The Daughters of Henry Wong Read online

  The

  DAUGHTERS

  of

  HENRY WONG

  HARRISON YOUNG

  The

  DAUGHTERS

  of

  HENRY WONG

  The Daughters of Henry Wong by Harrison Young

  First published by Ventura Press 2016

  PO Box 780 Edgecliff

  NSW 2027

  AUSTRALIA

  www.venturapress.com.au

  Copyright © Harrison Young 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Young, Harrison.

  Title: The Daughters of Henry Wong

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-97-0 (print)

  ISBN: 978-1-925183-96-2 (epub)

  Cover images: istock and Shutterstock

  Cover and internal design: Deborah Parry Graphics

  Editorial: Catherine McCredie

  Production: Jasmine Standfield

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  About the Author

  Harrison Young has been writing fiction in airports and on weekends since 1981. Graduating from Harvard University in 1966, Young has been a journalist for The Washington Post, a captain in the U.S. Army Special Forces, a government advisor and an investment banker. He has done business in twenty countries and has advised a dozen governments on financial system issues. Young helped establish banks in Bahrain and Beijing and as a senior official at the FDIC in Washington he managed the resolution of 266 failing banks. A dual citizen, Young retired as chairman of Morgan Stanley Australia in 2007 and became a director of Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

  For Nick Deane and Dan Melia, and with thanks to Heather Rose

  1

  There are no secrets in China. You learn that eventually. People may pretend not to know things, but the information is there if you want it.

  The Julia was eighteen hours overdue. I was having lunch alone at the Hong Kong Club, sitting at my usual table next to the wall. A group of three men walked past me and one of them spoke. “Sorry about your father-in-law, Wendy,” he said quietly.

  Not reacting has been part of my strategy since boarding school, where I acquired my peculiar nickname. I didn’t look up but replayed the last few seconds in my head. An English accent that was close to perfect. A whiff of something chemical. Mercury Chao. I wished it had been someone else.

  Then again, perhaps I didn’t.

  My father-in-law was Henry Wong, owner of the Julia and chairman of Pearl River Bank. Pearl River’s principal competitor was Chao Yinhang, of which Mercury was chairman. But Mercury was eighteen years younger than Henry, and only seven years older than I. He’d taken Amanda to some important parties in the months before I came on the scene. I should have been Mercury’s rival. If the Julia was lost, I finally would be. Mercury was acknowledging that.

  The Hong Kong Club had a nice mixture of Caucasian and Chinese members back in 2000 – all men, of course, most of them pleased with their lives. A man at the next table was bending forward over his lamb cutlets, as if eating a bowl of rice with chopsticks. His companion sat upright as a high court judge, buttering a roll. He actually was a judge, as I remember it. I am not sentencing you to death today, he seemed to be saying, with a faint smile in my direction.

  Four noisy British bankers came in from the bar and unabashedly stared at me. I was used to being looked at because of my height (six feet five) and distinctive attire (1930s-style, loose-fitting, cream-colored linen suits). As an American married into a Hong Kong banking family, I was used to being gossiped about. But it gave me a shiver to realize that everyone in the room would know that Henry Wong and his beautiful sailboat had gone missing. They would have been watching me since I came in. Now they were studying my reaction to Mercury. The fuckers.

  When I arrived at Exeter from Charleston, South Carolina – just to finish about my nickname – I was given a room in Wentworth Hall. My middle name is “Wentworth.” The Wentworths are a distinguished New England family, one of several with which I have connections. I made the mistake of telling this to the boy in the next room. People in Charleston talk about their “come from” all the time. The boy in the next room came from Kansas and was at Exeter on a scholarship. So of course I got called “Wentworth” – soon shortened to “Wenty” – by classmates seeking to embarrass me. When that didn’t work they tried “Wendy,” the girl in Peter Pan. It stuck. By the end of the year I answered to the name.

  A club servant interrupted my thoughts to give me a handwritten note, cell phones being forbidden. I read it quickly and stuffed it in my pocket. “Secretary remind you of party at Branch 38.” It was our code for a run.

  When I’d married Amanda and acquired a profession eight years earlier, at the innocent age of twenty-two, I’d taken the trouble to read Lombard Street, published in 1873, in which Walter Bagehot explained the workings of the London money market. If the partners of a bank worked after lunch, he said, it was a sign of trouble. I forced myself to finish my liver and bacon slowly.

  The thing about Henry, I told myself, was that he always had a plan. He didn’t make a lot of noise about it, but he thought ahead. So where had he gone? Amanda believed he’d drowned but she was a natural pessimist.

  Objectively, there was nothing to worry about. The weather had been fine all up and down the coast. Henry was an excellent sailor. Pearl River Bank was absurdly well capitalized. But a run is a run. And while Hong Kong does have deposit insurance, the concept is difficult to explain to customers whose culture and life experience have led them to regard catastrophe as normal.

  Waiting on the sidewalk for my driver to bring the car around, I stared at the war memorial across the street. “The Glorious Dead,” read the words chiseled into the stone on the side that faced me.

