Kowloon Tong Read Free Page A

Vanden Plas. Mr. Chuck's cash and "instruments" (that was the word) went to various Hong Kong charities. Already the relatives were loudly protesting, but there was more. Mr. Chuck's share in Imperial Stitching went to Bunt, "as a tribute to my late partner." Except for Betty's quarter-share, Bunt was sole owner of Imperial Stitching (Hong Kong) Ltd.
    On the sidewalk outside Hutchison House, Betty smiled at Mr. Chuck's Chinese relatives, most of them silent now, and said, "Look at them, they're choked."

2
    S EEING BUNT was never simple for his mother. He was two people. Just a year before Bunt was born, Betty and George had lost their newborn son to high fever, chills. The infant Neville they nicknamed Bunt, short for Baby Bunting. She had sung to him,
Bye, baby bunting,

Daddy's gone a-hunting,

Gone to get a rabbit skin,

To wrap the baby bunting in.
    Little Bunt had weakened and died. Betty wept. She said, "You know you're in a foreign country when they call a runny
tummy cholera." She had come home to an empty crib and the accumulated baby clothes in the "nursery," as they had begun to call the box room. This was in Bowen Road, where it is crossed by Borrett, their first flat. The nursery held all the visible signs of her preparation and high hopes, and she knew she was pitiable in her husband's eyes. She felt desperate to have a child—and not just another child but Baby Bunting, she wanted
him
back. They succeeded within the year, and so for forty-three years she often thought of Bunt as two boys, or else as a second child, another Bunt. She knew she would never let him go.
    Bunt had a clear memory of the day he was told about the brother who had died.
    It was at Happy Valley, a day at the races. He had gone with his mother, the amah's day off—where was Dad? He remembered the day especially because he was happier than he had ever known. He liked the tram ride: sitting on the top deck, he had seen the grandstand at the racecourse, filled with people. His mother gripped his hand and let him hold the coins for the turnstile at the front of the tram. Though he could not formulate his happiness in words, it was an intense feeling—of his mother's attention and effort, her closeness, the warmth of her body; it was love. Later, he watched her call out a horse's name, watched her cheer loudly: she had won. She collected her winnings.
    Over tea in the members' enclosure she said, "Bunt, you have to be two people," and she told him why.
    It was so confusing that the boy had his same name and
nickname. As a result, if his mother thought of him as two people, he thought of himself as half a person.
    His father, George—"Geo would have got an M.B.E. at least, if he hadn't of died," Betty said—had never mentioned that first child, never spoke of the loss. It was not because he was indifferent or cold, as many people in Hong Kong believed George Mullard to be, but because he was passionate. Beneath his placid and usually unflappable exterior and his cry of "Mustn't grumble!" was an extremely sensitive and sentimental man. His own mother and father had been. He believed that the English took trouble to mask such emotions so as not to be a burden. Americans cried—American men blubbed all the time. George kept himself in check. He made a point of not disclosing his feelings and revealed his emotional side in only the pettiest matters: the price of postage stamps, a belittling remark about the royal family, or what he took to be wastefulness. "There's not a thing wrong with that banana. The dark spots only mean it's ripe." He opened parcels carefully and smoothed and folded the brown paper; he saved glass beer bottles and returned jingling crates of them to the brewery; he saved string, he was proud of the ball he had made.
    String-saving had led him to Mr. Chuck, for Mr. Chuck also saved string. One day in Victoria Park, rolling a length of string around his hand—the lost tether of someone's