Big Lychee, Various Sectors

I start the day stirring my congee in the booth with the window view in the charming Formica surroundings of Yuet Yuen restaurant – one of the last remaining family businesses in this edge of Central now largely blanketed with stores selling designer-label scented candles, fine handcrafted elite stationery, exclusive lifestyle collections of silver and glass ornaments, and impractically shaped jars of brightly coloured wellness products. Opposite me, ever-ravishing Administrative Officer Winky Ip dabs ladylike traces of chili onto her noodles and then turns her laptop round to show me something.

“Do you remember this email from about three years ago? It was originally sent to every legislator. Then your boss got it, my boss got it, every government minister and public figure got it.”

I take a look and it comes back to me immediately. It was one of those something-for-everyone rants by someone who had simply suffered too much injustice and had gone over the edge. It had expat (in fact, Singaporean) housewife anguish, middle-class rage, more than a dash of seething kiasu, and GENEROUS USE of UPPER CASE to MAKE THE POINT.

The last straw for this woman – and she was not alone – was a woeful government decision to retroactively suspend a levy paid by employers of Filipino and Indonesian maids. It all came down to whether the maid was hired before or after 1 August. Rather than rejoice in others’ good fortune, employers who had already signed a new contract and had to pay the HK$9,600 railed at the great unfairness of it all.

Dear Legco members, I strongly believe that the policy is SO UNFAIR to the employers who have just signed a new contract with our domestic maid.  I have just signed a contract to employ a domestic maid in July therefore unfortunately not able to benefit from this new policy.

Having been in Hong Kong for over 20 years and being a faithful tax-payer all along, I am EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTED  with the Hong Kong SAR government.   I am not able to take  advantage of any of your government benefits, such as  purchasing a government subsidised flat, government medical  (how to, when you see hundreds of Chinese immigrants who  never pay tax queuing up, etc.), crapy local school systems  which made the children become ‘white mouse’ (B.T.W, I sent my kids to ESF, a British International school in order to  avoid further suffering), despite the loads of money that I  have been paying for the tax to the Hong Kong government.

Keep paying and paying to SAR HK Government, contributing so  much to Hong Kong, but yet NOT A BIT OF RETURN at all.  And  on the contrarary have to suffer from the soaring inflation,  depreciation of Hong Kong currency against Singapore dollars  and Renminbi, etc., it’s high time that I should decide to LEAVE HONG KONG FOREVER, together with my family.  Indeed, Hong Kong is NO LONGER AN ATTRACTIVE PLACE FOR FOREIGNERS TO STAY ON, ALL MY FRIENDS AGREE TOO! I urge that the new policy be taken with immediate effect  so that we will not suffer further.  I am getting more and more disappointed with Hong Kong Government, especially our  CEO, Mr. Tsang. The scandals in the Hong Kong Government have fueled my disappointment.

I grin at the memory of this nice little rant arriving in the email in-boxes of Hong Kong’s great and good. “She sent another one just the next day, didn’t she?” I ask Winky. A few taps at the keyboard, and up it comes…

Dear Legco, Both my husband and I are completely disappointed with our Hong Kong Government!  My husband loss his job in April this year, as a result of the MTR-KCR deal.  He is a surveyor by professional.  Being a Master Degree holder, he has also other professional such as royal institute, a law degree, a member of many renowned industry associations.  His pay at KCR was HK$48000/- per month.

Tell me, is HK$48000 too high a pay for a professional who have spent years of studies, burning midnight oil to study, to obtain one after another professional qualifications? Despite his significant contributions to the industry of Hong Kong, pathetically, the Hong Kong Government directly led him to become jobless due to the MTR-KCR deal.  My husband, together with 11 other surveyors were being fired together in April 2008.  Needless to say, everybody was very distressed, upset, disappointed with Hong Kong Government!

My husband was lucky enough to be able to get a job to work in a consultancy firm in Hong Kong, however, unfortunately, most of the others have to force to work in overseas country such as Dubai, Middle East, India, etc. and to be parted with their family members.  When my husband queried as to why he was being sacked, they simply told him that his response to the firm commissioned by MTR was somewhat too brief as he had only related to them only 5 years of his past experience.  As a matter of fact, a standard template CV prepared by MTR consultant, required them to only list out the past 5 years of their work experience but he ended up being fired because of falling into a snare set up by MTR!  I hope the Government will seriously conduct an investigation into this case re MTR recruitment process.

