Vaudine England - Fortune's Bazaar

29:50He can't bring his Chinese lady with him. and he marries Sarah. Is she American? And then she, his white wife, to be blunt, takes on the care of his mixed-race children, i.e. some of the children he had with Inga Q, knowing full well where they come from and caring for them as well. I mean, and she says, it's a beautiful thing that they actually, they all know exactly what's going on and she shares the whole Motley Crue, which I find really interesting. And meanwhile, Inga Q lives to a nice, wealthy old life in Hong Kong. Yeah, it makes me think of the classic rock song, Love the One You're With.

30:34And that was very much a theme throughout your book, I would say. Oh, I was thinking, you know, she worked hard for the money. Yeah, well, that'd be another one. um yeah so uh you know probably my favorite picture of a eurasian family uh is you know comes out of out of hotong can you teach us you know who is his father who is his mother and then really what did he become i would say from a cultural perspective and then also from a business perspective right yeah robert hotong so uh i mean first of all he made up his name of course but his father was one of these Western traders who did not do the right thing by the euphemism.

31:18I mean, protected woman is a phrase, is a euphemism. You're meant to be protected, but often you're not. So this guy who, sadly, I'm now in Holland with my Dutch husband, but he was a Dutch, probably Jewish Dutch trader called Charles Bosman. and he had a local lady. We don't even know her full name, Zae, I mean S-Z-E. And he, you know, he slept with her for a while and then he left and left her literally holding several babies. You know, and he disappears. She has no money. She has to, of course, find a new protector of some kind. But what is amazing about her and so many others, like Inang Kiu, who we were just talking about, But she made damn sure that her kids were educated.

32:08So she put the man we now know to be Robert into a school where, and this is another thing, I kept on finding things that were quite positive about British colonialism, which kind of shocked me. I think, oh, actually, that wasn't bad. You know, they actually had these schools that, okay, were not for girls, so that's obviously always a problem. but boys of all different races were all able in different faiths to go to this school and get an education, central school. And so Robert and a lot of boys in his situation, mixed race and so on, that's how they got educated. As entirely bilingual beings, and I don't just mean they spoke two languages, they lived two cultures.

32:56They could go from one to the other any time. And I think this is the point that many people find impressive about these people, they can almost sort of get up in the morning and just say, well, today I'm going to be Chinese. I'll put on Chinese clothes. I'll speak Chinese or whatever. Or, you know, by lunch I'll be Western. I'll change into a proper suit or, you know, whatever. They went to these schools and they got educated and they became usually, I mean, there's this phrase, there's this word comprador, you know, loosely translated as middleman, but it's much more than that. It's a complete sort of crossover kind of personality, someone who understands local ways of doing deals, local sources, local habits and idiom in the broadest sense of the word, but also understands how to deal with different kinds of foreigners and get what they want.

33:50And if you're in that middleman position and you are able to keep everybody happy and you're also literally allowed, which is the case, to trade on your own account, then you can make a fortune. And Robert did. He was a comprador for the biggest trading house then, and some would even say not until this day, but for a very long time, which was Jardines, still, as you know, in London and all over the world, especially Indonesia. And he was able to, partly, I think, because he had an older sister who'd married a Scotsman, or at least was the protected woman of a Scotsman. It was a grey zone, you're never quite sure.

34:34So he made his first fortune with Giardines. He then went independently into trading on his own account. But he had brothers, half-brothers, and of course offspring, because he had at least two wives and God knows how many mistresses. So he became this great patriarch, And he quite deliberately went out to create a family clan and create a family name, Ho, Ho Tung. So he's got brothers who are Ho Kwok, Ho Kung Tong. And then to sort of organize through very judicious marriages, connections with other important families. I mean, you know, I would do great big sort of colored flow diagrams. trying to follow where these people went and how they interconnected.

