THE CHINA SYNDROME

Miami Herald, The (FL)
May 3, 1992
Author: MICHAEL BROWNING Herald Staff Writer based in Beijing

He is the Cassandra of Hong Kong, a doomsday satirist overflowing with bile, gall and spleen, endlessly enraged. He preaches daily that the end is nigh -- and it is; just under 2,000 days away, when Hong Kong reverts to China at midnight, July 1, 1997 -- but his warnings fall upon heedless ears. He thunders, ridicules, expostulates, entreats . . .In vain. Larry Feign, an American cartoonist married to Hong Kong in more ways than one, has a vision of an Apocalypse boiling up like a thundercloud from the Chinese mainland: Six million souls are going to be delivered to a communist dictatorship very soon, and there is nothing Feign or anyone else can do about it, except -- laugh.

For six years in a corrosively funny comic strip called The World of Lily Wong, published in the local South China Morning Post, Feign has sounded the alarm, urged Hong Kong people to stand up for their rights, to confront China, to demand government accountability -- in short, to behave like free citizens, not a colonized and subject race.

"I do what I do for the love of it, and also because what I'm doing down here seems important to me," says Feign. He is a vegetarian, a slender, ascetic-looking man whose burning-coal stare and thinning hair give him the urgent look of a prophet. He is considered a bit eccentric by co-workers.

"Larry is the only person I know who actually carries a picture of his pet goldfish in his wallet," says Nury Vittachi, another popular columnist at the paper.

"It wasn't a goldfish!" Feign exclaims angrily. "It was a salt-water clown fish, a tropical reef fish, and he died. He was . . ."

We'll get back to the fish later. Right now, what about Feign's politics?

"I never was anti-communist until I moved to Hong Kong," he answers. "I was at Berkeley in the 1960s. I had a copy of Mao's Little Red Book and I believed there was going to be a revolution someday.

"Now I have seen the good and the bad of capitalism, and all the bad of communism. So I'm a rabid anti-communist. Hong Kong works. China doesn't. Like it or not, that's the truth."

Pricking Pagans

That truth is something hard to put across in Hong Kong, a cynical, apolitical place with a firm allegiance to money. It is among the most splendid and colorful cities in the world, founded on the opium trade in the 1840s and now the last, wealthiest crumb of the British Empire: An Altar of Mammon set on the rim of the Pacific Ocean -- "a capitalist carbuncle on the communist derriere of China," as the late journalist Richard Hughes once put it.

It is gradually going to pieces. Lately Hong Kong is tinted with a sunset glamour as the days of British rule dwindle away like sands in a draining hourglass. People are frantically saving every penny against the evil hour; skedaddling out, emigrating to Canada, Australia, anywhere, at the rate of 1,500 a week. Those who remain seem struck by a dull, hopeless apathy. When the colony's first free elections were held last September, only 39.5 percent of those eligible to vote turned out.

Feign has set himself a Quixotic task: pricking the consciences of pagans, using humor on the hardest-headed people on the planet -- trying to "hurry the East," which, as Rudyard Kipling pointed out long ago, is a fool's errand.

Still, Feign tries.

A Hong Kong delegation is visiting Rumania after the fall of Ceausescu. "Ceausescu's dead, but we still have his son, and we're not sure what to do with him," a Rumanian official says. "Ah, well, we in the Hong Kong government have only one way of dealing with ruthless, bloody, petty communist officials," is the reply. The delegation falls to their knees and kisses the shoes of the younger Ceausescu.

The World of Lily Wong

Feign jokes that "divine intervention" brought him to Hong Kong. He had been living an aimless, gadabout life. After dropping out of the University of California at Berkeley, he hitchhiked around the U.S. for two years and ended up in Vermont where he finished his B.A. at Goddard College.

"Finally I ended up in Hawaii where I was supposed to study applied linguistics. I had some idea I would teach English in Japan."

On campus in Hawaii Feign put up a notice saying he was looking for a room. He drew a caricature of himself on the notice.

"It was really ugly. I got a call. The man said, 'I don't have a room for you, but I've got a job. I want you to work in a caricature stand on Waikiki Beach."'

After some hesitation, Feign took the job. Soon he was earning $600 a month in a very "hand-to-mouth" existence. But he liked the work, liked the beach.

"And after awhile I began to think: 'Hey, maybe I can make a career out of this.' So six weeks before I was due to get my M.A. I quit school -- to the horror of my parents! But to me the choice was simple: Should I do two research papers on sociolinguistics, or should I do a line of T-shirts for a video shop? To me, the choice was clear."

Something else happened on the beach. A young psychology student named Cathy Tsang, from Hong Kong, was selling souvenirs at a stand across from Feign.

"Three years later, we were married."

Cathy Tsang became the model for Lily Wong, a self-willed, almond-eyed Cantonese beauty who was both muse and creation in Feign's comic strip. Eventually the couple ended up in Hong Kong.

