Fragrant Harbour

by John Lanchester

  We swept round a corner and began travelling uphill.

  ‘That’s the Bank of China on the right, I. M. Pei’s masterpiece. He’s the chap who put that pyramid over the Louvre. It’s not very popular with the locals because the feng shui is said to be very aggressive. One of its corners points towards Government House, which you’ll be amazed to hear is where the Governor lives. It’s got a hideous little tower on top that the Japanese put there when they owned the colony. Nobody knows what they’ll do to it after 1997. The smart money is on a Museum of Colonial Atrocities. We’re just going past the Peak Tram, which is a tram that goes up the peak. And now we’re heading round towards Robinson Road, which is where you fit in.’

  My new home was a block of a couple of dozen flats called Harbour Vista with a tiny, poky, unreassuring lift. But the flat itself was lovely, with a double bedroom, a single study or spare room, and a sitting room with a dining table set up at one end. Behind the table was a large display case of blue-and-white china; at the other end was a small bookcase of art books and paperback blockbusters, a hi-fi, a TV, and two sofas. The flooring was parquet, which helped make it an unfeminine flat, with something squared off and retired-brigadier-on-the-plantation-ish about it. The view from the balcony was almost comically without any trace of the harbour, if you excluded the tiny chink of water you could glimpse between the circular skyscraper immediately in front (known locally, I was to learn, as Phallus Palace) and the blockier but equally tall building slightly beyond it, down the hill and to the left.

  ‘This place has good feng shui,’ said Berkowitz. ‘You can see both water and mountain, not much of either admittedly, but then you don’t need much. When you’re less knackered you must get me to tell you some feng shui horror stories. They always involve a couple who split up, husband tops himself, next people move in, consult the feng shui man, he says the chi is spoilt, moves the fish tank two inches to the right and installs a mirror – feng shui stories always involve a strategically placed mirror – and everyone lives happily ever after. The botanical gardens are over that way. You’ll like them. Hong Kong Park is over there. It’s got an aviary in it. I’m in the pay of the Rotarians. Right, now I’ll leave you to it.’

  Chapter Four

  At various moments over the next year or so some well-wisher or other would ask whether I had ‘settled in yet’, or how long it had taken me to ‘settle in’. Even by local small-talk standards it was a stupid question. What would it mean, for an expat on the make (any expat) to have ‘settled in’ in Hong Kong? It’s not a ‘settle in’ kind of place. I felt a near-continuous mixture of exhilaration, panic, culture shock, and alienation, mixed in with another, perhaps deeper feeling of being finally at home. Money was all that mattered. In the decade I worked in UK journalism there was a huge amount of talk about materialism in Britain – all that guff about Thatcher having said there was no such thing as society. Well, I have lived in Hong Kong for a few years now, and I can tell you that every single word about materialism in the UK is bullshit. The whole country is a Franciscan monastery compared to Hong Kong. It is like a fusty family firm where the paterfamilias died years ago and they have carried on doing everything in exactly the same way, except somebody installed a 1924 cash register a year or so ago, and since then everybody has been congratulating themselves on how up to date they are. Money is a typhoon, and Britain has so far felt only its first faint breath.

  On a more specifically practical level, my main initial impression was to do with the fact that nobody spoke English. Okay, that’s an exaggerated way of putting it, a good few people did speak English: everybody at the magazine, for instance, in its shining high-tech office in a hideous skyscraper in Admiralty, where three quarters of the staff were in any case gwailos; some waiters in some restaurants; policemen, if the ID number on their shoulder of their uniform was red; the staff in expensive and/or centrally located shops. (Incidentally, my ambition to stock myself out with a brand new wardrobe at eye-bulgingly, knicker-combustingly low prices – I saw myself dressed top to toe from this madly cheap Prada factory outlet I just happened to have discovered – came to grief on the fact that Hong Kong was by now one of the most expensive cities in the world. Real estate again: if the shops in Central are paying more rent than they would be on Fifth Avenue, the Champs-Elysées, or Bond Street, your frock will tend not to be such great value. Now, fake designer clothes – that was a different story.) But apart from that, I was amazed by how little the language had penetrated the place – given, after all, that we Brits had been running the colony for 150 years. Other groups you might well have expected to speak English were, as a rule, remarkable for being monoglot Cantonese: taxi drivers, for example, for whom, unless you were going to some no-bones-about-it landmark like the Star Ferry or the Mandarin, you needed a bit of paper with the destination written out in Chinese. It was a mark of how little we had affected the real life of the place. I suppose part of me had thought of Hong Kong as somewhere essentially British, except with a lot of Chinese people scattered about, for local colour.

