Since he moved to Hong Kong three years ago, the Rat’s Cantonese has been coming on apace. This has rather less to do with his language skills — never that much in evidence on his school reports — than it does with the fact that my stepson works in what is still, despite the mainland Chinese’s best efforts, one of the most aggressively free-market cultures in the world.
‘It’s like this,’ Rat explained, when the Fawn and I visited earlier this year. ‘If you want to get a cab somewhere urgent in the morning and you can’t speak good enough Cantonese then basically you’re stuffed. The drivers just swear at you and drive off. They haven’t got time to be wasting listening to dumb Gweilo trying to make themselves understood. In Hong Kong time is money.’
This was the first time we’d seen the Rat and his girlfriend in their new home and it was a joy to see how much happier they were. Pleasing as well to hear them so ardently channelling my political views. You’d think living with me would be enough to turn any child left-wing. But hearing them going on about how much they loathed the feckless, scuzzy, dole-scrounging culture they’d left behind them in Camberwell, I almost felt like Jeremy Corbyn listening to a treatise by Nigel Farage.
Fraser Nelson and James Delingpole discuss Hong Kong and Brexit on the Spectator podcast
They’re dead right, though, of course. In London, they were just scrabbling to no real purpose. Neither was earning enough to save even for holidays, let alone accumulate sufficient capital to get a place on the property ladder. Now, they can afford to go on long-weekend jaunts to Thailand and the Philippines, eat out whenever they wish and still put money aside for a home for all the beautiful grandchildren they’re going to make us now that they’ve just got married.
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