35:27And it was quite the nightmare. By the way, on that subject, so when people say, like I think of the Barbie movie more recently, when people say patriarchy, there is like, I'll call it like a, I will say a white Western colonialism that goes with that. And when you say patriarchy with Ho-Tung, Robert Ho-Tung, it is a vastly different picture of patriarchy. okay uh yeah it's one of those words um so yeah to me a a patriarch is just a male dominant figure who's going to run all our lives whether we like it or not sure sure and uh in chinese culture they do it a lot um and uh you know everyone's organized to play their particular role in a vast family complex whether any of those individuals like it or not well with with robert though i think you had a letter or a statement he had made i can't remember which was but you quote it in your book it you know part of i asked the question was part of the reason that robert you know rep like at least most often was you know in pictures seen to be chinese it seemed like he had a lot of daddy hurt from his father who was never present I was kind of like, I was making my little annotations as reading your book and I put daddy issues in his section of the book.

36:52But to your point, I mean, he didn't just organize his children. He organized his brothers. He made sure his children were placed into, I'll call it business alliances, social alliances, social arrangements. And again, like we talked about before, he looked white or British in many respects and yet dressed traditionally Chinese in all the pictures he's caught in. One thing we haven't, I mean, we're talking freely about all of this now. And I could write that book in recent years because some of these families involved are happy enough to talk freely about these things now. Sure. But then was a whole different context of prejudice and social hierarchy.

37:40I mean some of these guys like Ho Tong became richer than anybody else so it sort of didn't matter that they were mixed race but in their own minds it did and so what Robert has said at one point early on was that according to one of his daughters was that he chose to quote be Chinese because he knew they would never reject him whereas if he tried to pretend only to be British he would never make it I'm paraphrasing it's not exactly what he said but but that I mean and it's of course true there's a slice of Britishness which is utterly snobbish and obnoxious and uh you know oh you're really not one of us and I mean uh you know you didn't go to the right school I don't have the right accent for example yeah unaccepting unaccepting that's for sure um whereas a Chinese is ethnically, even partially ethnically Chinese, you're probably not going to be thrown out.

38:44That was his calculation. But, of course, he played it both ways to suit him, however it played. I mean, he just loved to be knighted by the Queen in England. Plus, he got all the awards, honours from the Chinese dynasty. And he spent huge amounts of money on all kinds of things, whether they were British or Chinese or something else, to make sure that everybody loved him. So he played all sides of every coin. Well, yeah, him and his wife's golden anniversary for their wedding at the Peninsula Hotel. I mean, as I'm reading your book, I thought, well, that would be the party that you'd want to be at.

39:22Because obviously the Peninsula Hotel is still there. And so, you know, much of this, I think the other thing I loved about your history is we don't have to look very far to find where the legacies of these have continued to seep through in the lines of the history of Hong Kong. I want to pivot a little bit because since I'm talking about the Peninsula Hotel, obviously Kowloon was dominantly made by the reclamation of land. And that has been a very common thing in parts of Hong Kong. How would Reclaim Land go about? Was it just someone buys up all the waterfront and decides to reclaim? Was it opportunistic because they had extra dirt?

40:00How did that go on? Oh, huge, huge question there. I'll try to keep it tight. The government early on thought, you know, we've just got this tiny little sliver of land on the north side of Hong Kong Island, which we now call central. And then they wanted to reclaim, but they couldn't make a deal. One of my favorite guys in the book is this guy, Paul Chater. Yep. And he is, again, a beautiful mix. He's an Armenian from Calcutta who comes to Hong Kong in 1862. And he'd been trained as an orphan, as a surveyor. And so he had this concept of, you know, how you lay out land and so on. He had some skills.

40:47Plus, by the time late 1900, 1800, sorry, late 19th century, Yeah. He by then had, of course, made a few fortunes and had all his contacts and networks, both among merchants and in the government. And he was able to make a deal that suited both, whereby merchants who had waterfront sites, because a lot did from early on. their boats would just literally, you know, come up to the bank on the land, on the island and unload and there's your sort of go down your warehouse and that would be it. Okay, things evolved, got more complicated. If you're going to make new land in front of my waterfront site, then I want to keep that right to the water.

