Fragrant Harbour Read Online Free PDF

syndrome. The idea is you spend so much time in the air it’s the same as being an astronaut.’ He fished a thin leather wallet out of his pocket and took out a photo of a small fat baby. ‘My daughter Mei-Lin,’ he said. He didn’t ask me if I had children.
    All babies look alike to me.
    ‘She’s lovely,’ I said.
     *
    I had heard about the landing at Kai Tak airport, but I still couldn’t believe my eyes. We flew in over the archipelago of small islands, 235 of which – my guidebook told me – make up the territory of Hong Kong. As we came in lower you could see the boat-wakes, looking weirdly like jet contrails, then the boats themselves.
    ‘That’s where they’re building the new airport,’ Matthew said as we passed over Lantau island. ‘They made your Prime Minister come out for the signing ceremony, the first Western leader to visit China after Tiananmen.’
    There was anger in his voice, though not in his expression.
    ‘Don’t look at me, look out there,’ he said. ‘That’s the harbour.’
    We were now at a couple of thousand feet, coming in over the busiest harbour I had ever seen. The plane banked right over the city, and we began descending lower and lower. You could see laundry on people’s balconies; you could all but smell the traffic. You could more or less look into people’s flats. The air was not calm. It was as if we were flying right down into the city and the pilot was planning to attempt a landing in one of the canyons between the manically crowded buildings.
    ‘Jesus,’ I said.
    ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Matthew.
    Then suddenly we were over the airport runway and bumping down on it and the engines were roaring backwards as we headed out into the harbour. By the time we had stopped and turned off towards the terminal buildings, I could speak again.
    ‘Do planes ever end up in the harbour?’
    ‘Of course,’ smiled Matthew. ‘All the time.’
    I found out later that wasn’t true. He gave me his business card, which, having swotted up on my Asian etiquette, I took with both hands. You never know when contacts will come in handy; as it happens, I used him for a piece I did about astronaut syndrome a few months later.
    We got off the plane comfortably before the proles at the back of the 747. The air was close. It was hot, but more than that it was lethally muggy and humid. It was as if your whole body was wrapped in warm wet muslin. Kai Tak was older and scruffier than I had expected, and both more Chinese – in the fact that 98 per cent of the people all around were Chinese, the script and the language were everywhere – and also, in that odd colonial way, more English, in details like the weird khaki safari-suit uniform of the policemen. Berkowitz was supposed to meet me, and although I had been cool and if-you-insist about it over the phone, I was now feeling distinctly glad that I wouldn’t have to make my own way. It wasn’t so much culture shock as what- the-fuck -am-I-doing-here shock.
    In those days, summer of 1995, British citizens did not need a visa to waltz into Hong Kong and stay for as long as they liked. (The reverse, needless to say, did not apply.) Within about ninety seconds of my bags coming off the carousel I was pushing into the arrivals hall, looking and being looked at by a wall of Chinesefaces. It’s always a self-conscious moment, getting off a plane and running the reception gauntlet. Then I saw Berkowitz, standing with his arms crossed at the far end of the throng, marginally fatter and balder but essentially the same. Beside him stood a Chinese man in a uniform and peaked cap. People were surprisingly dressed up; many more suits and ties than you’d see in an equivalent line-up at Heathrow. I was suddenly glad that I’d nipped into the ladies and combed my hair, checked my face. My shoes were, after twelve and a half hours at an altitude equivalent to 7,000 feet, too tight for my puffy hooves. My luggage trolley was pulling hard to