Perhaps the non-colloquial Chinese should have tipped-off Tristram that the sailor wasn\'t really Chinese. And that indeed he wasn\'t in a very foreign place.

Also, as I mentioned, Burgess took up Chinese in Malaysia. Most Malaysian Chinese speak one of the southern dialects at home, and that has some influence on Malaysian Mandarin.

Read it as Burgess lays it out and I suspect he\'s telling you -- yes, you, the Chinese literate -- that Tristram isn\'t as capable in Chinese as he thinks. The sort of only-a-few-will-get-it wordplay Burgess enjoyed. Why else would he actually set out the Chinese characters in his text? He was writing for you.

While I don\'t know what level he achieved, Burgess was a student of Chinese from his time in Malaysia.

(Doing stuff like this is how you get professors to spend a lifetime analysing your works.)