41:39Yeah. And so I need to guarantee from you that when you put more land in front of me, I'm still going to be on the waterfront. So I'm going to move forward, right, without going into complex property law. Trader worked out a deal whereby merchants and government would each benefit from basically adding what we now call central. I don't know if you remember where the tram line goes, but everything between the tram line and the actual water now is new land. Yeah. And it's some of the most valuable real estate in the world. and what I mean it's quite simple they'd chop off the tops of mountains and bring it and dump it in the sea I mean that's how you and you talk about Chater would literally take a cliff edge knock it off and they'd bring it out I think the other thing too is there were there would be some time to time fires and so out of the rubble of areas that have been decimated they would then take and supplant that land elsewhere to clean it up I think you talk about a creek bed that you know, they end up covering up because again, created more land.

42:48Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, it's happened several times since. And in fact, the whole sort of harbor of Hong Kong, the gap between the island of Hong Kong and the tip of the Calhoun Peninsula is now about half as wide as it used to be. And, you know, it's an incredible temptation, of course, to governments to just make new land. Wouldn't that be nice? It's good. It's good for property taxes, right? Yeah. But yeah, Trader was the guy who somehow made a deal that made that possible. And then, of course, he founded a company called Hong Kong Land, which just by chance happened to have the waterfront rights from his good friends, the Sassoon's.

43:32And so he could develop a lot of the sites on this new land that he had created. I mean, insider trading doesn't even cover this stuff. and also to your point when it gets out to the ho-tongue offspring um you know you have situations where they feel like they got an edge someone puts a note on the table they go to use insider trading and it actually financially ruins them so there's there's evidence where that goes the opposite direction um uh you know to detrimentally i you know on the reclamation the Kai the Kai Tech airport obviously used to be reclaimed land you know on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong um I never got to fly in there I feel bad because I've seen the old plane videos of like you know these planes coming in very narrowly over the hill and the wind blowing and it being very dangerous and scary looking that being said when when Kai Tech was built in in 1929, how far out would have that been compared to now the airport's obviously many, many miles away?

44:37Yeah. Yeah, the scale of things, of course, it just changes so much kind of without you noticing. Yeah, I have flown in many, many, many times into the old Kai Tak airport. But I always lived on Hong Kong Island, so Kowloon felt like kind of quite a long way away. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't, of course. You're right in the middle of Kowloon City, and it was quite fantastic. Yeah. And you could get a cab from there to anywhere. But now the airport, Chiklap Kok, is right out on one of the other islands, Lantau Island, and whole new infrastructures that could never have been imagined, even, you know, half a century ago, new highways and bridges and everything.

45:28You can drive to this airport even though it's on an outlying island. It takes about 40 minutes. An express train takes about 25 minutes to get to the airport, but it's in a completely different place, that's true. That was one of those projects that was connected to the handover that it was started by the British before the Chinese were taking over to kind of encourage more confidence in the future of Hong Kong. Went all the way out to now the bridge that goes to Macau, which obviously that was not there either. No, no, that was, well, I was a bit simple-minded. I just thought, really, you can't do that?

46:07And they've done it. It's not actually used as much as I think they had hoped because, of course, the costs and all kinds of things, different calculations. I'm a bit out of date on that. But yeah, this whole process of ever closer integration with the mainland, it's physical through these kinds of things you're mentioning. It's political, obviously, above all else. It's political. It's dressed up as economic, but of course it ends out it's very cultural. Sure. This different stage. The other time that this idea of race or ethnicity or people groups comes into a very focal political view is when World War II, the onset of World War II.

46:57Britain seeks to take British people out. But again, what's the definition of British? Is that British by passport or what we deem now as passport or cultural or whatever that may be? Because you obviously explained that not everybody that considered themselves British was taking out. And then back to the idea of messiness again. Even if you tried to say, great, we're not going to take what we might deem to be British. We'll take other people. You go to other parts of Asia and they didn't want the Asian people either. No. Yeah.

