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I am admittedly an outsider to Hong Kong, but as Liu Yichang’s 1962 novel The Drunkard proves, the outsider is a classic Hong Kong type After years of wandering through a China ravaged by war, Liu’s unnamed narrator has finally run aground in the city He is an intellectual with strong opinions about Vittorio De Sica, and a conviction that Beckett represents the future of literature He is thus a person for whom the furiously acquisitive colonial port of the 1960s — which he bitterly describes as ‘the citadel of crass materialism’ — has no use He is utterly dismissive of the Hong Kong cultural scene; he caustically imagines a delegation of Hong Kong writers, who qualify for the delegation by dint of owning a Parker 61 pen, heading to the Philippines to babble about Tang poetry, profess ignorance of ‘newer’ writers like James Joyce and pick up women Since he doesn’t fit in with that set, he is forced to earn his living by writing martial arts fiction and pornography for the Hong Kong tabloids   With no family, no office to report to, and no society to which he belongs, the narrator drifts in a cloud of drink through the city Sometimes old acquaintances appear before him like shades in Dante’s hell: a former classmate working as a handyman; a producer who shamelessly steals a film script from him; an ex-journalist who lets bygones be bygones with the Japanese and goes into business with them, making plastic dolls He moves house three times He wakes up next to an ageing woman of ill-repute he picked up at a bar, blotches of lipstick on her mouth ‘like tinned cherries that have lost their color’, writes the next instalment of pulp fiction, hands it in, and heads back to the bar He gets attacked by two-bit thugs and put in the hospital, and as soon as he’s able, he heads back to the bar Nothing pins him down, nothing moves him forward The neon collisions of Hong Kong — Cantonese and cosmopolitan, traditional and modern, all priced to move