‘Sour Sweet’ by Timothy Mo

Personal ambitions within migrant Chinese communities in 1960s London and clashes between cultures result in a beautifully modulated story of business, loyalties, expectations, tradition and, ultimately, family.

But Sour Sweet is no deep socio-political commentary on similarities and differences between Anglo and migrant Chinese communities. Instead, it’s a deft, occasionally funny, affectionate family story of the Chens, a young couple only recently arrived in north London. He is passive and works long hours as a waiter in Chinatown: it is the spunky Lily who is the driving force of the family, particularly with the arrival of a son (Man Kee) quickly followed by her sister (Mui) from Hong Kong.

As the Chens settle into London, with Lily determined to make a success of the family’s new life, so a power struggle is taking place among the Triads who control the illegal gambling and drug distribution in Chinatown. The two worlds collide when Chen, due to family obligations and expectations back in China, is forced to borrow money. His mistake is that he fails to tell his wife.

Yet Mo choses to predominantly focus on the unknowing Lily and her sister Mui – and Sour Sweet is the more charming for it. The two women save enough money from the housekeeping to open a small takeaway business somewhere in South London: Lily is the more savvy of the two but Mui has an aptitude for figures. Somehow they make it work with Chen happy to almost disappear behind the hatch in the kitchen.

What works less in Mo’s enjoyable novel is the parallel time spent with the Triads. Whilst Mo paints key characters with similar sympathetic traits, the detailed violence between rival gangs and the internecine struggles within the Hungs is sometimes too much. The sour of Sour Sweet comes too much to the forefront.

But Timothy Mo’s second novel is nevertheless something of a little gem. Shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize, it lost out to Thomas Keneally and Schindler’s Ark.

‘Schindler’s Ark’ by Thomas Keneally

Schindler gave me my life, and I tried to give him immortality. So spoke Poldek Pfefferbeg, a surviving Schindlerjuden and the man responsible for introducing Thomas Keneally to the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler.

As a result of Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film, Schindler’s List, many are already familiar with how Schindler saved some 1200 Polish Jews from the Auschwitz and Gross Rosen extermination camps in southern Poland during World War II.

A Sudeten German and industrialist, originally a member of Hitler’s National Socialist Party, Schindler was a hard-drinking womaniser who exuded charm and influence. It was opportunism and profit rather than anything significantly humanitarian that initially motivated him. With the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he acquired Emalia, the enamelware factory in Krakow that was to save the lives of so many. Using contacts and bribes, he built up the factory to include the making of armaments – a financial windfall but also key to its protection as the war dragged on.

Initially disillusioned, progressively more and more angered and disgusted with the inhumanity of Nazi policies towards the Krakow Jews, Schindler established, at great personal expense, protective factory policies for his ‘highly skilled workforce.’ He witnessed the cleansing of the Krakow ghetto and treatment of men, women and children alike. Thousands were murdered whilst those with the all-important work card were transferred to the Krakow-Plaszow work camp under the control of the monster, SS-Hauptsturmführer Amon Göth (When you saw Göth, you saw death).

Availability of land, diamonds and a great deal of luxury black market foodstuffs facilitated Schindler in the building of a camp for his inmates separate from Plaszow – with no SS guards allowed on the premises. At a time when starvation rations were doled out (Goth sold much of the camp supplies on the black market), Schindler purchased bread and chickens for his workforce.

He repeated the building of a camp at Brunnlitz, close to his birthplace of Zwittau, when, in July 1944 and with the threat of the Red Army, the Germans began to retreat west. Instead of incineration or the long death marches of the Final Solution, the Schindlerjuden found themselves in a second work camp in the Sudetenland foothills. The workforce survived, liberated by the Russians in 1945. As a member of the Nazi Party and Abwehr, Schindler risked execution but had already fled west.

Keneally’s novel, based on numerous eyewitness accounts, is a desperately moving testament to the horrors of Hitler’s attempted genocide of European and north African Jewry. The horrors of action are almost unimaginable – thousands of people killed daily, thousands others barely alive. But in telling Schindler’s story, Keneally focuses on the memories of the survivors and the fragility of that survival.

It’s a true story, a remarkable story of a remarkable man. Schindler wasn’t perfect – Schindler’s Ark is a reality of a man who was neither ”good” nor ”virtuous”. But he was humane, principled, charming and a chancer – for years he managed to make Göth believe they were friends, plying him with alcohol, cigars, foodstuffs to ensure the possible survival of a secretary or maid.

It’s a hard story to read. And not just emotionally of the mostly harrowing individual stories. In documenting the eye-witnesses accounts, there’s a great deal of detail which is important to the validity of the story but unfamiliar to German military titles, for example, can get very confusing (Oberführer, Oberstgrüppenführer, Hauptsturmführer, Standartenführer and more).

But, at its core, Schindler’s Ark, whilst diluted in impact 35 years after its writing, is an extraordinary achievement. It was awarded the 1982 Booker Prize.