Status Updates From Mr Ma and Son

At last, when she’d finished getting ready, she went and seated herself quietly in the drawing room, taking out a copy of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to read, so that when her Chinese guests arrived, she’d have a suitable topic of conversation ready.

Newspaper vendors, flower vendors and cigarette vendors glided their trolleys about in solemn silence: English people approach buying and selling with the same air as they approach funerals.