Filth: Failed in London, Try Hong Kong

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Hong Kong investors were duly unimpressed by last year's offering for the Hui Xian reit. As the first chart (left) shows, its shares have woefully underperformed its closest counterpart on the Hong Kong exchange, the Hong Kong dollar-denominated Yuexiu reit. Ok, I don't want to trigger heated arguments with this thread, but I am curious to know, just how relevant are the "FILTH" expats in HK 20 years after the handover? As in the "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong" category. Expats (mostly Brits and maybe some Aussies) who crashed and burned in London and ventured over here in HK to look for greener pastures.

Adrian Gyle is a veteran British reporter, but one who has never quite made a name for himself. Instead of headlining talks at the FCC, he’s more likely to be found at Fung Shing, a North Point restaurant just below his flat on Java Road. He wasn’t completely FILTH—Failed in London, Try Hong Kong—and had a reason to be there: his old university friend, Jimmy Tang. The book starts out with judge Feathers retired and alone. He and his wife retired to Dorset in England after his long career in the East as barrister and judge. "It had been said that he fled London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit." You can inflict pain through ignorance. I was not loved after the age of four and a half. Think of being a parent like that.'This book, published in 2004, was reviewed as Gardam's 'masterpiece' in the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004... Wow....I read this book yesterday and I did not know I read it before. I only gave it 2 stars some 1.5 years ago. Now I am giving it 4.5 stars. I suppose the only thing that could account for me really liking it this time around is perhaps when I did the re-read yesterday, I had an enhanced appreciation for Gardam's writing. I had read The Flight of the Maidens about 3 weeks ago and really liked it, and very much liked her writing style. Filth in fact was no great maker of jokes, was not at all modest about his work and seldom, except in great extremity, went in for whims. He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after retirement." Sir Edward Feathers is an eighty-year-old widower living a comfortable and quiet life in Dorset, England. Before retiring, Feathers was a successful judge in the English courts and had a prestigious legal career. After training as a lawyer in England, he worked in Southeast Asia for many years before returning to the U.K. In peer circles, this makes him an “Old Filth” – Filth being an acronym for “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong.” The less you know about the plot the better. However, please be assured that ' Old Filth' is a real treat, and I cannot wait to read more of Jane Gardam's work.

When he returned to Hong Kong, in 2007, he hoped to land a job in investment banking. Instead, he had to settle for one in internal strategy at UBS Group AG, where speaking Chinese wasn’t a requirement. The play's four main characters are all friends from Britain who decide to start new lives in Hong Kong. What a brilliant book! For me it is a true masterpiece. Jane Gardam wrote an incredibly subtle book about the Raj orphan Edward Feathers, a.k.a. Old Filth. The story has interesting locations and people. His father was a district head in Malaysia and had baby Edward raised by the Malay nanny in the next village, as Edward’s mother died when delivering his son. He did not see his son till he sent him off to England. It is implied that the father suffered from post traumatic stress from fighting in WW-I. But, then again, as you progress with the story you learn that Edward was one of the many Raj children who were sent all alone to England at a very early age. High class colonials were of the opinion that their young children could easily be hurt or killed by living in the tropics, so they should be sent off to boarding schools in England for their own good. However, there seemed not to be an awareness at all that what they did to their children only resulted in everlasting trauma’s of the children feeling displaced and unloved.We are introduced to our eponymous hero with the tiniest bit of a dramatic scene, which takes place in the lunchroom of the courts where we hear several people talk about Old Filth, a retired judge whom they have just seen. The remarks are largely positive, leading readers to like the character even before we meet him. We also learn that he is called Old Filth because he invented the word FILTH, an acronym standing for Failed in London, Try Hong Kong. (And he was an attorney in Hong Kong for many years before he returned to England to be a judge.) As we get into the novel proper, we learn more about Old Filth, Sir Edward Feathers, who was born in Malaya to English parents. His mother died when he was three days old, and his father showed little or no interest in him. At three days old he was sent to live in a Malaysian village with his wet nurse and stayed there until he was four and a half, living as a native Malaysian. At that point an emissary from his father (she was a missionary who persuaded his father to let her remove young Edward from the care of his Malaysian family) comes to accompany him “Home” (to England) where he is placed in foster care with a Welsh family until he is old enough to be sent off to an English boarding school. Hong Kong in Western literature used to be a portrait of colonialism. Now it’s a portrait of a multicultural society, a gateway to China and an unparalleled trading hub. If there’s a persistent theme in 20th Century novels set in Hong Kong, it’s the Westerner’s anxiety about China’s influence and power. In more recent fiction, the economic surges of globalism have brought a new, glossier depiction of Gatsby-style wealth in a world-class luxury zone. Sometimes I joke that Hong Kong is an ethnological Disneyland. It's like we can cater to whatever you want." Failed in London, try Hong Kong........the words behind the acronym Filth. A small joke that gets way too much distracting play in this novel about Edward Feathers, ostensibly successful British barrister and Hong Kong lawyer and judge. Bittersweet scenes, combined with humorous moments, made this an excellent read. The author presents a character study of a man who never felt he belonged, who always felt that he was left behind.

She also writes for children and young adults. Her novel Bilgewater (1977), originally written for children, has now been re-classified as adult fiction. She was awarded the Whitbread Children's Book Award for The Hollow Land (1981) and is the author of A Few Fair Days (1971), a collection of short stories for children set on a Cumberland farm, and two novels for teenagers, A Long Way From Verona (1971), which explores a wartime childhood in Yorkshire, and The Summer After the Funeral (1973), a story about a loss of innocence after the death of a father. On Java Road is not just a story of a friendship, but it’s also a love letter to Hong Kong. Towards the end of the story when Melissa is thinking of her family’s own getaway until the scandal blows over, Adrian muses: July 2007, a decade after the 1997 Handover and with China’s presence all-pervasive, how will the expatriates from Hong Kong’s colonial past fit into the picture? Reading this book at first I thought it was superlative, further on I simply thought it merely excellent, but by the end I suppose I felt it was just very good. Although I do wonder mildly quite what the Orange prize winner in 2005 was like if this was only one of the also rans. While the story has tragic elements that other writers might turn into sentimental slush, Gardam maintains a superb balance between tragedy and comedy, making this book about displaced lives very easy to read, profoundly moving and funny all at the same time. She has a great gift for dry humour, which is sometimes so gentle that it can almost be missed, and sometimes so sharp you gasp.

Crime Fiction

For the past two years, JPMorgan Chase & Co. has hired more than 40 per cent of its full-time graduates and interns for Hong Kong from local universities, a number the bank expects to increase as it ramps up business in the region. Most global banks have tried to bring in Chinese power brokers. Many of these bankers are not only bilingual but also bicultural - products of elite Western universities who can move seamlessly between China and the global Wall Street. Many also bring deep connections to China’s leadership and state-owned enterprises. Now mostly in their 40s and 50s, they include Morgan Stanley’s Wei Sun Christianson and Credit Suisse Group AG’s Janice Hu. Gardam, herself, explicitly raises issues of "memory and desire." This puts forward many questions, including: