Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Through the gloomy chill of dawn, a slightly hunched figure can be seen shuffling across Exchange Square towards the beckoning warmth of the IFC Mall branch of Pacific Coffee. It is wild American friend Odell, on his way to the dreaded early shift as assistant head security guard – sorry, Chief Guest Behavior Management Artist – at Disneyland.  He is stopping by for a chamomile and organic calendula latte, getting visibly irritated by the fat man who always pours tons of sugar into his cappuccino, and then making his way over to join me in the most comfortable and spacious yet discreet corner of the thinking man’s Starbucks.

“Jeez, those three whatever-they’re-called guys are out there with the leaflets again.”

“Down Syndrome,” I remind him. He nods.

For several days now three young men – teenage boys, really – with the unmistakable features of the chromosomal disorder have been handing out advertising materials to passers-by on the walkways linking the office towers of core Central.  They are among many dozens of people who publicize pedicure, food delivery, tailoring, gym and other services in this way.  But they are doing it wrong.  First, they are out early in the deserted morning before crowds of commuters invade the district.  Second, they bunch themselves together between adjoining footpaths and office lobbies so they end up offering the pamphlets (for herbal medicine, as it happens) to the same person in quick succession, while other human traffic bypasses them just yards away.

“I wonder how much money they make doing that,” Odell says.

“I bet you,” I tell him, “some heartless bastard is paying them in beads or something.”

My ex-Mormon companion picks up a magazine left on the table and looks at the cover.  It shows someone from the other end of the mentally disabled wealth scale: Stanley Ho, Macau’s casino king, who has just been released from hospital after reportedly having a blood clot removed from his cranium.  At least he didn’t die as some rumours had it. According to the gossip, his medical bill was HK$200 million.

Did they remove the part of his brain responsible for saying extremely stupid and embarrassing things?  Comparing the voluble tycoon at Macau’s chief executive ‘election’ last July with the broken apparent stroke victim wheeled out of the hospital a few days ago, it appears they might have.

On my left shoulder…  No, never mind him.  On my right shoulder, a small, shining winged being with a halo around its golden hair flutters gently up to my ear and whispers, “don’t forget – one must never, ever mock the afflicted.”  After thinking about it for a second, I grab the little angel, hurl it squealing onto the floor, stamp on it a few times and kick the remains under the chair.  But Odell beats me to it.

“Good! Looks like that’s the last crap we’ll have to listen to from that dickhead!”

Indeed. The world of sleazy, casino-monopolizing, polygamist, democrat-baiting, North Korea-linked plutocrats whose opponents’ lawyers mysteriously get beaten up seems set to become a duller place.

On the top floor of S-Meg Tower, in the throbbing core of Asia’s leading international business hub, the Big Boss approves the near-final drafts of the company’s 2009 financial statement and management analysis, which will be released to shareholders and commentators in less than two weeks.  Six of us sit at the special feng-shui triangular table in the conference room, watched over by the conglomerate’s late founder peering from his iron lung in the dark-framed, black-and-white photograph hanging from the wall.  His son, our visionary chairman and chief executive, fiddles nervously with the ceramic three-legged toad that faces north to bring in extra revenue.  The draft annual report is fine by him – it shows a vibrant, keenly managed, highly professional group making a healthy profit and boldly exploring innovative new activities and markets bursting with potential, opportunity and, basically, tons of dough.  But will the auditors buy it?

There is a knock at the door, and two tall men in expensive suits, a graying middle-aged Westerner and a younger Chinese, enter, dragging a bruised, bleeding and bedraggled spotty accountant.  They fling him to the floor and, without being invited, sit down directly opposite the silent and petrified Big Boss.  The elder auditor, Brian, moves some glasses of tea to one side and spreads a sheaf of papers on the table.  He looks at them for a minute and sighs.  “Right,” he says, taking his spectacles off and looking at S-Meg Holdings’ senior management team one by one.  “Well, I thing it’s fair to say that there have been some… issues.”  His sidekick smugly glances at the crumpled head bean-counter whimpering on the faded carpet.  “But I think we’ve sorted them out… satisfactorily.”

The problem seems to have been something to do with deferred tax assets.  It is all over my head.  I gave up trying to understand accounting many years ago when I found that unrealized, year-on-year gains or falls on our investment division’s equities portfolio went straight to the bottom line as part of the group’s profit or loss.  Common sense, at least for private individuals, dictates that although the shares have a current market value, you haven’t gained or lost a penny until you sell them.  It’s voodoo.

