Fragrant Harbor

To give your life is one thing; to do it for a gesture is another; but to do it for a gesture you know is meaningless is a desolate trick of fate.

Longevity can be a form of spite. I am an old man myself now, and I recognise the symptoms.

...Mandarin sounds like someone chewing a brandy glass full of wasps and Cantonese sounds like people having an argument. The written language of both dialects, incidentally, is the same.

...thanks to Marler, who prided himself on never being in any doubt as to what was on his mind, and on never being slow to speak it. He had the kind of bluntness that is proud of itself.

Grief is the hardest emotion to describe, because so much of it is numbness; it is also passive, something one undergoes rather than something one undertakes. It becomes difficult to locate oneself. When Maria went missing, a part of me did too. My capacity for love, which had always seemed elusive and equivocal even to me, was bound up in my relationship with her. I discovered that after her death. I had not known it before. It is a familiar story. There is nothing original about pain.

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 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:

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

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.