The Daughters of Henry Wong

by Harrison Young

“I’m sorry,” said Amanda. “I thought you knew its Chinese name. It means…what does it mean, Wendy?”

  “Wind that brings prosperity,” said Serena. “Who is your chef, Amanda? I have never had snake soup as good as this.”

  “Snake?” said Simon.

  “Local delicacy,” said Sam Canadian.

  “Do we have a chef?” said Amanda, looking at me.

  “What’s wrong with snake?” said Serena to Simon. “You always say you eat rats for breakfast.”

  “Song is our cook,” I said, to no one in particular. And our housekeeper and governess, I said to myself, and more that I haven’t yet worked out.

  “You eat rats?” said Sam the girl.

  “Only metaphorically,” said Simon.

  Sam the girl looked puzzled.

  “It’s a way of preparing them,” said Sam Canadian.

  “I’m sure Song would like your recipe for metaphorical rat,” said Amanda to Simon. Unusually for her, she was on her second glass of wine. “We are troubled with mice here. They come and go like servants. Song poisons them but others appear a month later. It would be much more economical to eat them.”

  At this point Song herself, who had been standing in a corner of the room, approached the table and began to help the intelligent waiter clear away the soup dishes.

  “Hen hao chr,” Serena said to Song in Mandarin – meaning “that was delicious.”

  “Xie xie,” said Song – meaning “thank you.” And then in old-fashioned BBC English: “The next dish will be rice birds. They are only available at this time of the year.”

  A smile flickered on the intelligent waiter’s face. A worry skittered across my brain: how else would Song surprise me?

  “What are rice birds?” said Simon.

  “Sparrows, I think,” said Amanda, who had not registered Song’s previously undisclosed capacity. “Or maybe it’s finches. They gorge themselves on the rice that falls to the ground during the harvest. You eat them whole, except for the beak.”

  “Another local delicacy,” said Sam Canadian.

  Serena was explaining to Sam the girl: “The bones are so small you just crunch them up in your mouth.”

  Amanda was explaining Chinese cuisine to Simon: “They eat everything. The grosser the better. I refuse.”

  “If we could return to the subject of the Party,” I said to Simon, the student in me coming to the fore, “how do foreign countries help those idealists you mentioned?”

  “Very difficult,” said Simon. “It certainly isn’t by huffing and puffing about human rights. Human rights are important, and there are gross violations in China – as in many countries Her Majesty’s Government regards as allies, I might observe – but pressure on that topic tends to do more to strengthen the hard-liners. Or at least that’s my view. I’m a cold-blooded conservative, I fear. No, from a hard-hearted, reason-of-state point of view, what we should most fear is fragmentation, a breakdown of China’s central command structure, because some of the bits China would split into would inevitably have unattractive governments, ruled by unstable individuals, who might wind up with control of a few nuclear weapons. That’s the nightmare. And if you want a more optimistic reason, it is only a united, strongly governed China that will do anything about carbon emissions, though that is hardly my field.

  “The thing that will produce fragmentation is popular revolt, as in the twenties and thirties. And the thing that will produce popular revolt is corruption. So what we should most wish to do is help the straight-shooters, as you Americans would call them, to fight corruption within the Party.”

  “How does anyone do that?” I asked.

  “Very hard,” said Simon with a shrug, “but that’s the way to view the problem, I think.” He turned back to Amanda. “Do you go to the mainland often, Mrs. Lee?”

  “Almost never. I do not speak Mandarin as well as your Serena does. I would be cheated.”

  The party didn’t break up until after midnight. Song let me sleep late Friday morning. “Likee English?” she asked, when she appeared with my tray. Before I could respond she went on in her BBC voice: “This morning we are serving muesli, a European preparation of nutshells and wood shavings, alleged to be slimming.” And then in pidgin again: “Missy sick. Song think Missy hung over. Throw alarm clock at Song. Not Song’s fault.” She paused. “Servants run away. Scared of Missy.”