Albert the deputy auditor has some questions about the treatment in the Chairman’s letter to shareholders given to one of S-Meg’s most recent, and possibly shameful, projects – a (I can hardly bring myself to type this out) mainland property development.  The company has taken a minority stake, with a local partner owned by some county officials, in a gated community of luxury villas rising out of fetid Pearl River Delta paddy fields and crushing the livelihoods of a hundred evicted farmers.  Is the site really next to a five-star luxury golf course designed by a world-famous champion hitter of balls with sticks?  Is it really just 45 minutes from the border?  Is there really a Hong Kong-standard medical centre nearby?

The Big Boss calls on Johnny Mao, the ‘simplified character’ who runs our mainland division, to confirm that this rather heavy-handed marketing blurb infiltrating the corporate report is all correct.  It slowly transpires that Albert is actually considering buying one of these houses.  “Um, is it a good place for dogs?” he asks.  “I need somewhere for our Dalmatians.  They’re our children!”

Johnny admits that pets will not be allowed in the development.  But, he goes on to explain, there will be special arrangements for people like Albert and his apparently barren wife.  It seems that one corner of the subdivision will be named the Pooch Zone.  Early every morning, a team of workers will enter the area in a truck and scatter lumps of canine excrement on sidewalks and green areas.  There will also be a network of loudspeakers audible to every home, which will broadcast the sound of both yappy and husky barking at random, often lengthy, intervals, 24 hours a day.  Last but not least, every resident will be given a free stuffed toy dog with a realistic tongue, which they will be able to rub their shod or bare feet against to get an authentic ‘master’ feeling.  This way, Johnny concludes, villa owners will enjoy a suitably ‘doggy’ ambience.  Albert seems tempted, but not totally convinced.

And with that – as Ms Lui, the world’s least adequate company secretary, kneels to gently anoint the spotty accountant’s facial wounds with a pack of Nice Day tissues – Brian and the Big Boss shake hands.  Another financial year, another ‘true and fair view of the state of S-Meg Holdings’.

Today is the day Hong Kong indulges in one of its regular games of political charades: the annual budget, in which the government announces its revenue and spending plans for the 2010-11 fiscal year.  The details will be unoriginal, unsurprising, unexciting and, for better or worse, ineffective in changing anything.

Several decades ago, the Big Lychee’s current leaders were junior civil servants.  It was drummed into them that this is a colony: its purpose is to accommodate business; to the extent it requires a workforce, people may settle here, but government should do nothing above and beyond the needs of business to attract or keep them.  Despite their obvious role in creating the city’s wealth, the residents should mainly be seen as a potential burden.  Policymakers must view the population as competing for resources with businesses and government itself and therefore as a threat.

Thus programmed, the junior automaton-bureaucrats embarked on their paper-shuffling careers.  Now, nearly 13 years after the British possession came under Chinese sovereignty, they find themselves thrust into positions of power, in which they robotically implement the only principles of governance they have ever known – those of a politically backward, refugee-crowded, mid-20th Century British colony in which inhabitants are a necessary nuisance.

As part of the usual, time-worn charade, Financial Secretary John Tsang asked the community for its views on what this year’s budget should do, even producing a comic book to reach out to the younger generation.  Pro-government parties, notably the Democratic Alliance for the Blah Blah of Hong Kong, were given a list of minor welfare expenditure projects to pretend to suggest, in order to give the impression that officials listen to and adopt outsiders’ suggestions – an abomination in bureaucratic eyes since the 1840s.  Entering into the spirit of things, pro-democratic groups made similar suggestions, usually adding 10 or 20% to the proposed sums of money to be handed out.  Other commentators, including for some reason the clueless and self-interested society of Australian-trained CPAs, tossed in other vacuous ideas involving seemingly random numbers.

The cause of all the fuss is such measures as one-off allowances for the elderly, small rebates for the tiny number of people paying any tax, or inane schemes to help pay poorer students’ Internet bills. Band-aids, in short. Some subsidies, like medical or kindergarten vouchers or tax breaks for mortgage payers, are probably absorbed by higher rents charged by doctors’ and nursery schools’ landlords and higher prices charged by property vendors – in other words, it ultimately ends up in you-know-who’s pocket.