Isn’t it pathetic, these people have contributed significantly to Hong Kong, but ended up having to FAREWELL TO HONG KONG. What we fail to understand that while most developed countries will strive to sustain talent workers, the Hong Kong Government on the contrary, force out the talents to overseas and send them away like a ‘christmas gift’!  Therefore, it’s no matter that Hong Kong Government is getting more and more hopeless and the recent poll re survey of Donald Tsang explicitly should tell us how we citizens in Hong Kong are very, extremely, fed up with Donald ‘Duck’ Tsang!!!   Furthermore, all our friends from the middle working class, also share our views about the Hong Kong Government.

They all way that Hong Kong Government is getting more and more BRAINLESS, USELESS, HOPELESS and living in hong Kong is MEANINGLESS!!!

P.S.  now the phillipinos maid commotions!!!!  And our Mr Donald Tsang is happily enjoying his trip in North China. Anyway, we all don’t expect any miracles from him!

P.P.S.  Sadly, I previously quite admire Mr. Tsang, but the recent scandals, such as recruitment of senior government officers holding foreign passports, now the domestic maids issue (I just signed a contract)

At which point, the email fizzled out, leaving just the echoed screech of someone who was borderline unhinged, or at least getting a huge amount off her chest. I would have liked to have written it as fiction, but I’m not that good.

“Well guess what?” Winky says, leaning forward to me. “She’s back.” She turns the screen to me again. The raving Singaporess has been stirred back to life and moved to email the entire Hong Kong establishment by the recent minor spot of bother the MTR got into when its ad agency stupidly threatened to withhold future advertising from a newspaper that ran a negative article on the company besides one of its advertisements…

Dear all, I am writing to express my ‘happiness’ and ‘relieve’ over the recent scandals about MTRC, in connection to OMD advertising issues, last year’s Optopus whereby we ignorant citizens discovered that our personal data had been sold out to insurance firm, etc.

The truth about MTRC, being a public corporation, funded by Government, has no social responsibility at all!  My husband, together with 11 other highly educated, professionals who had contributed to their utmost efforts to work on various Airport and other MTRC infrastructure projects since 1990, had been ruthlessly fired by MTRC!  This group of talented personnel, who had strived for the best interest of HK, were sadly being disregarded by MTRC.  Right after the retrenchment, we got an update that all these professionals left HK for other countries such as Singapore, Canada, Australia, USA, and in our case, Beijing, and due to their departure, their spouses also left HK.

For me, I had just went to the HK Home Affairs yesterday to declare permanent departure from HK, having lived here for over 20 years, to go back to Singapore and also live in Beijing sometimes, to reunion with my husband.  So you see, the HK government has balatantly loss tens, and perhaps hundreds of this elite group who had in the past contributed to paying a substantial amount of monies of tax, a faithfully group of tax payers BUT NEVER EVER ENJOY THE BENEFITS OF HK.  For example, we never have the opportunity to apply for government flat due to our income, never have the courage to give birth in a government hospital due to a chaotic influx of mainland Chinese women who literally occupy all the beds and fill up all government hospitals, my daughter goes to an international school in HK as we never trusted the ever changing, keep on changing, treating all children like ‘white rats’ ‘wonderful’ education in HK (also the shockingly high standard of English teachers over in HK, majority of whom flung their English test), government officials fetching heft salaries, but keep making wrong decisions and never act in the interest of the public, etc.

In retrospect, when I see our lives in HK, we have been paying and paying annually taxes to the HK government, BUT we have to ask ourselves ‘what have HK Government done to return our kindness, especially to the middle class professionals’?  No more infrastructure jobs available to sustain highly professional engineers, there also goes their spouses who, like me, used to work in an investment bank, but HAVE TO LEAVE HK (no choice, otherwise, I might face the consequence of divorce from my husband, having been living apart for so long, it’s high time to join him).

All of us, the past victims of MTRC ex employees were EXTREMELY THRILLED AND JOYOUS WHEN WE LEARNED OF THE RECENT NEWS ABOUT MTRC.  We feel that all the senior management staff of MTRC OUGHT TO BE FIRED as they are a group of brainless, lazy, bureaucratic, ruthless, bunch of shits!  There were 11 talented surveyors, together 11 of their spouses left HK permanently, as ‘eliminated’ by MTRC.  I had also contributed to the prosperity of HK, but sadly had to be ‘eliminated’ by MTRC as well as HK Government.  I am sure you folks have heard about this Chinese proverb ‘you drink the water and you must remember the source of the water’, ie. be grateful to people who are kind to you, BUT ironically, after all we had help built HK to be a  successful place as it is, MTRC (funded by HK government) ‘chopped’ ‘executed’ us, treating us like ‘merely another piece of machinery’ in HK.

Well, well, good luck to HK.  I felt a great joy when I file an oath at the Home Affairs department yesterday as its a relieve that I am finally going to be OUT OF HONG KONG.

P.S.  Keep on taking in millions of Mainland Chinese who come to HK to give birth everyday, and subsequently follow by their aunties, uncles, fathers and mothers who apply to come to HK to receive pensions but not contributing their talent to HK at all.  I wish you all as Good Luck as us.  B.T.W., we actually have to thank MTRC, it was a blessing in disguise, due to being fired by MTRC, my husband got a job from a renowned Australian firm and is now working for a huge project in Beijing.  Both his firm and his client, a renowned top 500 fortune American firm, are so impressed by his professional qualifications, skills, experience and above all, his integrity and character, have offer to extend his contract for another 5 years.  Anyway, after the end of the contract, we don’t decide to return to HK, but will be returning to Singapore, after all, PAP is STILL THE BEST!  We LOVE LEE KWAN YEW!

Magnificent. This is to literature what the King of Kowloon’s graffiti is to painting. I push the laptop back to Winky. “Wow… I wonder if she feels better now.” My congee has been getting cold.

The bureaucrat lowers the monitor of the computer with respect and affection, like a relative gently closing a loved one’s coffin. “I think I’ll miss her.”

“There are plenty more out there,” I assure her.

As dawn breaks over Exchange Square and the first office fodder start marching out of their subterranean production-unit conveyance system, a morose-looking wild American friend Odell seats himself in the softest, grandest easy chair in the IFC Mall branch of Pacific Coffee and takes a worried sip of his organic jojoba and grapeseed oil cappuccino. Always eager to start the day with a challenge, I try to cheer him up with page 2 of the South China Morning Post.

“Isn’t this funny,” I say. “The top headline says ‘Government accused of failing to nurture internet’, while below it says ‘City’s e-economy valued at HK$100b’.”  He glances at it and shrugs. Obviously, I have to spell out the little logical conundrum. “Basically, it’s saying that when the government ‘fails to nurture’ part of the economy, rather than tries to boost it like Islamic banking or medical tourism, it thrives!”

Unmoved, he stares into the distance, roughly where the girl who reads the Bible while mentally undressing me would be sitting if she were here. I flick through the paper and hold up a big report about Osama Bin Laden. “The US isn’t going to release a photo of the corpse,” I tell him. “Spoilsports. What about taxpayers’ rights?”

The ex-Mormon suddenly perks up. “I’ve got a photo a bit like that to release!” he announces. “Same kinda thing – armed men bursting into a quiet home at the dead of night!” He pulls out his Hello Kitty Nokia and shows me a picture taken at some stage in the blur of three-day weekends Hong Kong enjoyed during the last month. He had been sitting in his apartment, in his pajamas, quietly eating a rather late dinner after an evening’s merrymaking in high-class nightspots. There was a knock at the door, and his long-suffering Thai wife Mee opened it to find…

…the entire HK Island Drunk Gwailo Psychopath Restraint Unit inviting themselves in for a little chat.