  Logic cannot stop a panic. Only a flamboyant display of confidence has any hope of success. I would have to be a gallant commander rallying my troops. Having been raised in the American South, I knew what the painting should look like. Why I believed I’d succeed, I have no idea.

  The smell of new-cut grass around the memorial mingled with that of bus exhaust and the pollution blowing across the border from the factories in Guangdong. I have a small nose but an acute sense of smell, which is not necessarily an asset in Hong Kong, with its climate favorable to mold, but it gives depth to one’s experience. What I’d smelled when Mercury passed me was dry-cleaning fluid. I read a book once about the care of garments from which I learned that gentlemen never have their suits dry-cleaned. Their servants air and brush them. Wool will be what it is supposed to be if you give it time. Mercury was cutting corners.

  Knowing the man, knowing the city as I did, I wasn’t surprised. Mercury thought he was nobility, but the empire was in decline. Vitality had been seeping out of Hong Kong since the mid-eighties, when Thatcher settled with Deng. Or so I’d been told by long-time residents. You can have it in ’97, the Lady must have said to herself. I will be gaga by then. And indeed, the whole place has, at a spiritual level, the odor of an old people’s home – which is to say, shit and disinfectant.

  But wait. I want to tell this story as I experienced it. Standing outside the Hong Kong Club that afternoon, I was a fairy-tale prince waking up from a long sleep. Hong Kong was wrapped in mist. All I felt was exhilaration. Disgust came later.

  To be precise – and fair to myself – it emerged later. Not everything I did in the next few m
onths was admirable. To many, I was and remain a preposterous figure. But I hadn’t been proud of my motives or my behavior since I was seven. Self-disgust, and whatever seriousness comes with it, was in my make-up. Hong Kong suited me, and that was why.

  The driver took me to Branch 38. It served a cluster of high-rise apartment buildings – all public housing – that were built thirty years earlier on land once occupied by a Hakka village. Enough of the residents of the project were Hakka to make Pearl River Bank, now that Henry controlled it, a natural choice. So it was a big branch, on the ground floor of one of the apartment towers, with, at the moment of my arrival, more than a hundred customers in the lobby, and a crowd outside the door.

  One of the television crews spotted me before I was out of the car, and a pretty Chinese girl hurried over to shove a microphone in my face.

  “What are you going to do, Mr. Lee?”

  “Rodean or Cheltenham?” I said, wise ass that I was.

  “St. Mary’s Ascot,” she said.

  But of course, I told myself. This polished young woman would be a Shanghainese Roman Catholic – same as Mercury – which is the top of the social pecking order in Hong Kong.

  “And then?”

  “Harvard,” she said, growing embarrassed.

  “Me too.”

  “I know.”

  “What you do?” said another reporter, crowding in.

  “Give everyone their money,” I said. “That’s what banks do.”

  “Branch run out soon,” said someone else in the crowd.

  “I’ve sent to the main office for more. But I need to explain that to our customers, who are waiting so patiently. So if you’ll excuse me…”

  There was not exactly patience in the lobby, but neither was there chaos – just closely packed elderly Chinese, most of them women, all talking. Behind the counter, four harassed tellers were taking passbooks and paying out cash. I grabbed the hand of the pretty reporter and pushed my way, gently but firmly, through the sea of grandmothers.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Helen Fong.”

  “Sorry, but I don’t watch much TV.”

  “You will now.”

  When we reached the front of the crowd, I picked her up at the waist like a vase of flowers, and stood her on the counter. She weighed nothing at all – and didn’t seem to mind.

  “Explain what’s going on,” I said to her, as soon as I could see that her cameraman was in position.

  “We’re here in the New Territories,” she said, “in a branch of Pearl River Bank that has been experiencing a run.” As she spoke, the crowd inside the branch quieted. “I’m standing with Jonathan Lee, son-in-law of the chairman of Pearl River. Mr. Lee, what happens next?” She let her arm drop so I could speak into the microphone.

  “Helen, my first concern is to get all our customers cash tonight. I’m not sure why they all want it – want it in their homes overnight, that is – but that is none of our business. If they want it, they shall have it.”

  I said all this in English, and then in Cantonese, which produced murmurs in the crowd, and then in passable Hakka, which caused the oldest ladies to laugh out loud.

  “I have sent for more cash. The bank has plenty of money, but no branch has very much cash on hand.” I paused for effect. “To have a lot of cash on hand would be an invitation to robbers.”

  “Where Henry Wong?” said a voice from the crowd.

  “Taking a holiday on his sailboat,” I said, and then quickly went on. “I have an important announcement, and also a suggestion.” More Cantonese, more Hakka. “My announcement is that this branch will stay open tonight until midnight.” I probably wasn’t allowed to do that, but I figured the Hong Kong Monetary Authority would forgive me. Hong Kong is a pragmatic city.

  “No one has to worry about the branch closing before they get their money,” I continued. “And anyone who decides they don’t need quite so much cash tonight can come back and redeposit it. There will be a teller at the end of the counter, over there, to handle any deposits.

