Tak International Airport on a warm and humid Friday evening, he was dead tired. He had been so excited at the prospect of his upcoming stay in Hong Kong that he’d slept only a few hours since leaving the Midwest Wednesday morning.
In order to reach Hong Kong, which was on the other side of the International Date Line in a time zone thirteen hours ahead of his hometown, he spent more than twenty-four hours on three separate airplanes and in airport transit areas. The long trip had a flight path that spanned parts of the Pacific Ocean and the East China Sea, and it required two intermediate stops. The first stop was in Los Angeles and the second was in Tokyo.
The highlight of the flight to Hong Kong was definitely the final few minutes that it took the Boeing 747 to make its final approach to Kai Tak’s famous Runway, 13/31. While conducting research on Hong Kong, Archibald had read about how the rugged mountains near the airport required a low altitude, hard-left banking approach to the runway that jutted into the surrounding Victoria Harbour. Even so, he didn’t expect the steepness of the turn, let alone the bird’s-eye view he had of people eating their dinner or watching television in the six-story apartment buildings that the plane’s huge fuselage flew by!
As promised, Dr. Chen and Robert Liu were outside passport control waiting for Archibald. Both men were Chinese, but that’s where any physical similarity ended.
Even though Dr. Chen had just turned fifty-two, his neatly combed hair was prematurely gray, just as his father’s had been at the same age.
At almost six feet tall, Dr. Chen was very fit, and the tailored blue suit, white shirt, and silver tie added to the distinguished look that set him apart from all the other people milling around the airport. He wore thin wire-rimmed glasses, and his engaging smile was accented by some of the whitest teeth Archibald had ever seen.
Robert Liu could not have been more different than his employer. The shiny hairless head that sat atop his rotund five-foot-five-inch, forty-year old frame was moist with perspiration. Dr. Chen’s driver wore a dark suit, but it clearly had been purchased off a bargainbasement rack with minimal, if any, alterations. His white shirt seemed one size too small for his bulging neck, and his black tie appeared as though it was slowly choking him, like a python crushing a defenseless piglet. He also wore glasses, but his were horn-rimmed with quarter-inch lenses.
Dr. Chen
However, what defined Robert Liu’s strange appearance wasn’t his bald head, his height, his weight, his glasses, or his clothes—no, not one of those unusual characteristics distinguished him in Archibald’s eyes. It was his teeth. When his full lips parted in a broad smile, two rows of highly polished gold teeth gleamed in the fluorescent light that illuminated the bustling baggage area!
While Dr. Chen waited with Archibald for his luggage to arrive, Robert Liu waddled off to fetch his pride and joy, a black Mercedes-Benz W123 four-door sedan.
As they waited, Dr. Chen explained that Robert’s father, Liu Dingxiang, had been his own father’s trusted driver and bodyguard for many years. He also said that in addition to driving duties, Robert served as his bodyguard as well, adding that out of the thousands of people he employed inside and outside Hong Kong, none was more loyal than Robert.
Twenty minutes later, Dr. Chen and Archibald were sitting comfortably in the air-conditioned back seat of the Mercedes, sipping cold water as Robert navigated a very familiar route toward the Cross-Harbour Tunnel that ran under Victoria Harbour between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. Dr. Chen explained that before thetunnel was finished in 1972, the only way to reach his home on Hong Kong Island from Kowloon was by ferry.
Robert Liu
Although Archibald had seen dozens of photographs of Hong Kong at night, they didn’t do justice to the breathtaking panorama