So this is how the Big Lychee’s version of the US Navy SEALS descend upon their prey. Presumably, the valiant sleuths’ strategy is to use the little bespectacled one in the T-shirt (carrying a club and, in his left hand, a round plastic shield) as a sort of sacrifice, to lure the ferocious and volatile target away from his pizza. As the dangerous lunatic criminal-beast spits the last bloody shreds of black Giordano cotton onto the floor, the ones in uniform pin him down with their .38 revolvers before highly trained kamikaze robots with Uzis come crashing through the window.

It seems that a short time beforehand a taxi driver and Odell did not part on the best of terms. What the cabbie told the cops is anyone’s guess; the fact that he was not so badly mutilated that he could still call 999 and give a no-doubt vivid description of the alleged maniac suggests that half a riot squad did not need to turn up. Nonetheless, poor Odell was handcuffed and processed at the station before being driven around in a very well-manned police van to find an ATM to pay a few hundred bucks bail. (Would you accept credit cards from the sort of people they deal with?)

He is adamant of two things: one, he remembers nothing at all of what happened; two, he committed no wrongdoing whatsoever. Logical conundrums all over the place today. Where will this end up? Mee is baking a cake with a file in it just in case.

I examine the faces of the boys in blue carefully, one by one, and conclude that I would have just hidden under the bed – it would never occur to them to look there.

To the Foreign Correspondents Club for a hastily convened meeting of the Hong Kong League of Gwailos Not Related to Kate Middleton – a select group of just eight people who have successfully buried any evidence of third cousinship twice removed or similar genetic linkages to the supermarket checkout woman-lookalike getting married to Prince Whichever at whenever it is supposed to take place. In London, isn’t it? We are sure of that, at least.

To my delight, we find we have even more in common. None of us has ever seen the film Titanic, putting us in an even more exclusive club than the paucity of blood ties to the latest, sadly unappealing star in the soap opera that is the British royal family. And as if to further enhance an already unattainably elite status, a show of hands reveals that not one of us has ever visited either the Great Wall or the Angkor Wat, nor has the slightest desire to. Is this not the crème de la crème de la crème of discernment?

But wait! There’s more!

Out of courtesy, I give everyone a preview of the publicity materials for that exhibition, including invitations to the opening on the evening of Thursday, May 12…

Inevitably, my fellow members of the privileged few ask me who will be there. “Just about everyone,” I sigh, reeling off a list of prominent and distinguished appreciators of the category of work I like to call ‘this sort of thing’, and not mentioning a few less salubrious names who are planning to turn up. “But,” I add, “not me – I don’t think I’ll be there. Barely, at most.” The other seven all nod their heads in agreement. Wouldn’t be seen dead there, they all agree.

As part of the preparations I recently signed the works. These are prints – on very superior, heavy, glossy-but-not-glossy paper – each to be sold as one of a limited edition of 10. Thus they have 1/10, 2/10, 3/10, etc, written in the corner, allowing lucky owners of the first few of each work to add a scrawl of their own, such as “Must try harder,” or “See me after class.”

“One question,” an inquisitive non-relative of the royal sales clerk asks. “With all respect, aren’t you worried that when these collages of yours are on show alongside all the other Hollywood Road galleries displaying real professional artists, that they’re going to stand out as, well, you know… sort of, um…”

I look at her coolly for a few seconds. This did occur to me when the idea of an exhibition was first put to me. I show her a fuzzy photo taken just an hour earlier through the window of one of the various galleries in that part of town.

Click to hear Fever Tree’s ‘Man who paints pictures’!

“Let’s put it this way,” I reply. “I didn’t the catch the title of this painting in a gallery near the Mid-Levels Escalator, but a perfectly literal description would be Man Contemplating Teddy Bear on Pile of Rubble, because that’s what it is.  Possibly inspired by the magnificent Damien of Drop the Dead Donkey. That’s pretty much a random sample of the, er, competition.” If anything, the danger is that my creations will fit in perfectly.

At this point, the peace of the FCC morning is disrupted by the arrival of a crowd of plump, red-faced people sporting Union Jack T-shirts and loud shorts with black socks, clutching pictures of Princess Kate (if she isn’t in her 40s, why does she look like she is?) and munching pork sausages dipped in Marmite. Loudly ordering specially warmed beer, they sit down and turn to the large screen above the Main Bar, eager to see their distant kinswoman’s big day, walking down the aisle of… whatever cathedral it is.

