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some no-bones-about-it landmark like the Star Ferry or the Mandarin, you needed a bit of paper with the destination written out in Chinese. It was a mark of how little we had affected the real life of the place. I suppose part of me had thought of Hong Kong as somewhere essentially British, except with a lot of Chinese people scattered about, for local colour.
    But the great thing was that none of this had to matter much, if you were one of the territories’ hundred-odd thousand expats. (Forty thousand Brits and Eurotrash, fifty thousand mainly Chinese–American Yanks, ten thousand odds and ends. I’m excluding the forty or fifty thousand Filipino servants who don’t, for this purpose, count.) You could live in a bubble, and most of them, or most of us, did, earning lorryloads of cash, working and partying hard and concentrating purely on the pursuit of money, which was the one thing about which absolutely everybody in the territory was agreed.
    Gwailo life in Hong Kong was like living in the still, protected centre of the money typhoon. For a start, most of us had servants , which is not a factor you should underestimate when it comes to how easy and protected your life feels. I had Conchita, who was much much cheaper than the flat, at a cost of a few thousand Hong Kong dollars per month. I shared her with a Brit banker who lived two floors upstairs and who I met only in the lift; he had the haggard, masturbatory pallor of a man putting in sixteen-hour working days. Conchita was a permanently cheerful Filipina of about my age (I thought it would have been indelicate to ask) whose normal uniform was a canary yellow T-shirt and blue jeans; she lived somewhere inMongkok, with a bunch of other maids. Berkowitz filled me in on the Filipinas.
    ‘Most of them are educated, capable women, with degrees and training and what-not, not to mention, most of them, husbands and children,’ he said. ‘They come here because there’s no work at home, and they’re subservient to the husband’s mother, who invariably lives with them and dedicates herself to making the daughter-in-law’s life a total misery. They send their money home, so they get the kudos of being the main breadwinner, plus they don’t have to take their mother-in-law’s shit all day long.’
    Conchita’s presence, and her efforts, were wonderfully lulling. She cleaned, washed and ironed, cooked three nights a week, and generally provided a welcome layer of insulation between me and the dreary reality principles of dirty knickers and bedmaking . Her all-purpose, all-weather amiability made it hard to tell, but I suspected (or hoped) she preferred me to previous employers on the grounds that I didn’t make her do as much work. And the best thing was that telling Jenny about Conchita made her gibber with envy.
    *
    The activity which best summed up life in the bubble was junking . Do not be deceived by the faux-Asian term: this meant going out on a big boat to spend time drinking, boasting, schmoozing, and showing off with other gwailos and (sometimes) a few carefully chosen locals. It was fun, and it got you off Hong Kong island, which is one of the world’s great places for cabin fever. The only bad thing about junking was that every time you went out on a boat someone told you the favourite gwailo urban legend , about an occasion when some pissed expat had fallen off the back of one boat and been picked up by another following along a quarter of a mile behind, to be reunited with his chums off Cheung Chau island before any of them had noticed his absence.
    I knew I was making it in Hong Kong when I was invited to go junking on Tai Pan , a boat belonging to a local heavyweight called Philip Oss. I had been in the territory about six months and, though I say it myself, had made a bit of a splash. Asia was full of plump, juicy subjects, lying there just begging for it. The best of these were set somewhere other than Hong Kong itself,because the libel situation in