The World of Suzie Wong

Wan Chai in the mid-1950s — a district of waterfront bars, sampan traffic, and the perpetual noise of cargo being unloaded — is where an unemployed British painter rents a room at the Nam Kok Hotel and meets a young woman who works the bars at night. Mason's 1957 novel gave Western readers their first sustained image of Hong Kong's street-level life: the dai pai dong stalls, the cramped tong lau apartments, the harbor before the land reclamations changed everything.