Click to hear Pearls Before Swine’s ‘Another Time’!

…taken from Why the West Rules–for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris, shows the amount of opium sold by – or perhaps we should say eagerly bought from – the British East India Company in Guangzhou as China’s protectionist trade policies, aimed at accumulating cash as an end in itself, soaked up the supply of silver. In today’s world, at least before China’s current account surplus suddenly vanished in the first two months of this year, the Middle Kingdom effectively exchanges exports for IOUs from the US Government repayable in a currency that will have shrunk significantly in real value. The West rules because others let it?

Hordes of voyeuristic perverts pour out of the closet and onto the streets of Hong Kong, unable to resist the prospect of a whole weekend’s leering at semi-naked, hairy, muscular, latent homosexual men jamming their faces between one another’s buttocks while writhing in mud. Adding to the annual Rugby Sevens strain on flights and hotels are the expatriate refugees fleeing Japan and its marauding mobs of radioactive mutant radishes coming after their kids.

But wait – there’s more!

The Big Lychee is, at this very moment, on the receiving end of a third inundation: the Invasion of the Giant Public-Relations Junket Leeches, trading expenses-paid tours of five-star accommodation and restaurants for column inches of praise more glowing than the Fukushima Prefecture spinach crop. It’s the Exciting Grand Soft Pre-Opening of the World’s Tallest Hotel, the Ritz-Carlton at the top of the 118-storey ICC Mega-Phallus nestling unobtrusively among the real estate/infrastructure/white elephant quagmire of West Kowloon. Never before in the field of human endeavour have so many tiny plastic bottles of shampoo been assembled with such loving attention to detail at so great a height above ground level. Nowhere else in the history of the hospitality industry has the breakfast buffet offered cold meats of such sublime and superlative quality that mysteriously somehow look identical to cold meats in every other hotel on the planet.

And no, I’m not jealous of people with job titles like Hotels Reporter, Luxury Travel. We are all prostitutes, but most of us draw the line somewhere.

In my case, the line just about encompasses advising Human Resources Manager Ms Doris Pang on fine-tuning her brutal personnel policies. Standing before my desk in the gwailo’s lair on the top floor of S-Meg Tower in the throbbing heart of Asia’s leading international financial centre, she fingers her knuckle duster while explaining her quandary in her clipped, slightly Nazi, accent. With extreme reluctance she has authorized the hiring of a group of more-uppity-than-average Hong Kong staff for a technical project. Unwilling to submit to her fascist kindergarten style of discipline, the free-thinking youngsters are breaking numerous petty rules – though of course doing the work perfectly. Specifically, how can she keep the fiends on the premises and stop them from drifting away too early in the evening?

“Ah!” I reply. “The old ‘How can you keep them from the elevators?’ problem.” After thinking for a few seconds, I recall an elegant solution: a short, purpose-made motivational film guaranteed to persuade office workers to stay at their desks all night if necessary…

Before declaring the weekend open, a quick quiz for cerebral types who are above rowdy and drunken ritualistic spectator sport gatherings. What does the following graph show?

A northeasterly breeze chills the dawn breaking over a quiet, faintly glowing Exchange Square. In the comfort of the IFC Mall branch of Pacific Coffee, I find wild American friend Odell sitting in the hidden corner from which he likes to indulge in voyeuristic perving and where I seek refuge from the girl who reads the Bible and mentally undresses me.

I sit down and look around. Something is wrong. First of all: what are they putting in the coffee here that puts everyone to sleep? Decaf is one thing, but lacing the stuff with barbiturates is another, especially this early in the morning. Secondly, where is Odell’s usual pomegranate and organic black cumin seed latte lightly dusted with henna? And what is he grinding up with a cheese grater and stirring into a cup of hot water?

“Toasted acorns,” he tells me. “We’re, um, kinda short on cash for the next coupla weeks, so I can’t afford real coffee. Or tea, or Coke, or anything.”

“So it was you I saw outside just now rummaging through a bin and eating a discarded McDonalds hash brown.”

