The cocktail party

Literary Review, Summer, 2004 by David T.K. Wong

The cocktail party is an all-purpose rite in darkest Hong Kong. It can be used to celebrate a betrothal, an anniversary or a national day, to gain face or to give face, to launch a business, to seal a contract or to reassure a creditor. It can be employed just as easily to turn a heart, to slight an enemy or to forestall a social death. Chinese Communist cadres adapt to it in no time at all. Sometimes even the underworld flaunts the success of its criminal undertakings with such parties.

No one is more familiar with the multifarious uses of the cocktail party than K.B. Woo, that billionaire entrepreneur known to admirers and foes alike simply as "K.B." As the most famous tycoon in a city replete with taipans and captains of industry, he is the darling of the cocktail cult. His name figures on the invitation lists of virtually everybody pretending to the upper crust. It is not unusual, therefore, for him to attend three or four cocktail parties in a single day. He attends them grudgingly, however, as a concession to his shareholders, his financial backers and the legion of photographers, financial journalists and social reporters who keep his name in the public eye. He knows that unexplained absence would provide grist for the rumour mills.

In truth K.B. finds cocktail parties an interminable bore. He had thought otherwise when he was just the impecunious son of a roadside hawker of fish balls and noodles. Then he had hankered after the untasted glamour of such occasions. But now, as chairman of Trans Universal Enterprises, that famous international conglomerate he has built up from scratch, such parties have become an imposition, deflecting him from the serious business of exploiting the greed of others.

Indeed, he wishes nothing more than to be relieved of the rituals of the cocktail cult. He resents their artificiality and their pretences. Mixing with mediocrities is bad enough, but the charade of smiling at dowagers with vanities as outrageous as their over-rouged faces, of humouring commercial parasites wheedling for crumbs of insider information, or of posing for photographs with treacherous rivals coveting various bits of his empire seems beneath a person who has already paid his way to the top.

Such are K.B.'s thoughts as he prepares to leave for Lulu's cocktail party to launch the high-fashion boutique he has agreed to finance. As he tidies the papers he feels a vague distress and, being in the privacy of his office, he gives reign to his discomfort. He allows his penetrating brown eyes to mist over behind his gold-rimmed glasses and his high, intelligent forehead to knit into a frown. He compresses his mouth into a severe line and in the process his jowl quivers with unfamiliar tension. All of a sudden a certain crudity or want of refinement returns to his features so that neither his immaculate Savile Row suit nor his expensive accoutrements prove sufficient to disguise his humble origins.

He knows deep down he is going to lose Lulu, no matter what he does. She has told him as much. But he still refuses to reconcile himself to that prospect. She remains the only pleasant thing that has happened to him through a cocktail party. That was more than five years back, when he was 45, and nothing quite as pleasant has happened to him since.

The remembered thrill of that meeting still quickens his blood. He had just acquired his first bank and had hosted a small cocktail reception at a leading hotel for the lawyers, accountants, merchant bankers and others involved in the deal. At the end of the function, Lulu had come up to him with a leather folio containing the bill.

Perhaps he had been unduly elated by his acquisition or perhaps he had had too much to drink, but the sight of Lulu simply stopped him in his tracks. She must have been fresh out of school for she could have been no more than 20. Her face, then as now, had been at once childlike in its innocence and mysterious with oriental complexities. Her eyes had a bright, trusting quality, her nose was dainty and her mouth, pleasingly large against the other features of her face, hinted at unawakened passion. Her long, silky hair, black as a raven's sheen, swung sensually against her crimson Chinese long gown. Although the gown was no more than a uniform for hotel staff, on her it had looked provocative, for it hugged the agreeable contours of her body and revealed two tantalizing slivers of thigh between its tall side slits. She had looked so unspoilt, so vulnerable, so in need of protection, that his bowels had churned and he felt a surge of libido inappropriate for his years.

"I hope everything has been satisfactory, sir," Lulu had said in a cheerful voice, as a prelude to presenting the bill. At the same time she had flashed a smile that melted into dimples on her cheeks.

He had peered at the identification tag pinned on her gown, noting that it read: "Lulu. Trainee. Customer Relations." He had never felt so powerful and irresistible as he did then. So, waving aside the proffered folio, he had declared: "Lulu, you're being wasted. Have dinner with me in Paris next Saturday and I'll give you the world."