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the sweat with his cotton cap. A policeman is questioning him. He takes out his driver’s license in its red plastic folder, and the policeman confiscates it. He immediately protests.
    “Why are you making excuses? If you’ve run over theman, then you’ve run over him!” A youth pushing a bicycle yells out.
    The conductress wearing sleeve-protectors comes out of the bus and rebukes the youth. “He was trying to get himself killed. The horn was sounding and the bus had braked, yet the man wouldn’t give way. He just went under the bus.”
    “The man was in the middle of the road and had a child with him. It was broad daylight, so he must have seen him!” someone in the crowd says angrily.
    “What does it matter to drivers like him if they run over someone? He won’t have to pay for it with his life.” This is said with derision.
    “What a tragedy. If he didn’t have the child with him, he would have got across long ago!”
    “Is there any hope for the man?”
    “His brain came out?”
    “I just heard this plop —”
    “You heard it?”
    “Yes, it went plop —”
    “Stop all this talk!”
    “Ai, life’s like that, a person can die just like that…”
    “He’s crying.”
    “Who?”
    “The driver.”
    The driver, sitting on his haunches with his head down, has covered his eyes with his cap.
    “He didn’t do it deliberately…”
    “If this had happened to anyone, they would…”
    “The man had a child with him? What happened to the child? What happened to the child?” someone who has just arrived asks.
    “The child wasn’t hurt, it was very lucky.”
    “Luckily the child was saved.”
    “The man was killed!”
    “Were they father and child?”
    “Why did he have to hook a buggy to his bicycle? It’s hard enough not to have an accident even with just one person on a bicycle.”
    “And he’d just picked up the child from kindergarten to take home.”
    “Kindergartens are hopeless, they won’t let you leave children for a whole day!”
    “You’re lucky if you can get into one.”
    “What’s there to look at! From now on, if you run without looking across the road—” A big hand drags away a child who is trying to squeeze between people in the crowd.
    The Hong Kong star has stopped singing. People are crowded on the steps of the radio repair shop.
    Red lights flashing, the ambulance has arrived. As medical personnel in white carry the body to the ambulance, the people in doorways of all the shops stand on their toes. The fat cook wearing an apron from a small eatery nearby has also come out to watch.
    “What happened? Was there an accident? Was someone killed?”
    “It was father and son, one of them is dead.”
    “Which of them died?”
    “The old man!”
    “What about the son?”
    “Unhurt.”
    “That’s shocking! Why didn’t he pull his father out of the way?”
    “It was the father who had pushed his son out of the way!”
    “Each generation is getting worse, the man was wasting his time bringing up the son!”
    “If you don’t know what happened, then don’t crap on.”
    “Who’s crapping on?”
    “I wasn’t trying to start an argument with you.”
    “The child was carried away.”
    “Was there a small child as well?”
    Others have just arrived.
    “Do you mind not shoving?”
    “Did I shove you?”
    “What’s there to look at? Move on! Everyone move on!”
    On the outer fringes of the crowd people are being arrested. Traffic security personnel with red armbands have arrived and they are more savage than the police.
    The driver, who is pushed into the police car, turns and tries to struggle, but the door shuts. People start to walk away and others get on their bicycles and leave. Theonlookers thin out, but people keep arriving, stopping their bicycles or coming down off the pavement. The second trolley bus leads a long line of sedans, vans, jeeps, and big limousines slowly past the buggy with the torn red-and-blue checkered shade in the gutter on this