Kowloon Tong Read Free

influenced Bunt in his not going. For many years it had been impossible, then it was merely difficult, but for the past fifteen years you had the impression that a visit to China was demanded of you. Americans went in their millions—and that convinced Bunt that he would never go, even though he was assured that he could easily manage the trip during his lunch hour.
    "I've notified them," Monty said. "They will want to do something."
    "I can't imagine what," Bunt said.
    "And if they make demands?"
    "They can get stuffed."
    Chinese relatives!
Bunt saw himself with a hundred meddling Chinese partners, all named Chuck, in Imperial Stitching.
    Mr. Chuck's funeral at St. John's, Central District, was a solemn affair, attended by the eighty-seven workers from Imperial Stitching, everyone except Maintenance, Mr. Woo. Some of
them seemed ill at ease in the church, others recited the prayers without glancing at the order of service.
    "We're the only
gweilos,
" Bunt said.
    "And him," his mother said, facing the pulpit, where Father Briggs stood in his frilly smock preparing to speak.
    In his eulogy Father Briggs spoke of Mr. Chuck's unselfishness and generosity and the prosperity he had brought to Hong Kong through the success of the factory. It had started as a modest postwar operation and had risen with the colony. It was now a valuable asset. Each time the Mullards were mentioned by the priest, the mother and son frowned so as not to appear frivolous.
    "In a very real sense," the priest intoned, "Imperial Stitching is the best of British. It
is
Hong Kong."
    All this while, in the church, surrounded by the Chinese mourners, Bunt was imagining the Filipino girl from last night, who called herself Baby, getting down on all fours, naked, presenting her bottom and looking back at him and saying, "Let we make puppies!"
    And he laughed, remembering that she had pronounced it
fuppies.
    "Bunt?"
    He recovered and said, "Poor Mr. Chuck."

    The funeral procession stopped traffic, but at Pok Fu Lam a strange thing happened. Like an apparition rising from between two tenements, twenty hooded figures met the funeral cortege. They were Chinese, but like monks in white cowls—druidical and threatening, pagans ambushing Mr. Chuck's
Christian burial. Some carried banners with Chinese characters in gold, some banged gongs, some rang bells. One of the banners displayed a picture of a much younger Mr. Chuck in a black suit and starched collar and slicked-down hair. Children, also in the stiff white robes, carried stacks of fake paper money, like Monopoly money, and small combustible replicas of houses and cars, and wreaths shaped like horseshoes and archery targets.
    "God help us," Betty said.
    Monty spoke to the driver: "Hoot at them! Move along!"
    These were the Chinese relatives. They mourned noisily and attached themselves to the big black cars from the mortician's, howling near the hearse and now ringing bells. At the cemetery they burned the tokens and the paper money. They shot off massive red clusters of firecrackers until Pok Fu Lam, the hillside like an amphitheater, was filled with smoke and the smell of gunpowder and the litter from the shredded tissue of cracker wrappers.
    And then Mr. Chuck's coffin, a Christian cross riveted to the lid, was lowered into the grave, the coffin draped with garlands of flowers and the Chinese paraphernalia fashioned from red and white paper like a mass of broken kites.
    After a week of suspense the will was read in the conference room of Monty's office, Brittain, Kwok, Lum & Levine, in Hutchison House. Betty and Bunt sat at the oval table, the Chinese relatives crowding around, some sitting, some standing, nearly all of them muttering.
    Monty read the will in English and his partner Y. K. Kwok translated it into Cantonese. The terms were clear enough. The
relatives were to divide Mr. Chuck's personal possessions—books, home furnishings, his collection of exquisite perfume bottles, his Jaguar