Читать книгу Gok Wan - Emily Herbert - Страница 5

The abuse rang out across the deprived council estate in Leicester, as a group of youths rounded on a tall, overweight teenage boy of mixed Chinese and English blood. It wasn’t the first time he had been called ‘queer’,‘chinky’ or ‘faggot’, and it wouldn’t be the last, but the boy refused to be intimidated, turning on the bullies and giving as good as he got. Nonetheless, the taunts stung and their subject was to remember them for many years afterwards, even when he had become one of the most famous and adored men on TV.

Ironically, given that background, the bullied boy was going to become known for the kind way he treated the people around him. But back then, nothing was further from his thoughts. The bullying was non-stop. It was endless, it was vicious and it was cruel. It was also to toughen the young boy up and make him determined to show his detractors he was going to make something of his life. And, several decades on, he has done just that.

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On 9 October, 1974, John Tung Shing, a Chinese immigrant living in Leicester, and his English wife Myra were ecstatic. The couple, who had met while working in a takeaway and now been married for years, had just added another baby to their growing brood. In 1969, Myra had given birth to Oilen, and in 1973 to Kwoklyn. Now the baby of the family had arrived, little Ko-Hen Wan, Chinese for Noisy Big City, a name that would prove exceedingly apt when he grew up.

One day he was going to achieve enormous fame as the television stylist Gok Wan, but there was certainly nothing back then that would hint at the glories to come. Little Gok was in for a very rough childhood, and teenage years that would be marred by obesity and self-doubt. But no one had a clue about what the future would hold for any member of the family and at that stage he was simply the adored baby of the family, a little Anglo-Chinese infant with charm and a winning smile.

For John, in particular, it was the fulfilment of a dream. Originally from Hong Kong, he had come to Britain as a teenager from a poverty-stricken background, and although by no means rich now, was settled with a growing family in the west. It was a huge contrast from where he had started out. ‘He came to Leicester from a northern Hong Kong village where his mother would still have been catching fish for lunch,’ Gok explained. Now John and his wife ran a restaurant, and had built up a stable family life into which the infant Gok had now arrived. They, as their children would also do, had encountered racism and boorishness as a result of their mixed marriage, but the relationship was a strong one. Their family unit would become a haven when, in Gok’s childhood years, matters got out of hand.

But now all the family gathered round to coo at the new arrival, and he was a little thing at birth.‘Gok was the weight of a bag of sugar when he was born,’ Oilen recalled.‘He was smaller than his first teddy bear. We had to wrap face cloths round his bottom because he was too tiny for the smallest nappies. We called him Babe, and it’s stuck, even though by the time he was four or five he was as robust as the rest of us.’ In fact, Gok would have to become very robust indeed – and adept at fighting his corner.

It was a very deprived childhood and not at all easy at the time. ‘I was born in a trailer park and we grew up on one of the scariest council estates in Leicester,’ said Gok – referring to Fosse Road North in Leicester’s West End.‘I’ve been back since for a drive-around and honestly, I didn’t want to get out of the car. It’s like the front line out there. Mum is a big, apron-wearing Englishwoman, and we were fat, mixed-race kids. We used to get abuse shouted at us all the time.’

Nor was it directed just at the children. ‘Mum was once stopped with Oilen and Kwoklyn in the double buggy and told they couldn’t possibly be her kids,’ Gok said. ‘I don’t know how we survived, but it made our family an incredibly tight unit.’

It was, in short, blatant racism. No one really knew what to make of the young Gok, as he himself came to understand in later years. ‘My family is very, very close,’ he said. ‘But it was unusual. We lived on a huge council estate and to be mixed race, and not even black/white mixed race – well, it was a huge deal. My parents went through a lot of prejudice.’ So did Gok. It was to shape his childhood, casting a huge shadow over his teenage years and shaping his character. Indeed, Gok was so unhappy growing up that he refused a request from the Leicester tourist board to highlight his home city after he had become famous, simply because his childhood had been so difficult there.

Even as a very small child, however, Gok already knew where his interests lay. If Gok is to be believed, it was his mother who was initially responsible for his love of clothes. ‘My mum said when I was three I would have to dress myself,’ he said. ‘I would get into a different outfit to go and pick up my brother and sister from school. I was slightly neurotic about what I was wearing.’ Stories abound about the number of times the young Gok would insist on changing his clothes. If he had been wearing one outfit all day, then it had to be changed for the excursion to the school gates. With hindsight, it is not hard to see how Gok ended up with the job he did.

