PERHAPS I SHOULD have seen a portent in the entrails, but I could divine only horror from the scene. We’d come home from a pleasant Chinese New Year lunch to find our backyard had become a charnel house. The chickens which had arrived that morning had been slaughtered; their decapitated, plucked bodies now lay in a small fleshy pile on the concrete.

At the Chinese New Year open house at our home in Kowloon Tong that day in early 1967 – the dawning of the Year of the Ram – my father had doled out, in customary red packets, bonuses to the top men in his construction company. In response they showered him with gifts; no gold, frankincense or myrrh, but plenty of cigars, brandy, dried beef and other food of doubtful provenance and the chickens, in several clucking bags.