Saying Goodbye to Hong Kong's Great Storyteller

In the summer of 1979, I was 14 years old. Thinking that I should be productively occupied over the school holidays, my father arranged for me to work as a copy boy at Hong Kong's English-language paper of record, the South China Morning Post. He did this through his sometime drinking companion — the paper's most famous and influential writer, Kevin Sinclair.

A hungover Sinclair greeted me on my first morning. Unable to speak coherently on account of a recent tracheotomy, he made the gesture of raising a drinking vessel to his mouth. I assumed this was an instruction to bring him coffee. In fact, he was proposing that we go to the pub, and by 11 a.m. we were at the Smuggler's Inn in the seaside town of Stanley. As word got around of Sinclair's whereabouts, uproarious characters — friends or contacts — began to stream in and a party ensued. Toward sunset, having drank steadily for the entire day and consumed no food besides peanuts and crisps, I was unconscious on a bench in the corner. Sinclair concluded my introduction to journalism by placing me in a cab with the fare home. When my parents opened the front door, I stumbled to the bathroom and was spectacularly sick. Then I reappeared before them with the life-changing words: "Mum, Dad, I want to be a journalist; I want to be like Kevin Sinclair."

Sinclair eventually became the doyen of Hong Kong's press corps and a prolific author, editor and columnist. His memoir, Tell Me a Story: Forty Years of Newspapering in Hong Kong and China, is an anecdote-rich chronicle of his life and career, a newsman's perspective on major events in recent Chinese history — from the Cultural Revolution to the launch of China's economic transformation — and an encomium to his adopted home, Hong Kong. Sinclair and tales of drinking go together like Scotch and a beer chaser, and passages of Tell Me a Story also document his struggles with alcohol, which lent poetry to his reputation yet almost certainly contributed to the old lion's final vanquishment by cancer last month at the age of 64. Viewing him through posterity's filter, it is clear that he wasn't simply a local firebrand and celebrity. He was the last of a breed of reckless, old-style, table-thumping China Coast journalists.

Born to a teenage single mother in Wellington, New Zealand, Sinclair was raised in impoverished circumstances and, though bright, left school at 16. After being arrested and brought to court for throwing rocks through a train-station window, he was interviewed by a juvenile counselor. Startled by the young vandal's command of Gorky, Conrad and Steinbeck, the counselor eventually referred Sinclair to a copy-boy position at Wellington's Evening Post. From there, his progress through the newspaper world of New Zealand and Australia was buccaneering: sleeping rough on Queensland's Gold Coast after turning up drunk and late for a job on the Courier-Mail; moving in, at the age of 19, with a thirtyish American stripper named Melodie ("She taught me a lot, and it wasn't just how to carry a tune"); and writing for publications too poor to pay him anything besides meals and flagons of cheap wine. He eventually began earning notice as a crime reporter on Sydney's Daily Telegraph, but it was only when he went to Hong Kong in 1968, to take up a job on a now defunct tabloid, that his passion for journalism became wedded to his love for a place.

A chance encounter with Edgar Snow's sweeping account of the Chinese revolution, Red Star Over China, had given Sinclair a pent-up curiosity about Chinese culture since his boyhood, and from the moment of his arrival as a 25-year-old he became an assiduous student of it. He openly despised the kind of expatriates who "seldom meet a normal Hongkonger" and instead sided with and befriended Chinese at the grass-roots level. For the next 40 years, his work and life were peopled with laborers, police constables and villagers of Hong Kong's rural New Territories region, which he explored obsessively, resided in and became a leading authority on.

Completed just two weeks before his death, Tell Me a Story is imperfectly written but no less compelling for that — these are, after all, the words of a man ravaged by chemotherapy, who knew he was dying. But swaths of it are equal to Sinclair at his roaring, mid-period best. He never compensated for his tracheotomy by being verbose in print — on the contrary, having to choose every spoken word with great care taught him the value of writing with fierce economy. At the book's launch, four days before he died, Sinclair was too ill to even sign his name. But in life, no China Coast newsman wrote with a more muscular arm than his.