Hong Kong Noir Quotes

“Diamond Hill—what a glorious name for a place. No one outside of Hong Kong would have guessed it was the moniker of a squatter village in Kowloon East. In the fifties and sixties, it was a ghetto with its share of grime and crime, and sleaze oozing from brothels, opium dens, and underground gambling houses. There and then, you found no diamonds but plenty of poor people residing on its muddy slopes. Most refugees from mainland China settled in dumps like this because the rent was dirt cheap. Hong Kong began prospering in the seventies and eighties, and its population exploded, partly due to the continued influx of refugees. Large-scale urbanization and infrastructure development moved at breakneck speed. There was no longer any room for squatter villages or shantytowns. By the late eighties, Diamond Hill was chopped into pieces and demolished bit by bit with the construction of the six-lane Lung Cheung Road in its north, the Tate’s Cairn Tunnel in its northwest, and its namesake subway station in its south. Only its southern tip had survived. More than two hundred families and businesses crammed together in this remnant of Diamond Hill, where the old village’s flavor lingered. Its buildings remained a mishmash of shoddy low-rise brick houses and bungalows, shanties, tin huts, and illegal shelters made of planks and tar paper occupying every nook and cranny. There was not a single thoroughfare wide enough for cars. The only access was by foot using narrow lanes flanked by gutters. The lanes branched out and merged, twisted and turned, and dead-ended at tall fences built to separate the village from the outside world. The village was like a maze. The last of Diamond Hill’s residents were on borrowed time and borrowed land. They had already received eviction notices from the Hong Kong government, and all had made plans for the future. The government promised to compensate longtime residents for vacating the land, but not the new arrivals.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“My head swirled, everything pale green—green, the color of my childhood. Everything was painted that color in those days: offices, schools, hospitals, even our tiny little state-owned apartment. Imagine it, the whole country green. I don’t think I knew what color was until I got to London and saw all the girls in their pretty summer dresses: pinks, reds, yellows, oranges, and, goodness me, the gardens and the flowers. My guts churned. The old smells returned—coal and cooking oil, sweat, shit leaking from overflowing latrines. My mouth tasted like iron, a memory, blood. I made it to the sink just in time, vomiting lumps, pale puke green.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“We think when we go abroad we’ll be free, but we’re not. Wherever there are Chinese, it’s there, like a great hydra. Its tentacles stretch into student digs, university lecture halls, Chinese restaurants. All smiles, offering banquets and cash, it slips into foreign institutions. For Chinese there’s no escape. It’s in the food, in the tea, in the air. You find it in a nod or a whisper, a tap on the arm, a few careless words marked on your file in the Chinese Embassy. The Chinese Communist Party, the most powerful organization the world has ever known. Old stench in new bottles.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“Big Six is the name Hong Kongers have for people from Communist China. It’s a Cantonese pun on the word for mainlanders. “They,” the emphasis was on the otherness of the they, “they have no traditional values, only care about one thing: money.” And now that I had no illusions left about Hong Kong, I understood the subtext. As a white English girl, I was marrying beneath myself.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“Inside every prostitute is an actress, psychologist, and philosopher. Her philosophy is a private interpretation of life to make it bearable. High-lifers talk about “philosophy” to look smart, to stroke the ego—something that she sold long ago. We are just chickens. Chickens are supposed to be dumb, with feelings only for money.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“What a beautifully whorish name I have—Feng Yue—Phoenix Moon. Can’t say my mother lacked foresight when she named me. Unfortunately, Xiao Feng Xian was the last celebrity prostitute. This is the 1970s, the modern world. They even made polygamy illegal a few years ago, after so many thousand of years. Can you believe that? What man would be happy with just one wife if they could afford more? Some girls thought it might bring us more business, but we have seen no evidence of that so far. The law has simply driven junior wives underground. They’ve become secret mistresses—less accepted, less recognized, less protected, children relegated to the shadows. The senior wives are now more suspicious of their men than ever, wondering what their mistresses are like, feeling more insecure. Nobody gains. Stupid. In any case, we don’t have the same good karma as our sisters from the dynasties. Phoenix is now a euphemism for chicken, which means hookers in Cantonese slang. Poets are extinct. We have become just chickens.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“In the old days, when women were mostly illiterate, and their only “skill” with men was limited to blushing with the head down, courtesans could read, write, sing, dance, and play instruments—real and euphemistic ones—in and out of bed in a hundred different positions. Brothels were the only place a gentleman could find a worldly, elegant, irresistible, learned, challenging, understanding, interesting, and amorous woman. Many five-star courtesans became multimillionaires and eventually married distinguished suitors who immortalized their charm and beauty with poems.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“The blood in my head was roaring, but my mind was still somehow calm and calculating. Hey, nothing happened. What other option anyways? It’d be stupid to push him into a corner. That’s right. Nothing happened. Not yet. He lit another cigarette with the butt before stubbing it in the ashtray. I smiled sweetly.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“Hong Kong’s a lawful place now, Feng baby. Even we need evidence before charging anyone. Yesterday, my inspector told us no more forced signatures on blank statements or bathroom beatings until further notice. Otherwise, we’re on our own. Imagine. Crime rate’s gonna soar.