Word: booth
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...Booth's appetite for Hong Kong's idiosyncrasies is already whetted. He encounters a woman with bound feet, a waiter whose tongue was cut out by the Japanese as a punishment and a dentist whose recollections of wartime internment are so gruesome that Booth endures the drill without novocaine or complaint. He learns how to eat boiled beetles, polish ancestral bones during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts and speak rudimentary Cantonese. He spends long afternoons wandering around what was then a quiet city of green hills and mysterious alleys, catching geckos and digging up spent bullets?and, one scary...
...idyll has a villain: Booth's father, a stiff, cocktail-swilling prig who denigrates the locals and mocks the boy for "going native." The elder Booth "was a natural-born bully," writes his ever-upbeat son. "On the other hand, I did grow up mixing a mean cocktail." The heroine is his mother?spunky, intelligent and curious about all things Chinese. Dad, a civilian employee of the navy, wants to go home; Mum wants to stay. As the family heads for the ship that will return them to England, she impulsively grabs Martin and leaps from the car. Gweilo...
...Gweilo should rescue Booth from relative obscurity, if only for the story behind it. Two years ago, as the author was battling brain cancer, his children asked him to set down an account of his formative years while he still could. Booth finished just before dying in February...
...resist touching it. "I was a walking talking talisman," he writes. This, plus his status as a gweilo ("ghostly man," or Caucasian), allows him to walk undeterred into Hong Kong's brothels and opium dens to befriend coolies, Triad gangsters and the real-life model for Hiroshima Joe. Perhaps Booth's biggest coup is talking his way into Kowloon Walled City, a notorious no-go area of vice, violence and opium dens. Afterward, his guide, a young Triad member named Lau, gestures toward a pig being slaughtered in a nearby butcher shop. "Blood sprayed from its neck," writes Booth...
...natural-born killers. To keep them in a world where wilderness areas are shrinking will require all the innovative strategies that conservationists can muster. Otherwise these majestic creatures will end up living out their days in zoos--banished forever from the wild where they belong. --With reporting by Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas and Simon Robinson/Johannesburg