Review: Eating Smoke

Eating Smoke by Chris Thrall

Blacksmith Books, pp 420

What just might be the funniest if not first autobiography ever penned by a drug-addicted foreigner in China, Chris Thrall's Eating Smoke contains more spiritual pollution than all of the titles on the banned books list combined.

In a country whose history was irrevocably altered for the worst by the scourge of foreign-imported opium throughout the 19th century, it is no wonder that today’s China has one of the world’s least-tolerant anti-drug laws – including executions for traffickers. Basically, buying or selling drugs in China is a really stupid idea.

Enter Chris “I’m not a stupid guy, just an average guy who does stupid things” Thrall, a 25 year-old Royal Marine who hastily quits the service to pursue a business venture in 1990s-era Hong Kong, a city “where situations can only get worse”, just to find himself broke, homeless and fulfilling his own ominous prophecy.

Recalling the commando’s motto of “cheerfulness under adversity”, Thrall tries to make the best of his lowly situation by spending his time dancing in discos or hanging out in the notorious Chungking Mansions, “the world’s all-time greatest craphouse”. The immigrant ghetto of Kowloon is not, however, the best influence on Thrall, who befriends all the wrong people, including a hebephile drug dealer from Ghana and a Filipina working girl, and soon succumbs to that favourite of Chungking pastimes – drugs.

To fund his new crystal meth habit, our detritivorous narrator forages the South China city-by-the-sea like a bottom-feeder for any job that will hire a white face. From cubicle fixture to phone-book scams, English teacher to nightclub DJ, businessman to bouncer, Thrall manages to get fired from every gig dumb enough to hire a spun-out chi sun gweilo (crazy foreigner in Cantonese) who doesn’t sleep for nine days at a time and tends to forget his own surname.

By the time Thrall reaches his last-resort of a job – as a doorman at a bar operated by the 14K, the largest triad (Chinese crime family) in the world – he has been reduced to a hyper-paranoid shadow of his former self on the verge of drug psychosis. “I would listen to the radio phone-ins, suspicious of the Cantonese conversation and wondering if people were calling in to report my movements,” he describes during one of his many speed-soaked conspiracy theories.

What ensues is a hilarious amphetamine-paced cautionary tale of what not to do when addicted to drugs in Wan Chai gangland “where the Dai Lo's rule is law, pride is everything and life means nothing”. Thrall’s true story evokes Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram and Alex Garland’s The Beach, both of which have been licensed to Hollywood, as Eating Smoke is sure to follow.

Review by Tom Carter, the author of CHINA: Portrait of a People