Some lone voices cry for genuine reforms, like a serious rebalancing of the ratio of capital to recurrent expenditure, a broader and more transparent revenue base or an end to the pathological accumulation of reserves.  (The main consultation document repeatedly frets about the ‘depletion’ of fiscal reserves in recent years and makes it clear that rebuilding the hoard of wealth is a priority.)

Much excited chatter will concern tax rebates, even though only a minority of people will be affected, and none of them will detect a meaningful difference to their wealth.  To paraphrase from the document: of Hong Kong’s 7 million people, 3.5 million form the workforce, and only 40% of that (1.4 million people) pay any salaries tax.  The top 100,000 salaries tax payers (1.4% of the total population) contribute 79.4% of the salaries tax revenue, or 8.3% of total government revenue.  This is, among other things, a reflection of the large number of people on surprisingly low incomes in this supposedly high-GDP economy.  The bizarre numbers in a table:

After a rebate, around 1.2 million of the 1.4 million taxpayers in 2007-08 (they’re still counting last year’s take) paid at a rate of 2% or less, which must have barely covered the cost of stuffing and mailing all those green envelopes.  Even the highest salary earners – 13,000 folk on over HK$3,000,000 a year – coughed up less than 15.5% each on average.

Corporate taxes follow a similar pattern.  Nearly 73% of profits tax (18.5% of total government revenue) came from the top 1,200 taxpaying corporations in 2007-08. Another 78,500 companies paid the remaining 27.4%.  That leaves literally hundreds of thousands of registered businesses mysteriously failing to make enough profit to pay tax.  Even the worst-squeezed find enough loopholes and allowances to pay a rate well below 16%.

What the numbers don’t show is the impact of the huge hidden taxes represented by the high land price (or artificial accommodation scarcity) policy.  This invisible levy is built into many or even most commercial transactions in Hong Kong and is largely collected by landlords and developers who keep a big slice for themselves, like medieval tax farmers.  For people paying private-sector housing rent or paying off a mortgage, the real personal tax rate in Hong Kong is probably far closer to the 35-40% people pay in the Western world.  For people like me, who paid off the mortgage years and years ago, the system makes an above-50% savings rate effortless.  From a purely selfish, personal viewpoint, long may the colonial zombies reign.

The mood on the Mid-Levels Escalator this morning might best be described as ‘borderline personality disorder’, as Hong Kong’s hard-toiling, clean-living, disfranchised middle class struggle to make sense of a world gone mad.

No fewer than four of us gliding gently down the hill towards Central – Mr Chan the banker, my neighbour Mrs Ng the marketing manager, Brian the British stock analyst and myself – have all found something called Google Buzz installed on our Gmail accounts.  We are mystified.

“Apparently,” Mrs Ng says, “it’s a new way to share updates, photos, videos, and more.”

“So what’s email for?” asks Brian.

I remind them that there is something special about this new…thing: “You can follow people to see their buzz.”

Bewildered looks.

“Well, that’s what it says.”

“I don’t want to see anyone’s buzz!” Mr Chan says.  “What would my wife say if she caught me?”

A schoolgirl just in front of us can’t help overhearing and turns round to explain it all.  “It’s like Facebook.”  In other words, she goes on – for we have no clue what Facebook is for either, even though we have had accounts full of ‘friends’ thrust upon us – you can find out what people you know are doing, and they can find out what you are doing. “You stay connected!” she concludes.  We all look at each other doubtfully.  It sounds like hell.

It gets worse.  On the walkway over Hollywood Road we take a random sample of 10 of our fellow commuters and discover that 40% of them are wanted in Dubai for the killing of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh after apparently having their identities stolen by Mossad.

It’s the last straw.  We’ve got to get out of this place.

“Let’s all emigrate to Yoho Midtown!” someone shouts.

Thus it is that barely an hour later a small fleet of taxis passes through the Western New Territories’ sprawl of colourful container storage yards, ranks of gray housing blocks and elevated roads, and arrives at a large construction site just a stone’s throw from the Yuen Long Highway.  We all get out and admire the two rows each of four towers.  Come September, they will be sparkling palaces in the sky, according to the artist’s impression.  Today’s Standard notes with approval that prices at the development will reach up to HK$9,000 a square foot.