  But the great thing was that none of this had to matter much, if you were one of the territories’ hundred-odd thousand expats. (Forty thousand Brits and Eurotrash, fifty thousand mainly Chinese–American Yanks, ten thousand odds and ends. I’m excluding the forty or fifty thousand Filipino servants who don’t, for this purpose, count.) You could live in a bubble, and most of them, or most of us, did, earning lorryloads of cash, working and partying hard and concentrating purely on the pursuit of money, which was the one thing about which absolutely everybody in the territory was agreed.

  Gwailo life in Hong Kong was like living in the still, protected centre of the money typhoon. For a start, most of us had servants, which is not a factor you should underestimate when it comes to how easy and protected your life feels. I had Conchita, who was much much cheaper than the flat, at a cost of a few thousand Hong Kong dollars per month. I shared her with a Brit banker who lived two floors upstairs and who I met only in the lift; he had the haggard, masturbatory pallor of a man putting in sixteen-hour working days. Conchita was a permanently cheerful Filipina of about my age (I thought it would have been indelicate to ask) whose normal uniform was a canary yellow T-shirt and blue jeans; she lived somewhere in Mongkok, with a bunch of other maids. Berkowitz filled me in on the Filipinas.

  ‘Most of them are educated, capable women, with degrees and training and what-not, not to mention, most of them, husbands and children,’ he said. ‘They come here because there’s no work at home, and they’re subservient to the husband’s mother, who invariably lives with them and dedicates herself to making the daughter-in-law’s life a total misery. They send their money home, so they get the kudos of being the main breadwinner, plus they don’t have to take their mother-in-law’s shit all day long.’

  Conchita’s presence, and her efforts, were wonderfully lulling. She cleaned, washed and ironed, cooked three nights a week, and generally provided a welcome layer of insulation between me and the dreary reality principles of dirty knickers and bedmaking. Her all-purpose, all-weather amiability made it hard to tell, but I suspected (or hoped) she preferred me to previous employers on the grounds that I didn’t make her do as much work. And the best thing was that telling Jenny about Conchita made her gibber with envy.

  *

  The activity which best summed up life in the bubble was junking. Do not be deceived by the faux-Asian term: this meant going out on a big boat to spend time drinking, boasting, schmoozing, and showing off with other gwailos and (sometimes) a few carefully chosen locals. It was fun, and it got you off Hong Kong island, which is one of the world’s great places for cabin fever. The only bad thing about junking was that every time you went out on a boat someone told you the favourite gwailo urban legend, about an occasion when some pissed expat had fallen off the back of one boat and been picked up by another following along a quarter of a mile behind, to be reunited with his chums off Cheung Chau island before any of them ha
d noticed his absence.

  I knew I was making it in Hong Kong when I was invited to go junking on Tai Pan, a boat belonging to a local heavyweight called Philip Oss. I had been in the territory about six months and, though I say it myself, had made a bit of a splash. Asia was full of plump, juicy subjects, lying there just begging for it. The best of these were set somewhere other than Hong Kong itself, because the libel situation in the territory made London seem like a Mardi Gras of free expression. One or two local heroes simply issued a lawyer’s letter every single time their name was mentioned in print. So one of my first pieces was ostensibly an account of the Nick Leeson case, and of how well the chubby Essex boy was faring in his Singapore jail – but the real meat of it was about what an extraordinarily horrible place Singapore was. The cabs had alarms to limit the top speed, the streets were 100 per cent rubbish-free, the family was central, and the city was stone dead. It was a thriving necropolis. Although the local gwailos were a chillingly thick, amoral bunch, even by Hong Kong standards, you too would want to celebrate your free time by smashing car windscreens or drinking fifty pints of lager and mooning bystanders – at least you would if you lived in Singapore. That piece led into another, about the big earthquake due in Japan. (It was the Kobe earthquake that caused the Japanese stock market to take a dip just as Leeson had bet his bank on its going up.) I spent a weird two weeks in Japan, mainly Tokyo but with a bit of Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto thrown in, living in tiny clean hotel rooms and being fobbed off, patronised and misled by a series of Nipponese men in dark blue suits. The gist of their story was that the Japanese earthquake preparations were the best in the world. This was not very subtle code for ‘We’re Number One’. The gist of my piece, on the other hand, was, if that was true, then how come a six point four earthquake – which a drawling and wonderfully quotable San Francisco architect told me was ‘barely enough to shake a martini’ – had killed several thousand people? That went down well. Pieces about Japanese hubris usually did, in south-east Asia and in the English-speaking world both.