47:37I mean, I could sort of riff forever on the problems of sort of nationalism. Yeah. nationalist identities and nationalist ideas because they really screw up everybody's lives. Yeah. And you see this indeed in 1940 when they say, oh, excuse me, we'll evacuate all the British wives and children to keep them safe. Yeah. Okay. So then you've got women who are possibly part Portuguese or part Indian and maybe part Chinese and their husband of whatever Rachel makes is actually fighting in the British forces. but they're not called British because they're not white, basically. So what's interesting is that in Hong Kong, they could identify as British and probably be seen as British.

48:26They've certainly chosen themselves to fight for the British side. So they are identifying as British to the extent that they're actually choosing to fight for the British side in the war, which is, you know, quite a commitment. I mean, they're choosing to die for being British. But once they're on this ship full of other British wives and children, they're taken first to the Philippines. In the Philippines, the Philippine government doesn't have a problem. The problem arises with their ultimate destination, which was meant to be Australia. Now, at that time, Australia had what they charmingly called the White Australia Policy, and they were only going to take in white people.

49:11so these people of mixed race even though they were british they identified as british they fought for the british whether or not they had british passports wasn't the issue they were british they were not going to be allowed to the final destination so they had a choice they could get off in manila or come back to hong kong well it reminds me of how restrictive the australian policy was during covid i mean it was it was so restrictive relative to other parts of the world And to your point, that is very Australian in some respects. Yeah. Oh, don't set me up. I'm an Australian. I'm from New Zealand.

49:47Good grief. But no, you know, governments, I mean, anywhere, frankly, make the most ridiculous choices at different times. Well, so let me let me pivot it, because obviously there were tensions prior to World War Two in Hong Kong, some that we didn't touch on. but I have my notes here, was the, I think it was the 19, was it the 1914 tram boycott, Hong Kong tram boycott, for example. So there's like these underlying tensions. Some of those could be fed off mainland China, maybe like communist tendencies, et cetera. And then you have the Japanese show up. So you're, you know, let's just say in a simple, generic, vague 30 ,000 foot level, someone would say, well, you know, that'll be so much better because it'll be Asian people ruling a dominant Asian culture.

50:36And what you end up finding out is, no, it's way worse. It's a bad idea for people in Hong Kong. And business and even food becomes scarce in Hong Kong during Japanese rule. Oh, absolutely. And it was quite a, I mean, there are more modern examples of this. media organizations I've worked for have thought, oh, let's post an Asian news correspondent to, you know, a Korean to Indonesia or something. Yeah. Surely that'll work better than having some white chick like me or something, and it didn't. So it really didn't. But, yeah, at that time, the essential struggle within China was, of course, between nationalist Chinese and communist Chinese.

51:28So that was a civil war and that was going on basically for a very long time. You know, 1911, the empire, the dynasties collapsed. It was a Republican revolution in China. Yeah, Sun Yat-san, et cetera. And you basically have a civil war going on all along. You then had the Japanese invading China really from the mid-1930s. And then you have World War II on top of this. So it was a mess. when the Japanese started moving down through Asia, they had this idea indeed, which they called the co-prosperity sphere, that we Asians are going to be so much nicer to you than these British - Overlords, yeah.

52:11Dutch colonial imperialist horrors. Because we're Asian, we're much better. And of course, some people in these various Asian places initially thought, well, yeah, that sounds good because they're sick to death of Western colonialism. I mean, there are lots of things to be sick of and that, that's for sure. And yet it very quickly became very clear that Japanese rule, for example, in occupied Hong Kong was brutal and it was in no way better than British imperial rule and in many ways a lot worse. You know, people didn't kowtow on the street in the right way. they got slapped or shot. There was an incredibly vicious way of getting rid of people.

53:01This was to solve the problem that not enough food was coming in. They were just put on boats and the boats were sent off and nothing. Yeah, I think you even said they would just burn boats that were sent out to sea. Yeah. I mean, forced evacuation into nothingness, basically, is sort of... Anyway. You also talk about, you know, the Japanese military. I mean, the idea of rape was commonplace to women. In other words, the danger of a woman in Hong Kong was heightened during Japanese occupation. Absolutely. I mean, I think we now know pretty well anywhere in the world that rape is a weapon of war and is constantly used everywhere now also as another way to oppress and brutalize a country.

