Tim Heald

Ghost Boy

Gweilo: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood

By

Doubleday 342pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

On 2 May 1952 a small boy called Martin Booth set sail for Hong Kong aboard the P & 0 liner Cofu with Joyce, the free-spirited mother he loved, and Ken, the boozy, blimpish father they both more or less loathed. Ken, a sort of Naval grocer, had been posted to the colony, and for the next three years, while he stuck to pink gin and out-of-date English newspapers, mother and son went native. Actually, the little boy went more genuinely native than Joyce. He became a sort of Chinese version of Kim or Mowgh, roaming the streets and alleys of the city and the relative wilderness of the hills and islands, befriended by rickshaw boys, a demented aristocratic Russian bag lady, a predatory homosexual called Nagasaki Joe, Triads in the Forbidden City and other colourful characters.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Tarantino's latest film is 'a fairy tale about Hollywood, where fantasy is an industrial product and the boulevards… ,
    • 'I don’t think we’re here on Earth to be Happy. I think we’re here on Earth to help God. I am a messianic writer'.… ,
    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    Follow Us