[kombuchakid]

plucked from somewhere in the middle of 'LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDOURED THING'
O sea-wet rock thronged, thronged and swarming with hunger and misery and wealth and want and abundance and waste, vice and purity and corruption and law and justice and privilege, charities and private property and Monopoly and Big Business and rackets and tuberculosis and beauty and horror; window of democracy Hongkong, haven of Shanghai racketeers and American missionaries and Chinese professors and international businessmen and out-of-job Kuomintang generals and Peking prostitutes and London marriageable girls and Mainland opium addicts. Refuge of refugees and political exiles, end-of-the-road to so many rejects of the New World and relics of the Old fusty order, Grand Hotel of men at a loose end and men on the make and men with nowhere else to go; outpost of Empire Hongkong, excrescence off China with two million four hundred thousand Chinese, communists and Nationalists and nothing-ists and so many many many sitters-on-the-fence; deep roaring, bustling eternal market Hongkong, where life and love and souls and blood and all things made and grown under the sun are bought and sold and smuggled and squandered, spring is come home to you.