  8

  The following Monday, Mercury launched his attack. Chao Yinhang announced its intention to make a bid for Pearl River Bank – 57 percent cash, 43 percent shares. I was in Sam’s office, “getting an update,” when the news hit his Bloomberg screen.

  Sam’s office was total chaos, which surprised me.

  “Pay no attention to the mess,” he said. “I’m not actually supposed to let you in here. The place is lousy with secrets: Lantau Island being sold to a Russian oligarch, that sort of thing. But there’s a closing this morning in the conference room.”

  There was a bookcase and a credenza, and everything was covered with piles of papers. On top of the bookcase was a collection of plastic shapes – cubes, oblongs, scale models of buildings – most of them with shrunken “tombstone” deal announcements inside. A tennis racquet and an exercise bag sprawled in the corner.

  “Show me an investment banker with a neat office,” he said, “and I will show you someone who has retired from the fray and calls himself a ‘manager.’”

  “I take it that’s an insult.”

  “In my world, it is.”

  “So what is Simon’s office like?”

  “Bigger.” He paused. “Simon’s office does not look like an office at all. It looks like a sitting room. There is no desk. His secretary brings him anything he needs to look at – and that doesn’t happen very often. You will not become a partner of the firm if you send Simon memos. He is not a manager. He’s an owner. He works smart, to use the American term, but he does not work hard.”

  It occurred to me that my own office was not that different from Simon’s. So perhaps Henry had been training me to be an owner. Perhaps – my eyes watered slightly as the thought occurred to me – perhaps he wanted Wendy to be a gentleman, just as he would have wanted his son to be, if he’d had one.

  “What does Simon spend his time on, then?” I asked.

  “Oh, the usual things: sits on charity boards, shoots pheasants, charms clients, outwits competitors, thinks deeply, radiates ruthlessness.”

  “He seemed very nice when he came to dinner.”

  “Your situation amuses him,” said Sam. “And it allows him to deploy Serena. She’s his new toy.”

  I wasn’t sure I liked any of that. “Because she speaks Chinese?”

  “Yes.” He paused. “Knows about rat soup, or whatever it is you made me eat.”

  It didn’t seem the moment to correct him.

  “But look, you got me in the bargain, and I do know something about the take over business, and I probably wouldn’t have called you unless Simon had suggested it. So be nice to the girl.”

  Sam described Mercury’s offer as “technically interesting.” He said it was worth 18.50 Hong Kong dollars per share. They were offering 10.50 of cash and half a Chao Yinhang share for each Pearl River share. “Chao Yinhang’s traded down to sixteen dollars,” said Sam, “which on the face of it is crazy, because the deal is anti-dilutive.” He showed me some jottings he had made. “Chao Yinhang could have traded down simply as a knee-jerk reaction – a bidder’s shares normally trade down – or it may reflect the market’s belief that they will ultimately make a higher offer. I think it’s the latter, because our shares are at nineteen dollars fifty, or a dollar above the value of the offer. The offer only represents a twenty-three percent premium over our unaffected price of fifteen dollars, which is barely respectable.

  “The way Morgan Stanley have pitched the offer is very clever,” he continued. “They’ve gotten the market to vote for the deal in principle, with price a secondary consideration. That lets you n
egotiate for another couple of dollars and save face. And Mercury buys it on the cheap.

  “He’s pretty confident, I’ve got to say. As long as you don’t tender the family’s shares, he can’t get to ninety percent, so he can’t do a squeeze-out merger, and he can’t consolidate the two banks. He’ll have control, but he can’t get the synergies.”

  “Maybe he figures Amanda will persuade me to tender when it is clear we have lost the war.”

  “Maybe,” said Sam, who had probably been waiting for the right moment to introduce this topic, “a court will declare Henry dead. That could take a long time, but if it did happen, Amanda would be able to sell without your agreement. She’s the key to the whole deal.”

  The fact that I’d already figured that out pleased me, even if the reality didn’t. “But wait a minute,” I said. “What if the court agrees with Zhang that Henry is dead? Would that give Amanda the right to sell?”

