Originally broadcast on 11/29 at 16:30pm on 91.5FM you can listen to Adam discussing his new book The Dragon’s Tail online at CRIENGLISH.com
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One of the pleasures when going to Hong Kong is to dine at the Cub. It preserves an old fashioned, oak-panelled Pall Mall style with a discreet Asian gloss and maintains the best menu and winelist in the Territory. Last week I was lucky enough to be invited for lunch and breakfast, and also to speak at a British Chamber of Commerce function there.
It’s plush and pleasant inside, but the tall skyscraper building where it is located is unremarkable. It was put up during the big building boom of the Eighties when the old Club building was demolished. You have to look at an oil painting behind the porter’s desk to see what the original looked like. My brother was the artist. It was one of Piers’s first professional commissions as a painter, and he chose to portray the Club as it was in about 1900. Every time I pass the painting it gives me pleasure, because that white and blue shaded colonial building with its pillars, shutters and verandahs was an institution during my boyhood.
It was always a treat to be taken there for Sunday tiffin. We children, like the women, were only allowed in one airy dining room. The intimidating-looking members disappeared upstairs to the library (probably for a nap or a cigar). Do I really remember them wearing white linen suits or is that a trick of the memory? It was certainly grey business suits by the end of the sixties when my father took me there to dine among the imposing administrators and taipans. And of course we wore dinner jackets for the St George’s Ball. It was in one of those airy halls, sunlight slanting through the shutters, that I had my wedding reception in the late seventies, after a service in St John’s Cathedral…. Church and club: each in their way anchored the memories of a colonial past, while the glass and concrete of real life Hong Kong grew skyward around them.
Now only St John’s survives. It would be crocodile tears to mourn the old Colonial buildings of Central - the Gloucester arcades, the Post Office, the Club. Hong Kong’s ethos has always been to knock down, rebuild and move on. That’s the vibrant if rather ruthless place it is - but I am proud when I pass my brother’s painting, and I am grateful that the Club still sees fit to hang it there, because beauty in Hong Kong, while always being a one night stand rather than a long affair, does deserve a memento.
The Hong Kong Club, circa 1900, by Piers Williams.
Check out his website www.piersart.com to see paintings from his latest exhibition The Attraction of Flowers.
Adam Williams’s second novel, The Emperor’s Bones, has just been published in translation by Longanesi in Milan and is now selling all over Italy under the title Il Fiume Scorre Verso Oriente (The River Flows East).
Visit the Longanesi Website.
Adam will be giving two speeches on his most recent novel The Dragon’s Tail this month, both at the Bookworm, one in its new Suzhou branch on 14th November and the other in the old Beijing branch on 20th November.
Further details from the Bookworm Websites below: