She simply could not, she reflected, reconcile herself to such an un-Chinese match. Startled by her own thoughts, Lady Mary laughed aloud. Only ten years earlier, it would have been inconceivable that she should think in such terms. But, she realized, that through the years she had almost imperceptibly come to equate herself with the Chinese. She remembered again the words of the former soldier who had exhorted the angry mob to spare Sarah and her in 1951: “They are not foreigners. They are Sekloongs. They are our people.”
Lady Mary knew she could not prevent the match. Perhaps Sarah could divert her son Albert, as his grandmother could not. Although she never talked about her humiliation by Japanese soldiers, Sarah hated their nation, refusing even to visit Japan.
But, if the marriage could not be prevented, it must be accepted. Concluding realistically that she could not risk a breach with Albert, Lady Mary resolved to make him Chairman of J. Sekloong and Sons as a wedding present—whomever he married. She would content herself with the title of Honorary Chairman, and she would retain only vestigial power. She was already planning the festivities that would celebrate her eightieth birthday the following year—if she lived that long.
“So there’s nothing to fear,” Albert was saying. “They’ve really shot their bolt. Only encore I can think of would be for old Mao to proclaim himself Emperor, and that’s not very likely. They’ll settle down. And we can get on with business.”
“Albert, my lad,” Lady Mary replied. “Don’t ever underestimate the ability of the Chinese to make problems for themselves—or for others. They’ve shown again that they can’t rule themselves. An encore, an even more spectacular mess? I don’t think so, not really. But I do wonder.”
Part VIII
ALBERT AND THE RED GUARDS
October 24, 1965–September 26, 1967
October 24, 1965–March 6, 1966
The Boeing 707 with the blue-and-white globe of Pan-American Airways shining on its tail swept low over dingy Mongkok. The jet-engines’ raucous whine rattled the grimy windows of cock-loft sweatshops and egg-crate tenements only two hundred feet beneath the extended landing-gear.
Neither the pale women assembling artificial flowers and cheap transistor radios nor the men tending cutting machines and drill presses raised their heads when the buildings trembled. They were inured to the peril of airliners landing over the world’s most densely populated square mile. That constantly repeated shock was just one of the barely endurable strains Hong Kong’s drive to transform itself from an entrepôt for others’ products into a light manufacturing center imposed on frail human organisms. They worked their twelve-hour days and they slept in fetid cubicles amid unceasing clamor, never out of sight or hearing of at least twenty other persons.
The proprietors of the textile mills, plastic plants, clothing factories, and machine shops were comfortably isolated in their villas on Hong Kong Island or the New Territories. Their balance sheets did not reckon the human cost of their profits. A high birthrate, supplemented by the flow of refugees from China, provided cheap, intelligent labor in apparently inexhaustible profusion. The men, women, and adolescents who toiled in the Colony’s workshops could not count the cost in shattered nerves, tuberculous lungs, rickety bones, or chronic exhaustion. Those traumas of the body and the spirit were the price of their survival.
The silver airliner settled like a weary stork on the runway that jutted into Kowloon Bay. The air in the first-class compartment was stale after the four-hour flight from Tokyo, and the stewardesses slumped in their seats, yearning for hot baths before an evening of flirtation at Gaddi’s in the Peninsula Hotel. A pair of American businessmen rubbed their stubble-bristled chins and stretched muscles cramped by the nine-teen-hour flight from San Francisco. Apparently untouched by fatigue, the two women in seats 1A and 1B peered out the oval window as the 707 taxied into the gathering twilight of October 24, 1965.
Lady Mary Sekloong was, she said, too old at eighty-five to be tired, even after a six-month trip around the world to bid farewell to her widely dispersed family and friends. Opal, her traveling companion, was incapable of fatigue, since at forty-one the vital juices flowed undiminished in her ample body. Only concern for Lady Mary had marred her childlike pleasure in the long voyage of discovery. She was distressed because the older woman would make no concession to either her age or her frailty.
“Hong Kong’s utterly different, Opal.” Lady Mary’s high voice quavered slightly. “I wish I could show you how it was when I first arrived sixty-five years ago. It’s a new world now, all the old buildings gone. The Hilton, the Mandarin, Prince’s Building, all concrete towers instead of funny, homely, square little buildings with gingerbread cornices and columns.”
“And there, something else new.” Opal pointed. “Albert’s new toy, one of his airplanes.”
The 707 halted beside a Lockheed Electra. Above the gold-and-blue stripe on its fuselage the legend Hong Kong Airlines was scrolled, while the golden winged dragon reared against a royal-blue shield on its rounded tail.
The front doors of the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow that drew up beside the 707’s boarding ramp displayed the same emblem. Sarah Haleevie Sekloong and her daughter-in-law Kazuko Matsuyama Sekloong waited in the Rolls for the Immigration Officer to clear Lady Mary and Opal. The four women met in a flurry of perfumed kisses and joyful exclamations.
“That was very naughty of you, Sarah,” Lady Mary laughed. “Snatching us off the airplane, instead of letting us go through the normal arrival routine. Willie Evans will be annoyed.”
“Our terrible-tempered Director of Immigration is very annoyed.” Sarah smiled with light malice. “He snorted about special privileges, flouting regulations, and so on for half an hour. But his instructions came from Government House.”
“Are you very tired, Grandmother?” Kazuko’s speech showed no trace of Japanese sibilance. Her mid-Pacific accent bore the British imprint of the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo and the special American imprint of Radcliffe.
“No, my dear. Not at all. I can’t waste the little time I have left being tired. But a glass of champagne will perk me up when we get home.”
Kazuko opened a whorled-walnut panel to reveal a miniature refrigerator. Her mouth curved in the complacent pussycat smile of a Saito print, and her small, capable hands stripped the foil from a bottle of Taittinger blanc de blancs. A Pucci swirled with a serpentine print in bold primary colors sheathed Kazuko’s slender body under her blond mink, and her finely molded ankles were handsomely set off by alligator pumps. An expensively nurtured, late-twentieth-century female, she was the antithesis of the stereotypical dumpy Japanese woman. Kazuko’s natural charm and her obvious deep affection for Albert had reconciled both her mother-in-law, Sarah, and Lady Mary to the match they had originally resisted.
“From Albert,” Kazuko said. “He apologizes, but he really couldn’t get away.”
“To your safe return!” As Sarah lifted her tulip glass, her simply coiffed white hair contrasted with her dark eyes and the black sheen of her sable cape. “We’ve all missed you terribly!”
“Tell me all the news,” Lady Mary demanded.
“We’ve been very quiet, Mother,” Sarah replied. “Except for my trip to Israel. I wrote you about that. My Research Institute in Jerusalem is doing exciting work on cancer. I never, never tell the rabbis that I’m sponsoring research in swine genetics here. Trying to produce a super-pig—what a project for a good Jewish girl!”
“And, Kazuko, have you any news?” Lady Mary candidly scrutinized her granddaughter-in-law’s slender figure.
“We’re rather quiet, too,” Kazuko smiled. “Business keeps Albert so busy. And, I’m afraid, the answer to your question is no. No baby coming as yet.”
“Doesn’t bother me, my dear,” Lady Mary said. “I’m not desperately anxious for more great-grandchildren. Too much breeding already—in the family and the entire world.”
“Actually,” Kazuko confessed, “I’ve been working with
the Family Planning Association. Albert’s all for it. Father Romanio never says a word, just gives me that sweet, enigmatic Italian smile, like a male Mona Lisa.”
“It was different in my day,” Lady Mary recalled. “But so many things were utterly different. It’s easier for the women now, but, I think, harder for the men.”
“You’ve never told us how things were about that in your youth,” Kazuko asked brashly. “What was it like?”
“Children, yes. We need children, but don’t let him make you a brood-mare. Why, I remember … but that’s another story.” Lady Mary abruptly veered from the subject in deference to Charles’s memory. “Do you know it took us only twenty-two hours to London? I remember just ten or eleven years ago it took me sixty-two hours—and fifty days back in 1900.”
