MO, Timothy (Peter) 1950(?)-

PERSONAL: Born December 30, 1950 (some sources say 1953), in Hong Kong; son of Peter Mo Wan Lung and Barbara Helena Falkingham; partner's name Lisa; children: Marie. Education: St. John's College, Oxford, B.A..

ADDRESSES: Home—Hong Kong. Offıce—Paddleless Press, BCM Paddleless, London WC1N 3XX, England.

CAREER: Novelist.

AWARDS, HONORS: Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize, 1978; Booker McConnell Prize for fiction shortlist, 1982, for Sour Sweet, 1986, for An Insular Possession, and 1991, for The Redundancy of Courage; Hawthornden Prize, British Society of Authors, 1983, for Sour Sweet; E. M. Forster awards, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1992; James Tait Black Memorial prize, 1999.

WRITINGS:

novels

The Monkey King, Deutsch (London, England), 1978, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1980.

Sour Sweet, Deutsch (London, England), 1982.

An Insular Possession, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1986, Random House (New York, NY), 1987.

The Redundancy of Courage, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1991.

Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard, Paddleless Press (London, England), 1995.

Renegade or Halo2, Paddleless Press (London, England), 2000.

Contributor of reviews to periodicals, including New Statesman.

ADAPTATIONS: Sour Sweet was adapted for film in 1989.

SIDELIGHTS: British novelist Timothy Mo has established himself as a powerful chronicler of colonialism and the immigrant experience. As the son of a Chinese father and a English mother, born in Hong Kong and educated at Oxford University in England, Mo has experienced cultural ambiguity first-hand. His award-winning fiction utilizes settings as varied as contemporary London, nineteenth-century Hong Kong, and the Philippines.

After completing his studies at Oxford, Mo settled in London. A former boxer, he worked as a columnist for The Boxing News while writing his early novels. His first published novel, The Monkey King, was hailed by critics as an expatriate's portrait of Hong Kong culture, one reviewer maintaining that he evoked author V. S. Naipaul's masterful description of Asian society in Trinidad. Sour Sweet, Mo's next novel, was also praised for its subtle depiction of the immigrant experience from the viewpoint of a Chinese family in London. A principal theme in both novels is the cultural clash of East and West, viewed with a keen eye for comic incongruities and sympathetic respect for the courage and resilience people display coping with unfamiliar social milieus.

Discussing The Monkey King in the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Neve stated that it "breaks new ground" for novels set in Hong Kong by creating an authentic urban ambiance that is more than simply an exotic background for the characters. The narrative follows the career of Wallace Nolasco, a Chinese-Portuguese youth from Macao who reluctantly agrees to a marriage with a daughter of his father's Hong Kong partner, the shady merchant Mr. Poon. Wallace and his dim-witted bride, May-Ling, live with the rest of the extended Poon family in a ramshackle mansion where mutual suspicion thrives as the various in-laws maneuver for a share of the family fortune. "The book captures the sense of familial claustrophobia well," observed Neve. The Poons resent Wallace as an interloper and cultural outsider, and Wallace in turn is generally disparaging of the Hong Kong Chinese, despite his own ethnic affinities. This frequently results in comic clashes, yet "the comedy is never farce, the characters are never caricatures; all are uniquely Hong Kong," reported John Marney in World Literature Today. "The dialogue is in that inimitable and hilarious compost of obsolete and misspoken English idiom that uniquely and indelibly identifies Hong Kong Chinglish." The story proceeds through Wallace's years of unsuccessful struggling to secure a place in Mr. Poon's commercial empire. When at last he is exiled to work as manager of one of his father-in-law's estates in the New Territories on the Chinese mainland, Wallace is immersed in traditional Chinese culture. He must arbitrate local matters such as disputes over paddy fields and religious shrines. Eventually, his handling of these concerns regains Mr. Poon's trust, and on his deathbed, the man names Wallace the unlikely leader of the Poon family dynasty.

Cultures in conflict are also at the core of Sour Sweet, which New Statesman critic Mike Poole termed "a brilliantly observed study in the first-generation immigrant experience." The novel marks a departure from traditional fictional treatment of the crosscultural theme, noted Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post Book World, by shifting the narrative point of view from Westerners in the exotic East to a recently settled Hong Kong Chinese immigrant family in England. Mo "has turned a witty, imaginative, and wholly successful twist on what has become a familiar twentieth-century genre," Yardley declared. "Sour Sweet is, on every level that really matters, a work filled with wonders, surprises and rewards—a novel that, at the risk of using a word cheapened by familiarity and abuse, can only be described as enchanting."

