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Kowloon Tong: A Novel of Hong Kong
Kowloon Tong: A Novel of Hong Kong
Kowloon Tong: A Novel of Hong Kong
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Kowloon Tong: A Novel of Hong Kong

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In this “moody thriller,” a family business is targeted for takeover as control of Hong Kong shifts from the British to the Chinese (The New York Times).
 
Ninety-nine years of colonial rule are ending as the British prepare to hand over Hong Kong to China. Betty Mullard and her son, Bunt, have lived here for years, mostly keeping apart from their foreign surroundings, except for some indulgence in the local food, or in Bunt’s case, the local girls. The handover is not a concern for them—until the mysterious Mr. Hung from the mainland offers them a large sum for their family business.
 
They refuse. But they fail to realize that Mr. Hung is unlike the other Chinese people they’ve known: he will accept no refusals. When a young female employee whom Bunt has been dating vanishes, he is forced to make important decisions for the first time in his life—but his good intentions are pitted against the will of Mr. Hung, and the threat of the ultimate betrayal.
 
“A compact, provocative gem of a novel” (The Boston Globe), from an award-winning author acclaimed for both his fiction and his travel memoirs—including Deep South, The Great Railway Bazaar, and The Mosquito CoastKowloon Tong was praised by Bette Bao Lord in The Washington Post Book World as “a taut, illuminating story that transcends its timely subject.”
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 6, 1998
ISBN9780547525884
Kowloon Tong: A Novel of Hong Kong
Author

Paul Theroux

PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Bad Angel Brothers, The Lower River, Jungle Lovers, and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I thought this was going to be a travel book but it is a pretty uneventful novel about an ex-pat family called the Mullards living in Hong Kong just before the hand over of Hong Kong to China from the UK in 1997. For many UK ex-pats I should imagine there was anxiety and trepidation about the hand over, known in this book as the "Chinese Take-away" because many families had settled in Hong Kong in their own British bubble and had failed to integrate with the culture, and had a wariness of mainland China. The Mullards, Mum Betty an overprotective interfering lady and her son Neville, known as Bunt (named after Baby Bunting) own a stitching and labelling factory in Kowloon Tong, and they have prided themselves on being able to compete with mainland Chinese factories and do not use child labour. Betty Mullard is a character I cannot stand, for all her love and mollycoddling, she controls her son's every move and is a bigot. Bunt is 43, he lives in the shadow of his dead older brother, his Mother insisted he should try to be her two boys. Bunt runs Imperial Stitching and fits in time at local strip clubs and brothels. This world comes crashing down when Mr Hung, a chinese army official makes advances to buy the factory. Bunt wants to cling on to his world but cannot face the harsh reality initially. Mr Hung's gifts and advances turn to threats. Bunt Mullard is forced out and made to leave Hong Kong. It transpires Betty Mullard always wanted to leave Hong Kong and she appears to have orchestrated this in collusion with Mr Hung. I found the book interesting for its descriptions of ex pat life in Hong Kong, and the book is very dark in places. What holds it all together is the unpalatable Betty Mullard, who is the epitomy of everything I hate: bigotry, ignorance and selfishness. Three stars.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    As much as I do agree that Theroux has pretty perfect prose, there's something about the way he sees things and how he shows a lot of thing in bad light that make me cringe a little bit (This claim made after trying to read another of his books to no avail). It's a skewed view, as far as I'm concerned, being a Chinese from HK, that Theroux chose to write about what happened to an Englishman at a time when the colony was to be handed over to Chinese authority, and how an Englishman lost his way. The Chinese to me are being portrayed in an exaggeratedly negative way I think, because it's only natural that we don't make friends with people that don't look like us. I don't suppose a Chinese would easily get his way in the snobbish London society either, for similar reasons. Too bad history unfolds itself the way it does, and too bad foreigners find it hard to establish the status, after the hand-over, the way they assume they always could. Too bad Theroux chooses to portray the scenario in a vulgarly biased fashion.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Theroux always writes about what he knows, and he knows the Chinese - and British ex-pats, which is just as important. 'Kowloon Tong' explores what happens when the rug is pulled from under you - in this case, Hong Kong is being handed over to the Chinese, throwing into doubt the future of a mother and son who had spent over forty years in the territory.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Why do I think that Theroux, in naming his lead character “Bunt”, was one letter away from what he really wanted to call him? And I don’t mean “Dunt”. This novel was Theroux’s take on the handover of Hong Kong to China from the British. Basically, the story was about how we’ve been shagging the colony for years, exploited her citizens, pissed on her culture and wished we’d made it Southend on Sea. Now we were faced with an unsmiling, brutish, military regime who’d tolerate no nonsense or compromise in taking it back and making it their own.Still, Theroux comes up with enough sarcastic asides and characterisations to keep you amused: “Whoever thought the Chinese were inscrutable had met one Chinaman, but not two”. His disdain for everyone peopling the book shines through and leaves you with the impression that this was a sweet and sour novel, without the sweet.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong (meaning nine-dragon pond, a district in Hong Kong) is a novel of Hong Kong on the verge of the 1997 handover. Written against the historical backdrop of handing a free Chinese city back to a totalitarian Chinese state, Kowloon Tong is far less glittering from the inevitably rip-roaring story for the global media, it is a piece of cobbled (opportunistic, maybe) fiction.Neville "Bunt" Mullard was born and raised in Hong Kong, went to the posh Queen's College, and inherited the almost-monopolizing Imperial Stitching Company, which manufactured badges sewn on breast pockets of sports-jackets from his late father and his partner Henry Chuck. At 40, Bunt was not married, devoid of friends, frequented bars and brothels, but felt the pressure of his dead brother, dead father, and the late avuncular Chuck hovering near him at work.A pathetic mama's boy, Bunt lived a life that synchronized with his mother's, so confining and dull. She knew so much (too much) about his life, his daily routine and his where about that he deliberately contrived to create secrets (the topless bar and an affair with an employee Mei-Ping) and manipulated his mother's mood.As the British prepared to hand over Hong Kong to the Chinese motherland, the much-talked-about upheaval did not concern the Mullards, who lived nonchalantly at the Peak (a rich-and-famous, on-top-of-the-city neighbor which afforded panoramic view of the city and was away from, say, 95% of the colonial population). They executed their social fares with the small band of Brits at the Cricket Club, the English tea ritual at the Hong Kong club, outings to horse races by taxi, and lived as if the city and majority of its inhabitants (meaning the Chinese) didn't exist. The Cantonese was such grating noise that was remotely similar to any human speech. The Chinese food made them retch.When a Mr. Hung, who spoke perfect English with an American accent, on behalf of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (soon to station in Hong Kong), offered 9 million to purchase the building of Imperial Stitching, the Mullards' world of insouciance was jolted. Through a series of minatory gestures that might have attributed to the missing employee Ah Fu and janitor Woo, for the first time in their life the Mullards learned the truth of the colony's prospect-smiling but threatening and know-it-all Chinese officials behind a system of bribes and disloyalty.I have to applause to Theroux's keen eye on the geographical and cultural details of Hong Kong that are usually accessible to those who live in the city, the natives. His effort in nailing down the Hong Kong Chinese to the root is admirable and formidable-the inveterate trait to look after family, to not to say the thing that was no the heart, to say "I don't know" when you knew, to not to show feelings and emotion and (this is my favorite) to mob the exit on arrival in any transportation mean as if it was a panicky evacuation under an emergency. That's Hong Kong, in addition to all the incessant noise-the clanking of trams, the beeping of cell phones, and the ubiquitous charivari of Cantonese conversations that sounded like a hair-pulling argument, serenaded the city.The book also deftly captures Hong Konger's despondency of the uncertain future. For over 100 years, under the British governance, Hong Kong stood as the only Chinese society that lived an ideal never experienced and realized at any time in the history of any Chinese society. The colony, which practiced capitalism, provided a stable home for refugees from turbulent events of Chinese history such as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. Inhabitants of Hong Kong were those who fled the Communists in 1949 and their descendants. Thus in the proximity of 1997, a taut atmosphere hovered over the colony as everyone tried to secure an escape route, which usually manifested in the form of a foreign passport, a green card, a relative in Canada, or a marriage of convenience. Theroux has astutely seen to this political tension in his novel.What infuriates me about this book and thus makes it a cobbled piece of fiction is the puerile plot. Theroux portrayed the Hong Kong Chinese women as some of the most naïve and gullible and stupidest species of the human. Women were constantly abased, manipulated, used, and sexually abused. As a native of Hong Kong, I could vouch that the chance of an affair between a foreigner and a factory worker is infinitesimal. The affair itself was stuck in a deadlock and the characters that involved in the affair were one-dimensional. Betty Mullard's ruler-ver-subject attitude toward the Hong Kongers was also snobbish and obnoxious. If the Chinese were really so out-of-focus and were like riddles to her, why couldn't she at least try to know the Chinese people? It was true the British were rulers and the Chinese the subjects, but what infuriates me is the arrogance on her part, not knowing she was in Hong Kong, where the majority was the Chinese people.It occurred to me toward the end that the stitching company and its fate might have served as a symbolism of Hong Kong but I prefer not to give away. The ending was disappointing and ambivalent. It is a cobbled piece of fiction that astutely delves in the significance of the historical backdrop but sacrifices the backbone of the story. Readers will learn more about the culture of Hong Kong but disappoint at the story.