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“Kit Zai’s a cop, now a victim of the newly established anticorruption agency, ICAC. Unlike its numerous predecessors which would go away after getting paid, the ICAC seems to mean business, and has caused a financial crisis in the force. Many, especially plainclothes detectives like Kit, have started bouncing at nightclubs and gambling dens and whatever to sustain a lifestyle they had long taken for granted. The same mix of cops and thugs are now hanging out at the same dumps under a different symbiotic arrangement. A comedian once suggested solving the triad problem by recruiting more police: The law of conservation tells us that having one more cop means one less thug on the street.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“The neighbors are dead quiet. In this building, the first response to a scream for help is to bolt the door and stay put. Miu then called 999. We never call the police for help. We settle everything our way, without government interference. I suppose this is an extraordinary situation. “Yes, yes. The crazy woman’s still in here. She’s locked herself in the bathroom. She’s got a knife,” she said breathlessly, unnecessarily loud. “He’s fainting, bleeding a lot. Maybe dying. Hurry, lah, Ah Sir!” To support her claim, Kit Zai groaned in the background like a pig in the slaughterhouse. Well, she was wrong. I don’t have a knife. I have a pair of scissors, brand new, German made, top quality, used only once so far to fantastic effect. His dick offered less resistance than blanched pig chitterlings, my favorite bedtime snack. She may be right about me being a lunatic, though. I’ve been suspecting that for years. But hey, look around, who isn’t? Only that I know and they don’t.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“My thirty-three-year-old body is well past school age, seriously overused. I still trust it like a cabbie trusts his old taxi. Not perfect all right, but will do the trick at least one more night, then one more night. My sunless flaccidity still looks good in dim light, good enough. Most men like pale skin, and are incapable of noticing its subtle defects once I’ve got them by the quivering dick. Occasionally, a jerk may make a few smart-ass comments too many. I’ll tell him to go fuck his own mother instead. If he freaks out, well, he’ll have to talk to Ah Bill or one of his buddies. The girls in this building are protected by the 14K triads. Ah Bill is our resident da dun security manager, invisible unless there’s trouble.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“It’s the waiting that kills you. The waiting for purpose and clarity. For a watched pot to boil. For the results of a blood test. For proof you’ve left the past behind once and for all. Like everyone else my age, I’ve lost the ability—if I ever really had it—to inhabit my own skin for more than thirty seconds at a time. I’ve heard of stillness. I’ve even seen patches of it here on Cheung Chau. Yet I check my phone every ten minutes for updates about scattered friends and grievous exes.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“I’m staying in a wretched little flat in Bela Vista, the same seaside cluster of buildings where people took their one-way vacations twenty years ago. Rent one of these apartments for the weekend, enjoy one last sunset, drink a few beers, and then burn charcoal in one of the rooms. This form of suicide is one of Asia’s worst clichés, much like jumping from a high window or a slow death from drink. Even the reasons can sound trite if you’re not the one enduring them: a crash in the property market, so much homework you only get three hours of sleep a night, parents unwilling to settle for anything less than Oxbridge and a doctorate.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“I had been back in Hong Kong for two days. The swelter of late summer here is a physical assault when you’re not used to it. The noise too: taxi horns like air-raid sirens, old ladies bellowing in their raspy banshee voices, relentless. I remembered in the abstract but my body had forgotten.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“Look around, it’s always only the girls who come when I call. Many of our johns are just as dead as us, but do you see them here? No. Bang, bang, thank you, ma’am, as the sailors used to say. And then they get to sleep the sleep of the dead. Meanwhile we’re wandering, exhausted, famished ghosts with no hope of rest. What we’re looking for to appease our restless spirit we’ll never find, and what we need to still our hunger pangs is lost to that heaven where emperors rule and girls must remain girls forever.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“We were poorer then, during the four decades before and after the second war, even though wealth lined some of the lanes, avenues, streets, and roads of TST. We came to TST because of that wealth and the men who haunted the district, trolling for love, gluttonous with desire. But we were happier then because any money is better than being impoverished. After all, we were young and pretty enough, smart and hungry enough, sad and desperate enough to go away and stay away in TST, far from the shanties or villages or homes of our birth. Those homes where love was absent and our desire for more translated into lust for a future that could be our own. We came in droves during war and peacetime, hunting out a perch to land on for what passed as a lifetime.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“Men don’t lie to whores. I once had a lover who had been MI5. He was gentle, though, and sometimes cried after he fucked me. The man who killed me was rough and never cried. He kept two fierce Alsatians in his bathtub. That’s the trouble with Hong Kong flats—too small for dogs, especially large ones, but some people insist on having them. This man, an English police inspector, he was vice. Those dogs were hungry the night they ripped me apart and almost tore his left hand off in the process. He still has the scar. The photo in the newspaper caught it when he put up his hand to cover his face the day he was arrested, although that happened years later, long after I was gone. Jail ended his career, but he just went to the mercenaries. There’s always a place in the world for the rough ones. About my death, though, that was an accident. He lost control of his hounds and they savaged my jugular and feasted on my flesh until he muzzled them. Afterward he hid my corpse because what else could he do? First, however, he cleanly sliced off my hands and feet to be found with no canine teeth marks, separated from the rest of me.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir