The Monkey King – Timothy Mo

In 1950’s Hong Kong, Wallace Nolasco’s marriage to May Ling was arranged solely to satisfy the needs of the respective parents.

Mr Nolasco senior, respected but impoverished school teacher, had only his Portuguese name to pass on (the genes long lost in decades of intermarriage with the Cantonese) so sought a dowry and prospects for his son; Mr Poon, successful but miserly businessman, needed to get his daughter (by his second concubine) off his hands and a ‘Mecanese’ hybrid was an acceptable compromise between an unattainable high ranking Cantonese and an undesirable Chinese of lower rank.

So Wallace is thrust into the already crowded Poon household comprising in addition to May Ling, Mr & Mrs Poon, their spinster daughters, their son and his wife and sons, and a couple of servants (‘amahs’) who rule the kitchen and perform domestic duties without grace.

There is a complex pecking order and Wallace’s place initially is firmly at the bottom. Undaunted he uses his ingenuity to create alliances, gain favour, and climb, step by step, through the family rankings until he becomes more use than ornament to Mr Poon in his business dealings in the city.

Life in the Poon household, and later in a remote New Territories village (where Wallace is exiled temporarily due to a need to lie low) is told with a deadpan humour that is more wry than laugh out loud. The trials and tribulations, petty victories and manoeuvrings are played out against the strange exotic world of the colony adjacent to the newly Red China.

Written before Mo’s brilliant ’Sour, Sweet’, The Monkey King is engaging enough but lacks the contrasts – light and dark, East and West - of the later work.