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Kowloon Tong - Paul Theroux

First Mariner Books edition 1998

Copyright © 1997 by Paul Theroux

Afterword copyright © 1998 by Paul Theroux

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Theroux, Paul.

Kowloon Tong / Paul Theroux.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-395-86029-6

ISBN 978-0-395-90141-0 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS3570.H4K68 1997

813'54—dc21 96-29717 CIP

eISBN 978-0-547-52588-4

v3.0520

Mah jiu paau.

Mouh jiu tiuh.

The horses will go on running.

The dancing will continue.

—Deng Xiaoping’s pledge,

in Cantonese, to Hong Kong

1

SOME DAYS Hong Kong seemed no different from the London suburb she had lived in before the war. Today, for example, the cold early morning with fragments of fog at the windows, she was back in Balham. The gray sky was falling in big soft wisps of tumbled stuffing, like a cushion torn open—but not one of those stinky straw-filled Chinese cushions. When the wind gusted, the drops of rain, as though flushed from just above her, plopped harder on the roof, which was also the ceiling of the parlor at Albion Cottage. The sky, the roof, the ceiling—on a wet day like this they were one thing.

Betty Mullard sat in what she called the lounge waiting for her son, Bunt, to come in to breakfast.

Fancy that, she said softly to the plip-plop of the rain. Chinky-Chonks.

And she went on thinking: Chinese relatives? What Chinese relatives?

She had just put the phone down after speaking to Monty, who was Mr. Chuck’s solicitor, and also hers—theirs, the firm’s, everyone trusted Monty Brittain. He was a Londoner too, a lad, sported a bowler hat, and he just laughed and looked at her with dead eyes when she said, I trust you because you’re a Jewboy.

Mr. Chuck had never mentioned Chinese relatives.

The question was, How to tell Bunt?

Hearing another sudden clatter of raindrops, she was back in Balham again. She looked up and saw the Queen, the portrait over the mahogany sideboard, a larger photograph than that of Betty’s late husband, George, in his RAF uniform on the same wall. The portrait had been part of the room, as permanent a fixture as the lamps and candle brackets, but lately Betty had begun to look closely at the Queen’s face, querying it. The Queen was practically a goddess, but she was also a mother, and a ruler. Her kingdom was established and serene and orderly. She works so hard was all Betty had ever said, a kind of benediction.

The greatest change Betty had known in her life, keener than the death of her father, worse than the war but with the same unexpected surprises and hurts (all her sighs of Whatever next!), was the seismic shift in the domestic life of the royal family. Her father had been old and sick: his time had come. The war had been won. But in these past years Betty had felt a sense of overwhelming disillusionment—loss and grief and bewilderment of an almost blaspheming sort that had very nearly unhinged her—at the news of divorces and muddles and adulteries and scandals and secrets of the royal family. Her Majesty excepted, they were human and horrible, and they were naked, exposed for all the world to see. For the first time in her life she saw their flesh, the common freckles on Fergie’s moo-cow face, Diana’s skinny arms, even Charles, his white legs. To Bunt, who had no idea of the majesty of the Queen and how much had changed, his mother said, And the youngest—just a shame—he’s a nancy boy, no question.

