With senior mainland officials declaring that the yuan is now fairly valued in the foreign exchange market, it is hard to imagine that investors in Singapore will be queuing up to buy reit shares simply because they are denominated in yuan.

July 2007, a decade after the 1997 Handover and with China’s presence all-pervasive, how will the expatriates from Hong Kong’s colonial past fit into the picture? The book starts out with judge Feathers retired and alone. He and his wife retired to Dorset in England after his long career in the East as barrister and judge. "It had been said that he fled London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit." Read and judge for yourself, particularly if you are interested in empires because this gives a worms eye view of the Imperial endeavour what it is like to be brought up and live within the physical necessities and mental space of an empire. Throw the first stone if you think you're good enough, I'll pause and hold it for a while yet. Ben Quinlan hardly qualifies as FILTH. But he's felt the walls close in. Born in Hong Kong and educated in Australia, he doesn't speak Mandarin.The NY Times reviewer timesreview wonders how a writer of Jane Gardam's general awesomeness can remain neglected by U.S. readers who apparently find time to read the anemic maunderings of that one-note whiner Anita Brookner. To be honest, I'm a bit puzzled myself. Adrian Gyle is a veteran British reporter, but one who has never quite made a name for himself. Instead of headlining talks at the FCC, he’s more likely to be found at Fung Shing, a North Point restaurant just below his flat on Java Road. He wasn’t completely FILTH—Failed in London, Try Hong Kong—and had a reason to be there: his old university friend, Jimmy Tang. Instead, this is a superb character study. Gardam precedes her novel with the quote from an inscription and a dedication, both of which have great bearing on what is to follow. Lawyers, I suppose, were children once

Sometimes I joke that Hong Kong is an ethnological Disneyland. It's like we can cater to whatever you want." Old Filth was one of many children 'sent home' to England to to get an education and be raised by foster parents. An orphan child. At Citigroup Inc., Chinese students will account for the majority of university graduates the firm intends to hire full time in Hong Kong next year, according to James Mendes, the US bank's Asia-Pacific head of recruitment. But, I thought, you’ll return to Hong Kong soon enough. You’re tied to this city by the heartstrings. The novel's chapters alternate between the present - the old man, funerals, visiting equally elderly relatives, ill health and worse - acquaintances - and his youth - birth in Malaya, farmed out to Wales, schooling, war time activities, and post war qualification as a barrister.

Being a native english speaker or white is nothing special in the UK compared with HK. This may explains the words "Failed in and Try" The same person is nothing special in Singapore, as too many Singaporeans are fluent in English. An acronym for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong" - a term that refers mostly to Britons who came to the former British colony in search of a better life - is set a decade after this city returned to Chinese sovereignty. Playwright Jingan MacPherson Young poses the interesting question of how this remnant of the colonial era felt adrift under the new political and economic climate. But there is also something awful in Filth's past that he chooses to bury. A darkness from his childhood that his shaped his entire personality. We get a sense of it throughout the story though it is only fully revealed at the end. And this caused me to view him in a whole new light, with much more sympathy than I had previously allowed. The two friends in Osborne’s story would become so close that Jimmy would call Adrian his comrade, sometimes using the English and sometimes the Cantonese.