Kowloon Tong by Paul Theroux Page A

anyway?"
    "Bottom feeding." The man had not hesitated.
    "Excuse me?" Before hearing the bewitching expression, Bunt had seen only the swaying bottoms of Filipinos wearing blue jeans on the dance floor.
    "This place is going to change a lot," Hoyt was saying, gesturing in the dark. At first Bunt thought he was talking about La Bamba, but no. "Hong Kong, with the Chinese running the show? Big changes."
    Americans ignorantly lecturing him on Hong Kong were as numerous as, and only faintly less preposterous than, Americans lecturing him on China. His mother just said, "Yanks!"
and laughed, but he had come to see them as dangerous bores and buccaneers.
    "It doesn't much matter, does it?" Bunt said, because mentally he was beginning to move out.
    "Sure it does. There'll be crime and corruption, backhanders all over the place, police on the take, child labor, pitiful wages, probably whorehouses up and down Central." Hoyt sucked at his beer and said, "All bargains. It'll be beautiful."

    The next day and for several succeeding days, Mr. Hung phoned to advise him of the progress of the deal. Checks were being prepared, the name given to the new company account, Full Moon, was registered in the Cayman Islands—"Where exactly are the Cayman Islands?" Bunt asked Monty, who had replied, "On the Tropic of Cancer, I believe"—and Mr. Hung repeated his invitation to celebrate.
    "Celebrate" meant summon witnesses, snap pictures, swap crummy presents, laugh insincerely, eat a revolting meal, close the deal, sign the papers.
    "I'm busy," Bunt said.
    Sick, busy, helpless—those were his lame excuses, but the truth was sadder: he was dying inside, losing his business and his home, losing his mother, who had turned on him and on Hong Kong.
    "Why not ask my mother?" he said. "She likes a party."
    "This is between men," Mr. Hung said.
    That meant he already had her signature.
    And it also meant that instead of befriending his mother, who was grateful and would have enjoyed a chance to tell him
stories, Hung had attached himself to Bunt, who resented him. It was as though, having proven Bunt to be weak, Hung now wanted to insinuate himself further, to exploit him more, to exhibit ownership, to toy with him, to savor the foreign devil's humiliation.
    Without using the word—maybe he didn't know the word—Hung seemed to want to subject Bunt to a binge. "Must celebrate properly" was all he said, but Bunt knew what he meant: a bust, a blowout, a knees-up, more. That was very English in some ways, Bunt felt, but it was Chinese too.
    Something about feasting revealed a background of poverty and deprivation where there was never abundance, where binging was infrequent and longed for, a fantasy of pleasure that was a kind of greedy madness, like drunks who sang themselves hoarse and stuffed their faces every Christmas until they puked all over their shoes. Many of the English people in Hong Kong behaved like that. Bunt suspected his mother to be that way until she said, "People who do that sort of thing are common," and then he was convinced of her passion for it, because, almost without exception, what she most yearned for she condemned.
    "It's just so pig-ignorant to talk about money the way people here do," she had been fond of saying before Mr. Hung came along with his nine million Hong Kong dollars, each Honkers and Shankers bank note showing a lantern-jawed lion.
    The repeated invitation to celebrate—"tie one on" was the way Bunt interpreted it—would have indicated to any sensible person that Mr. Hung was from a peasant family that had never known a good harvest. Mr. Hung was from China. China was
deprived. They were all like that, well spoken but threadbare, polite but ruthless. They were civilized cannibals, who used napkins and had decent table manners but nevertheless flourished by sinking their teeth into you. Bunt would have been worried otherwise, for Mr. Hung's good English did not hint at sophistication. He was