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which helped make it an unfeminine flat, with something squared off and retired-brigadier-on-the-plantation-ish about it. The view from the balcony was almost comically without any trace of the harbour, if you excluded the tiny chink of water you could glimpse between the circular skyscraper immediately in front (known locally, I was to learn, as Phallus Palace) and the blockier but equally tall building slightly beyond it, down the hill and to the left.
    ‘This place has good feng shui,’ said Berkowitz. ‘You can see both water and mountain, not much of either admittedly, but then you don’t need much. When you’re less knackered you must get me to tell you some feng shui horror stories. They always involve a couple who split up, husband tops himself, next peoplemove in, consult the feng shui man, he says the chi is spoilt, moves the fish tank two inches to the right and installs a mirror – feng shui stories always involve a strategically placed mirror – and everyone lives happily ever after. The botanical gardens are over that way. You’ll like them. Hong Kong Park is over there. It’s got an aviary in it. I’m in the pay of the Rotarians. Right, now I’ll leave you to it.’

Chapter Four
    At various moments over the next year or so some well-wisher or other would ask whether I had ‘settled in yet’, or how long it had taken me to ‘settle in’. Even by local small-talk standards it was a stupid question. What would it mean, for an expat on the make (any expat) to have ‘settled in’ in Hong Kong? It’s not a ‘settle in’ kind of place. I felt a near-continuous mixture of exhilaration, panic, culture shock, and alienation, mixed in with another, perhaps deeper feeling of being finally at home. Money was all that mattered. In the decade I worked in UK journalism there was a huge amount of talk about materialism in Britain – all that guff about Thatcher having said there was no such thing as society. Well, I have lived in Hong Kong for a few years now, and I can tell you that every single word about materialism in the UK is bullshit. The whole country is a Franciscan monastery compared to Hong Kong. It is like a fusty family firm where the paterfamilias died years ago and they have carried on doing everything in exactly the same way, except somebody installed a 1924 cash register a year or so ago, and since then everybody has been congratulating themselves on how up to date they are. Money is a typhoon, and Britain has so far felt only its first faint breath.
    On a more specifically practical level, my main initial impression was to do with the fact that nobody spoke English. Okay, that’s an exaggerated way of putting it, a good few people did speak English: everybody at the magazine, for instance, in its shining high-tech office in a hideous skyscraper in Admiralty, where three quarters of the staff were in any case gwailos ; some waiters in some restaurants; policemen, if the ID number on their shoulder of their uniform was red; the staff in expensive and/or centrally located shops. (Incidentally, my ambition to stock myself out with a brand new wardrobe at eye-bulgingly, knicker-combustingly low prices – I saw myself dressed top to toe from this madly cheap Prada factory outlet I just happened to have discovered – came to grief on the fact that Hong Kongwas by now one of the most expensive cities in the world. Real estate again: if the shops in Central are paying more rent than they would be on Fifth Avenue, the Champs-Elysées, or Bond Street, your frock will tend not to be such great value. Now, fake designer clothes – that was a different story.) But apart from that, I was amazed by how little the language had penetrated the place – given, after all, that we Brits had been running the colony for 150 years. Other groups you might well have expected to speak English were, as a rule, remarkable for being monoglot Cantonese: taxi drivers, for example, for whom, unless you were going to