Simon Elegant

Similar in many ways, actually, but we won't go into that now.

Yeah, I think the family comes first is a huge thing for Chinese, often because of history.

The same reasons that, you know, you go to an Italian hill town, all the houses look like forts.

They had to protect themselves, especially.

Anyway, yeah, that's right.

I think of China, I think of Chinese and the veneration of family and secondary education.

Obviously, that's the other big thing.

And you think of what?

Well, I think of what I just said, which is everything in China is about its reaction to the arrival of those little Dutch, Portuguese, excuse me, boats in the 1600s.

And they're still trying to really cope with the fact that they existed for 2,000 years as the only game in town.

Everyone revolved around them.

simon your last name is elegant so you didn't say guilo you didn't say guilo because you are an elegant person simon okay i'm gonna say the word east uh-huh uh mysterious no i shouldn't it's a cliche would be yeah i don't know uh you know we're taught nowadays we're not allowed to say oriental anymore we have to say far east and so on but uh

Yeah, you know, for me, to some extent, that means home.

I was born in Hong Kong.

I've lived in Asia my entire life.

So for me, a fascinating place full of wonderful people.

Well, I was going to say home, but I would have to say now I would say some word, some variation of the word Hong Kong.

sad and oppressed because it's going to end up that way.

And much like, I mean, you know, I'm working on a thriller right now that's entirely set in China.

And the thing that strikes me when I try and write about this, and I'm trying to keep the philosophizing blather out of it because it's a thriller, but, you know, basically in Hong Kong and in China, you're talking about the infantilization of 1.2 billion people.