“Tell them about the trip, Lady Mary,” Opal suggested. “We saw everyone, the Rothschilds and the Sassoons, your brother’s grandchildren and Sarah’s Henry … Major Sir Henry, very handsome. Gwinnie’s Blanche and George. Even that terrible son of George’s, Chappie Parker. Just everyone.”
“Yes, everyone,” Mary followed Opal’s lead. “Henry’s Jonathan and little Mary are terribly country, to the manor born. Only fifteen and fourteen, but they have the self-assurance of centuries of unchallenged privilege. You’d never think …”
Mary paused. She did not wish to tarnish the glow of her homecoming by so soon confiding her concern for her great-grandchildren to the three women who were closest to her.
“Look there.” She indicated the working-class tenements of Kowloon. “I see the National Day flags are still up. Funny, isn’t it? The poor always put out many more Nationalist suns than Communist stars, while the banks and big shops fly so many more red flags. But why aren’t the cranes on those half-completed blocks working? Have they stopped building?”
“We wrote you about the bank failures,” Sarah recalled. “Five Chinese-owned banks went under, and the construction industry seized up for lack of funds. However, it’s picking up again slowly. But you were going to say something about the family, weren’t you?”
“Yes, Sarah, I was,” Lady Mary replied reluctantly. “I shall if you wish. I’m troubled. They’re all so complacent. The entire world’s changing, but the grandchildren and their children are too secure, smug and untroubled. It’s true, you know. Wealth, particularly great wealth, makes people different. Perhaps you and Kazuko don’t really know what I’m talking about. You’ve always enjoyed great privilege. But Opal and I, we know.”
“Different how, Grandmother?” Kazuko prompted.
“We’re isolated from the reality most people know. The family, all of us are sheltered from the uncertainties of life. We simply don’t know how the other ninety-nine percent of humanity lives and feels. It makes me afraid.”
“Afraid?” Sarah was still fascinated by Lady Mary’s speculative intellect. “Why afraid?”
“We Sekloongs are vulnerable only to the ills of the flesh, to corruption of the spirit, and to great political storms. But we’re able to buy the best medical care, and we can even influence political developments in our favor. We cannot, however, buy spiritual immunity. I smell degeneration, and I’m afraid for the family.”
The Rolls-Royce purred onto the vehicular ferry to Hong Kong Island, which was already glowing with a hundred thousand lights in the dusk. Ignoring the curious stares of other passengers, Lady Mary sought the precise words to convey her misgivings.
“We live above humanity, as aloof as tribal deities. It’s not like the bitter struggles, the triumphs and disasters the Old Gentleman knew when he created this realm for us. Or even the hopes and disappointments Charles and I knew.”
The fiction—or at best half-fiction—was firmly embedded in her mind. She refused to remember that Charles had, for most of his life, contributed appreciably less than she herself to rearing the House of Sekloong.
“The grandchildren can’t understand, the great-grandchildren can’t even try to understand that it wasn’t always so. Today the Sekloongs’ troubles are troubles we make for ourselves, the sins of the wayward spirit. We reach too far. We demand too much. In our boredom we seek thrills in artificial danger or silly … so-called love affairs.”
Lady Mary realized that she had not fully communicated her incipient distress. She waved at the panorama of the Island shimmering in the gray-velvet twilight.
“This is our kingdom, this Hong Kong, the center of our power. Even the shape of the land has changed radically, but we reign secure from Sekloong Manor. Look at St. George’s Building. Fifteen years ago, it was an old, squat, crenellated block with the dark offices of J. Sekloong and Sons spreading through it like a mole’s burrow. Now Albert sits on the nineteenth floor of a glass-and-steel tower and thinks he can control or command everything below him. I wonder if he ever notices the big red-neon characters on the Bank of China: Hail the Invincible Thought of Mao Tse-tung!”