The rain shaken from the overhanging trees fell noisily on the cobbles out front and on the crazy paving that George and Wang had put in. Betty looked in that direction too when she heard the loud dribbling spatter of the drizzle, and she saw the lily cluster, big leaves hit by the falling rain, and, nodding, the blossoms seemed to grieve like girls in white bonnets, to share her sorrow.

In her purple woolly sweater Betty matched the tea cozy that lay thick on the contours of the teapot before her, and the egg cozies, two of them, that sat on the soft-boiled eggs like bobble hats. On mornings like this Wang always fitted the items with these accessories that Betty had made. The color was unfortunate but the wool had been cheap, bought in bulk through one of the company’s wholesalers, which explained the amount of yarn. There were also purple coasters for the souvenir glasses on the sideboard, where they stood with the souvenir saucers and the letter holder and the sturdy thermos flask and the tiny ceramic wine barrel from Spain, with its clutch of toothpicks, and the various items (brass jar, crystal bear, enamel ashtray) she had bought in the gift shops of transit lounges on her London flights.

With the same wool she had made cuffs for the chairs and collars for the lamps, and the pictures too—of George and Ivy in Carshalton, of Reeny and Ken, of Bunt in his pram at Southend, and of an odd foursome, mothers and sons on the beach at Silver Mine Bay in Lantau: Betty and little Bunt with Jia-Jia and her small son Wang—the frames had purple knitted sleeves. They held the damp and filled the bungalow’s lounge with the smell of clammy wool. And cold toast and bacon fat and the savory sourness of just-sliced papaya—Wang had left the kitchen door ajar.

Albion Cottage was off Lugard Road, on a bluff above the Peak fire station. The fire brigade was inside today with the windows and doors shut. No voices, no music, no sirens. Everything in the bungalow on a morning like this had a film of dampness, and the dampness seemed to liven the mildew and gave the interior the ripe cheesy odor of a mortuary. Varnished wood was affected: a dampness dulled the case of the wind-up clock with its ponderous ticking and its iffy mainspring, caused a slick on the oak box of silver cutlery with its small silver plate, engraved George and Betty, 1946. There was damp on the newly twisted mechanical calendar that needed a turn every day, reading THU 7 MAR 96; on the sofa and the needlepoint cushion covers; on the leather footstool (still showing George’s heel marks), the jam jars, the tea tray, the old magazines stacked beside the armchair, and the armchair itself—it all ponged.

Yet on a clear morning, like a hallucination from the eastfacing windows, where heavy with blackflies and aphids there were nasturtiums tumbling from a window box, Betty could see China—Red China, as they used to call it. Shum Chun was an hour by train from the factory in Kowloon Tong across the harbor. In forty-five years she had never visited, nor had George when he was alive, nor had Bunt, for—near or far—what was the point in going to China?

Bunt came in blowing his nose, saying, Did you hear the phone ring at six o’clock? Imagine a twit calling that early!

Wang hurried after him with the toast rack and a plate of bacon, the papaya she had smelled, and a napkin bundle.

Bunt folded his handkerchief into his pocket and went to the table and hesitated. He was forty-three and balding, and he touched his scalp lightly with Braille-reading taps and tracings of his fingertips, as though for luck, or searching for hair—or was it perhaps a reflex from the time he had had hair?

Wang made some fresh oaties. Have an oatie, Bunt. Give him an oatie, Wang, there’s a good chap.

There was an element of pride in Betty’s encouragement. It was not really Wang’s food. She had taught the man her own recipes and so it was her food.

Wang was tall—taller than Bunt, with a broad north China face, a flattish head, and wide-apart eyes that gave him a snake’s features. He looked even more snake-like when he smiled, but that was seldom. His laughter was more frequent but even more sinister, since it never indicated pleasure, only anxiety and fear. He seemed to be on the verge of laughing this morning. Had he heard anything of the phone call?

Wang said nothing. He put the food on the table and withdrew. He had a sloping sideways walk which Betty blamed on his height. He was solitary. He was not mysterious. He jogged.

Bunt also said nothing. He was dealing with his egg, his mouth was full, a fleck of egg clung to his cheek.

