The Daughters of Henry Wong

by Harrison Young

  Nothing in history is as difficult as opening a door slowly. The Chinese leadership has been doing so successfully in the rest of the nation for thirty years. They would probably like Hong Kong to move to a slightly more representative shade of government, or at least to choose leaders who are less stupid. But they do not want full democracy, which would set a bad precedent. They must hope enlightenment will emerge. But complaints that are ignored can morph into anger that is hard to control. So Hong Kong could yet be a problem.

  I sat in my gentleman-scholar’s office, thinking about history and studying the spots the rain had made on my shoes. I was still procrastinating about moving, but I had scheduled a meeting with Catherine that afternoon. I’d said we should meet in Henry’s office. It was a start.

  I had to move to Hong Kong to learn its history. How Henry laughed when I reported my discovery, soon after I married Amanda, that the English had launched the first “Opium War” to keep the drug flowing. “You have too high an opinion of mankind,” he said.

  What happened is that English developed a passion for tea, which at that stage only the Chinese produced. This created a balance-of-payments problem because the Chinese insisted on payment in silver, and didn’t feel the outside world had any products they needed.

  The answer to this financial dilemma turned out to be opium, which the Chinese became addicted to and the Europeans were able to supply. Sales of opium for medicinal purposes had always been legal, but in 1799, the Emperor decided opium was bad for China, and banned it. This had about as much effect as Prohibition did in America.

  Then in 1839 a new and forceful government official seized about three million pounds of opium and the English went to war. I had naively assumed that it was the English who wanted to suppress the opium trade. After all, the slave trade was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1807. Shutting down drug dealers seemed like the natural next item on their reform to-do list.

  “So my honorable ancestors were traffickers,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Henry, “the Americans had a fair share of the trade. Didn’t they teach you that at Harvard?”

  “Perhaps I missed that lecture.”

  “If you’re interested,” Henry went on, “you still haven’t got it straight. Most historians would say the casus belli wasn’t opium at all but extraterritoriality. The British government never wavered from the view that the Emperor could make whatever laws he wished regarding opium. But they refused to let Chinese courts try British sailors who got in fights in pubs, which of course is what sailors tend to do. When push came to shove, and skipping quite a few steps, Her Majesty’s Government decided honor required them to send a few thousand soldiers over from India and teach us a lesson. Which they did. But we got Hong Kong out of it.”

  “We?” I said. “I thought the British got Hong Kong.”

  “Only for a hundred and fifty-six years,” said Henry. “Then we got it back – and a very fine city the British built us.”

  “How long before you get the rest of China back?”

  “From the Communists, you mean?” I would have been interested in Henry’s answer, but he changed the subject.

  Song had continued to bring me breakfast in bed, coming soon after dawn, well before the rest of the house stirred. At first I assumed she just wanted to wake me up, to get me to work. I’d been lazy the past few years and that had to change. But by coming into my space that often – and without knocking – I began to realize she was indicating we were confederates.

  “Painters gone,” she had said one morning the previous week. “Canada.”

  “Important painters?” I said reflexively.

  Song didn’t answer, which I decided meant “yes,” even if I wasn’t sure what “yes” meant. In retrospect, “Canada” was quite a clue.

  Breakfast varied. Song never asked what I wanted. It was her house, she seemed to be saying. My job was to go out and defend it, but inside the walls she was in charge. Some days I got cereal, occasionally an egg. That morning it was sliced mango, with a quarter of a lime. They looked comfortable together – orange and green, one slippery, the other astringent, but both children of the same yellow sun. They sat on a blue and white dish on a white linen placemat. Along with a folded napkin and English silverware, there was an odd-shaped shiny green leaf on the tray, which she must have cut from the bush beside the front steps. There was something troubling about the odd shape of the leaf. I know a bit about Hong Kong’s flora but I couldn’t call up its name.

  “Bring coffee,” she said and disappeared.

  The mango was evidently something to focus on and enjoy slowly. So I had done just that, and had thought about Song going down the steps in the gray morning, rain splashing her slippers, to cut the leaf. I can do things for you, she had seemed to be saying.

  My office phone rang, “Simon’s in town,” said Sam, referring to his boss, as soon as I picked up the receiver. “He wants to meet you.”

  It was interesting that Sam hadn’t bothered to ask why I was in the office. Simon’s wishes seemed to take priority. “Ten o’clock?” I suggested.

  “Actually,” said Sam, “I’d like you to invite him to dinner at your Castle.”

  “Really? Tonight?”

  “He needs to meet Amanda.”

  “You bring your wife, then, Sam.”

  “Haven’t got one.”

  “Then bring a date, for Christ’s sake, or Amanda won’t feel comfortable.”

  “I suppose I can find someone presentable,” said Sam.

  My first thought, when he came into the sitting room at the Castle that evening, was that Simon was the most perfect Englishman I had ever seen: greyhound thin, entirely bald, navy blue suit, probably from Huntsman, gold signet ring, Old Etonian tie.

  There were only two problems. As Sam had told me, he was quite obviously of Russian descent: the high cheekbones, the pale blue eyes. His hair would have been yellow before he lost it. “Family got out at the time of the Revolution,” Sam had told me. “More importantly, they got quite a lot of their money out before the place went pear-shaped.”