53:46But then that was something I think that was very shocking in Hong Kong, where people had been used to a much higher level of personal security. But it's the same with occupied. I mean, when I read stories about the occupation of the Netherlands during World War II by Germany, you know, our dear next door neighbor, you know, you get all sorts of similar things. But absolutely running out of food and running out of fuel to such an extent that people would do anything to survive. Well, that made it very clear, I think, quite early on in occupied Hong Kong that Japanese rule wasn't going to work.

54:28Sure. Well, so, but the Japanese still needed the business culture to exist, right? Because the businesses that are trading, the businesses that are bringing goods, and even as we find out later, the businesses that were even in cahoots with the Japanese military, right, that was the conduit to get stuff to there, to get food to there, to get anything to there. So there had to be a certain amount of diplomacy that the Japanese military had because the town and the city would not function at all without the business people. Yeah, they tried to co-opt the business elite. And of course, this is a standard pattern for any occupying power.

55:13I mean, in France, you had Vichy and so on. and of course there will always be traders out there who will trade with whoever for any kind of personal gain of course and it's like now when there are sanctions against Russia who's going to try to break those sanctions or who's not who's going to find a different way so at that time of course there were people finding different ways but I think the difference, the important point there was that there was still a hinterland of China, where there was still agriculture, food could still come from there sometimes to a far more limited extent than before.

55:57But normal trade in terms of, you know, the port functioning and ships coming and going and bringing goods and so on, that wasn't really happening. I mean, they didn't actually succeed in co-opting enough of a business elite to keep Hong Kong successful in any way. Sure. I think you talk about the population. It went from something crazy like 1.3, 1.4 million people. 1.6 down to 0.6. Yeah, to 0.6. Yeah, a million people either left, died, you know, whatever. Were taken into internment in other areas, etc. Because there just wasn't food. There just wasn't enough trade, frankly. Sure. So let's touch on this.

56:36Macau has a very, it always has had a special relationship with Hong Kong, but even more so, it almost becomes the escape for Hong Kongers at this time. Oh, look, it's the Casablanca of the East, you know, because Portugal was neutral in World War II, officially speaking. Macau was a Portuguese enclave, so officially Macau was neutral. In actual fact, a lot of people in Macau were more anti-Japanese than not. but uh it was a place and you always find a place like this at any moment of stress and trauma in in any particular like what dubai has become today for like russians for example it's the sort of thing that if it doesn't exist it's got to be created because still stuff has to be traded sure um so there were uh i mean the word collaboration and who is a collaborator is of course, an incredibly messy word and difficult to define, although some people see it as very black and white.

57:41Sure. There was a lot of that in Macau. Of course, people made fortunes. Others just used Macau as a place to go through to get into China where they could live off the land more easily. And a lot of the people who had left Macau 150 years earlier, their families had left and come to Hong Kong, now I could go back to Macau and be Portuguese again, i.e. neutral, and not have to be a party to the war. So yeah, it was a handy place, I've got to say. Yeah. So let's see, the next thing I want to kind of touch on is, you know, this brings up a whole, I think this is a great big picture discussion. So, you know, looking at this, was it strange that Hong Kong was better kept by, what I'll say, biased Britain, is how I'll term that, than an aggressive Asian country like Japan.

58:33And I'm asking that. We've kind of talked about that a little bit. So let's take that to a wider lens. Think of Hong Kong in the aggressive hands of China relative to a biased Britain. I mean, I think about that as a paradigm. And I think today, gosh, if I was a Hong Konger, I'd still rather be in like 1994 than I possibly want to be in 2024, which is bizarre to think that you'd rather be 30 years prior from a freedom and political and also uniqueness of the culture of a city to decide its own fate. Right, right. No, but you're exactly right. I mean, that is exactly the situation, and most people would make the same choice that you've just outlined, which really shocked me.