“Yeah,” he admits. He looks haggard. “My first food since Tuesday. We’ve got something for today, though – Mee has scrounged some neat leftovers from the Thai restaurant down the street. Oh well… Just another two weeks to go til payday.”

He pulls his iPad out of his bag and starts whirling his fingers around on the screen, magicking brightly coloured games, photos and riveting social networking apps into being. As usual, I am thinking far ahead of the slow-witted former latter-day saint. “Why don’t you take that thing to the pawn shop and get a few bucks to tide you over for a while?”

He looks at me as if I am insane. “Man, this is the reason I’m so hard up! Can’t you see? This is the new iPad! The iPad 2. I managed to get one of the gray-market triple-the-real-price ones. Look at everyone staring at me in envy,” he says, waving his arms in the direction of the unconscious customers.

So some gizmo bolted together by nimble-fingered peasant girls in a Shenzhen factory gets shipped all the way to the US to be sold at US$500, giving Apple the huge mark-up any designer label commands, then gets brought back here by some desperate under-class entrepreneur and sold at US$1,500.

“In what way is it better than your old one?” I ask.

“Well…” He looks at the contraption for a few seconds. “So far as I can see, it’s basically the same.” He lifts it up and peers at it for a few seconds more. “Except!” he blurts out, “it’s got two cameras. One on the front and one on the back. So you can photograph both sides of your head at the same time.” Then he comes up with the ultimate justification for his two weeks of starvation. “And most of all, this is a third thinner, man! A freakin’ third thinner!” He sits back with a triumphant nod at the anorexic, 7.62mm miracle of consumer technology. “I mean – jeez – can you imagine? What kinda total freakin’ loser is gonna be seen walking around with a 13.4 millimetre iPad? Huh?”

I put my newspaper on the table. “When I bought this South China Morning Post ten minutes ago I could have paid seven bucks,” I tell him. “But I didn’t. I paid twenty-five bucks for it. And do you know why?” I unfold it and hold it up for him to see. “Because it’s a third thinner!”

The mood on the Mid-Levels Escalator this morning is one of unbridled inquisitiveness as Hong Kong’s disfranchised and neglected middle class try to get to the bottom of the ultimate government whitewash: the painting-over of the stripped pine in the Central Market hanging-gardens corridor. No sooner has the emulsion dried than certain insightful predictions are proved correct, and the job is revealed to be an undercoat with a view to further aesthetic enhancement of the locale.

The work is at an early stage, but there is sufficient outline to see what is happening, and it is not going to be pretty. Heaven knows it is scary enough when our civil servants attempt to be creative. But when they gather in their committees to choose successful applicants among Hong Kong graphic designers vying to demonstrate their artistic imaginations in public, the results can be bloodcurdling. My neighbours and I stand in awe of what is grimly forming.

“That’s so revolting it makes me think they would have been better off knocking the place down and selling it to the property developers to build another mega-tower,” says Mr Chan the asset manager.

Maybe, I suggest, that’s the whole idea. Fortunately, I have a breakfast assignation with sharp and shapely Administrative Officer Winky Ip ahead of me, and I will discover the truth.

The splendorous bureaucrat is stirring her congee as I sit down opposite her in the elegant Formica confines of Yuet Yuen restaurant. When I show her the pictures of the unfolding artistry she is defensive.

“Let’s get this straight,” I tell her. “Exhibit A. You paint over natural wood surrounded by genuine potted plants. Then you ask someone to come along and paint really bad-looking, um, plants over it.”

Winky looks at me suspiciously. “Correct.”

“OK,” I continue. “And then we have this thing here. Exhibit B. A sunset, maybe a bit Van Gogh or a bit pointillist, over a…”

Winky examines my photo. “That’s a cornfield.”

“OK, a sunset over a cornfield.” I look at it myself for a few seconds. “Can you tell me how the sun has come to be reflected in the amber waves of grain?”

“It’s the ocean,” she snaps back. “I was thinking of something else.”

“What kind of an ocean is it that clearly has some sort of vegetation growing on it?”

“It’s the Sargasso Sea. That’s seaweed.”