The main plot line of Sour Sweet follows the Chen family's gradual and somewhat reluctant accommodation to British society, and the discoveries they make about themselves and each other along the way. For several years, Chen, his wife, Lily, their small son, Man Kee, and Lily's sister, Mui, live largely within London's virtually autonomous Chinese subculture, and maintain few links to the outside world. Chen works as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant, learning only enough English to haltingly communicate the menu; the two women spend almost all their time in the small flat, caring for Man Kee and waiting on Chen's return, the high point of their day. According to Michael Leapman, a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, "Mo marvelously evokes the cocooned self-sufficiency of the Chens' home life." Strong-willed and irrepressible, Lily offers a sharp contrast in temperament to the stolid Chen, while Mui refuses to budge from a maddening lethargy, planted in front of the television set. The author "depicts the family relationships and tensions with a delicate balance between comic distance and emotional involvement," observed Peter Lewis in the Times LiterarySupplement. "He has a very sharp eye indeed for the nuances of behaviour in close-knit social units." The Chens' world begins to change when they open a Chinese take-out restaurant and expand their contacts with the English, resulting in numerous comic cultural collisions. The staple of their menu—carefully researched to accommodate English tastes—is sweet-and-sour pork served with pineapple chunks in a lurid orange sauce, which the Chens themselves refuse to eat, preferring such genuine Chinese cuisine as yellow duck's feet and white, bloody chicken.

Running parallel to the Chen family saga in Sour Sweet is a dark narrative of the Chinese criminal underworld, organized in the secret Triad Societies that flourished in London in the early 1960s. Chen transacts some business with a Triad gang, and though innocent of any wrong-doing, he is subsequently murdered by the organization. His family does not know what has happened to him, only that he does not return home, and a mysterious monthly stipend begins to arrive at their house. In reality, it is a kind of payoff from the Triad gang, but Lily prefers to believe that Chen has taken a job abroad and will someday return. The family fortunes have indeed turned "sour sweet" and "the book thus ends on a note of serenity and optimism," appraised Leapman.

In his third novel, An Insular Possession, Mo moves from the settings and themes of his first two works and focuses on nineteenth-century Hong Kong, Macao, and Canton. The novel explores the infamous Opium War of 1839 to 1842, in which Britain attacked and took possession of the Chinese city of Hong Kong to ensure a continued market for its silver, via opium supplied to the Chinese by India. An Insular Possession is a sprawling novel filled with historical minutiae and large thematic concerns of empire, religion, and politics. In an interview with Eden Ross Lipson for the New York Times Book Review, Mo commented: "So many modern novelists write small novels perfectly. . . . I'm aiming for sweep and ambition."

The plot of An Insular Possession concerns two Americans living in the Far East. Gideon Chase is a young, naive man who becomes an interpreter and translator for the British, while his friend Walter Eastman explores photography through the invention of the daguerreotype. Disagreeing with the trade viewpoints of the established local English-language newspaper, the Canton Monitor, Chase and Eastman establish their own paper, The Lin Tin Bulletin and River Bee. Through the opposing perspectives of the two newspapers, Mo chronicles the events of the Opium War. Commented Robin W. Winks in the New York Times Book Review, "What most appears to fascinate Timothy Mo is a central question of empire. . . . How could the missionaries go up the China coast on the opium clippers, distributing Bibles with the drug?" Many reviewers praised Mo's ability to render compelling historical details in an old-fashioned, large-scale story, but some criticized the novel's narrative pace and structure. Washington Post Book World critic Jonathan Yardley noted Mo's "deliberately archaic" prose style and wealth of historical detail, and decided: "As period piece and as history, An Insular Possession is a considerable achievement. As fiction, though, it is only intermittently interesting." Nonetheless, Yardley felt that "Mo must be admired for his daring, for his refusal to be typecast as a writer of droll crosscultural domestic stories."

Mo's novel The Redundancy of Courage is set on a fictional island off the coast of Australia. Loosely based on the 1975 revolution in East Timor, an ex-Portuguese colony, the story is a study of war and the challenges it presents to courage and decency. The narrator, Adolph Ng, is a gay Chinese man who owns a hotel in the island's capital. After his property is appropriated by the ruling military regime, Adolph finds himself captured in a rebel raid and taken into the jungle. Adolph first adapts by taking part in missions for the rebels to overthrow the regime; after being captured, however, he informs on his former colleagues and even shoots one in battle. "This is a superbly written, absorbing but disturbing book," commented Kate Kellaway in the Observer. Comparing The Redundancy of Courage to An Insular Possession, Lorna Sage in the Times Literary Supplement remarked that the more contemporary setting of Courage makes it "altogether more uncomfortable and more challenging and closer to home."