Gok’s parents ran their own catering businesses – they still do – and the whole family was expected to get involved. Gok, however, was adamant that it wasn’t a chore, explaining that he started working for his parents when he was about three. ‘It wasn’t like child labour, though,’ he went on. ‘My parents have always owned restaurants or takeaways and they worked such long hours that my sister and I wanted to spend time with them when we were young, so we helped them out. I loved it. I love cooking and hospitality. I always think now that if I gave up being a stylist, I’d probably open a restaurant instead.’ It was to promote a rather troubled relationship with food, however, as Gok himself was to acknowledge later on.

As so often with the oldest child, it was Gok’s sister who braved the challenges first and led the way for her brothers. ‘Because the age gap between Oilen and me is quite big, she was going through puberty and adolescence while I was still very much a child,’ said Gok. ‘She paved the way for me and my brother. She was the only Anglo-Asian at school and she took all those issues on the chin before we even got there.’

But it didn’t stop the bullying being visited on her two younger brothers as well. Oilen went on to become a childcare solicitor, sometimes having to deal with some very unpleasant cases, and it’s hard not to surmise that difficulties in her own childhood might have contributed to that.

According to Gok, her influence on him was so great as to influence his sexuality, or so he believed at the time.‘When Oilen was going through her New Romantics phase in the 1980s, she said: “I hope you turn out to be gay, because that will make me really cool,”’ said Gok. ‘Her influence on me was so strong that until I was about 22 I truly believed it was her fault I was gay.’

She also encouraged his love of clothes. ‘My real love of fashion came from my older sister Oilen,’ said Gok. ‘My parents worked in catering so I spent a lot of time with her. She loved Duran Duran, the whole Goth thing and the New Romantics. I loved seeing her getting ready to go out. I loved the idea of her coming back from school and within an hour she’d transformed herself. I used to think “God, you look so cool.”’

The two were always very close. ‘When I’m trying to remember how I felt about my sister, it’s the lilac of her bedroom and the dusty-pink dust jacket of her book Little Women,’ Gok said. ‘One of my earliest memories is of creeping into her bedroom, which I liked so much better than my Superman one, and lying on her bed reading her book, pretending to be her.’ He might have been laying it on a bit thick, but it’s clear that from an early age, Gok was attracted to feminine things, choosing his sister’s room over his brother’s (Kwoklyn was to become a martial arts instructor) and remembering the soft, pastel colours. That he ended up in fashion should have been of no surprise to anyone.

The young Gok hero-worshipped his sister but like so many older siblings, she affected to barely acknowledge him. ‘She didn’t even notice me,’ said the adult Gok. ‘I can recall the exact stitching on the back of the grey jacket with the lining coming down at the back that she used to wear when I was nine, yet I was so not in her orbit, she doesn’t even remember me being there. I was effeminate and camp, so afraid of people knowing who I was, that I created this character to hide behind. I was straight out of Disney Club. I remember once leaping up and offering to help make sandwiches for her friends, just so I could be part of her clique, and she said: “OK, then. You do it.” And they all marched out of the kitchen. Even now, she’s the only person in the entire world who can really get to me.’

They have remained close, as Gok has to all his family, with Oilen providing a shoulder to cry on even as an adult. This phenomenally close relationship with his sister, and his mother, too, also goes some way towards explaining Gok’s natural rapport with women. He has always been close to them, liked and loved them, been protected by them and felt entirely natural around them. It is no surprise that woman love him so much.

His natural ebullience and strong personality were apparent from a very early age, too. When he was a young child, Gok’s parents ran a restaurant (it closed in the 1980s; at the time of writing, they run a fish and chip bar). It was at this restaurant that he first developed the urge to perform. The infant Gok would be dressed up in black tie and brought out to charm the customers, a feat he not only managed perfectly, but which honed the skills he uses on television today.

‘The women customers at our parents’ restaurant absolutely loved him,’ Oilen recalled. ‘They made far more fuss of him than me or my other brother. He was really cute. And always incredibly tactile. He just doesn’t seem to have any boundaries. Almost the first thing he does when he meets women for the first time is hug them, which makes them feel safe. He learnt that at a very early age. He’s like a sponge – he absorbs people’s problems – which is why he’s so good at what he does.’ Indeed, part of Gok’s charm is that he is so tactile, while his sexuality means that women don’t feel threatened by him. All of the mannerisms that are apparent today were already manifesting themselves while he was still a child.