I personally find such slippery evasiveness rather fetching in female officials, but not everyone shares this taste, and I remind Winky that Hong Kong’s residents expect greater transparency these days. Come clean, I urge her. What’s really happening here?

As we sip tea and prepare to head off to our respective offices, she admits that there is an agenda at work. She produces a story in today’s South China Morning Post: ‘Beijing to build world’s slowest maglev’…

“Tell you what,” I say, “if you give me enough funding, I bet I could build an even slower one.”

“No no,” Winky assures me. “That would be me-too-ism. We’d get criticized for that. But we have to do something to put Hong Kong on the map and make sure we don’t get left behind by the mainland. So this is it.” She points to the pictures of Central Market. “We’re going to have the world’s most unnecessary, ugliest and stupidest urban indoor mural! The decision was made at the very top! Who’s going to be able to beat that?”

Click to hear the Great Society’s ‘Grimly Forming’!

On the top floor of S-Meg Tower, in the heart of Asia’s dynamic international financial hub, Ms Fang the hunter-killer secretary shouts to the three Stanleys in the mailroom. Seconds later, one of the trio of dedicated messengers emerges carrying a bottle of Watson’s water, one pack of Garden-brand Saltine crackers and an egg. As he places them on her desk, Ms Fang pours boiling water into a plastic bowl of Doll instant noodles and sprinkles a little sachet of sesame oil into the mixture. Then she breaks the raw egg and stirs it into the steaming, MSG-laden broth with a pair of disposable wooden chopsticks still joined at the top. “It’s been four days now,” she mutters. “He needs some protein.”

Two managers from the Accounting Department look on glumly as she takes a key from a drawer. They put the foodstuffs on a tray and follow the vicious executive assistant to an emergency exit at the end of Private Office. I tag along behind them as they carefully descend two flights of dusty, ill-lit, bare concrete stairs, taking care on the landing to avoid the little plastic plates of brightly coloured rat poison pellets. We stop outside a sign saying ‘19/F Storeroom’. Ms Fang knocks, waits a few seconds, and then unlocks and pushes open the door.

After the two beancounters go in, the large cupboard is crowded and Ms Fang and I simply peer in from the stairwell. The company’s chief financial officer sits, disheveled and unshaved, on a camp bed from a first aid room. He stares forlornly at the meal set before him by his apologetic underlings.

A hint of humanity briefly flashes in the hunter-killer secretary’s eyes, and she breaks the silence. “Not long now, Mr Poon,” she says. “Less than a week to go.”

“But it’s so unfair,” replies the CFO. “He knows it’s not a real fall in profit. It’s simply a year-on-year reversal of unrealized gains in…” He breaks off in mid-sentence and I have an awful feeling he is going to cry. So angry was the Big Boss with S-Meg Holdings’ 2010 results – to be released tomorrow when eyes are on the Hong Kong budget – that he punished poor Mr Poon with 10 days’ detention. The man’s wife and children have been told he is on an urgent business trip in Libya.

Fortunately, I have some good news. As well as being unnecessarily harsh, incarceration could backfire if the media sense that this senior executive is absent after the announcement. At least, that’s how I put it to our visionary Chairman and Managing Director, who has reluctantly agreed to let his hapless top money man out in exchange for an alternative form of chastisement. Merely cutting his bonus won’t do. It has to be something not just unpleasant but unforgettably so, to serve as a dread warning to the whole senior management team. After giving the matter some thought, I have come up with a suitably fearful penalty.

“Mr Poon,” I begin, “the Big Boss has decided to let you out early – right now, in fact. But you have to make a promise.” The pallid face looks up at me in hope as I reach into my pocket and produce a long coloured ticket. “You’ve got to… you’ve got to go and see Riverdance.”

Silence returns to the tiny room as Mr Poon’s head slowly drops with a muted, bitter sob. After a few awkward moments, we tell him to think about it and let us know when we bring his food tomorrow.

A superstitious tradition we can live with! After tearing the red envelopes away, grasping the contents, and sniffing the fresh inky aroma of each perfectly folded bill, I spread today’s haul onto my desk in the Gwailo’s Lair on the top floor of S-Meg Tower, in the heart of Asia’s throbbing international financial hub.