There is even a rumour that some of the apartments come with a view of Shenzhen.

Two smiling young ladies in Sun Hung Kai sales personnel uniforms greet us and escort us into the MeWe Delight Express to learn more.

“Yoho Midtown,” the shorter of the pair announces with an extravagant wave of the arm, “is the embodiment of the MeWe concept – the spreading of happiness from oneself (‘me’) to family, friends and the community (‘we’).”  She beams at us while we take this in.  “The constant joy in this harmonious environment,” she goes on, “motivates Yoho people to share happiness with others.”

Mrs Ng peers out of the window at the giant slab.  “You know,” she says, “it’s like a huge beehive.”

The taller sales girl, suddenly glaring, swiftly approaches and, to our horror, delivers a vicious slap across Mrs Ng’s face, leaving the petite marketing manager sprawling across the laminated pine-effect floor surrounded by glossy brochures.

“No!” the brutish sales agent shouts.  “Not like beehive!  Beehive has lots of bees flapping their wings at the entrance for air-conditioning!  Not here!  Every apartment comes with Toshiba multisplit condensing units!  Beehive made of waxy material with natural anti-fungal properties!  Not here!  Yoho – pure concrete!  Beehive residents all have millions of eyes and make honey!  Not Yoho people!”

The first Sun Hung Kai girl claps her hands to regain our attention.  “Sorry about the misunderstanding.  As I was saying, Yoho Midtown is where ‘individual’, ‘connectivity’ and ‘space’ are unified. Expand your horizons, yet…” a shudder of déjà vu ripples down my spine “…stay connected.”  She hands out mortgage applications and adds, “A progressive community, a unique world without limits!”

As Mrs Ng dusts herself off, Mr Chan turns to us.  “I don’t want a world without limits.”  Back to the Mid-Levels.

Thursday evening

To wild American friend Odell’s hovel in the ratty, greasy, malodorous region of lower Escalator Land for a meeting of the Mid-Levels Welcoming Committee for the Society of Truth and Light.  While we are waiting for the others to arrive, the conversation leads the ex-Mormon to ask me an impertinent but I suppose fairly common question among friends: “What’s the strangest place you ever had sex?”

I think about it for a few seconds.  “Singapore.”

“Huh?”

“It’s a really strange place.”

As he mulls this over – he was hoping to regale me with tired tales of bygone, nocturnal rutting on the Star Ferry – the buzzer near the door sounds.  He picks up the phone on the wall and tells the visitor downstairs to come on up.  “We’re on the second floor, even though the bell says it’s the third…  Yeah, one of those,” he says before pushing the button.  A minute later, a short dark man in a Food-by-Fone vest and an old open-faced motorbike helmet is handing over a large flat cardboard box in exchange for cash.

While his Thai wife Mee expresses delight and surprise at not having to cook, Odell puts the box on the coffee table, opens it and pulls out a triangular slice of stringy pizza.  He examines the topping closely.  “Damn!  Squid, mango and thousand-island – again!  Oh well.”

Mee looks happy, though.  “I like!”

As we chew the reasonably edible fast-food, I have to ask: “Why did you order it if you don’t like it.”

Odell wipes his mouth with a tissue.  “I didn’t,” he says.  “The people above us chose it.  The doorbell unit outside uses the American system of floor numbering – first, second, third – while the numbers inside use the British system – ground, first, second, etc.  Dickheads upstairs haven’t worked out that their ‘third’ floor bell rings this apartment.”  He looks slightly sheepish.  “And I’m hungry.”

Soon after, the other members of the Welcoming Committee arrive.  The chairman explains that the Society for Truth and Light will be collecting ‘flag day’ donations on Hong Kong Island on Saturday.  The fundamentalists will divide the proceeds equally among the organization’s three new exciting projects:

• The Spiritual Pollution Addicts Correction Institute, a mosquito-infested rehab facility in desolate Shui Hau village, Lantau, that will receive, on the recommendation of a special panel of Evangelist senior police officers, pro-democracy political activists, protesters who appear on magazine covers in their underwear and deviants who look at unhealthy Internet sites.
• The Junior Anti-Sex League, a youth outreach mission dedicated to mentoring young people so they receive the grace of the Holy Spirit in their hearts and stop touching their private parts.
• Hong Kong Homosexual Rescue, which cures gays of their sickness using a special aversion therapy involving ice-cold baths and Cantopop and is guaranteed to turn them (Odell starts nodding at this stage) into red-blooded straights who reflexively copulate furiously with strangers of the opposite sex late at night on cross-harbour public transport.