It wasn’t just in his parents’ restaurant that Gok would make women feel nurtured and happy.‘At primary school he used to sit next to his teacher and stroke her leg while she read the story,’ Oilen continued. ‘He’s never had a problem saying to someone: “You’re adorable”. And he means it. He used to tell our Auntie Dawn she was beautiful, and somehow from him it didn’t sound cheesy.’ It still doesn’t – one of the reasons he’s become such a success today. It was a remarkable way to behave, however, not purely because he was brought up in repressed British society, but also because as he got older he started to get such a difficult time from other residents on the housing estate. But somehow, although he suffered, it did not make him bitter or any less empathetic to those around him. He retained the many qualities he had as a small child.

It was the solidity of the family background that helped him most, providing a secure base from which to go out to face the rest of the world. ‘My parents are so in love,’ Gok said, looking back on his childhood. ‘Nothing could ever harm them. They were unbelievable: fun and caring and loving and honest and hard-working and slightly twisted sometimes, like all parents, but nothing too hideous, and none of this is sickening because we argue like cat and dog. But we genuinely love each other. If you upset me now, or if I have a panic attack about being famous, I’ll call my mum and she’ll talk complete crap and it’s what I need to hear. Or if I’ve fallen in love with a boy and he isn’t in love with me but we’ve had sex anyway and I feel terrible, I’ll call my sister.’ It is an emotional security that endures to this day.

Another factor in Gok’s huge rapport with so many women is not just the closeness to his family members, but the fact that the two women themselves were so different. One is high-powered, the other far more of an Earth mother, but Gok established a very close connection to both. Oilen became something of a role model, while Myra provided huge emotional and moral support.

Oilen ‘taught me very strong feminist values and groomed me slightly, in a lovely way,’ he said. ‘Mum is the complete opposite to her: she loves the apron, which makes her a powerful woman in my eyes. She transcends feminism. She does things for my dad because she loves him.’ And she had to put up with abuse as well. An English woman married to a Chinese man might not raise many eyebrows these days, but it did when Gok was growing up. Myra had not only to protect her brood but also to look out for herself.

Gok’s mother was clearly the foundation stone of the family. Gok refers to her frequently, citing her not just as an inspiration, but also praising her and her personality in her own right. ‘She is a bottomless pit of love and is never judgmental of others,’ he told one interviewer. ‘She easily sees beyond what a person looks like and always taught us when we were growing up that every person has a right to be in the room. She always told us that we could achieve anything and be whoever we wanted to be – as long as we respected other people. I firmly believe that this attitude has been the cornerstone of my success.’ It almost certainly was, and as an adult, it informs Gok’s approach to how he treats the people around him. He is famously gentler than other great stylists of his age.

However, he was keen to emphasise that Myra also gave him and his siblings space to be themselves.‘That’s not to say that she was the type of mother who was constantly up at school fighting our corner; she made us all fiercely independent in the knowledge that she was there in the background if we needed her,’ he said. ‘Besides, she wasn’t around much because she’s a real grafter – another quality I think I’ve inherited from her.’ He was going to need it, too. Success did not come overnight – far from it. He would be in the business for the best part of a decade before he finally got his break.

Gok’s parents have always worked hard, and he was brought up on the ethos of hard work and endeavour. Despite losing his way slightly in his late teens, it has been part of his personality ever since and his current work schedule is dominated by what he saw in his childhood – hard graft.

Gok never had any doubts about his sexuality, knowing from a very early age that he was gay.‘When I was about six,’ he said to a questioner who asked how old he had been when he worked it out. ‘I had a crush on a teacher. I lost my virginity far too young to a guy and a girl in the same week. I was socially bullied into sleeping with the girl, but with the guy I really wanted to. Still, I was very confused about it. I didn’t have anything to compare it with. When I see kids now, I feel jealous. It’s so much easier; everyone has a gay auntie or uncle now.’

While Gok is so open about his sexuality, it is sometimes forgotten he is actually one of the people responsible for changing the climate of opinion. But at the time, his sexuality contributed to his problems. Although not ‘out’ as such back then, Gok himself has said he was effeminate, and he wasn’t the only person to notice it. It was one of the elements involved in the bullying and it didn’t make his life easy.

