Please Enjoy Your Happiness by Paul Brinkley-Rogers

certain women were strongly attracted to men skilled at artful and deceptive behaviour. I was suddenly popular. The Suzie Wong bar, like the fictional version in the film, was a nest of Eurasian vamps who moved deliberately with the restraint of snakes and who were especially good at slow-smoking black Russian Sobraniecigarettes with gold filters. A pretty girl sitting in your lap, kissing the wound on your cheek and blowing smoke into your eyes when you are nineteen . . . Ahhhhhh. Sublime. You may recall that I used that word when I told you about the incident and you laughed with a strange kind of regret.
    I almost forgot. I believe I showed you that history book when we met on that July day in Yokosuka. You saw a couple of blood spatters on the cover. You seized the book, looked sternly at me, and said: ‘Oh. Oh. Oh! What is this? I told a certain poet to be a good boy.’ I explained at great length what had happened. You looked proud of me. ‘Fighting in defence of literature,’ you said loudly, as if you were making an announcement. ‘A noble sport!’
    I still have my copy of the Chinese history book. The final paragraph in the book reads,
    The victory of the revolution of the Chinese people and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China is a victory of Marxism–Leninism in China. It is the most important event in the world after the Great October Socialist Revolution (in Russia). It is a source of inspiration for the oppressed people of the East as well as other people in the rest of the world and affirms their confidence in the ultimate victory of their struggle for liberation.
    I remember reading that passage and thinking a forbidden thought: ‘I suppose that includes me.’
    I’ve just remembered another book acquired on that same Hong Kong visit. I still have that, too. It is
The True Story of Ah-Q
(Q). You know my habit, which you started, of wandering into used bookshops not in search of any particular book but in search of the great unknown. ‘I always have a bookwith me,’ you said mischievously in the White Rose. ‘When the world becomes too much, I open the book and slip inside. Would you like to know how to do that? Watch! See! Look, here is the book. I open the book. I start reading. I am in a trance. Now look at me. See? I am invisible.’
    When I die I want to be buried with
The True Story of Ah-Q
, the
Outline History of China
with the blood spots from the battle over literature, the
Senryu
with your fingerprint inside, and the antique bronze vase with the green patina you bought me because I said that if I ever was a writer I would use it to store pens and pencils and rulers and ink brushes and a long thin paper knife I would use to slit open the envelopes containing your letters. You can still write to me, you know. I am here, waiting, waiting.
    ‘You want to talk to interesting people as much as you can,’ you told me. ‘The best way to do that is to walk into a bookstore, pick up a book – any book – and ask the person next to you if he has read it. A stupid person will just shake his head. An intelligent person will say, “No, but I would like to read it.”’
    I did not buy the
Ah-Q
book, which was written by Lu Xun and had been published as a magazine series in 1921 and 1922. It is considered a masterpiece in China. The story traces the ‘adventures’ of Ah-Q, a peasant with little education and no definite occupation. He is a bully to the less fortunate but fearful of those above him in rank, or power. He persuades himself that he is spiritually ‘superior’ to his oppressors, even as he is hauled off to be executed for a minor crime. Inside the book I wrote, ‘Paul Rogers, Victoria, Hong Kong, 6/17/59. Bought for me by Paul Feng.’
    Paul Feng happened to be standing alongside me in that Hong Kong bookstore. He looked surprised, and pleased, whenI not only asked him if he had read the book but I asked questions about it after he said
Ah-Q
was a classic. ‘This