Kowloon Tong Read Online Free PDF

less at the factory, but at least once a month he showed the old man the month's accounts, the orders, the payroll, the overheads, the revenue.
    "Lovely and cool in here," a visitor had once said to him on the cutting floor. It was a typical Hong Kong May, the city was stifling. "Good air conditioning."
But there was no air conditioning. It was just open windows and damp bricks, ventilation and shadows. It was the
feng shut,
perfect harmony.
    Bunt turned forty. He gave up smoking. His father had smoked, so had his mum. A bad month at the factory had him on three packs a day, and soon the skin on his forearms turned as brown as a kipper, and he seemed to be sweating smoky poisons through his pores. His throat was raw, his eyes stung, his fingers were trembly. It was not hard for him to lay off cigarettes for a day—indeed, it made him feel a bit better to desist. But after two days it became an effort of will to fight off the urge to light up. He sucked sweets, he paced, he shouted, he even barked. And he stopped drinking, because alcohol made his craving worse.
    He had believed that in the long run giving up smoking would make little difference to his health. But the change was profound and unpleasant: not smoking turned him into someone else, a simpler, fatter, more agitated person with chronic indigestion. It became a way of dating his life, to before and after smoking. He was smug and took some satisfaction in having quit, but he mourned the loss of his cigarettes. And he suffered.
    There was first of all the shock to his system. He was lightheaded, he slept badly, his throat ached as though he had been smoking. Without cigarettes he had to learn how to eat again. He had to find new ways to digest his food. He was never more constipated than when he gave up, and that never left him. He was much hungrier, and each meal ended with an urge to smoke. He ate more, he developed a sweet tooth, for almost a
year he drank nothing but cream sherry. After a time he was disgusted by the smell of other people's smoke, but he knew that these smokers had inhaled the best of it—the heated sweetness of the toasted leaves—gulped away the tobacco aromas of roasted nuts and ripe fruit, and what they snorted out of their nostrils was the sour exhaust.
    Smoking was a blotter that soaked up time, the minutes of a phone call, the hours between meetings, the meetings themselves. So, without smoking, his days were longer by three or four hours, and having no use for the time—and every minute being aware of the pleasure he was missing in having abandoned tobacco—he spent more hours at the Pussy Cat and Fat-Fat Chong's rather than at Imperial Stitching. The decision to quit smoking changed his life, and he was never able to say for certain that it had been a change for the better.
    Business had been good in the 1950s, but that was hearsay. Bunt's awareness dated from the 1960s, when business had been poor. Orders had picked up in the seventies, boomed and busted in the eighties, and after a brief recovery most of the factories, textiles especially, had moved to China, relocating just over the border in Guangdong.
    Mr. Chuck refused to move. Instead he adjusted, approved cutting back the staff, retooled to make cheaper labels and badges, stopped making shirts, made fewer uniforms—how could he compete with the China-based factories?—and Imperial Stitching grew smaller. It still occupied eight floors but there was more empty space. The offices were on the top floor, Shipping was on the ground floor. Nearby factories manufactured goods for Eddie Bauer, Anne Klein, and Donna Karan,
and some of them made five different brands on the same floor. But Bunt was almost exclusively engaged in making labels, and in defiance, with Mr. Chuck's permission, he dropped "Labels" from the company name, changing it to Imperial Stitching.
    In 1984 Margaret Thatcher announced the Hand-over of Hong Kong to China. The Chinese had been