But while he had no doubts about his sexuality, Gok had very mixed feelings about his racial heritage, probably because it was another factor that made him and his siblings stand out from the rest of his surroundings and became one of the main reasons he was so badly abused. In the 1970s and early 1980s British council estates were hotbeds of racial intolerance, and so a mixed-race couple and their offspring were almost guaranteed to have a difficult time.

‘It was a very, very rough place,’ said Gok. ‘It was a hard place to grow up even for people who did blend in. But being overweight, Chinese, effeminate and gay, it was a nightmare. I was called queer, chinky, faggot. The bullying was relentless and horrible, not just for me, but for my brother and sister as well.’

Perhaps partly as a result of the stress it caused, Gok first developed a nicotine habit when he was very young – one he retains to this day. He was 11 when his father left a cigarette burning in an ashtray and he tried it out himself.‘I thought it was so lovely,’ said Gok.‘I nicked a whole packet off him the next week.’ Gok, not an academic child, would play truant with some of the local girls and smoke with them in the woods near his home. It was a rare moment of let-up from the problems he was experiencing from the other boys who lived on the estate.

Matters did not ease up as Gok got older. Instead he became an even more obvious target as he gained a huge amount of weight, helped by his parents’ choice of profession. Always a slightly chubby little boy, Gok ballooned to an obese 21 stone in his teenage years – almost unrecognisable from the slim figure he cuts today. He knew why, too. ‘Our relationship with food was, “If it makes you feel better then eat it,” which resulted in three fat, mixed-race kids,’ he observed of the growing-up years. ‘So life was in many ways difficult. But with her as a mother it never felt too bad.’

Gok’s personality was undergoing some sort of metamorphosis as well: he was developing a loud, brash persona, partly to deflect attention from his weight and partly to live up to it. It affected him, too. Now seriously overweight, he adopted a persona that was quite unlike the one on show today. He went through periods of not being close to his family, denying his racial inheritance, and feeling alienated from everything around him. ‘I was quite a tearaway, an angry child,’ he said. ‘I struggled a lot with my identity.’

But although it would not have seemed so at the time, this was building Gok up for the future. Many highly successful people go through extremely difficult childhoods, including being bullied, and emerge determined to prove themselves to the world. All the resentment he felt at the treatment he was receiving and the determination to stand up for himself would one day going stand him in good stead, while his sheer determination not to give in to the bullies would translate into a determination to make something of his life. But if this agonising period was ultimately going to be the making of him, Gok certainly couldn’t see that yet.

There were a few consolations in the difficult life he was leading, however. As he grew older, his love of clothes began to develop – something that would hardly have endeared him to the bullies either – and he was beginning to realise how important they could be. Far more than simply something to keep you from the cold and rain, they could provide a key to the way people behaved around you – a lesson that one day was going to stand Gok in spectacularly good stead.

‘At 13, I’d discovered that clothes can change the way people see you,’ Gok said. ‘I used to be in a tracksuit all the time, but then I went out and got chinos and brogues, so I didn’t look like a fat person. I was confident about being big, and I worried that if I got smaller, I wouldn’t have the right personality.’ In fact, when he lost weight, not only would he keep the personality, he discovered he preferred the way people treated him. But at the time, the persona he’d created was something to hide behind.

The bullying continued but Gok’s experiences also made him more resilient and determined to make something of his life.‘Being camp, overweight and Chinese on a council estate in the Midlands was tough,’ he said, with some understatement in later years. ‘When I was little I saw my brother being bullied, although he’s not camp like me and I’d stand up for him. From a very young age I knew bullying could happen and when it did, I handled it in my own way. I became quite mouthy and obnoxious. We just dealt with it. Anybody that goes through any kind of social torment has to. But I come from a strong family who supported me and really were my wall of defence.’

Gok wasn’t just fat: he was getting taller and taller, and this just served to make him stand out even more. There seemed to be nothing he could do about his predicament: his height and obesity, married to his Chinese looks, would have made him stand out anywhere (including China) so a Leicester council estate was a parlous place to be.

