Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

In the early nineties I was in Hong Kong looking for a job. I already had part time work as a barman and a sandwich delivery boy, but I had got it into my head that I could find a job working in an art gallery, and I would find this job the way I had found the others, by walking into likely looking places and asking nicely.

I cannot remember where I had got hold of this namecard, but it said, among a lot of Chinese, ‘art gallery’ in English, and an address in Tsimshatsui. I had assumed a shiny mall, but no, the card directed me to a shabby office block, far from the commercial streets. I climbed stairs and found a metal door and a hand written sign. Well I was here, I might as well go through with it.

I knocked and was greeted by a couple of sharp looking gentlemen, who ushered me into a cluttered office lined with racks, and got their vampish girl to make me a cup of tea and we all had cigarettes.

Then they showed me the merchandise. One whole rack was Picasso – here was the Weeping Woman, rather larger than the real one, and Guernica, a whole lot smaller – that was just a sample. They were keen that I check out the Van Goghs and the Monets, and I had the impression that those were their most popular lines, which was confirmed when they showed me their catalogue, the first half was all your standard sub and post impressionisms. But they were versatile; the latter section was a lot of depositions and the like, from the Renaissance, and I think I remember rightly in saying that their most expensive piece was Leonardo’s Virgin on the Rocks.

These were not prints; they were very well made forgeries. The impasto on the Van Gogh’s was as thick as half an inch and you could feel the vigour behind every swirling sweep of paint, just like the real thing.

The sharp looking gentlemen spoke no English. The girl understood a little, but my request was too bizarre for her to take in for some time. But yes, we worked it out eventually, I was not a buyer, I was actually, of all things, looking for a job; bemused, they ushered me straight out.

That was my first brush with what you might politely call the Chinese aptitude for imitation. I was reminded of it yesterday because another sharp looking gentleman was pulling out racks of beautifully made fakes. This time they were watches, Rolex and Cartier and so on, and he was taking the backs off to show me the works. Anyone can print a logo on a t-shirt, but a watch, fake or not, is full of a great number of finely calibrated working parts, and these were something to admire. I’ve heard they’re made by prison labour in factory jails run by the army.

I was in a three storey mall and every shop sold fakes. Though it was all very blatant for some reason the watches could not be kept on obvious display, perhaps they were just too high value. I didn’t buy one. But I did get a pair of Converse trainers for about four quid, a Swiss Army bag for about the same, Guess sunglasses for a quid and a Mont Blanc pen for a bit less.

Mostly it was clothes, bags and shoes but there were also golf clubs and, of course, Cultural Revolution memorabilia. I always found that peculiar. I mean, a real cultural revolution alarm clock – the classic Mickey Mouse shape, but with a picture of a Red Guard on the face, his arm waving the little red book back and forth as it ticks – is a bizarre enough object, product of a sinister mania. But if you think about it, a fake one, battered and artificially aged, and designed for foreigners to take home, is an even stranger thing.

It’s easier to get fake DVDs than real ones. In the chemists, you have to watch out for fake drugs – look out for spelling mistakes in the instructions. Babies have died from drinking fake milk powder. They’re everywhere.

Over the road from that market is a vegetarian restaurant. The menu looks like a standard Chinese menu, with roast duck, chicken and cashews, three ways fried pork, and so on. But it’s all fake, the meat is artfully made from tofu and ginger and so on, from ancient Buddhist recipies, and designed to have the look, taste and texture of the real thing. I figured this might be my one chance to try – well, get near to trying – the prohibitively expensive shark fin soup and abalone. But no; annoyingly, they were the same price as the real thing, about twenty quid each. I can understand that, due to the relative scarcity of shark fins, shark’s fin soup is pricey, but why should a tofu concoction designed to taste just like it be twenty times more than a similar concoction made to taste like chicken?

I had fish maw. I don’t know why I had fish maw. If it had been real fish maw, I wouldn’t have ordered it; who wants to eat fish mouths? But I thought cause it was fake it might be ok. What I had tasted just like oily rubbery strings of tofu – which for all I know, could be what real fish maw tastes like.

On the other hand, the meatballs were excellent. They looked like meatballs, they had the texture of meatballs, they tasted like meatballs. But maybe I had spent too long at the market over the road. I couldn’t help a nagging suspicion that I had been passed more dodgy merchandise; fake fake meat – the genuine article.