59:20There was just one quick little anecdote that really made this clear to me. and you know the fact that my surname is England is not always a great thing in my life I had no say in the matter but yeah and you know I used to work for the BBC so and I was the BBC correspondent in Hong Kong in the early 2000s so and there was this moment where Hong Kong people were activating to preserve a piece of the most colonial piece of history in Hong Kong that you can imagine, the first prison, Victoria prison, the first police station. I mean, the first literally concrete symbols of British imperial power.

1:00:06And here you have, you know, 160 years later, after the handover to Chinese rule, you've got Hong Kong people trying to hold on to this symbol of British imperialism. And so I toddle along there with my little microphone and I say, yeah, hi, I'm Miss England from the BBC. Why are you trying to preserve a piece of British imperialism? I mean, really, what's going on here? And they say, oh, because it's part of our collective history. It's part of who we are as Hong Kongers. You know, we're Hong Kongers. We're not mainland Chinese. We have a different history. And I would say, look, please don't just say that because of my name more because I'm for the BBC.

1:00:45You know, don't, don't, don't give me this British line because you think that's what I want to hear. Yeah. I said, no, no, no, we really mean it. Yeah. And I gradually learned that they really meant it. They are very conscious. And, and in fact, after a while, I also, once I stopped doing daily news also, and felt more able to feel, you know, have my own feelings instead of having to pretend to be objective all the time. Yeah, we Hong Kongers know that Hong Kong has a distinct and different history and makes it a different place. And that's point one. Point two is, I think if you understand that the world, I mean, there are always empires.

1:01:23I mean, there are different kinds of empires at different times in different places. I mean, I would call what's currently going on with China as a Chinese empire. They are, the China of today is a lot bigger geographically than it was 500 years ago. They have expanded. They have also been imperialist. If you think about Tibet and Xinjiang, you think about their ideas about Taiwan and Hong Kong, you think even about what they're thinking of the waterways in Southeast Asia, what they call their nine dash line. This is an empire. So you then have a choice. Would you rather be under the British Empire or the Chinese Empire?

1:02:01Or, for example, under the Russian Tsarists or under the Ottomans or the Austro-Hungarians or whatever? And of course, God knows there's enough wrong with British Empire and in different places at different times, much, much worse experiences than Hong Kong ever had under British rule. That's for sure. I don't want to airbrush any of that. But if you had that choice, I mean, for sure, why wouldn't you, I mean, if you could, and I think that's what the millions of people on the streets of Hong Kong in 1989, 2003, 2014, 2019, and what they're saying is, no, excuse me, we kind of preferred it when we were allowed to say what we liked.

1:02:43Sure. The old saying holds true, all politics are local. And I think that especially rings true in Hong Kong. So we kind of touched on this, but here's some questions. And I mentioned this before, I'll throw out some hot takes. You can say yes, you can say no, you can give me your quick two to three lines on this. If I said, I believe the handover in 97 to the Chinese, was maybe the most pivotal event in the history of Hong Kong. Would you agree? Would you disagree? What would be your take on that? Not the most pivotal. Okay. I think the more pivotal, you could say, 1979. Okay. Was when the first Hong Kong Chinese tycoons took over from British.

1:03:32It was two of the biggest British combines. So when Li Ka-shin came up, he got hold of Hutchison, and YK Power took hold of worldwide shipping. That was 1979. So that was Hong Kong Chinese money taking over from British. 1997, you got Chinese political form taking over British political form, but actually nothing much changed for a while. Sure. You then get to more like 2007, I'm into the sevens, where by then people are starting to become aware that culturally things are changing, a whole lot more mainlanders are coming to town. And I really think the most significant moment has been 2019, of course, when we had these huge demonstrations during the summer of 2019.

1:04:22I mean, what people would call the revolution of our times, revolution which failed, which was crushed by the national security law and those things are still being played out. To me, that's the most significant because it's when it really becomes clear, no, there's no room for maneuver here. This is how it is. You have that power. Well, and then COVID obviously crushed the head of the serpent on that subject. In other words, it took that to a finality. Let me ask you this one for kind of like our next hot take. And I think, I'll put some intrigue in this. It'll be a one word answer. Was a British national overseas passport ever British?

