Suzie Wong: 60 years after Hong Kong icon was created, we recount an interview with late author Richard Mason
From the moment he discovered his hotel was ‘virtually a brothel’, Mason knew he had his book; six decades later, the tale of sex, prostitution and interracial relationships, and the fame of its heroine, continue to endure
This year marks 60 years since the publication of British author Richard Mason’s classic Hong Kong love story, The World of Suzie Wong. The tender romance between Robert Lomax, a young aspiring English artist, and Suzie Wong, a beautiful Chinese prostitute, struck a chord with the public and became a bestseller.
Its appearance in an age of innocence when sex, prostitution and interracial relationships were taboo subjects proved a revelation.
Mason’s assured writing – never letting the subject matter appear cheap or hollow – ensured his story of Wong and her fellow Wan Chai “yum yum” bar girls, with their motto of “no money, no talk”, also resonated with critics.
“Suzie Wong is enchanting,” gushed the New York Herald Tribune’s review, while The Times Literary Supplement praised Mason’s “extremely readable” story, which had been “written with uncommon skill and intelligence”.
However, back in 1956, when Mason first stepped off the liner in Kowloon carrying his portable typewriter, ready to start his next book, he had no idea what he would write about.
“I had felt I needed a background for a book and something in me said Hong Kong was a place where I would immediately find material, so I simply bought a ticket,” he told me in an interview in 1993, four years before his death from lung cancer, aged 78.
