Fragrant Harbour

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The iconic red-sailed junk that you see in so many images of Victoria Harbour is the Duk Ling, or Dukling, which claims to be the last authentic junk in Hong Kong. It was built in Macau over half a century ago and is still operational today, offering regular one hour cruises of the harbour.

Here I have an advantage over him, having been there in August 1945, trying to attend to released internees, and I can pit my memory against his imagination. This is a fortuitous advantage that a reviewer ought not to take. Still, Hong Kong was a more awful place in 1945 than this account of it makes clear.

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Again and again, the key events of his life happen offstage. On first surrendering to the Japanese, he reports that: 'The soldiers subjected me to certain indignities.' We are never told what these certain indignities were. Later, after he has abruptly broken off his engagement with a high-spirited young Englishwoman, Stewart says: 'It is a conversation that I prefer not to recall.'

Progress was brutally halted under Japanese occupation from December 1941 until the end of the war, with the Hong Kong Chinese population and colonial civilians alike suffering terrible hardship. While the exact number of trees remaining in the wild may be in dispute, it’s clear that serious poaching is taking place. As the rest of Britain's empire gradually achieved self-government, Hong Kong increasingly resembled an anachronism. After the allied victory, Stewart builds up his hotel business, while coming to terms with every local variety of graft and criminality. Maria continues her missionary work. When she vanishes, a Triad victim, it is of more account to Stewart than to the reader, whose nerves are shredded by her awesome rectitude. The pay-off from their polite passion becomes clear in a final section, which introduces a third voice. People are full of fantasies about how to do business in China. The key is that you must find people with power and deal directly with them and be clear about everything and be prepared to pay." (p. 269)A big, ambitious novel that doesn’t read like one. There are no pretensions here. Lanchester’s prose is so clean and his style seems so effortless that one begins to underestimate the real achievement: In four personal narratives from four engaging characters, Lanchester chronicles the history of Hong Kong in the 20th century. Wow. He makes it look so easy. In addition to these and other parts during Ho's segment, I loved nearly everything Tom Stewart had to say. The way Stewart handles himself - always with dignity, loyalty, honesty, stubbornness - makes his character one of my favorite protagonists in recent memory. A man of unwavering principal he is.