Status Updates From Mr Ma and Son

bro the characters in this book are so frustrating

progress is slow but steady

A large part of the evening paper is devoted to horseracing and football results, and these people buy a copy – at nine o’clock in the morning – to check whether they’ve won or not. When they see they’ve lost, they purse their lips and read a bit of the anti-foreign news to make themselves feel better.

Yes, the character he’d written meant ‘beautiful’, but when Mrs Wedderburn had embroidered it, she’d done it upside down, and the ‘beautiful’ now looked like the three characters ‘big’, ‘king’ and ‘eight’ – the ‘big’ standing on its head – which together mean ‘big bastard’. He burst out laughing. Never since coming to England had he had such a good chuckle.

‘It’s no good you sticking up for the Chinese, Mum. If they weren’t so horrible, why would all the Chinese in films and plays and books be murderers or arsonists or rapists?’