The Crazy Gweilo of Tai Po

Okay, here is the story of the Crazy Gweilo, and believe me, he is definitely as mad as a box of frogs. There’s a sort of modern dislocated colonialism about this man. I have known him for a long time; we have been through thick and thin together, but for the last decade or so he has made his home in Hong Kong, far from the madding crowds of Old Blighty. The actual phrase used is ‘ji-sing gwei-lo’, which means ‘crazy white foreigner’, and has long been a favourite term amongst the Chinese of Hong Kong and the New Territories to describe the eccentric Westerner. In some parts of China, white Europeans are referred to rather ironically as ghosts or devils...to the Chinese of Tai Po, the Crazy Gweilo was a mythical demon; mothers would threaten to send their squabbling children to him and old men rolled their eyes, sucked in their cheeks and threw their hands into the air as they traded stories about him. He was a celebrity for all the wrong reasons; people crossed the street when they saw him coming, and he had terrible difficulty in finding a maid who would clean for him.

The Crazy Gweilo lived in the New Territories, on mainland China...a sort of limbo, a marginal space between old imperial Hong Kong and the modern People's Republic. There aren’t too many Europeans living in the New Territories - he was certainly very well known amongst the people of Tai Po village; they all thought he was crazy.

He bought an apartment, very comfortable, roof garden, the works...he was doing okay, but he had a problem with his rubbish. He noticed that his rubbish was being blatantly scattered hither and thither by a particularly mangy mutt. Lots of dogs in the New Territories are addled, riddled, irredeemably lost, roaming in packs, but this particular creature was a law unto himself. It was a lone wolf, a free radical that didn’t give a shit. It would continually and persistently raid the communal waste collection point, situated inconveniently closely to my friend’s apartment building, and rifle the plastic bags containing household waste which had been left there. It was a source of a mounting, seething frustration in my friend’s mind that this dog was generating such chaos. Rotting rubbish was scattered everywhere around the drive to the apartment building and in tropical conditions, that is not a pleasant or a healthy thing.

The Crazy Gweilo is getting really fed up with having to pick up all of his own semi-putrescent rubbish, and everybody else’s too. No-one else in the building seems to care. ‘Who am I,’ he rails, ‘some sort of Crazy Gweilo coolie or something?’ You should see him go when an oblivious Chinese person ignores queue protocol...Chinese people don't seem to want to know much about queueing...maybe only crazy gweilos have the queueing gene?

He digs the small patch of his garden that will one day yield vegetables in his mind’s eye and unearths, quite by chance, a length of old lead pipe...about two foot long, like a small two handed weapon. It's comfortably heavy...he passes it from left hand to right, making himself familiar with the weight of it. His imagination is working. He sees himself raising the heavy lead pipe high above his head and bringing it down sharply, with a sickening thud, smashing bone, tearing at muscle, splattering blood...a dark space in his mind....he is the Crazy Gweilo, and he now knows what he will do with the pipe.

He picks up more rubbish, fetid in the tropical heat. It is rank...and he renews his resolve, sits down to fantasize about cracking that dog’s head open like a walnut. He knows which dog it is; he’s seen it hanging around guiltily, furtively, with an eye for the main chance. He’s thrown stones at it, so it retreats to a safe distance and waits, laughing at him, taunting him. But its a seasoned old veteran and keeps its distance. The question becomes clear: how shall the damned thing be caught?

The Crazy Gweilo has an idea. He finds a store selling fishing tackle and buys a couple of lethal-looking hooks...really big ones with vicious barbs...

From his refrigerator, he takes a fine steak, very expensive, and cuts off a large cube. He’s going to get that mangy cur. He has a plan. He takes this monstrous hook and attaches a nylon line, to which he secures a nylon rope. He’s going to bait the hook, he’s going to hook the dog and reel it in and then he’s going to beat its brains out with a length of lead pipe that he found in his garden. Highly satisfactory. Perfectly reasonable behaviour. Its the sort of thing anyone would do...surely...

He took the barb and speared the meat...but in so doing, he inadvertantly ran the barb straight into the flesh of his short, fat index finger.

'AAAAAIIIIIYYYYAAAAAAAHHHHH!' as they say in China. The Gweilo roared like a wounded dragon.

...but he didn’t panic, because he is the Crazy Gweilo...his finger had been stuck with a barabrous hook and it hurt like hell...it was bleeding (profusely is a succinct adjective)...but the Crazy Gweilo has nerves of steel...

The dilemma which confronted him was that he could not pull out the hook because of the vicious barb, and it was hurting like hell, really...

There is only one thing to do. He has to act quickly, because the red red krovy is running down his arm, and him a qualified nurse and all. He has to really try hard to suppress the panic instinct that is surging through his veins...Blood alert, blood alert, danger, warning!! He whips off his leather belt and grips it between his teeth...and, in an adrenaline bloom, by holding the end of the hook upon the table at which he sits, he tries to force the hook all the way through his finger...

You have just got to be crazy to do that!

The Crazy Gweilo told me he was amazed at the elasticity of human skin...how it is relatively easy to penetrate from without but excrutiatingly difficult from within...and his eyes glittered rather uncomfortably for a moment, transfixing me...it was a sublime experience by all accounts.

Finally, when he did not think he could endure any more, the hook emerges. More of the red red krovy...two holes now, both pumping. It was as much as he could to to retain consciousness.

Such was the Crazy Gweilo's trauma that he entirely gave up any ideas of summary justice in relation to the mutt who was distributing his rubbish around to rot for all to see. The dog-god's protective magic worked its wonders...

Months later, after his finger had recovered from its ordeal, he sold the apartment. He looked out from his garden terrace, regretfully, knowing he would miss the view, the purple hills of the mainland behind him, the verdant green rolling down to the blue of the bay, the lush banana trees, the cicada chorus, and not far away, the dynamic humming power of the Vertical City. As he looked down, he spotted that selfsame mangy cur. It was snuffling around in his courtyard below very purposefully, like it was looking for something...actually looking for a particular spot...as dogs are wont to do...

And wouldn’t you know it, just as the dog found the exact place, squatted, hunched its back and went about its business, the Crazy Gweilo could have sworn, could have sworn that it looked up at him myopically and cackled like a hyena. Perhaps that was his crazy imagination...or mine...but after all, who is to say that a snake is not a dragon without wings?