1:05:06You can't do that in one world. You just can't. There's two things. How about I ask you this? Was it British prior to the more recent events that the UK has announced with that passport? Well, it was more British than not. But no, because there's a distinction between citizenship and nationality. You can have nationality, but not the right to be a citizen, in other words, to live there. And so that BNOC passport gave you the nationality of British, but it didn't give you citizenship. It didn't give you the right to live in Britain. It is now, for some, a route to citizenship. A bridge, yep. Yeah, but yeah, okay.

1:05:52Sorry, I couldn't do it in one way. It's okay. It's good. Do you think we will ever see a 2014 Occupy that is more reminiscent of Tiananmen Square in Hong Kong or, frankly, culturally, politically, is Hong Kong too Chinese at this point?

1:06:15I think the spirit of resistance both in Hong Kong and amongst Hong Kongers all around the world is so much stronger than people think, and it's really quite moving and inspiring. So do I think there is more resistance to Chinese rule of Hong Kong? Yes. Would I think that the Chinese government is prepared to use the ultimate violence against Hong Kongers? Sure. They haven't needed to yet, but they will if they want. Is Hong Kong too Chinese? Well, its character is changing fundamentally and has changed fundamentally in recent years in that a lot more mainland Chinese are coming and settling and taking over the culture and the language and the power.

1:07:05So some people would say, well, you know, so what's wrong with that? I mean, you know, they're going to be nice people. It's not a big deal. And in some ways, maybe that's okay. Maybe that's true. But the point is, the kind of people I'm talking about in the book, who have come from all over, from all different origins, and who are not necessarily ethnically Chinese at all, they don't have a place in that new China where you, if you're going to get ahead now in China, you have to have mainland contacts. You have to be right in with Beijing. You have to, in effect, be a mainlander. I asked a shipping tycoon recently, would the people I call my people, the people I'm talking about in my book, who are from all over the place, would they have a chance now to start with nothing and get ahead and make a new life?

1:07:58And the answer was, no, you have to be a mainland. Interesting. All right. And you have this, a lot of this we're discussing now on kind of these hot takes. This is obviously in your final writing in the book, because your book really does just incredible job of encompassing up to really the Cold War. And then you kind of you put your thoughts to today later in the book. And the other person I just, I'm a big fan of, I think the world of him as a business person, as a political leader, as a spiritual leader, et cetera. Will there ever be a Jimmy Lai again in the vein of the great business men or business patriarchs in Hong Kong?

1:08:44Will he be the last in effect? Wow. I can't imagine that he'll be the last. What is exceptional about Jimmy is the extent to which his own life story is the life story of so very many Hong Kongers. I agree. You know, who came out of China with nothing, who started, in his case, literally on the factory floor, becomes a millionaire and then finds his values and his ideals in not only democracy, also free market ideas, and is prepared to put his money where his mouth is. Now, that's the exceptional bit, that you get a guy who's super rich, who's a businessman, and is prepared to put all of that at risk, his money, for a cause that he believes in.

1:09:40and the number of people in the business world who have done that, you can count on the fingers of one hand. I agree. That's for sure. Yeah. I mean, there's him, there's maybe one or two others. There's not a lot. Yeah. A lot of people were a bit more under the radar who are very wealthy Hong Kongers and who are still there and who are absolutely still, you could say, fighting the good fight, who are supporting people like Jimmy, who are supporting whoever is still in Hong Kong and needs help for the fight for democracy. There are a lot of people under the radar. What is different about Jimmy, he was a very large figure in the business of Hong Kong in manufacturing and media and much more.

1:10:25And he is such a public symbol and he has been prepared to put himself personally at risk and he has chosen, in effect, to put himself into jail. I mean, he knew it was coming. He could have left. He chose not to. To stay there as a public symbol. Now, I mean, it's a rare personality who can choose to do that. And, yeah, I would like to believe there's more out there. Absolutely. Well, to your point, I mean, he's also a devout man of faith. So it's interesting to watch someone who believes that they're – he just firmly believes faithfully in what he's doing. And to your point, it is – that is so real.

