It was not a question. ‘Oh yes, very much. Nice place.’
‘You drink much beer in my restaurant.’
Nor was that. Praise, admiration, or perhaps a neutral acceptance of the differences between races. It was all profit, anyway, and boozing gweilos hardly made more noise than feasting Chinese. ‘Nice place,’ Alan said lamely.
‘Ve’y nice place.’
Alan turned to King. ‘Er, something I want to discuss with you, but it’ll keep.’
‘A moment, my friend.’ He and Mr Ng then embarked on a conversation in Cantonese with much guffawing from Mr Ng. No, he really would start to learn the language properly. Buy a book. Buy a tape. No, fall in love with a beautiful Cantonese girl. Alan examined King’s family photograph, idly speculating on the sexual potential of the pigtailed daughter. Perhaps she was now grown up, beautiful, available, ready to fall in love with him at first sight, to tumble into his bed in a wild whim of passion. King and Mr Ng shook hands, not without warmth. Then Mr Ng turned to Alan, and bestowed on him a final blessing from his golden mouth.
‘You come to my restaurant tonight, drink much beer, hahaha.’
‘Hahaha,’ agreed Alan. Ah-Hei got to his feet, still without offering a word, and walked cat-footed after his master.
‘You moving into the restaurant business, then, King?’ Alan asked, when they were alone.
‘Ng is an old friend of mine. We have done business together for many a year. His restaurant is only one of his interests. He owns the well, for example. Water is power on Tung Lung, Alan. Ng is also in property; he owns this place, among many others. He sub-lets much of the market-gardening land in the valley. He has a share in most of the fishing boats.’
‘And he owns the shrimp-paste factory outright, doesn’t he?’
‘No, that is Chuen-suk.’ Alan remembered the silver-haired Coca-Cola drinker at the waterfront café. ‘Chuen-suk and Ng are big rivals. Chuen-suk has the better well, and that means greater power. But my partner, Ng, is the more enterprising man, with more diverse interests. A big man, Alan, a big man on Tung Lung.’
‘Oh,’ Alan said. ‘I didn’t realise you were in partnership.’
‘In some aspects. In property, a little, but mainly we work together on import-export.’
Oh. ‘Actually, it was business that I wanted to talk to you, King.’
‘What else does anyone ever want to talk about in this town?’ This was brought out with a rhetorical flourish, as if it were something of a mot. Alan laughed, remembering from somewhere a line about it being almost as good being a hypocrite as a liar: the same warm feeling inside. And, allowing the smile to remain on his face, he made his proposal: suggesting that King be the subject of a ‘portrait’ in Business PanAsia. He had not expected difficulty, relying on King’s habitual readiness to oblige. But he was surprised by King’s flattered delight. Alan felt a comfortable frisson of the journalist’s endless source of power: the promise, or threat, of publication.
‘Tremendous, Alan. I’d be happy to be a “portrait”. When would you like the ordeal to commence?’
‘Right now, if by any chance you are free.’
‘For you, Alan, I am always free.’ So Alan ran downstairs to fetch a notebook, and returned to find King at the fridge liberating a pair of cans. ‘Would the roof be a suitable place for this inquisition?’
‘Admirable.’ So they climbed the island’s final flight of stairs. Table and chairs stood beneath a canopy of vine; other plants grew around in heavy glazed pots, decorated with Chinese characters or bamboo leaves. Below them the harbour, the fields to one side. Priscilla, if it were she, had gone. At sea, the twelve o’clock ferry was heading towards its berth. Alan could see the flow of people moving towards the jetty through the narrow streets, the wheeled motor-carts vying for the leading positions for loading and unloading.
‘To business, my friend. Shoot. As they say.’
‘Well, er, what is your main line of business?’
It was a question that gave deep delight. King smiled to himself for a long time, looking out across the sea, for all that there were no noble savages in sight. At last he replied, ‘Love, Alan. Love.’
Alan wrote ‘love’ in his notebook.
‘Now I can see that I have surprised you. Business is supposed to be a matter of oppositions. Enmity and hatred. But that is not how I work, my friend. I say this: there is only one sort of good business, and that is when both parties walk away as winners.’
King spoke as if listening to him speaking at length was an experience all serious people should undergo at some stage in their lives. He started, fulsomely, with his childhood in Shanghai, the Baptist school run by his father. ‘I learnt love in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien.’
His father had died shortly after the fall of Shanghai and their enforced move to Hong Kong. ‘Of a broken heart, Alan. I was sixteen, and never went to school again. There was nothing anyone could teach me.’
By the age of twenty-four, he was a millionaire. ‘Import-export. Contacts with China, always contacts with China. Hong Kong was ever the financial pore through which the Chinese dragon breathed.’ Alan hesitated over the shorthand outline for dragon.
The enmity of his partner, who was involved in the Triads – ‘for the love of God don’t print that, Alan’ – had seen King reduced to nothing. But by the age of thirty he had built up a second fortune. ‘Like Hong Kong itself, I diversified into manufacturing. Plastics. The joy of plastics, Alan.’ He bought a house on the Peak, married a beautiful Australian woman. ‘On the wall downstairs, the two women of my life: Monica, my lovely wife; Jacinta, my lovely daughter.’ For a second Alan wondered if King had read his mind as he’d mused over the pigtailed photograph. ‘You see them pictured below with the man destined to become my business partner and, ultimately, should we be saved, my boss. My son, Byron.’
‘Nice names,’ Alan said. After all, you had to say something.
‘They are all, alas, in UK,’ King said. ‘A matter of education. God, Alan, I miss them. Every day of my life, I miss them. A temporary thing. We remain a devoted family. I love my wife, and shall I tell you something else? I still fancy my wife. Twenty years we’ve been married, and when she was last here we were like two teenagers in love. Taking baths together. A honeymoon.’
‘And the kids?’
‘Fine children, Alan. Jacinta is now nineteen, and no longer in pigtails. Beautiful, wilful, headstrong, intelligent. Byron is sixteen, though most people take him for twenty-one. A remarkable boy who makes his father very happy. But where was I, Alan, in this history lesson?’
‘Living in millionaires’ row on the Peak.’
‘I merged my business with a larger concern. Things hotted up. I was on the move constantly: Singapore, KL, Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Taiwan. Busy beyond belief, stressed beyond belief, powerful beyond belief, rich beyond belief. And then one day, do you know what I said?’
‘Tell me.’
‘I said “fuck it”. I walked into a board meeting one morning, and told them all. I said “fuck it”.’
‘And how did they respond?’
‘They begged me to stay. Naturally. But I said “fuck it”, and I meant it from the bottom of my heart. And so what do you think I did?’
‘You moved out to Tung Lung and founded a business based on the principle of love.’
‘My