It was 1985. The agreement to hand over Hong Kong to China had been signed the previous year, but at the time people were still optimistic. Vast, mysterious China was reforming, wakening to the West after years of violent Maoism. China was still a bit of a panda in 1985, fuzzy, cute and exotic in Western eyes.

"God, I loved it," Feign says. "I felt like I'd just arrived in Disneyland. I just ate it up, the street hawkers, the atmosphere, the smells, everything."

Feign began drawing a one-panel cartoon called Aieeyaaa! for the Hong Kong Standard, based on amusing cross-cultural predicaments. Aieeyaaa! can be roughly translated as Cantonese for "Omigosh!"

In it, a dark-haired Cantonese girl with high ideals, high-hemmed skirt and hot temper appeared. She evolved into Lily Wong, a strong-willed latter-day reincarnation of the beautiful, complaisant Chinese beauty who haunted the old Luk Kwok Hotel in Richard Mason's 1957 novel about Hong Kong, The World of Suzy Wong.

Losing Face

In 1987 Feign switched papers. The South China Morning Post had been acquired by Rupert Murdoch and the new Australian editors were ready to shake up Hong Kong a bit. Feign was part of their plans. The World Of Lily Wong began as "a Far Eastern cross-cultural cartoon love story," but turned into political satire.

By now Lily had acquired a family. Her father, the foreigner-hating old Ah Ba, is based loosely on Feign's own 93- year-old father-in-law, who looked very much askance at his daughter's wedding to a gwailo, or "foreign devil."

Lily was wooed for years by Stuart, a blond, big-nosed American whose naive illusions about Hong Kong are forever being smashed.

But the most amusing character is Lily's brother Rudy, a ne'er-do-well, cigarette-puffing, rakehell gambler who captures the endless cynicism and self-interest that is a touchstone of the Hong Kong Chinese character. Rudy is modeled on a surly waiter in a restaurant Feign frequents.

The strip began with gentle ribbing about Chinese foibles seen through Western eyes -- superstition, the need to save face, the suffocatingly tight family structure, the scrabbling for money.

"Straight 100s on your school report!" exclaims Lily's father to his schoolgirl daughter. Then he slaps her. "Conceited girl!! You made your brother lose face!!"

"I can't see why we came to this stupid village," says Rudy during a visit back to the family relatives across the border in China. "They only invited us here to gouge us for money. Everyone for miles around claims to be our cousin. Everyone has their hand out." In the last panel two grinning water buffaloes stick out their hooves for money.

But not just water buffaloes. A pig, two ducks and a parrot join in the begging. Feign might have stopped with the buffaloes, but couldn't. His pen-work is always hyperbolic, seething with extra detail. Each square of the strip is only a little over four centimeters on a side, not even two inches square, but within this quadrangle Feign can, and has, packed the entire skyline of Hong Kong's central shopping district, or a large part of Tiananmen Square, or the heads of up to 50 people, clearly defined and countable. This superabundant detail lends an urgent, documentary truthfulness to the strip.

Lily Wong has held a succession of jobs, working as a government secretary, a coffin saleslady, a newspaper reporter. Her stint in the Hong Kong government allowed Feign to razz lazy civil servants.

"How many people work in this office?" Lily inquires innocently upon arrival.

"Oh, about half," is the reply.

The government workers doze, knit, practice their golf swings, and ponder "work startages" instead of "work stoppages." "You haven't put in your eight hours!" Lily exclaims to some co-workers leaving at 3 p.m. "Oh, don't worry, the week's not over yet," they tell her.

An Angry Mosquito

Time passed. Feign aimed higher. He lampooned paramount Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping; premier Li Peng; Hong Kong governor Sir David Wilson, G.C.M.G. (the initials stand for Grand Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, but it is an old British jest that they really mean "God Calls Me God").

Feign is pointedly, coolly ignored by British officialdom. He is anathema in the chummy club and cocktail party circuit in Hong Kong.

"All we can say is, that the cartoonist is merely exercising his freedom of speech, which we hold dear," said Albert Lin of the Hong Kong government's information office.

"Personally," Lin added, speaking for himself and not Her Majesty's Government, "I think it's an advantage (to have cartoons like Lily Wong). Honest comments like these may be in short supply after a certain year, you know what I mean?" He means 1997.

"That is what is so frustrating about this government!" Feign explodes. "They have done nothing to me! That shows the power of this colonial administration. The South China Morning Post is a powerful newspaper. In a real democracy its cartoonists would be a force to be reckoned with. Look at Thomas Nast, how he defeated Boss Tweed! Look at what an influence over American public opinion Garry Trudeau has!

"Here, since the government is not beholden to anybody, they aren't worried about mosquito bites. I wish they would react!

Feign is austere, all sharp edges. His talk is like turpentine, stripping away the veneer of things. What chiefly cuts in his cartoons is not the draughtsmanship, not the dialogue, not even the wit, but rather a wide spill of anger, a moral fire, a purity that borders on cruelty.