1:11:04I mean, where his life is at risk based on what he feels called to do for others, which is incredible. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

1:11:19Actually, my father was a church minister, and I argued with him for decades about everything. And I remember saying to him once, look, you know, you can be a political dissident or, you know, a democratic activist or something without having to be a person of God? Why do you need religion for that? Yeah. And his smart answer was he said, well, I think you'll find, you know, you can just count them up if you want, but the ones who actually last will have some kind of faith. And, you know, it doesn't have to be a Christian faith or whatever, but if you're going to tilt your, you know, windmills, if you're going to have that sort of dream, which in some ways, even in this biography I've just been reading about Jimmy, it comes across as kind of simplistic, you know, black and white, yes and no, goodies and baddies, democracy or not democracy.

1:12:16Well, you know, democracy is one of those words like race. You know, it has a lot of different meanings. But if you are going to believe in one big thing and you're going to put yourself on the line for it, it probably helps if you've got some sort of ability to take a leap of faith. Yeah, and have hope. Let's see. There's a lot we didn't talk about. I was thinking about, you mentioned Central School. We didn't talk about St. Andrews and Central School and all the different schools. Some of the girls schools that popped up and then disappeared and all that kind of stuff. We didn't, I'm trying to see here other people.

1:12:50Oh, we did not, I'm going to put this as like cookie crumbs to leave out for our listeners. We did not talk about Vandellur Grayburn who was a perplexing individual and yet an honorable individual in the end, I would say. So I'll put that out for there for our listeners and readers to learn about. You know, we also didn't touch on, you know, some of the, how the Korean War helped, obviously the development of Hong Kong and the American influence in Hong Kong. I was going to ask you, Vadim, where can people follow your writing and what you're working on going forward? what I hope I'm writing on is my next project is well actually one of these tycoons in Hong Kong who was telling me recently that you know when you say Hong Kong's all sort of over because it doesn't have these freedoms anymore like freedom of movement press freedom freedom of association of speech it doesn't have proper rule of law and he was saying you know it's really sad that all We've lost all these things, but, you know, we're still a port city.

1:13:52We're still functioning. The ships and planes are coming and going and so on and so forth. And so we were having this debate about are these kind of sweet freedoms, are they just the icing on the cake or are they the cake of a real functioning port city? And so I thought I would look at other port cities in Asia at different times just because Asia's my zone and I'd love to actually look at poor cities all around the world, but you've got to start somewhere. Well, did they all need these freedoms? Are they the icing on the cake? They're just something nice extra. Or are they essential? And what was really interesting is that a year later I went back to the same tycoon last year and I said, how are you feeling about the icing and the cake now?

1:14:38Because, you know, you told me it was just the icing, these freedoms. And he said, oh, no, no, it's not the icing. It's not the cake. It's the flour in the cake. in other words he had sort of moved on in a year or two and realized no no those freedoms are essential when you want to have a functioning trading port and you've got to have people coming and going you've got to attract the kind of people who are interested in being there to do new things and to make things happen and for that I think you need a fair bit of freedom so I hope that's what I'm writing on. So is that a coming book then?

1:15:15uh yeah well i shouldn't jinx this it's it's with my agent okay and so are you on are you on social media or anywhere else that people can follow you not very much i gotta be honest uh i'm on linkedin okay um i don't do a whole lot of other um frantic stuff i find it just takes too much time um is that very wrong of me uh maybe it's something for your agent to pick up for you I asked him if I had to and he said no no no so we'll see but thanks for asking yeah well I appreciate your time um and and your work in this book uh our tribe should go get a copy of fortune's bizarre uh Vadim your book made me think about the messiness of family and when I say messiness I mean the beautiful messiness of family the legacies that come with incredible business success and the demon that you know may be better than the demon that you don't.

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