Barring any unforeseen extra that gets thrust at me in the next few days, this season has yielded the lowest total take of laisee since an inexplicably lean Year of the Horse dawned a couple of decades ago. I put it down to the strange phenomenon that takes place over time whereby the number of people older than you seems to decline and the number of younger ones grows. (In Vietnam, I am told, no-one expects any of what they call li xi after the age of five or six, so we shouldn’t complain.)

The coarse and undecorated paper of the red packet on top of my little pile sticks out from the usual colourful and shiny ones. First, it is bigger. And quite rightly – this isn’t for putting those silly little HK$20s in. Second, it is rough and slightly uneven in shape. This is because it is handcrafted. It is from the Mainland and was, in fact, made by handicapped ethnic minority Christians.

It was only a matter of time. I have seen environmentally friendly laisee packs, and for all I know there are feminist/gay/Manchester United envelopes as well. It is de rigeur among certain quarters of Hong Kong’s Evangelical community this year to distribute the lucky money in these: painstakingly cut and glued by a tribe of one-armed, cave-dwelling Jesus-worshippers in a remote and distant province of which we know little.

Outside my door, Ms Fang the hunter-killer secretary is lurking, curious to see how much particular envelopes might contain for me, drooling at the sight of the bigger sums, and intrigued – indeed, aroused, I think – by my exotic habit of holding the banknotes up to my nose and slowly inhaling the singular scent. I will not disappoint her.

The mood on the Mid-Levels Escalator this morning is one of redoubled joy. The hanging baskets of fresh flowers, long a prized feature of the world’s most amazing moving walkway system, were joined by strings of Christmas lights a little over a month ago. Within a morning or two, cheerful commuters noticed that shiny yuletide baubles were also dangling above their heads as they glided down the hill to Central. And now, to everyone’s delight, this ‘busy’ assembly of festive decoration is augmented by the inevitable Chinese New Year lucky red things with tassels.

Conveniently, it is the Year of the Tiger’s successor that is approaching, allowing the relevant department that prettifies transport infrastructure to leave Xmas wildlife motifs where they are: after all, a reindeer is basically a large rabbit if you think about it. The only real difference is that (to quote the Ucko and Dimbleby classic Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals) if you are a male reindeer you may find that “Lapps wrap [your] scrotum in cloth and bite or chew it,” which of course no-one in their right mind would do to bunnies.

On the top floor of S-Meg Tower, in the heart of Asia’s throbbing financial hub, excitement fills the air as Hong Kong’s biggest annual holiday draws near. The clash of cymbals; the boom of firecrackers; the bewildering choice of 10 different varieties of sunflower seed; the piled-up boxes of Danish butter cookies; the tins of Sugus fruit chews; the prospect of long meals with parents, grandparents and in-laws asking impertinent questions; the parade of children in embarrassingly gaudy silk jackets. It is all too much to bear, and any sensible employee is finalizing plans for a very long weekend in one of those indistinguishable Bali/Langkawi/Phuket places where, in exchange for the almost microscopically small chance that you may be shot by a crazed bus-hijacker, you find a sunny refuge from the ritualized tedium of New Year.

Ms Fang the hunter-killer secretary strides into the gwailo’s lair and places a box on my cluttered desk. It contains no fewer than 200 S-Meg branded lycee packets. If I put effort into it – and I feel confident in saying that I won’t – I could just about get through about three of these things. I take 197 of them back across to the other side of Private Office and give them to Mephist, Ms Fang’s industrious assistant, who is painstakingly folding HK$100 bills, extra crisply, with the aid of a metal ruler. A small iron on low heat stands by in case of mistakes.

She is spending the day inserting several fat stacks of the gleaming, fragrant new banknotes into the red envelopes for the Big Boss to distribute to anyone he meets starting in two weeks time. The cash by her side must add up to the best part of a year’s salary for her, but she shows no signs of stuffing it in a bag and zipping off to Shenzhen to start a new life. She has a week in Penang on her mind. The Mid-Levels Escalator Ornamentation Department, meanwhile, is planning ahead and embarking on a survey to find space for Easter decorations.