriately paradoxical place to complete a journey through the teeming paradoxes of the present-day People's Republic.

I had six days here, and a notepad scrawled with leads. I was keen to find out more about Shakespeare in Chinese education, a subject I'd left under-explored until now. David in Taipei had primed me on the annual Shakespeare festival hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, happening the week of my arrival and packed with student groups from across China. I'd also arranged an appointment at the Hong Kong Academy of the Performing Arts, the most important conservatoire in this corner of Asia. A translator had agreed to talk about the very different challenges of putting Shakespeare into Cantonese.

But I was uncomfortably aware that there was only so much time to do more research, soak up yet more material. After two years of intermittent journeying, my travelling days were almost done. Despite the odd glimmer of insight, my head felt soggy with jumble and mess: tangled threads, dots that should have joined but didn't. Questions had a dismaying habit of drowning out answers. Theories I'd jerry-built en route were worryingly prone to collapse. At some point I was going to have to sit down in a room roughly the size of this one and do the journey all over again, this time turning it into the pages of a book. That journey, unlike the one I was currently embarked on, would need to make some kind of sense. In my current travel-shocked state, making sense of anything more sophisticated than the route to the nearest coffee shop seemed unlikely.

I thought of the world map with which I'd started, with its neat little marks and lines. It had seemed a charming conceit, the idea of following Shakespeare out into the world, chasing him down to locations even he could never have imagined. I'd been astonished at some of the places he'd shown up; just as often, he'd winked slyly and given me the slip. The wiliest and most seasoned of travellers, he was smoothly expert at camouflaging himself like a local and slipping back into the crowd.

But then maybe Hong Kong was a good spot to dwell on such thoughts, and turn them into something useful. If the sights and noises of the city were any indication, it contained more than enough jumble and mess of its own. I wondered if I'd be able to find a way through the confusion.

In mainland China, the connection between Shakespeare and the colonial reach of the British is slight: it is true that Lin Zexu, the Qing-dynasty diplomat who introduced a certain ‘prolific' British dramatist to Chinese readers, had done so in the context of the opium wars, but that was as far as it went. Shakespeare was taught in missionary schools in treaty ports like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Nanjing, but, unlike in India and parts of South Africa – Britain not having made deep enough inroads into the Middle Kingdom – the Bard was never officially a servant of Empire.

In Hong Kong things were different, as ten minutes strolling around its streets reminded me. If Kolkata had seemed haunted by the ghostly presence of the British, in Hong Kong they were hiding in plain sight. It might have been the best part of two decades after the handover, and Hong Kong more globalised than ever, but Britain was everywhere I looked: in the dumpy, right-hand-drive double-decker buses; the little green men at pedestrian crossings; the fact that people instinctively wove left on the pavements. I charged my laptop via a solid British three-pin. People talked to me of ‘ground floors' in a way they hadn't done for weeks. When I dialled a number I was rewarded with a doleful British
bleup-bleup,
not the chirpy single tone of China. Taipei had made me feel indistinctly homesick; Hong Kong reminded me all too pungently of why I'd wanted to get away. I began to regret that I had a flight back to London at the end of the week.

The same opium war that had encouraged Lin to commission a translation of the
Encyclopedia of Geography
in 1839 resulted in the loss of Hong Kong to the British in 1842. The island became a military stronghold, and when the Second Convention of Beijing was signed in 1898 – and with it the famous ninety-nine-year lease over the island and the territories that surrounded it – Hong Kong became a British linchpin in the region.

One of the more unexpected discoveries I had made in India and South Africa was that wherever British colonialists hung up their pith helmets and mosquito nets, sooner or later they found themselves disporting themselves on stage. Hong Kong was no different. In December 1844, just two years after the island was ceded, officers from the garrison founded what became known as the Hong Kong Amateur Dramatic Club. (No women were permitted to join, and members were pseudonymous for fear of bringing the army into disrepute.) The club's repertoire – perhaps the first spoken drama in Cantonese-speaking
China – consisted almost exclusively of light theatrical farces imported from London. In 1867 they staged the London barrister-cum-playwright Francis Talfourd's burlesque
Shylock; or, the Merchant of Venice Preserved
(1852), which makes ponderous fun out of Shakespeare's play and Thomas Otway's sensationalistic Restoration tragedy
Venice Preserv'd.
Talfourd's title page proclaims, tongue lumpenly in cheek, that this was ‘an entirely new reading of Shakespeare … printed from an edition hitherto undiscovered by modern authorities'.

Inauthentic though this version was, I found it instructive that the Hong Kong amateurs had chosen
The Merchant of Venice
as their first foray into Shakespeare; yet more proof that the play had a special resonance in trading cities like these. It was revived in 1871, but Shakespeare (even in diluted form) did not appear again on the playbills of the HKADC until 1913, when the players staged
Twelfth Night,
following it in 1922 with
The Tempest
(one wonders how sensitive they were to the colonial context).

Shakespeare took far longer to penetrate the world of Hong Kong's Chinese population, strictly segregated from their masters. The first Cantonese translations of the play did not arrive until the 1950s, a full half-century after the earliest Mandarin stagings in Shanghai. In April 1954, the Sino-British Club arranged a festival to mark the 390th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, including what seems to have been the earliest version of Shakespeare in Cantonese, a scene from
Romeo and Juliet.
It was another ten years, 1964, before an attempt was made to stage a full play in colloquial Cantonese. Students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong took part, wearing ancient Chinese costume in a nod to the traditions of Cantonese opera. The play, again, was
The Merchant of Venice.

There is a reason students were so heavily involved in the dissemination of Shakespeare. As in India and South Africa, the playwright became a fixture on colonial curriculums, particularly once the British had their feet under the table in Hong Kong. The select committee report on Colonisation given to the House of Lords in 1847, suggesting that it was ‘a nobler work to diffuse over a few created worlds the laws of Alfred, the language of Shakespeare, and the Christian religion', didn't just pertain to the subcontinent; those principles were applied zealously in East Asia too. They were certainly shared by Frederick Stewart (1836–89), founding headmaster at Hong Kong's first government school, who saw fit to declare that ‘the Chinese have no
education
in the real sense of the word'.

Shakespeare was used to remedy this supposed deficiency. In 1882, the plays began to be taught in schools; six years later, they were instituted as part of the entrance examination for the Imperial Maritime Customs Service. In 1902, one of Stewart's successors wrote, ‘Shakespeare requires the employment of all the commonest phrases in connection with matters of everyday life, as well as in expression of emotion and humour.' If one wanted to get on in Edwardian Hong Kong, one had better learn English, which necessitated brushing up on one's Shakespeare. As late as the 1960s, anyone sitting the Hong Kong Certificate was required to study one of the plays.

I spent an afternoon wandering through the Museum of History, with its walk-through displays of colonial Hong Kong – tailors' shops, a green tram, a full-size general store stocking Woodbine cigarettes, wares to make even the most flinty-hearted expat pine for home. The route culminated in a cinema playing footage from the 1997 handover. I sat in the dark, watching strange rituals I hadn't seen since they appeared on television the summer I did my A-levels: the Union flag being lowered over Government House to the quavering of the Last Post; the soon-to-be-ex-governor, Chris Patten, standing stoically in the pouring rain while the Royal Navy streamed aboard the royal yacht
Britannia.
These, too, felt like relics from a bygone age.