Albert Sekloong had not come to the airport because he wanted to avoid the cloyingly scented female reunion and, he acknowledged to himself, because he wanted to put off seeing his grandmother. Besides, several problems he could neither delegate nor postpone demanded his attention. His diverse enterprises were reviving after the shock to the Colony’s commercial life inflicted by the bank failures. But some of his affairs were still tricky, “temporarily fluid,” he conceded in American business jargon. He had, therefore, stocked the Rolls with champagne and promised “hopefully” to leave the office early. That hope was fading, for things were breaking fast. At 6:00 P.M. in Hong Kong, it was only 10:00 in the morning in London, while New York would not begin to stir for another four or five hours. But one matter he could deal with immediately.
He levered a toggle switch on the communications center that squatted robotlike beside his desk, flashing red, green, blue, and yellow lights.
“Try Jiro Matsuyama again. If he’s not at his office, he’ll be in his car or at home. And no calls while I’m waiting.”
Albert closed his eyes and sought to clear his mind with the Zen meditation technique his brother-in-law had taught him. But “perfectly blank lucidity” eluded him. He had watched his grandmother’s airplane land from his aerie seventeen stories above the Hong Kong branch of the Bank of America, the world’s largest financial institution. He would be glad to see her, though he devoutly hoped she would wait a few days before she began probing. He had, after all, dutifully sent her reports every two weeks. His affairs were, just temporarily of course, too tangled to describe concisely, and he dreaded the catechizing to which the old lady might subject him.
The mahogany connecting door from his corner suite was a constant reminder that he did not wholly control the Sekloong empire. The adjoining room was a replica of Sir Jonathan’s office in the original St. George’s Building, even to the twin scrolls on the wall. The black pedestal telephone still stood on the ebony desk. The single divergence from the old photographs was the red rose, changed every day, in a small crystal bud vase.
Albert had complained during the uninhibited discussions Lady Mary enjoyed that preserving the Old Gentleman’s office was gross sentimentality, made worse by the obtrusive rose in the vase that had once lightened her own dingy cubbyhole. She had replied equably that it was the best investment they could make, since it would constantly remind them of how they had begun. But he wanted to look forward, not backward.
Albert’s office was self-consciously ultra-modern, an industrial designer’s fantasy of stainless steel, lucite, and leather. The brushed-steel communications console sprouted plastic umbilical cords, and a teletype softly chattered reports from all the world’s major share, commodity, and money markets. Above the new computer terminal hung a long gold frame that displayed on a blue silk background the article Time magazine had devoted to the new image of the Sekloong enterprises three months earlier. Albert abandoned his unsuccessful Zen meditation and massaged his vanity by reading the words for the twenty-second time.
Lithe, powerful Alb
ert Sekloong, 32, slumps relaxed in his $2,000 elephant-hide chair, his feet in $200 loafers hand-crafted in London (He considers Hong Kong’s master cobblers “clumsy.”) casually propped on his kidney-shaped, hand-rubbed, tung-oiled teak desk. His eyes flash, and the full lips in his bronzed face smile disarmingly as he denies that he has materially altered the style of the world’s third largest privately owned commercial empire.
But the smart money and the smart moneymen in London’s City, New York’s Wall Street, and Hong Kong’s own Ice House Street say otherwise. The first of his richly complex Chinese-British-Jewish family to be admitted to the exclusive Hong Kong Club, Albert Sekloong has swept through the tradition-webbed offices of J. Sekloong and Sons like a steel-bristled broom. He has transformed the solid, substantial, once opium-based empire long dominated by his 85-year-old grandmother, Lady Mary Sekloong, into a hard-driving, hypermodern conglomerate. The emblem of the Sekloong dynasty is still the winged dragon chosen by its founder, half-Chinese Baronet Sir Jonathan Sekloong. The emblem of Sir Jonathan’s ambitious, American-trained great-grandson might better be a glitteringly aggressive Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. Albert Sekloong’s impact on his competitors must be measured in megatons.
His few intimates and his more numerous enemies agree that competitiveness is the key to his character—and his operations.
“Albert,” says one rival, “is determined to prove himself to the whole world, but most of all to himself. He’s not content administering an empire worth almost $1 billion or presiding over the measured expansion he initiated eight years ago under Lady Mary’s guidance. He’s got to pull off at least one major coup a week to show that he’s the equal—or the superior—of Sir Jonathan himself.”
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