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student who’d obtained a hundred per cent and drag him off to some quiet spot, saying, ‘Come on! Let’s do some swotting! You ask me fifty words, and I’ll ask you fifty, so I can learn to be a genius like you, and get a hundred out of a hundred.’
    Then he would proceed to wipe the floor with the hundred-percent hero, and leave him glaring helplessly. With the dictionary tucked under his arm, the hero muttered, ‘A noun is . . .’ and Ma would at one fell swoop obliterate all the humiliation of his thirty-five per cent.
    Mr Ma was a Cantonese, but had lived in Peking since childhood. He would always tell people he was a native of Peking, until Mr Sun Yat-sen ’s Three Principles of the People rose in market value and the power of the National government in Canton expanded, whereupon he arranged for the words ‘hailing from Canton’ to be printed upon his visiting card.
    After graduating from the Methodist school, he scrambled around trying to find himself a wife, and succeeded. With a bit of inherited property and Ma’s elder brother helping them out, the couple were able to live a jolly little life in complete harmony together. Ma Tse-jen sat the exam for the Board Of Education several times, but his papers failed to shine, and he was obliged to forgo all hope of a position there. Through a connection, he tried to find work with foreign interests, but his English wasn’t up to it. Someone recommended him for an English-teaching post in a school, but he wasn’t going to pick up the cane and turn himself into a teacher – not him!
    Out of work and at leisure, he would discreetly visit the singsong houses, returning home late, and sometimes the cosy couple would have a minor squabble. But fortunately, as it was night-time, no one else knew of it. On other occasions, he’d take his wife’s gold ring, and slip off to pawn it. But he’d always cheerfully promise to buy her a new one once his elder brother sent some money. Half vexed and half smiling, she would give him a good telling-off. This only put him in even better spirits, and he would narrate the detailed saga of how he’d come to pawn the ring.
    Three years after the marriage, Ma Wei was born. Ma Tse-jen wrote to his elder brother, asking for some money so that he might provide for the customary ceremony when the child reached the age of one month. The elder brother’s money duly arrived, and thus it came about that on the thirtieth day after Ma Wei’s entry into the world, all the family’s relatives and friends partook of a gargantuan feast. Even the neighbour’s pregnant dog came round for a gnaw of some pig’s trotters and fish bones.
    Now the young couple had taken a step up in society, having made the transition from ‘man and wife’ into ‘parents’. Although they had no exact notion of parental duties, they were amply aware of their moral obligation to display their parental status and dignity. So Ma Tse-jen stopped shaving his upper lip, and in two or three months he had duly grown a small black moustache. As for Mrs Ma, to match her husband’s dapper black moustache she took some of the rouge off her cheeks, leaving them only half as red.
    A most tragic event occurred when Ma Wei was eight years old. Mrs Ma, possibly through overeating or catching a chill, suddenly departed this life. Ma Tse-jen was utterly grief-stricken. To be left with a child of eight and nobody to look after him didn’t matter so much; what was worse was that Ma Tse-jen had been married to his wife all those years and never acquired her any noble titles through his own achievements. He’d let her down, and he felt thoroughly ashamed. He found huge teardrops coursing in one continuous stream down his cheeks, and he wept until his little moustache resembled the tiny sugar brush of the honey-twist vendors.
    All the cost of the funeral was borne by his elder brother. What did it matter whose money it was? You have to give the deceased a decent send-off, after