  *

  The invitation to go out on Tai Pan, Philip Oss’s boat, came via a phone call from Berkowitz, who was at pains to stress what a big deal it was.

  ‘I’ve only ever met him three or four times myself, for fuck’s sake. He’s my boss’s boss. The only gwailo close to Wo himself. If it was a mafia movie, he’d be the consiglieri. Something vaguely military about his background. Doesn’t talk about it. Well, you know what not to ask.’

  ‘Yeah yeah, big event, best behaviour, don’t mention the war. I’ll be good.’

  Berkowitz’s general view about the wealthy in Hong Kong was that ‘the first million or two’s always a bit dodgy. Some of these guys just pop up overnight, the money’s obviously from the Triads or the Communists. Then they get into property, which is where the real money is in Hong Kong, and they start to get properly rich.’ The ultimate owner of our company, T. K. Wo, controlled a multilayered and super-ingeniously structured firm which in turn controlled all sorts of businesses all over the world, among them the media concern which owned Asia. Wo was famous for his guanxi – his connections, juice, and general mojo – with Beijing. He was the son of a man who had fled to Taiwan to avoid drug charges in the sixties. There were rumours about how the Wo money had been made. The subject had only ever come up once in a work context, oddly enough when I went to visit Matthew Ho, the guy who’d sat beside me on the plane out, as part of a series about young entrepreneurs. He had mentioned in passing that his grandfather refused to have any publication owned by the Wos anywhere in his house. Needless to say I left that out of the piece.

  My view of the Wo rumours could be summed up as follows: so what? Compared to other local bigwigs, one of whom was the frontman for the opium-dealing Shan warlord Khun Sa, another of whom recycled Macao gambling money back through half the new building developments in Europe, the allegations were no big deal. In any case none of these guys was in the same league as the drug-dealing companies who had founded Hong Kong, like Jardines. Not for nothing was the HQ of Jardines, a skyscraper with hundreds of porthole-like windows, known as the Palace of a Thousand Arseholes. If you worked for Wo, people would occasionally try to needle you at parties, until they saw clear evidence that you simply didn’t give a shit.

  That Saturday, as per instructions, I went down to Queen’s Pier just before eleven. Two or three boats were bobbing about in the usual scum of filthy water and floating rubbish – cans, bottles, God knows what. One of the boats, which had just cast off from the pier, was flying a Hong Kong Bank flag on the stern mast and carrying the usual flushed quota of overseas officers, wives, chums, children. The harbour smelt the same way it always did. A fit late-forties Brit in an expensive-looking, I-could-sail-round-the-world-in-this-at-a-moment’s-notice windcheater was standing on shore beside a lurching yacht, on board which I could see Berkowitz and a dozen others milling about, getting stuck into the day’s first hard-earned beverage.

  ‘Miss Stone,’ said the man, smiling, affable, warm–cool. ‘What a pleasure. Philip Oss. Bob has told me so much about you. And, like everybody else, I’ve been so enjoying your things in Asia.’

  The calm I had shown when Berkowitz relayed this invitation was phoney. I was highly curious about Oss. He was T. K. Wo’s factotum and fixer and right-hand man, and as such was unusual, because the Cantonese tended to regard the British as thick, and not many Chinese tycoons had such a close British colleague. In the first instance, it was said, Oss had gone to work with Wo to help with things that required a fluent English speaker, and he was now inseparable from all parts of Wo’s business. There was said to be a Mrs Oss, an elegant German woman whom nobody had ever met. I could see that he was super-easy; not just smooth but absolutely frictionless.

  ‘It’s very kind of you to invite me out on your…’ The word that I was going to use next was ‘junk’, which suddenly seemed ridiculous, since anything less like a rackety old wooden junk than this opulent floating pleasure palace, its radar aerial revolving confidently in the muggy air, would have been hard to imagine. Oss helped me out.