  “Don’t know. Revoking a proxy is different from settling an estate. Different judge. He might require more proof of Henry’s demise, as they say, but then again, he might be influenced by the earlier decision.”

  “Amanda has already convinced herself that Henry is dead,” I said, thinking out loud, “but I don’t think she’d sell without my agreement.” I didn’t know if I believed that. “And I’m not sure she knows what Henry’s will says.”

  “Don’t ask her,” said Sam. “It will take a few weeks for the formal offer document to be distributed.”

  “Why so long?”

  “They’ll have to describe themselves in detail, since they are offering their own shares, and they will have to be more forthcoming than they are in their annual reports, because it is a hostile offer and they must assume we will attack the document. Deciding just how much new information to disclose will require negotiation between Mercury and his investment bankers. And when they do publish, we’ll have time to react, and then shareholders have to have a few weeks to decide what to do. You should take Amanda out to lunch.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought you were supposed to be smart,” said Sam. “As we’ve agreed, you may need her support. This needs to be her fight as much as yours. If people see you together at crucial moments, the papers will describe it as such, and just maybe she’ll decide it is.”

  Executing Sam’s advice proved difficult. Amanda had a previous engagement, according to Song, when I returned home. She had gone out and was not expected before three.

  “Find her,” I said.

  “How I know where Missy be?”

  “You know everything, Song. Tell her it’s important.”

  “She want Mosquito. Maybe call.”

  Amanda’s devotion to Mosquito felt like a form of disloyalty. It went after “Big Wendy” almost every day.

  In the event, Amanda was found, and by 1:15 presented herself at Vong, the fusion restaurant that used to occupy the harbor side of the top floor of the Mandarin, wearing 200,000 Hong Kong dollars worth of Ungaro and clearly angry, which was still a bit of a turn-on. No amount of luxury could extinguish the strain of Hakka toughness that gave definition to her calves and wrists and neck, and had bewitched me from our first encounter. Most of the world’s female population would have been very happy with her figure. She had no sense of this. She believed herself to be flat-chested. When we were first married and she sometimes obeyed me, I used to make her pose nude in front of a mirror and tell her how beautiful she was. She would let me go on for a minute or two and then reach for a scarf to cover herself, and tell me I was perverted.

  She was right. Sex is no substitute for affection. I am not a nice person. What I wanted was for her to play with my head the way she had with her absentminded silk dressing gown in her father’s library, to be ruthless. But I’d lost my curiosity value by the second year of our marriage. She was conscientious about trying to get pregnant, but couldn’t be bothered driving me wild. I never considered the question of what Amanda wanted.

  “This is very inconvenient, Wendy.”

  “Being bid for is inconvenient. We have to be seen together, in public and unconcerned. Who have you had to stand up?”

  “None of your business. It doesn’t matter. It was just frustrating to cancel. And what difference does it make? Mercury will buy our shares and you’ll never have to work again. You can buy all the creepy pottery you want.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Song showed me the teapot you bought at Sotheby’s that pours different kinds of tea from different chambers. She said Ming Dynasty poisoners used them.”

  “Amanda, I am talking about the bid for our bank. Why do you say it will succeed? Do you want it to succeed?”

  “We’ll get a higher price than Mercury’s current offer, of course, but why not? Who cares about the bank, really? You only go there because you are supposed to. I haven’t been inside the building since I was twelve.”

  “And Henry? Don’t you think he cares?”

  “Well, he did, but…You still think he’s coming back, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Amanda talked on. I looked out the window. The walls were closing in on Hong Kong, just as Hong Kong was closing in on me. Year by year the property tycoons who manifestly controlled the city had built buildings in front of buildings on newly reclaimed land until no one had a view and the once-beautiful harbor was little but an interruption in the concrete. “Possession Street,” where Captain Charles Elliot of the Royal Navy stepped ashore in 1841 and claimed Hong Kong for the Crown, is now many blocks from the water.

