“Of course, like everything else in history, different generations have different interpretations. When I first heard about how grotesque the British narco empire was, I couldn’t believe it. Then, soon after I made inspector, a very gifted Chinese academic from the mainland enlightened me.”
The inspector is watching me closely, like a man dropping hints incomprehensible to the recipient. I have not a clue where he is going. To be polite I say, “What did this historian tell you?”
Chan screws up his eyes in a kind of concentration. “Oh, it wasn’t that he was interested in the human suffering angle. He wasn’t a historian. He was an economist.”
He is waiting to see how I react, so I say, “An economist?”
“Yes. He said think about it.”
“Think about what?”
“Think about why the British, who were quite fanatical Christians in those days, should have blackened their names and their souls for all time by becoming the biggest narcotics traffickers in the history of the world.”
“So, what was the answer?”
Chan loses interest in the map and concentrates on my face. “Suppose, in the logic of empire, they had no choice? Suppose that in their time-we’re talking about the early nineteenth century-there was just enough wealth and employment in China for, say, ten percent of the population. And most of the rest of the world, even working-class England, was in the same boat. The British were almost as addicted as the Chinese. You see, opium was even cheaper than gin. According to this economist, even the great Wilberforce, whom the Brits like to cite as the honorable Englishman who got slavery abolished, he too was an opium addict.” He pauses. “Looked at from that point of view, the opium trade was not so bad. It was a way of keeping twenty million unemployed men docile. As soon as opium was suppressed, China tore itself apart in revolution-and the U.K. lost its empire.”
“A modern Chinese economist told you that?”
“Yes, but only by way of illustration. After all, economists are there to forecast the future. See, his punch line was: the world economy has positioned itself in such a way that almost everyone is going to be unemployed by the middle of this century. The American sucker-consumer is now bankrupt for the next fifty years, and there’s no way Asians generally are going to waste their money en masse on toys like iPods-hoarding is hardwired in every head east of Suez. Americans are strange people. They allow themselves to be bled white by gangsters for generation after generation and call it freedom. But that blissful ignorance may be in its endgame. The consumer economy is already dead-what we’re experiencing right now is its wake. What do you think governments are going to use to keep everyone docile when the shit finally hits the fan?”
“Surely not opium?”
“No. Not opium. Opium is an ugly way of dying. How about cannabis? The Spanish used it in Spanish Morocco to keep the Riff tribesmen sedated. The best thing about it: young men delude themselves into believing they’re already war heroes. They don’t need to kill anyone.” He smiles. “When this economist came here and told a select group of cadres that the PRC was thinking of legalizing it within the next decade, everyone left the room to make calls to Beijing, to get in on the ground floor with one of the consortiums. Imagine the value of a license that permits you to sell marijuana to a significant portion of two billion people. Salivation in floods from Shanghai to Lombard Street.” He pauses. “Of course, there will be other consequences of extreme poverty, worldwide.”
It must be clear from my posture and my expression that I have no idea what he’s talking about. He makes a decision, smiles at the same time as he loses interest in me except perhaps as a distant colleague to whom he should show hospitality. He puts an arm around me as he leads me out of the station. “If you stay one more night, I can get you invited to a box in Happy Valley on the finish line for the Wednesday-night races.”
“Would that involve gambling, by any chance?”
We are in the police parking lot outside the station. He talks to a sergeant who seems to be running the cars. Chan makes a point of opening the back door of the cop car and says, “Remember, no one’s elected in Beijing. That means they have time to plan ahead. They have teams looking fifty, even a hundred years into the future. They have detailed economic and social models. And they don’t have democracy. They know what’s coming next.”
“Like what?”
“Like organs for sale on eBay.”
“Okay.”
“Bear that in mind next time you talk to the Yips.”
“Okay.”
“And tell me every damned thing you learn.”
“Okay.”
“Or forget about entering Hong Kong, or China, ever again.”
“Okay.”
Now my Chinese colleague makes an Elizabethan bow: “ ‘Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ ” He checks my incredulous expression. “See, Hong Kong was still a crown colony when I went to school. The Brits saw their culture as something to ram down the throats of wogs, chinks, and nignogs in far-flung colonies, so they could pretend to be improving instead of exploiting. Unselfishly, they kept very little of it for themselves. I know Shakespeare better than any Brit I ever met.”
Now I’m in a Hong Kong police car racing to the airport. Once I’m in the terminal, I make a beeline for the computers that give free Internet access so long as you don’t take more than fifteen minutes. It’s takes less than one to access Wikipedia: Guanxi describes the basic dynamic in personalized networks of influence, and is a central idea in Chinese society. In Western media, the pinyin romanization of this Chinese word is becoming more widely used instead of the two common translations-“connections” and “relationships”-as neither of those terms sufficiently reflects the wide cultural implications that guanxi describes. Closely related concepts include that of ganqing, a measure which reflects the depth of feeling within an interpersonal relationship; renqing, the moral obligation to maintain the relationship; and the idea of “face,” meaning social status, propriety, prestige, or more realistically a combination of all three… As articulated in the sociological works of leading Chinese academic Fei Xiaotong, the Chinese-in contrast to other societies-tend to see social relations in terms of networks rather than boxes. Hence, people are perceived as being “near” or “far” rather than “in” or “out.”
I have over an hour to wait for my flight, so I find a seat and close my eyes to try to work out what it is that’s bothering me about the Filipina maid Maria. Something I left out, some subtle semaphore. I put the problem together with Chan’s insults about Thai poverty, and I see where I went wrong. I call her, and she answers on the third ring.
“Maria, I hope this is not too late.”
“Oh, no, sir. I am just in a taxi on my way home, so we can talk.”
“Maria, would you trust me to send you a thousand Hong Kong dollars by Western Union? I have to apologize, you must have thought me very mean.”
“Oh, no, sir. That’s okay, sir. We have a very high cost of living in Hong Kong, that is all.”
“Where d’you want the money sent?”
“To my mother in Oriental Mindoro, sir, care of the post office in our village. I think it better if I SMS on this number.”
“Okay, I promise to send it tomorrow. Now, please, regarding the Twins, there’s something you left out, right? Why is there such hostility between them? Why do they want to kill each other? They are beautiful, healthy, HiSo, rich, have the very best of everything. It seems unnatural.”
“Yes, sir, unnatural is certainly the word that comes to mind, sir. So far as I am aware, there are three schools of thought, sir.”
“Okay.”
“The first posits exposure to the nefarious practices of their grandfather, who enjoyed having rivals tortured to death in front of him. There are two strands to this hypothesis, the first being that the girls themselves witnessed such atrocities, the other, more subtly, suggesting that they inherited the old man’s sadistic gene.”