  ‘Dinghy,’ he said in his clipped accent. He had clearly used the line before; it had got a laugh before; and it did this time too. He handed me over to one of his boat boys, a middle-aged Cantonese in a navy blue-and-white uniform, and I was gently bundled towards the back of the ship.

  The only person I knew on board was – excluding my new friend Mr Philip Oss – Berkowitz. I went over and stood next to him.

  ‘Bob,’ I said. Calling him Berkowitz, which is what everyone always called him at work, would have seemed too intimate. We stood there and talked about nothing for a while as the boat gradually filled up. A couple of the new arrivals came over and schmoozed. Ricky Tang, a legislative counsellor for the lawyers’ Functional Constituency, quondam columnist for the South China Morning Post – another smoothy, with a lush Oxonian voice; a half-bright journalist called Mat something, ‘Pacific Rim correspondent’ for some Seattle magazine I’d never heard of; Susan Lee, a dressed-up Chinese woman, my age, who worked for Oss in some unspecified capacity; Sammy Wong, a Chinese–American businessman and, highly unusually for a money guy, a rabid anti-Communist, with links to the nuttier, let’s-nuke-China-while-there’s-still-time fringes of the Republican Party; his wife; and another woman called Lily Zhang, a not-quite-standard-issue Dragon Lady (she showed signs of having once read a book). I had already worked out that, as a general rule, Hong Kong required you to be one and a half notches more dressed up than you would be in England. This applied not just to men having to wear jackets and ties in the permanent sauna of Hong Kong’s summer, but to things like drinks parties and junking. In England, on a day like today, the boat trip would be a nightmare of exposed, lard-coloured, mottled and pimply flesh – unless the weather had already been good for a few days, in which case you could throw in some lobsterish burns for good measure. Here, though, there were crisp white ducks, imperial-purple Agnès B slacks, John Smedley sea-
island cotton tops – and that was just the men. I had my lightest English long trousers (Joseph, in an all-too-easily-stainable cream) and a too-cheap-not-to-be-fake Marc Jacobs dark-blue silk shirt from a new shop in a Tsim Sha Tsui arcade – and I was only just getting by. My secret weapon was a new black Gucci one-piece swimsuit. Berkowitz calmed me down with a compliment.

  ‘You look good enough to eat,’ he said.

  Susan Lee and I were doing clothes-shopping getting-to-know-you chat – her Fendi bag had cost two and a half thousand Hong Kong dollars, which I was assuring her was insanely cheap by European standards – when Philip Oss came over. The boat had cast off by now and we were plunging about the harbour through the wakes of the usual heavy traffic. Three or four young women – a couple of executive secretaries, a daughter or two – were already stretched out on sunbeds at the front of the boat; this was one of Hong Kong’s rare cloudless days, and they were going for it. The rest of the party were standing or sitting around in clumps, boozing and yakking.

  ‘Bob tells me you’re enjoying it here,’ Oss said. Susan held her glass up and headed off for a refill, or pretended to.

  ‘Well, it can be hard to tell, but I think so,’ I said. ‘Nice boat, by the way.’

  ‘You like boats?’

  ‘I haven’t been sick yet, so I suppose the answer is yes.’

  He laughed a rich hammy tycoon laugh. It was at this moment that I realised: he’s hitting on me. This, in the way that it can, caused a reassessment. Trim, mid-to-late forties, energetic, fond of himself; hard to think he would be anything other than selfish in bed, though I hadn’t yet seen him eat (I’m a believer in that one); in short, thinkable, but not really possible. Also, Oss was tanned in a way that you didn’t often see since the scares about skin cancer. Still, I had never fended off advances from a millionaire before. In a kind of emotional spasm I found myself thinking of Michael and his continual shall-I-or-shan’t-I male dithering about whether or not to come out to Hong Kong. On the one hand, his show had gone well, and that was an argument for staying on and getting as much work as he could while his profile was high; on the other, the fact his work was now beginning to be known made him more able to move about and go where he wanted, so he could come to Hong Kong without worrying about vanishing off the map. On the one hand, he was missing me, on the other hand he thought that in some ways the break was rejuvenating our blah blah blah.