Even as an adult, Gok has sometimes come across as being in denial about the racial nastiness of it all. The bullying, according one interview, was not racially based, and he did not use his ethnic roots as a way of fighting back. ‘I couldn’t do that as a Chinese person; I had to do that as a working-class white person,’ he said. ‘I was never attacked for being Chinese; I was attacked more for my sexuality and my size.’

What was more likely was that Gok had still not quite come to terms with his Chinese ancestry and so couldn’t accept that it was the reason he was having such a difficult time. And then there was the campness, a further personality trait to pick on.

His sister Oilen recalled it slightly differently. ‘I was so absorbed with myself as a teenager, my memories of him are pretty sketchy,’ she confessed.‘He was bullied a lot, because he was camp, chubby, mixed-race. Poor Babe. It wasn’t easy. We were all picked on, but our family was so strong that even when I was getting called half-breed I never wanted to be anything but mixed-race. I was into my books, Babe was always interested in clothes. As a child he’d change five times a day. Years before David Beckham wore a sarong, Gok was wearing one to a club in Leicester with a holey mohair jumper. I remember saying to him: “Promise me you’ll get a taxi right to the door.”’

Gok might have been in denial about the bullying having anything to do with his Chinese roots because for many years, he was actually in denial about the roots themselves. Although it is patently obvious, looking at him, that he has Asian blood, as a child he placed himself very much in the context of the country he was growing up in, not the one his father had left behind. This might have been a question of survival – he wanted to emphasise what he had in common with other people in the area, not that which made him different, so much so that he barely even felt Chinese.

Indeed, this lasted right into adulthood. In an interview given when he was 34, he said of feeling Chinese,‘It’s a new thing, actually. For years I stopped myself being Chinese. When I was growing up, we were the only Asian family in our area – can you imagine? But, had I not been bullied to within an inch of my life, had I not stood up for myself at 13 and said, “Right, you fuckers,” I wouldn’t be doing what I am now.’

He was right. Gok was going to be moving into the world of television, a notoriously tough environment and he needed to be tough. He also needed to be able to rise above the travails that might otherwise have destroyed him. Above all, he needed to accept the fact that he was half-Chinese. Without that, he would never be able to feel comfortable in his own skin, and never ultimately know who he really is.

It is no coincidence that as Gok has become increasingly successful, he’s increasingly in tune with his Chinese roots, not least because in the world he was going to enter, having an exotic background is no barrier at all to success. Indeed, it is positively welcome. It’s only in places where it made Gok feel unusual and uncomfortable that having a Chinese heritage seemed to be a burden to bear.

Strangely, Gok actually knew far more about his father’s side of the family than he did his mother’s. ‘My dad’s from Hong Kong and has very strong genes, so we all look Chinese,’ he told one interviewer, ‘but my mum’s English and though she never knew her father, we know he was really tall – hence my height. It’s pretty bizarre for a Chinese guy to be six feet one.’

But if that which doesn’t destroy you makes you stronger, then Gok was gaining in strength, little did he know it. He was already displaying another trait that would stand him in good stead in later years: steadfastly making himself the centre of attention. It might have been for all the wrong reasons, and the attention he was summoning might have been almost wholly negative, but as an adult he was going to be able to do the same thing to considerably better effect.

Gok might have loved fashion, but at that stage he didn’t see it as the way ahead, even though school certainly wasn’t going to provide him with a way out of his difficult life. Unlike his elder sister, Gok was not in the slightest bit academic and had no idea what he wanted to do. He was filled with resentment about the way people were talking to him, on top of which there seemed no obvious career path for him to take. ‘I was quite an angry child and I left school very young – before I had sat GCSEs,’ he later recalled. ‘I didn’t have any direction, really. I thought I might want to be a farmer, but that was only because they look sexy in wellies. Then I thought about archaeology because it sounded important. I had no idea what an archaeologist actually did.’

One obvious step would have been to follow his parents into catering, but Gok did not appear to want that. To this day he talks about opening a restaurant, but it’s clear that fashion really is his life. However, at that stage, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that Gok might forge the kind of career he did do – he was, after all, a working class boy from a very rough council estate.

In retrospect, it’s not difficult to understand the choice that Gok actually made. Large, camp and theatrical, accustomed to performing for customers from an early age and effortlessly commanding attention from everyone he encountered, the surprise would have been if Gok hadn’t made the choice he did. He wanted to shape a new life and get out of Leicester. So he decided to take to the stage.