Feign's finest hour came after the June 4, 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, a tragedy that convulsed even apathetic Hong Kong to its roots. Within days of the massacre, Feign sat down and drew some of the most savagely funny cartoons of his career. In a few panels he captured the full absurdity and horror of the bloodletting.

"CCTV news for Thursday," a Chinese television commentator says. "Lies continue to be spread by the biased bourgeois foreign media about rumoured massacres in the capital. Foreign propagandists incorrectly label the alleged victims as students. Do not believe such lies, comrades. There was no massacre. There were no demonstrations. There are no dissenters in China. IN FACT THERE ARE NO STUDENTS IN CHINA. Not anymore, that is . . ."

The TV screen shows a row of bound, kneeling students being executed by the People's Armed Police.

It was a prophetic image. A photograph of a similar scene involving "hooligans" being executed in China made Newsweek's cover several weeks later.

Feign also seized on the absurd, Kafkaesque excuse, which was actually, soberly advanced by Chinese premier Li Peng after the killings: That guns had to be used to quell the demonstrators because water pressure in Tiananmen Square was so low that water cannon were useless. "Can you BELIEVE that?" Feign asks, shaking his head incredulously. "The premier of China gave me my punch line. I could never have dreamed up something that crazy in a thousand years!"

The Clown Fish

Yet for all his fine madness, Feign remains very much a voice crying in the wilderness. If you ask the average Hong Kong resident, British or Chinese, what he thinks of Lily Wong, you will most likely get a bored, uncomprehending shrug.

"At his best, Larry Feign is absolutely brilliant," says George Hicks, a long-time Hong Kong resident and China expert who edited The Broken Mirror, an incisive collection of essays on the Tiananmen tragedy that appeared in 1990.

"I've still got things he did in 1986 on my wall, but I'm one of the few. The community here is so damned busy making money that, through no fault of his own, Larry has been quite unjustifiably ignored. It's one of the sad things about Hong Kong. This place has very little sense of humor. It is a fundamentally cruel place, and it is getting worse as 1997 approaches."

"I don't think I'm going to have much of a future here after 1997," Feign says. "Hong Kong is going to end up like my clown fish," Feign says.

That clown fish again . . . This is the selfsame fish whose picture Feign carries in his wallet. Ask him about it and his eyes begin to burn with a peculiar intensity.

"It was a marine, saltwater fish, a tropical reef fish. I had four of them, two damsel fish, one clown fish and a garoupa, and they lived five years, which is amazing for marine fish in captivity. I was very fond of them.

"I came to believe they have highly developed personalities and intellects. They responded to me. They wiggled with excitement when I approached them. Maybe it is anthropomorphizing on my part, but they had moods. My fish were kept alive on pure love. To me they were like house pets. They would all cluster over to my side of the tank when I was drawing, and watch me."

Then, while Feign was away from his apartment on vacation, the beloved clown fish flipped out of the tank and died. Feign was shocked. He suspected the caretaker had done something to annoy the fish and investigated the death as if it were a murder. He made repeated phone calls to find out exactly what happened. His friends giggled, but for Feign, the loss of his little clown fish was a keen personal sorrow.

Then the others died, too, and their demise was directly linked to the one trait that is the hallmark of Hong Kong: Greed.

"It turned out the 'pure sea salt' I was mixing in the water had been bleached and doctored by a dishonest dealer. It was really just ordinary table salt. By the time I found out the difference -- I had the salt analyzed by a chemist -- it was too late.

"Two of the others died. Then the surviving damsel fish broke his back. He was the smartest one of all. I tried to keep him alive by making him a splint with two chopsticks, but it didn't work. He fought to live, but in the end he didn't make it."

He pauses. Out the window is the blue panoply of Victoria harbor, with the green mountains of the New Territories, leased by Britain in 1898 for 99 years -- an eternity, or so it seemed then.

Beyond the green mountains lies China.

"I think Hong Kong is going to end up like my damsel fish, after the Chinese take over: Sick, splinted together with chopsticks, and dying a slow, agonizing death," Feign says. "The Chinese aren't going to be able to keep their hands out of the cookie jar. Corruption is a way of life in China, and it is insane to think it won't become a way of life here once they take over.

"The whole reason the place exists is because it is separate from China. Once it is absorbed, there'll be no reason to do business here. It'll be just one more big, dirty, crowded, chaotic city on the coast of China. Even in the best-case scenario, the low-level cadres aren't going to be able to resist putting their hands out. They'll figure: 'Why shouldn't I get a piece of the action? After all, I'm RUNNING this place!'

"In 1997 I'll be out of a job. It will not be out of the ordinary, in the way of Asian things, for there to be no freedom of the press after 1997. The light is going to go out here then."

Then, after having delivered this jeremiad, Feign turns back to his drawing board and gets started on a new week's worth of The World of Lily Wong, a world he firmly believes is coming to an end. As he draws, the clock ticks.

Section: TROPIC
Page: 20
Dateline: HONG KONG
Copyright (c) 1992 The Miami Herald