For his fifth novel, Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard, Mo took the unusual step of leaving his publisher and creating his own imprint for the work. His decision to do so was prompted by his disappointment with the way his previous works had been handled. The quirky plot of Brownout is set in the Philippines and features a German professor with rather extreme sexual tastes, a politician's wife, and several delegates to an international conference on ecology. The novel features broad comedy with numerous scatological references, and critical reception was less enthusiastic than it had been for the author's previous books. Observer Review critic Helen Dunmore called the novel "accomplished" but felt that the plot is not "coherent or resonant enough to make the effect for which it reaches." Commenting on the narrative's constantly shifting perspective and difficult prose style, London Review of Books contributor Adam Mars-Jones complained, "Readers of literary prose don't mind doing a bit of work, but in this book the division of labour between reader and writer is highly unequal."

Mo's next novel, Renegade or Halo2, was also published under his own Paddleless Press imprint. The protagonist of this story is Sugar Rey Castro, the offspring of a Filipino prostitute and an African-American serviceman. Like many of Mo's featured characters, Sugar Rey moves from one culture to another in sometimes unexpected ways. Ironically enough, although he is the product of the sex industry, he is educated by Jesuits and taught to think clearly and rationally. His youthful experience takes in running with a street gang and, eventually, being framed for a brutal rape and murder. Although he did not commit the crime, he was reluctantly involved in it, and the victim's ghost haunts the book. Running from the incident, Mo begins a series of world travels that take in London, Asia, Cuba, Florida, and many other locations. "Packed with action—much of it chillingly brutal—[Renegade or Halo2] . . . is propelled less by plot than by sizzling prose. In its vivid tales of boat people and stowaways, the novel suggests first-hand experience of a global underclass of migrants—often the detritus of empire—who live several lifetimes in one," remarked Maya Jaggi in the London Guardian. Bruce King, a reviewer for World Literature Today, offered high praise for the novel, stating, "The story is engrossing, the movement is fast, and [the book] ends too soon after 539 pages." Martyn Bedford, a contributor to New Statesman, labeled the work "one of those richly entertaining narratives that sweeps a lenient reader along on the momentum of its energy," and concluded: "This is in every sense an international novel, by a writer brimming with confidence. In Rey Castro he has fashioned a hero at once unique and archetypal. An outsider even in his own country, a perpetual misfit, a victim of racism who somehow survives within the armour of his own sense of identity. His tale could make you depressed about the common language of interracial animosity. That it doesn't is due to the upbeat tone that suffuses the writing and to the narrator's irrepressible optimism."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 46, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 194: BritishNovelists since 1960, Second Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

periodicals

Ariel, July, 1994, Elaine Yee Lin Ho, "Spicy and Thick," p. 26.

Asiaweek, December 21, 1986.

Far Eastern Economic Review, September 18, 1986, Dick Wilson, "On the Edge of History," pp. 60-61; May 30, 1991, Jonathan Friedland, An Insular Occupation, p. 59.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), June 20, 1987.

Guardian (London, England), October 7, 2000, Maya Jaggi, "A Life in Writing," p. 11.

Independent on Sunday (London, England), July 10, 1999, Boyd Tonkin, "Postcards from the Edge," p. 9; July 25, 1999, review of Renegade or Halo2, p. 12.

Journal of Commonwealth Literature, pp. 49-64.

London Review of Books, May 11, 1995, p. 22.

Los Angeles Times, April 2, 1987.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, Gayle Feldman, review of The Monkey King, p. 11; July 5, 1987.

New Republic, May 11, 1987, Ian Buruma, "China Syndrome," pp. 39-41.

New Statesman, July 14, 1978; April 23, 1982; August 16, 1999, Martyn Bedford, review of Renegade or Halo2, p. 40.

New Statesman & Society, May 3, 1991, p. 36.

New York Times, March 1, 1995, Mary B. W. Tabor, "His Own Publisher," p. B2.

New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1985; April 19, 1987, p. 2.

Observer (London, England), May 11, 1986, p. 24; April 14, 1991, p. 62.

Observer Review, April 7, 1995, p. 26.

Sunday Times (London, England), September 17, 2000, Alan Brownjohn, review of Renegade or Halo2, p. 46.

Times (London, England), May 8, 1986.

Times Literary Supplement, July 7, 1978; May 7, 1982; May 9, 1986, p. 498; April 19, 1991, p. 22; April 7, 1995, p. 26.

Washington Post Book World, March 31, 1985; April 26, 1987, Jonathan Yardley, "Timothy Mo's Asian Studies"; April 26, 1987, p. 3.

World Literature Today, autumn, 1979; summer, 1981; winter, 1988, review of An Insular Possession, p. 181; spring, 2001, Bruce King, review of Renegade or Halo2, p. 333.

World Press Review, August, 1991, p. 56.*