Fragrant Harbour Read Online Free PDF Page B

the left.
    Berkowitz came towards me and gave me, rather than the prepared line I might have expected, a hug.
    ‘Dawn,’ he said.
    ‘I think so. At least I was when I left. It’s good to see you, Bob.’
    ‘Let Ronnie take your bags. Dawn, this is Ronnie Lee, my driver and translator and all-round Man Friday. Ronnie, this is Dawn Stone.’ At close range, I could see that what I had taken to be a uniform was in fact an unusually smart high-buttoned Italian suit (or good copy thereof). Ronnie was about five foot eight and had an intelligent face framed with the invincible jet-black hair of the Cantonese. He nodded at me, swung the two bags off the cart and began walking away towards the lift.
    Berkowitz kept up a running commentary all the way from Kai Tak.
    ‘See that stone wall around the airport perimeter? That used to be the Walled City of Kowloon. During the war the Japanese tore down the walls and made POWs build the perimeter of the airport . The city stayed where it was, a total no-go area to the cops thanks to some ancient row over jurisdiction between the Chinese and the Brits. Literally swarming with Triads, junkies, sweatshops, whorehouses, you name it. More edifyingly, if you look out at the back window you can catch a glimpse of the mountains around Kowloon. They’re in the New Territories, which is the last bit of mainland before China proper. The Chinese said the hills were dragons. There were eight of them. Then the last of the Sung emperors came here in the thirteenth century, fleeing the Mongols, Kubla Khan among them, he of the stately pleasure-dome where Alph the sacred river ran. I remember thefirst time I heard that line thinking Alf was a weird name for a river. Anyway. The boy emperor looked up at the hills, said, look, there are eight dragons. His courtiers said, but sir, you are a dragon too – which the emperor traditionally was. He had dragon status in his own right. So he said, okay, let’s call this place nine dragons – gau lung – which became Kowloon. Not that it did the boy-emperor any good, since the Mongols caught him and killed him and ruled the whole of China for a couple of hundred years. Notice anything odd about these neon signs?’
    It was by now starting to go dark, and lights were coming on everywhere. The neon was the only colour in this part of town, and the buildings seemed aggressively drab – duns, browns, greys, no-colours. The streets were crowded and enclosed and very, very Asian. And the traffic – what I had thought, in London, was a Ph.D. experience of shitty traffic, was now being exposed as more like a GCSE all-must-have-prizes pass grade. This was shitty traffic.
    ‘You mean apart from the fact they’re in Chinese?’
    ‘Very droll. No, it’s the fact that none of them blink. There’s no flashing neon in Hong Kong owing to restrictions about the proximity of the airport. They’re worried that if too many lights wink you’ll have planes taking a wrong turn and crash-landing into girlie bars in Wanchai, with all the resultant expense and negative publicity. My point is merely that although this looks like an unfettered capitalist mêlée, the “purest free-market economy in the world” in the words of the Heritage Foundation in Washington – don’t you love that “purest”? – in fact Hong Kong is a closely regulated and legally supervised society. Zoning laws and building restrictions are extremely strict. Although everyone here talks non-stop about the free market and gases on about the place as a capitalist success story without equal, not least thanks to the 15 per cent top-rate tax which I believe I’ve had occasion to mention to you, they don’t point out that Hong Kong also has the largest public housing programme in the world, with over half of the population living in public housing built since the fifties, when bad publicity shamed the Brits into clearing the shanty towns. So Hong Kong can be described in the exact opposite of the