"The ferryboat came churning alongside and the crowd moved forward. We jostled together up the gangplank and chose one of the slatted bench-seats on the covered top deck. The ferries were Chinese owned and run, and very efficient, and we had hardly sat down before the water was churning again, the engines rumbling, the boat palpitating--and we were moving off busily past the Kowloon wharves, past anchored merchant-ships, past great clusters of junks. Ahead, on the island across the channel, was Hong Kong, squeezed into a coastal strip a few hundred yards wide, with the miniature skyscapers in the centre and on either side the long waterfront, stretching for miles, wedged with sampans and junks; and behind rose the steep escarpment of the Peak, shedding the town and the lower social orders as it climbed, until at the higher altitudes there remained only a sprinkling of white bungalows and luxury flats inhabited by the elite ...

I walked back after the cinema. It was nearly ten o'clock when I reached the quay, but many of the shops were still open. There was a busy noise of sewing-machines coming from the shirt-maker's. Four thin young men in shirt-sleeves were working at the back under a naked bulb. In the workshop next door a man was welding: the bright white glare of the welding torch threw shadows amongst the ceiling-high stacks of metal junk. Farther on a red neon sign glowed over a lighted doorway. There was a great clatter like the noise of a factory that grew deafening as I approached--the most familiar noise of the Hong Kong night, the noise of mah-jong. I glanced at the packed smoky room, where the players sat clicking the white bricks on the hard-topped tables. The clatter faded as I walked on. I passed the naval tailor's with the glass window and the fat beaming proprietor in the doorway and the blackboard beside him with welcome to all members of in white paint at the top, and three numbers chalked below--the numbers of the three American ships in port. There were a few more shops and then the blue neon sign of the Nam Kok. I could see Minnie Ho standing like a stray kitten outside the bar entrance. I knew that as soon as she noticed me she would say "Oh Robert! Please will you take me in!" It was a cry I heard several times a day, because the girls were not allowed to enter the bar without an escort: thus could the law be technically satisfied that they were not entering for the purpose of soliciting, and that the Nam Kok was not a brothel."

--The World Of Suzie Wong by Richard Mason (1957)

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