  “My suggestion is that we form a queue. It is stuffy in here, and I am worried that some of our venerable depositors may become ill.” I turned to the branch manager, hovering behind the counter and said quietly: “Take a note pad, write successive numbers on each page, then put a chop on. Quick.” Nothing in China has official status unless it has been “chopped” in red ink. Every branch has a stone seal, with the Bank’s name in reverse, condensed into a square monogram.

  Again to the crowd: “Now who thinks he or she is the very next person to be served?” A tiny woman whose chin barely cleared the counter raised her hand, and no one disputed her. I turned back to the branch manager. “Give me the first ticket, please, Mr. Liu.”

  When I had given out the first dozen “tickets,” I suggested that the holders be allowed to form a line, starting where I was standing and running back out the door. “That way there will be enough air for everyone.”

  Once I’d organized the line and could go back outside, I let Helen ask me a few questions.

  “I’m not sure how to put this,” she said. “I know you did East Asian Studies and were summa cum laude and all, but your Cantonese is amazing, and you have the look, you know, dark hair, round face, pale skin, and your name is Lee, so…are you part Chinese?”

  I answered without thinking: “Grandmother never said.”

  2

  The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong is primarily a bar. There are side chapels, to be sure, in which it is possible to examine relics – famous war photographs, a Pulitzer Prize diploma – and to perform the ceremonies of dinner and billiards, but the central basilica is devoted to drink and boasting.

  There being no war at a convenient distance, and China having opened its borders, the city’s supply of spies and actual journalists has dwindled, so that many who worship at this temple are now members of tamer guilds, such as advertising and public relations, or lonely Englishmen who simply wish their lives were more exciting. But the night I am speaking of, it still had a buzz. It was still possible to see Claire Hollingsworth, then past ninety, who had snuck into Poland in August of 1939 and held her telephone out the hotel window so her editors at The Telegraph could hear the German tanks. Everyone remembered the nights before the Handover in June of 1997, when more than a hundred people, some recognizable from CBS or CNN, crowded into the room to be part of history. I liked the place, the three or four times a year someone gave me a reason to go there.

  The bar was crowded. I was feeling terrific. I’d climbed on my exercise bicycle for the first time in months, showered and changed clothes. A call to Branch 38 had confirmed that the “redeposit” line was growing.

  I paused outside the crush around the bar, and smiled at the famous photograph hanging on the pillar beside me. It showed three British soldiers taking down the Union Jacks on the War Memorial, as a gust of wind answered the even more famous question about Scotsmen and kilts.

  Almost immediately, I heard people speaking my name. “There’s Wendy Lee,” they were saying, people I didn’t know.

  I realized I was on the local news, which was being screened above my head. I was getting out of the car. The camera moved from me to the line of customers outside the branch. Then to an old lady saying, “I got in line because I saw my friend in line. Henry Wong has been kidnapped and his family will give all our money to the triads to get him back.” Then there was another shot of me, standing on the ground next to Helen Fong, who was up on the counter, my head at the level of her knees. Then the same old lady getting back in line: “If I take my money home, my daughter-in-law will steal it.” Then Helen interviewing me again, and… “Grandmother never said.”

  Big laugh in the bar, rolling from group to group.

  “Nice work,” said a vaguely Scottish-sounding man with a Chinese face. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Thanks, but I’m supposed to be finding Zhang Hai Ming.”

  “T
hat table over there.” The man shouldered into the crowd and disappeared.

  Zhang – I generally thought of him by his family name – was drinking tea and eating peanuts, looking disheveled and furtive as ever.

  “I not know you have friends in police,” he said as I took off my jacket and sat down.

  “Is that what he is?”

  “You not know anything, do you?”

  “Well, I don’t know where Henry is, if that’s your question.”

  “He come back,” said Zhang.

  The certainty in his voice surprised me. For just a moment he seemed strangely dignified, but then the combined effect of his ill-fitting suit, bad haircut and bitten fingernails reasserted itself, and he was the same dubious character I had vaguely known for years. Zhang stood approximately nowhere in Hong Kong’s social “pecking order,” but he did have money and he owned a lot of stock in Pearl River Bank. He showed up from time to time and Henry tolerated him. Zhang wasn’t Hakka, but having been through the Cultural Revolution together, they had a bond. Presumably they had known each other’s parents, known each other’s friends. So perhaps there was more than toleration.

  I’d never heard Henry even mention his own parents, but I’d overheard Zhang say a given name once – “Su Ling” – and Henry told him to shut up. They were in Henry’s library, drinking tea. When I peeked in, they were just sitting there and looking at each other. Then Zhang had stood up, shuffled over and patted Henry roughly on the shoulder. “You do what you can,” he’d said.

  “You need drink,” Zhang told me. “Gin or whiskey?”

  The right answer was lemonade. Getting drunk with Zhang would have been profoundly stupid, especially when I was so pleased with myself.

  “Gin and tonic,” I said. “One is too many, two’s not enough. My grandfather used to say that.”

  “Charleston grandfather?”

  “Um, yes. I never knew my other grandfather,” I said.