There’s a wee scrap of bacon going spare, Betty said.

If it’s going spare. Bunt motioned with his spoon.

I’ll do the honors.

His mother slid the three stiff rashers onto his plate and then switched on the radio. It was green-painted bakelite with a yellow illuminated dial, as big as a breadbox, and it crackled. George had bought the radio. It’s a pup, Betty always said, and Bunt still boasted about it for its not being Japanese. It was a Roberts. Like the sturdy John Bull thermos flask on the sideboard it was English-made. We manufactured radios once! The TV was a Bush. The gramophone was a Bush. The toaster was a Dualite. The bathroom porcelain, basin, bath, and hopper were all Twyford Adamants. And cars. The Milliards’ car was a black 1958 Rover that George had bought. He’d been proud of these English goods because, he’d said, though they might need repair they would never need to be replaced in his lifetime. George was fond of saying, whether of these appliances or of his sturdy clothes, These will see me out.

The sounds the Roberts made were like those of an old dear who had had to learn a new language. This morning it was saying, In the run-up to 1997. . .

The Hand-over: they called it the Chinese take-away, and it was now the old refrain. It was the only news in Hong Kong, and any news related to it—the economy, land reclamation, sales of commercial property, the price of petrol, the new airport, the noisy fears of anxious politicians—was tied to the Hand-over. Because it was the same every day and had been for so long, Bunt never commented. Besides, they had vowed they were going to stay, just to see. There was no risk. They had British passports. And they were not so free as others in the colony, for they had a half-share in the factory; the other half belonged to Mr. Henry Chuck.

You’ll want your U.K. woolly, Betty said. It was one she had made. And don’t forget your gamp.

Anticipating that Bunt would say Soldiers, Mum?, meaning bread fingers, Betty was buttering bread. She did it her usual way, standing with her feet apart, holding the whole loaf and spreading the butter on the end. When the buttering was completed, she worked her knife through the bread and cut off the buttered end as a slice. But as she did this Bunt was wagging his finger, no, no, no, because his mouth was full, his cheeks bulging with tea.

Sensing that he could not deny it, Betty said, You’re nid-nodding over your food. You look a little peaky.

She knew she would not get the truth from him, but she was curious to know what his lie would be. She watched him closely as he swallowed. She had kept track of what he had eaten: a soft-boiled egg, five rashers of streaky bacon, an oatie, half the papaya, two slices of toast to one of which he had added jam, no soldiers.

Bunt’s reaction this morning was not to lie or make an excuse but to smile and pluck his umbrella from the stand and say he had to go.

You were late last night, his mother said, trying to provoke a lie.

Bunt smiled and said, Cricket Club. Had a drink with Mr. Chuck.

It was the worst lie he could have told, but perhaps it did not matter what he said. When she had put his shirt in the laundry basket, she had smelled cheap perfume—a hairy, cat-like odor of a sluttish woman. If she asked he would only deny it, but who was the woman? This was Hong Kong—it might be anyone, and the thought was alarming.

Bunt had gone thrashing into the rain and started the car. He was chafing some warmth into his hands and releasing the hand brake of his black lumpy Rover. He looked up and opened his mouth wide when he saw his mother coming towards him, buffeted by the wind and drizzle. She put her face and her lank rain-flecked hair against the passenger’s side window.

Mr. Chuck’s dead, she said.

It sounded like an afterthought, though it was anything but. The news had been worrying her since six o’clock, when Monty called. She simply did not know how to tell her son of the death of their business partner.

Bunt was not superstitious, but he knew that thereafter, every time he hitched forward on the leather seat of the old Rover and released the hand brake, or perhaps even gripped it, he would think of those words. The satisfying lift and click to free the mechanism would always be linked in his mind with Mr. Chuck’s death. He thought of death in the same way—the brakes are off, for that was how it seemed.

I’m sorry, Bunt said. I didn’t really see him at the Cricket Club.

Betty made a face—twitching eyes, pursed lips—that meant Never mind.

She said, Evidently he didn’t have an earthly . . .