Details of our welcome for the Society tomorrow must remain a closely guarded secret.  However, I can reveal that it will involve abducting the children for de-programming in an amusement centre full of ketamine-addled compensated-dating teens, and forcing all the adults to spend the whole Chinese New Year long weekend drinking San Miguel, smoking Salem Lights, betting on the Happy Valley horse racing and watching such porn movie classics as Mongkok Schoolgirl Sluts Go Wee-Wee – in 3D. For a charity, these people need serious help, and we can provide it.

8.31 pm Quite a big turnout!  We are here this evening in the modestly ornate ballroom of Government House for a state dinner hosted by our dashing Chief Executive Donald Tsang in honour of His Majesty King Letsie III of Lesotho.  As well as leading government officials, most of our top tycoons have been invited.  I am representing the Big Boss, who – as a result of a sudden problem at S-Meg Holdings – is sadly unable to make it.

8.34 I find myself seated towards the more obscure end of the lengthy banquet table.  A fetching lady on my left is called Olivia.  Her name card shows her to work at a senior position in Takchosau – ‘virtue and integrity’ – one of Hong Kong’s biggest and most widely respected property development empires.  She is representing the conglomerate’s chairman, who sadly cannot make it.

8.35 A bright-eyed young man joins me to my right.  He introduces himself as  CK.  He is a high-flying member of our loyal and dedicated civil service, and is representing one of our top, ministerial-level policy secretaries, who sadly is unable to be here in person this evening.  I ask why his boss didn’t send one of her political appointees – the assistant secretary or political assistant.  He just giggles rather shyly.

8.36 Who should be seated across the table from me but Damien, the company gwailo at the Cantograb Group?  He is representing the managing director, who had an urgent matter to attend to, and is visibly making the most of the Government House wine cellar’s pouilly fume.  And… who should be strolling up to sit at his left, dead opposite me, but the delectable administrative officer Winky Ip?

8.37 Winky has greeted the man to her left, a partaker of black hair dye with a little red flag in his lapel.  After a cold, brief “ni hao” she turns to Damien.  She does not apparently like what she sees.  Understandably.

8.40 Things should have started by now – there’s some delay.  The king is a long way to the left of us, but looking very fine in his leopard skin robe and cheerfully letting other guests touch his ceremonial knobkerrie.

8.42 Winky evicts CK and sends him to sit next to the mainlander, who is apparently sitting in for a senior director at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, who was called away urgently.  I ask why our top officials aren’t sending their political appointees on their behalf, and she groans.

“Well,” she starts, then stares at the table.  “Look at that.  Why do you think?”  I look at the sparkling crystal glass, the shiny bone china and… the gleaming silver cutlery.  Ahah.

“Yes,” Winky mutters.  “Knives and forks.  Even if their table manners were up to it… I mean they’re just not, you know, presentable.”

I idly opine that a particular assistant minister could be considered quite nice-looking.

“Cute?” she snaps back at me.  “She’s just a jumped-up Legco assistant!  And she’s got hairy arms.”

8.48 Donald Tsang’s wife is announcing something about having to start without her husband, who has sadly been detained by an unforeseen, critical matter.

8.50 King Letsie III rises to say a few words about the close and historic ties between his country and the Big Lychee.  Lesotho, he explains, has a pro-business government, with low taxes, a clean bureaucracy, good infrastructure – if not quite at Hong Kong standards (polite laughs all round) – and rule of law.

Damien knocks back his third glass of wine and turns to our end of the table.  “Just like Hong Kong!” he whispers.  He leans further round to address the blank-faced mainland official.  “Because they were both British colonies.”

8.52 As the king sits to applause, the waiters suddenly appear and start serving salad.

“Hem!!”  Damien hisses across the table and jabs a thumb in the direction of the royal guest. “Isn’t this the Johnny with 38 wives or something, paid for in cattle?”  I tell him he must be thinking of Swaziland.  We wouldn’t entertain a mega-polygamist here, surely?  What would the Society for Truth and Light say?

