five minutes before being overtopped by Central Plaza a few miles away, and then by twin towers—the tallest enclosed structures in the world—being built in Kuala Lumpur. A competitive place, Southeast Asia. And it attracts some types that can compete with anything I’ve seen. I sat at dinner one night between a tough-as- lug-nuts young woman from the mainland who lives in New York and deals in used motor oil—sparkling table talk—and a large and equally adamantine chick from the wrong side of somewhere’s tracks in America. I turned to the suicide blond. “I’m uh arht cunsultunt,” she said. “Come again?” “Uh arht cunsultant.” “That’s interesting. Who do you art-consult for?” She named a large Saudi prince. “What kind of art does the prince like?” I asked. “Nineteen-cenchury reuhlist—you know, Uhmerican.” “Any particular artist?” “Andrew Wyeth.” I’d been under the impression that Andrew Wyeth was still alive—rare in a nineteenth-century artist. And you’d think Hong Kong would be a strange place to look for one of his paintings. But who knows? They shop hard in Hong Kong. Buy hard. Sell hard. They drink hard, too. On Friday nights, police are posted in the Lan Kwai Fong bar district because people have actually been crushed to death there during happy hour. Nobody takes it easy in Hong Kong. The only idleness visible is on Sundays, when thousands of the city’s overworked Filipino maids come to Central, spread cloths and plastic sheets up and down the sidewalks, and picnic in the least attractive and most heat-baked part of town. The Filipino maids are Hong Kongese, too. They’re in Central because it’s practical to get there on the subways, trams, and buses. Hong Kong is a practical place, down to earth, or, rather, down to concrete. The complimentary city guide in my hotel room gave advice on pricing whores and noted, “Some of the conservative hotels don’t allow a man to toddle in with a rent-a-bird in the middle of the night. But as you can imagine there are plenty of ‘cheap guest houses.’” In the window of an antique shop, I saw an ivory carving of the familiar row
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