His mother was still talking but he was no longer listening. There was too much to do. Instead of the closely regulated schedule of the factory, Imperial Stitching in Kowloon Tong, the entire day had to be improvised. Bunt hated surprises, even pleasant ones. This was terrible—and worse, now everything in his life was in doubt.

And as someone who hated surprises, who was thrown by anything unplanned, Bunt had an English loathing for improvisation. Urgency made him anxious and inaccurate, and hurry left him speechless. Yet the death demanded his attention, and at the end of the day he was astonished by what he had managed to accomplish at such short notice.

He arranged for the funeral service at St. John’s Cathedral, on Battery Path Road—Mr. Chuck, though Chinese, was a devout Anglican. Miss Liu at the factory took care of the flowers, and Mr. Cheung the insertion of death notices in all the papers, including the Chinese ones. Mr. Woo lowered the Union Jack on the roof of the factory to half-staff. Lily, Miss Liu’s assistant, faxed some dates and club names to the South China Morning Post for its obituary. Bunt spent almost an hour at the Hong Kong Club with Monty, the solicitor. By late afternoon, Bunt felt he knew Mr. Chuck a great deal better. Apart from his father’s death—but Bunt was young then, just eleven—this was his first proper funeral. He realized that death produced unexpected revelations.

They believed they knew the Chinese, he and his mother, knew them especially well because they knew Mr. Chuck and Wang so well. The Chinese were frugal first of all, but not mean; they were self-denying and Spartan, strangely cheese-paring and given to binges—also capable of going mental and throwing an entire fortune away at Happy Valley or Sha Tin. In the casinos of Macao they were melancholy and self-destructive. They might seem stern the rest of the time, but it was shyness, which was another reason they didn’t look you in the eye. They could be sentimental, they did not shed tears—they had much to blub about and that was probably the reason they didn’t. They could be tasteless, for frugality was the enemy of fashion. They did not care, they did not complain, they were totally predictable.

Whoever said the Chinese were enigmatic might have met one Chinese person but had not met two. They were nearly always the opposite—obvious, unsubtle, unambiguous, and what was the opposite of mysterious? They carried on their lives in whispers and their business in shouts. If they wanted you to accept a present, they rammed it down your throat. The present was never an expensive thing. They liked simplicity more than ingenuity, because ingenuity costs more. But novelty that was a bargain pleased them. Children pleased them, families generally. They hardly drank. They never gave speeches. Patience and long suffering were attributed to them. No, in Hong Kong they were animated by one emotion, and that was impatience. They were not timid—they could fight like cats. They were too shy to say it, but Hurry up was the angle and the statement in all their posture.

At the meeting, Monty had said, And of course, as I told your mother, there are the Chinese relatives to consider.

And Bunt had raised his face to the man. Chinese relatives? Mr. Chuck had never spoken of them. He had refused to speak of China at all. That was Chinese—don’t look back, don’t even think about it. Mr. Chuck had come to Hong Kong in 1948 and had started Imperial Stitching with Bunt’s father two years later. It was called Imperial Stitching and Labels then. Mr. Chuck had never gone back to China. Perhaps that had influenced Bunt in his not going. For many years it had been impossible, then it was merely difficult, but for the past fifteen years you had the impression that a visit to China was demanded of you. Americans went in their millions—and that convinced Bunt that he would never go, even though he was assured that he could easily manage the trip during his lunch hour.

I’ve notified them, Monty said. They will want to do something.

I can’t imagine what, Bunt said.

And if they make demands?

They can get stuffed.

Chinese relatives! Bunt saw himself with a hundred meddling Chinese partners, all named Chuck, in Imperial Stitching.

Mr. Chuck’s funeral at St. John’s, Central District, was a solemn affair, attended by the eighty-seven workers from Imperial Stitching, everyone except Maintenance, Mr. Woo. Some of them seemed ill at ease in the church, others recited the prayers without glancing at the order of service.

"We’re the only gweilos," Bunt said.

And him, his mother said, facing the pulpit, where Father Briggs stood in his frilly smock preparing to speak.

In his eulogy Father Briggs spoke of Mr. Chuck’s unselfishness and generosity and the prosperity he had brought to Hong Kong through the success of the factory. It had started as a modest postwar operation and had risen with the colony. It was now a valuable asset. Each time the Mullards were mentioned by the priest, the

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