  What could it be like, I suddenly wondered, to be a “Hong Kong person,” as the city’s seven million residents now call themselves? I lived in Hong Kong, just as I’d grown up in sweltering Charleston, but I wasn’t exactly a citizen of either.

  What defined a person anyway – where you lived or where you came from? You could move somewhere, but with airfares so low, that didn’t accomplish much. Beijing took the position that anyone with Chinese blood was Chinese, no matter what passport they carried. This cuts both ways. It means, in principle, that a Chinese-American can never really escape – or at least takes a bit more risk than a Caucasian-American if he goes to China. But it also allows Chinese who remain and make their living in China, and benefit from their membership in the Party, to take citizenship in a foreign country. “I use a Canadian passport,” I remember one very smooth Beijing-based banker telling me. Allegiance didn’t seem to enter into it.

  It seemed to me that if you wanted to be defined as a citizen of X, you had to cut your ties to Y. I wrote to my mother twice a year: a Christmas card and a letter on her birthday. She usually wrote back. Boston grandmother wrote me every month. It was interesting that she wrote, rather than talking on the phone. It’s a way of not crowding a person, I guess, just as she had never crowded me when I was in Cambridge and she was nearby in Boston. If you save someone’s life, it is important not to crowd them, or they will hate you, and she had made a radical difference in my trajectory when she insisted I be sent to Exeter as my father had been. Anyway, I suppose you would have to say that I was still an American, even if I hadn’t been back since graduation, even though I regarded Hong Kong as my home.

  Amanda was still talking. She seemed to have lots of information about the merger business – presumably thanks to another tutorial from Mercury. Amanda normally didn’t crowd me any more than my grandmother did. We just didn’t have anything to talk about – except in theory the twins, whom Song noiselessly saw to. There was fault on my side, but trying to repair the situation involved too much pain. Henry had bought me. Amanda had tired of me. I just had to hope she was Chinese enough to be ruled by her duty to her family.

  I used to think I should invite Boston grandmother out to Hong Kong. She might have come. She’d not been able to come to my wedding, supposedly because of a spinster cousin having a terminal illness. My beautiful mother came. “I’m representing the family,” she’d said. What fami
ly? Henry had been enormously polite to her – earnest attempts to find out what she’d like to see or do, Rolls with driver available every day – and she had responded by conveying the faint impression that there had been some mistake about her identity, which it would be rude and tiresome to attempt to untangle. This tall young man is not my son, she seemed to want to say. I know we are both Southern, but…oh, never mind. Mother got what she wanted out of her marriage: honorable widowhood and endless bridge. She had a glass-topped table with my father’s medals in it, and his first lieutenant’s bars. “Not bad medals,” Charleston grandfather told me once. It was quite amazing, if you thought about it, that when I turned out to be six feet five, I hadn’t thrown Charleston grandfather into the fish pond.

  I sort of knew, without ever fully admitting it, that along with everything else, I’d married Amanda in order to have a father, but I’d never thought of Henry as looking for a son. He’d treated me as a sort of guest, really. He hid his emotions pretty well. Exploring his room at the Castle had shown me that.

  Hong Kong would not be able to throw its buildings into the harbor and reclaim its beauty. People owned them. Just possibly it would be able to reclaim its cunning. I knew a few of the bank’s more interesting customers – not people who could join the Hong Kong Club, but more presentable than Zhang. On a good day they could make you optimistic about the city.

  Amanda had stopped talking and was looking at me. “What are you thinking about, husband?” It was a sort of joke honorific, which she had liked to use the first few months of our marriage, when she was still amazed to be Lee Tai-tai.

  “The seriousness of our situation,” I said, feeling tears well up at the gentleness of her question and only barely holding them back. A waiter came, just at that moment, to take away our plates, and as we waited for him to finish, unspoken sorrow hung in the air.

  “I know how fond you are of my father, Wendy,” Amanda said at last. “But it is time to acknowledge that he is gone, and make sensible arrangements. Hong Kong needs fewer, stronger banks – under Chinese management. They would not like your getting in the way.”