Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have. A book that I would recommend and could also be read in conjunction with Gweilo, Memoirs of a Hong Kong Childhood by Martin Booth.

The pictures reference the child’s perspective, whilst the words are in the idiomatic style of a kind yet pedagogic parent, one who instinctually knows what might appeal, yet also wishes to be informative.Partly this because his story is about the air conditioner business, guanxi and the difficulties of doi

It made me really long to go to Hong Kong (or Fragrant Harbour which is its chinese name) and I subsequently did! The word ‘Hong Kong’ (or 香港 for those who can) is an approximate phonetic rendering of the spoken Cantonese, and the Cantonese word actually means ‘fragrant harbour’.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Perhaps the grossest of these occurs when a man - whose identity, for reasons already hinted, at, I can't reveal - manages, through the good offices of the very Dawn Stone who kicked off the story and is now an important figure in a shady Hong Kong media empire, to achieve an interview with the big boss. There’s the ‘adult’s’ public house, the place of historical importance, the stations and architecture of an adult’s world. At that point "Fragrant Harbor" shifts to the story of Tom Stewart, a young man who sails from England to Hong Kong in 1935, improbably learns Cantonese from a Fujianese nun on the ship, lands a managerial job in a Hong Kong hotel, and finds success and happiness there until the Japanese invasion in 1941. Some days I started playing the game after some more than usually gross piece of hypocrisy or cant at school, some days it would be triggered by something I saw on TV or heard on the radio or read in a paper or magazine or book.

As prints particularly, therefore, many of these images have as strong an appeal to adults as the ‘children’s’ images – the balloons in the park, the sailboats in the Jardin du Luxembourg – have for children.

Their mid-century aesthetic finds a particular resonance now with its retro-charm, and as prints, these are not only for children. I have read several of his books and they are all so completely different in style,tone, and subject. Soweit ich weis ist die Geschichte bis heute nicht auf Deutsch erschienen, das Englisch ist jedoch für den halbwegs geübten Leser kein Problem. I read John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbor both from the perspective of someone born and raised in Hong Kong of British descent, and someone extremely interested in the one-time colony's rich history.