8.54 Winky is patiently explaining to Olivia that Lesotho is in Africa.  “No, not near Haiti – believe me, Haiti isn’t in Africa.”

8.55 At last!  Something to eat!

More evidence of the dangers of trees comes to us from Macau, where one has been used to dangle an allegedly criminal and (non-allegedly) deceased Korean.  “The man was wearing a yellow T-shirt and jeans,” reports the Standard, helpfully providing a photograph on the off-chance that we doubt the accuracy of their description of his final choice of apparel. This use of an overgrown botanical beast as an accessory to murder comes after last year’s spate of killings and injuries by arboreous life-forms that leaped unprovoked upon innocent bystanders in various parts of Hong Kong, thus ruining our reputation as the world’s safest city in which acid is thrown from rooftops.

It all goes to show how wise and correct the Big Lychee’s government is to eradicate virtually all species of plant in our urban areas, replacing the banyans, rosewoods and other pests where necessary with concrete replicas painted pale blue.

There is even talk of chopping down the bauhinia near Wellcome supermarket on Robinson Road – the last remaining piece of vegetation more than a foot tall in the Mid-Levels.  On the one hand, it would rid the neighbourhood of the disgusting grey-green slime that for some reason always covers tree bark, and the noxious smell emitted by the leaves after they fall in late summer.  But on the other hand, what would we nail Jehovah’s Witnesses’ ears to?  I don’t envy the devoted personnel of the Tree Risk Assessment Office having to sort that one out.

What else is going on in the world?  Fund manager James Chanos says China is about to crash like “Dubai times 1,000,” and Google is telling Beijing to take its World’s Most Massive Consumer Market and shove it.  This could be the turning point where the Next Great Global Superpower story fizzles out and the 21^st Century goes back to being another American one after all.  Otherwise, not much happening.

Click for The Seeds!

She is a nicely proportioned, attractive and – now I think of it – high-earning woman, and she looks me in the eye and sighs.  “Hemlock, you really should come to see me… well, at least once a year.”

My heart swells.  How many appealing members of her gender would say such an accommodating and tolerant thing?  Not like that clingy, needy, possessive, dependent whining you get from girls who insist on emails, calls or even personal visits every week, or even every few days.  But there is one problem with this one.  She is Dr Amy KK Au-Yeung BDS DPDS, and she is looking through my records just before replacing a crown that came loose just before Christmas.

I vaguely ‘concur’, as we educated folk put it, lie back and obey the instruction to “open wide.”  The plastic temporary cap comes off, with a bit of a struggle, and the gleaming new porcelain one glued precisely and beautifully into place within moments.

So that’s it then?

No.  Once in there, she is reluctant to leave, and she is soon prodding, poking and probing her way around my oral cavity, murmuring “hmmm… OK… mmm…” softly as she proceeds.  Then, resting her hand firmly on my shoulder, she makes a signal to the dental world’s most spiteful and resentful hygienist, who swiftly locks the door.  There is no escape.  “Right – just a quick clean-up.”

Seven hours of agonizing scraping, chipping of barely existent plaque and mutilating of innocent healthy gum follows, the brutal hygienist viciously thrusting the saliva extractor around my cheeks and palate the whole time.  After a round of frenzied polishing with a little brush-tipped drill, Dr Au-yeung introduces some fiendish new contraption into my mouth.  It buzzes like a mosquito, and when my tongue contacts it, it feels burning hot.  I open my eyes to try to see the thing, but the hygienist – malevolent eyes staring at me over her surgical mask – swiftly adjusts the light upwards and dazzles me.  No looking at the equipment.

Eventually, they withdraw all their instruments and pull my near-lifeless body up to the little sink so I can wash the bloody residue out of my mouth.  Her sullen assistant’s back turned, I ask Dr Au-yeung what the hell that thing was.

“An ultra-sonic cleaner,” she replies, holding the black, streamlined device up with the chirpiness of a TV advertorial presenter.  “It removes even the most stubborn stains.”

Stains?  As in tea, coffee, orange juice, tiramisu, etc?  As in ‘stains that present no known health risk’?  Where, pray, were these stains?  She reveals that they were behind my front teeth.  A place totally invisible to anyone other than a particular person with a little angled mirror on a stainless steel handle.  Often not even once a year.  How self-centred can a woman get – rearranging the appearance of a hidden part of my body just to suit her own picky preferences?