  The other problem was the high heels. Even with foreknowledge, on first acquaintance it was startling.

  “I can see we’ll get along, Mr. Lee,” said Simon. “You like to dress funny too.”

  I looked down at my baggy linen suit. “I like the past,” I said.

  “Well, I fear you’ve got an exciting future,” said Simon.

  In the event, there were six of us for dinner. Sam brought an astonishingly beautiful Thai model who was in town for a shoot and Simon turned out to have a business-suit-clad associate in tow. “She’ll be very annoyed if he leaves her in the hotel,” Sam had said in a late afternoon phone call, “and I promise you, an annoyed Serena is not a good idea.”

  Amanda recognized the model from the cover of Vogue Asia.

  “Call me Sam,” she said. “My Thai name is too long and my alphabet has different letters.”

  “I thought his name was Sam,” said Amanda.

  “I suppose it is,” said Sam the girl.

  Serena the girl was having none of it. “I refuse to believe you don’t know the man you came with.”

  “Him,” said the model, pointing at Sam Canadian, who was several inches shorter than she was.

  Sam Canadian looked pleased. Serena scowled.

  It was a reasonably convincing scowl, but it didn’t make her any less attractive. English girls undeniably have something. Their voices? Their skin? In a room with two other gorgeous women, Serena got my full attention. The conversation swirled on, as if we’d all been drunk already, and I failed to realize that she was half the reason for the party. I couldn’t stop looking at her.

  “You have a very large husband,” said Sam the girl to Amanda.

  “I suppose I do,” said Amanda, and thankfully everyone laughed. Talking Amanda into this dinner party had been a challenge. New people made her nervous.

  “Do you like large men or small
men?” Sam the girl went on, turning to Serena.

  “Bigger than that one,” said Serena, pointing at Sam Canadian. The fact that he was a partner of the firm and she was a junior associate didn’t seem to concern her.

  Sam the girl then turned her attention to Simon and for the first time noticed his footwear. She caught her breath in surprise. “The new Manolo Blahniks,” she said.

  “We get them earlier in London,” said Simon. They both stared at his feet.

  “But why do you wear them?” she asked finally.

  “To frighten people,” said Simon. “They realize that if I’ll do this, there is probably nothing I will not do.”

  “Shoes don’t frighten me,” she said.

  “In my business it works.”

  “Mrs. Lee,” said Sam Canadian, “I suddenly realize I have not expressed my sympathies on the disappearance of your father. We all hope and believe he will return soon, but not knowing where he is must be very hard.”

  “He is dead,” said Amanda. “That makes me very sad, but I have to accept reality, as my husband does not.”

  “Americans are optimists,” said Simon. “And as your husband has perhaps explained, it would be a mistake to jump to any conclusions about your father.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Amanda. “Twenty-four point nine plus nine point nine is thirty-four point eight, which is more than half of the shares that are normally voted. Also, Zhang Hai Ming is a pig, and unless he finds a judge who is also a pig, his motion will be denied. Et cetera, et cetera. But I will be a good wife and be quiet. Come,” she said to Sam the girl. “I have fashion questions.” Their heels went click click click down the hall.

  This left Serena the girl in an awkward position, but I didn’t know what to do about it.

  “Don’t you have any fashion questions, Serena?” said Sam Canadian.

  “Not until I’m a lot richer,” she said.

  “As you will be,” said Simon kindly. And then, switching his tone: “Wendy, tell me about this Zhang Hai Ming.”

  I recited the known facts. “He claims to be Henry’s friend.” I paused. “He gave me a kind of warning, right after Henry went away, that things would get complicated.”

  “And now he has fulfilled his own prediction,” said Simon.

  “I think he is just preserving his options,” I said. “His life has made him do that.”

  “One of the tiger’s options is to eat you.”

  “Zhang is more rat than tiger,” I said.

  “Well, you may have to get your housekeeper to poison him. And Mercury Chao?”

  I sketched Mercury’s curriculum vitae. “More money, less menace,” I said in conclusion.

  “So neither of you is really a banker,” said Simon, “if I may be brutal about it.”

  “Mercury is a banker,” said Amanda, coming back into the room. She and Sam the girl were now wearing each other’s dresses, which made my head spin.

  “Which one is mine?” said Sam Canadian.

  “Mercury’s father was a banker,” Amanda continued, “and his grandfather was a banker, whereas my husband is a… scholar. I think that is the polite way of putting it. He can quote poets I have never heard of. He thinks he is a Taoist. Have you ever had a Taoist for a client, Mr. High Heels? They believe in the absurd.” Evidently playing dress-up with a semi-famous model had boosted her confidence, and she was milking it. “How do you like my new dress, everyone? Come play with us, Serena. You are wearing too many pinstripes.” She and Sam the girl each took one of Serena’s hands and led her away. More click click click.

  “And they told me Hong Kong has gotten dull,” said Simon.

  Song appeared at the door to the dining room. “Soup ready,” she said.

  There was nothing for the three of us to do but go in. A servant I had never seen before stood ready with a tureen and ladle.

  “Serve us now,” I said in Mandarin, “and then the ladies when they rejoin us.”

  He complied without speaking, his eyes alert, intelligent. I wondered if I should worry about having him in the room if we got into tactics again.

  “So Mercury endeavors to please Beijing?” said Simon.

  “Yes,” I said. “Most businessmen do. It’s pretty overt.”

  “But not your father-in-law?”

  “Henry has no politics,” I found myself saying.

  “How interesting,” said Simon. “How does he manage that?”

  “He has no further ambition, as far as I can see.”

  “He suffered under the Red Guards, I believe,” said Simon.

  I wondered how he knew that. “He doesn’t make a point of it,” I said. “He’s not angry. Life has worked out really well. He just doesn’t take an interest in ‘all that,’ as he calls it.”

  “Mercury takes an interest, though?”

  “Clearly.”

  “What is he ambitious for?”

  “Prestige. I suppose he wants the Grand Bauhinia Star eventually,” I joked. Sometimes I wondered whether Hong Kong’s most prestigious decoration, named for the official floral emblem of the city, sounded as absurd to Cedric as it did to me. I couldn’t ask him, though. He was Cedric Fung GBS already. Rumor had it he had turned down a knighthood in the eighties.

  “I like it that you don’t like Mr. Chao,” said Simon. “It is so frustrating when I have a client who wants to be merciful.”

  “We Taoists are weak on hate.”

  “Stir some Mencius into your tea,” said Simon, referring to the father of “legalism,” who specified gruesome penalties for every conceivable infraction.

  “You didn’t by any chance read Chinese at Oxford and forget to tell me?” I said.

  “Serena briefed me.”

  “She read Chinese at Oxford?”

  “I forgot to tell you.”

  “The spooks tried to recruit her,” said Sam Canadian, “but we offered more cash.”

  As if on cue, Serena appeared at the door.

  “Look what we’ve done,” said Amanda, coming in behind her. Sam the model followed, wearing another one of Amanda’s dresses and a string of black pearls.

  They’d put the English girl in a low-cut party frock. Serena was bustier than Amanda, but it fitted reasonably well. What was shocking was that they’d hung a million-dollar jade and diamond necklace around her neck, with earrings to match – a million U.S., that is. The safe was in Amanda’s room.

  Serena was clearly embarrassed by how much she was enjoying herself. “It’s a look,” she said, reddening. I couldn’t help wondering how extensively she blushed.

  We rose and seated the ladies, and I motioned for the intelligent waiter to serve them.

  “Your wife has such wonderful taste, Mr. Lee,” said Sam the girl.

  “My father buys the jewelry,” said Amanda.

  “Will he adopt me?” said Serena, and then quickly added, “Oh gosh, I’m sorry.”

  “No offense,” said Amanda grandly.

  “I mean her wardrobe,” said Sam the girl. “As you can imagine, Mr. Lee, I meet many women who spend a lot of money on their clothes. Much of it is wasted.”

  “Amanda wears clothes very well,” I said.

  “He means I’m skinny,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Sam the girl, “you have an ideal figure, but you also buy well.”

  “So what do you think, Serena,” said Sam Canadian, “can you swallow one of those earrings when no one is looking?”

  “Just to finish with Mr. Mercury Chao,” said Simon before Serena had time to reply, “Do you think he understands the sea he wishes to swim in?”

  He hadn’t addressed the question to anyone in particular, but Amanda answered.

  “Of course he does,” she said. “They come from Shanghai. His family maintained relationships on both sides up to the end – the ‘Liberation,’ as they call it.”

  “Do you think his grandfather was a Party member?” said Simon. “He died in the late sixties, didn’t he?”

  �
��1971,” said Amanda. “But what is the Party – I mean today? Who joins it?”

  “I am hardly an expert –” said Simon.

  “Nor am I,” Serena interjected.

  “– but what I find most useful is to remember that, like any political grouping, the Chinese Communist Party is composed of people motivated by a combination of idealism and ambition. At the top, those motivations tend to sort themselves out. Some of the people who run China are driven almost exclusively by a desire for power, and now also money. Some, thankfully, and despite having a superior understanding of power, are driven by the same ideals they embraced as adolescents. What those outside China must do is to identify those senior leaders who are truly of the latter category, and quietly – I might even say covertly – try to assist them.”

  I could see that Amanda was losing the thread of Simon’s little lecture. He evidently saw that too, and he came back to the familiar. “I wonder, Mrs. Lee, whether Mr. Chao Mu Bai is seeking to take over your father’s bank because he wants it, or because someone has told him to want it.”

  I was pleased with myself for noticing Simon’s shift to Mercury’s Chinese name. He was telling us that Mercury should be considered in the context of China, not just as a Hong Kong person. What I failed to notice was that Amanda accepted without demur Simon’s premise that Mercury was going to make a bid.

  “Well, he says,” she responded, “that it would be better for there to be one local bank that could compete with Waifong, rather than for the two of them to compete with each other.” She paused. “He’s said it in the press.”

  Simon looked at Serena. “Waifong is the Hongkong Bank?”

  “Correct.”