“See you in 2011,” I say as I leave.  If you’re lucky.

Click for the Easybeats!

A small card in the mail box at Perpetual Opulence Mansions informs me that I have some sort of special delivery awaiting my personal collection at the post office.  Could it be the bulging parcel of genuine Turkish delight, or lokum – sadly unavailable in Hong Kong – that I was hoping someone would be sending me?

Alas, it turns out to be no more than a registered letter (as I would have known had I curbed my excitement and examined the card).  A registered letter is not necessarily good news.  It could, for example, be a court summons following an unpaid fine for loitering, a cuckold challenging me to pistols at dawn, or – most probably – some impertinence from the government.  But in this case, the envelope is plain, which is probably a good sign, and I recognize the way it is addressed to me as that used by HSBC, purveyors of fine banking services to the gentry.  Suspecting a new credit card, I gently feel and bend it – there is something in there, but it is not a bit of plastic.

Ignoring the slightly startled stares of passers-by, I tear the thing open in a frenzy just outside the post office doorway and find myself with… seven Park N Shop HK$100 tokens.  Plus a letter thanking me for participating in a unit trusts promotion and telling me that, having met the conditions of the offer, I am now entitled to what they quaintly call the gifts.

So Ms Gladys Lo, personal financial services officer at HSBC, thinks that I invested in a mutual fund purely to get some free groceries, does she?  Could she, by any chance, also be the sort of person who thinks it is cute when dogs sniff each other’s bottoms?  I have a sixth sense about these things – it is never wrong.

I normally avoid unit trusts/mutual funds on the grounds that their up-front fees are a rip-off, exchange traded index-trackers provide cheaper and easier asset-diversification, and I do a better job of stock-picking.  However, a few months ago, I did put some money into a commodities futures fund that was available free of sales charges to HSBC’s most favoured and handsome customers.  But it is a modest hedge to put a bit of balance into a lopsided portfolio – not some desperate attempt to qualify for a year’s supply of noodles and detergent from our local supermarket duopoly.

I haven’t been this insulted for… weeks.

To make myself feel better, I will click on the picture of Marks & Spencer’s chocolate mint stirrers (“Perfect [as in ‘pointless other than’] for after dinner coffee”) over and over for the rest of the day.

The final results of the exciting East Asian Games are in.  As expected, Hong Kong, China performed abysmally, while Chinese Taipei, China was downright mediocre, and Macau, China a disaster except at fan-tan and blackjack.  In fact, People’s Republic of, China reaped virtually every medal on offer, leaving only a few meager crumbs for the junior members of the Middle Kingdom and the Outer Mongolians, barbarian Koreans and unrepentant militarist devil-dwarf-dogs responsible for the Rape of Nanking.

All agree that the biggest and most miserable failures of the competition were the team from Guam – initially welcomed as ‘plucky little Guam’, but within days universally derided as ‘ridiculous and pathetic embarrassment little Guam’, unworthy to be a member of the happy East Asian family of nations, divided nations, city-states and breakaway provinces, and henceforth to be banished to an obscure spot 1,700 miles out in the Pacific Ocean.

The Guamian team consisted of a swarthy, tubby guy in a loincloth with tattooed face and buttocks, and a petite, dusky woman clad in coconut husks who was – according to conflicting reports – his trainer, dance partner or lunch.  Their catastrophic efforts in the Latin Cha-cha-cha and Jive competitions earned them the wrath of the Guamese diaspora worldwide and, according to the Guamish Daily Gleaner, could result in their imprisonment under the Guamite penal code’s harsh sentences for acts that bring the nation into terpsichorean disrepute.

Having embraced the East Asian Games with such obvious enthusiasm, the people of Hong Kong are now widely expected to be given the immeasurable honour of spending yet more billions of dollars on hosting the Asian Games in 2019.  As well as Greater China and northern Asia’s yurt-dwelling, grass- and dog-eating and war-criminal elements, this regional Olympics includes sportsmen from the Orient’s sweatier climes, such as badminton-crazed Malaysians and Indonesians, the polo- and cricket-whizzes of the Indian subcontinent and Vietnamese shuttlecock-kickers, plus puny Singaporean weenies upon whom everyone else will take great pleasure in stomping – as they did with the Guamanians.

A committee of top Hong Kong officials is standing by to design the mascot.