The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries, Vol. I)

By D. L. Kung

THIS IS THE REVISED AND RE-EDITED VERSION, WITH UPDATED ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, THANKS, EYES & EARS EDITIONS

"Kung delivers a touching story enriched by its strong Hong Kong atmosphere.” Publishers Weekly

"This is a Hong Kong readers don’t come across very often and the author brings the city alive." Chicago Tribune

Hong Kong's Lunar New Year break is over and Business World’s testy New York editors are howling for China copy. Unfortunately, Hong Kong bureau chief Claire Raymond’s new colleague Vic has gone missing. Plus, she’s contending with a nasty surprise on her doorstep—a Chinese mainland doctor confessing to murder.

With only a year to go before Beijing takes over the British colony, China's transition to power is revealing its dark and lawless side. Claire's desperate search to rescue Vic across Hong Kong’s border with China leads through the free-for-all landscape of Guangdong's coastal export boom into the murky use of Communist prison labor to feed the organ transplant trade. And Claire's hard-won career in a man’s world may be meeting stiff competition for her attention now that she’s met the dashing Swiss, Xavier Vonalp, setting up a Hong Kong base for his UN employers.

Novelist D. L. Kung worked as a journalist for over twenty years in Asia for publications including Business Week, the Economist, the Washington Post, National Public Radio and the International Herald Tribune. Kung won the Overseas Press Club award for Best Humanitarian Coverage in 1991 and was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eyes And Ears Editions
• Release date: Nov 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9782970074854

D. L. Kung

D. L. Kung worked for over twenty years in China as a reporter, covering everything from narcotic control in Hong Kong to political infighting in Beijing's inner Communist Party circles. Over the course of a career leading from Hong Kong to Beijing to Tibet to Sichuan and the Greater China coastline, Kung kept notes that now inform The Handover Mysteries with a vivid sense of place and pace.

Book preview

The Wardens

of

Punyu

D. L. Kung

E&E

EYES AND EARS

By the same author

The End of May Road (The Handover Mysteries II)

The Shadows of Shigatse (The Handover Mysteries III)

A Visit From Voltaire

Love and the Art of War

Under Their Skin

Dear Mr Rogge (a three-act play based on the true story of Chinese dissident He Depu)

Eyes and Ears Publishers, Inc.

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New York City, New York

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mailto: earsandears.editionsatgmaildotcom

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Copyright 2011 by D. L. Kung

All Rights Reserved

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Published by Eyes and Ears Editions at Smashwords

ISBN 978-2-9700748-5-4

To Peter

Chapter One

—Friday morning, February 23, 1996—

If he came to work late today, she’d kill him.

Hong Kong’s Lunar New Year holiday was finally over; the Year of the Rat had skittered in, and although it was a Friday, today marked the beginning of Business World’s weekly news cycle. To catch up with New York after a week’s break, their bureau would have to file two stories by next Tuesday.

The clock hanging over the crowded lobby of the Dominion Building showed 9:30 already. He wasn’t in the elevator as Claire rode up, pressed against the back wall by the crush of secretaries and clerks.

If he wasn’t in by ten, he was cutting it pretty fine. When he did show his sheepish mug, he’d better not give her the usual bull. In less than two months of being his exasperated bureau chief, Claire had heard all the excuses available to white man in Asian fleshpot: missing the commuter ferry from his island digs on Cheung Chau, waking up in the wrong apartment after a night ‘interviewing’ a German exporter, and his best yet—helping a bar girl elude one of her pimps on a two-day chase from the dives of Mongkok to the Mandarin Hotel’s Captain’s Bar.

The expenses filled in for that heroic and apparently educational tour of Hong Kong’s underbelly had been a work of art.

Claire could see Vic’s puppy-dog appeal but unfortunately for him, she was a cat person. He was trying her patience. His excuses showed more imagination than his story proposals. There were the hangovers, the tardy interviews, the hackneyed pitches for features they’d done long ago, but what really got to her—really, really irked her as a woman trying to run an major bureau with fifteen stringers spread between Sydney and Beijing—were his chummy calls placed from his apartment behind her back to pals back in their New York headquarters.

He was pitching ideas to New York without first passing them through her.

She’d warned him on the eve of the annual holiday that he’d better shape up. Or rather, she’d asked their Chinese assistant to explain the traditional Chinese New Year to him in terms even he couldn’t misunderstand.

‘Cecilia, why don’t you explain to Vic the importance of his Chinese birth year?’

‘It’s my pleasure,’ smiled the guileless young Chinese woman. ‘So, Vic, people born like you in the year of Pig are practical, down-to-earth and industrious, always looking for the next project to take on. They enjoy working in groups and work well with other people.’

‘Got it?’ Claire asked Vic. ‘There is no Year of the Lazy, Bull-shitting Hound Dog.’

This morning she’d see if Vic had, indeed, ‘got it.’

The bureau door was swollen tight by the island’s humidity. Claire turned the key again and this time kicked hard. The wood gave way with a groan, sending a pile of newspapers at her feet sliding across the mildewed carpet. She sidestepped them to get past Cecilia’s reception area into her private office. A six-foot tongue of telex paper snaked across the shabby carpet, stories filed and copied to her bureau by her colleagues around the region. Now it was her turn to pick up the slack. New York was desperate for Asian business copy and never satiated, no matter how many stories they filed.

‘That’s the trouble with China copy,’ Claire muttered, ‘One edition later they’re hungry all over again.’

She gathered the whole bundle into her arms, checking only to see if there were any messages for Vic, or ‘DVIC,’ as the computers in New York knew him. The telex was old-fashioned insurance against a breakdown in their newish e-mail systems that still took some getting used to, and—in the case of Jakarta, Delhi and Kuala Lumpur’s patchy Internet service—didn’t work at all. She dumped the armful of paper into the trash. She’d read all her own messages on her home computer before breakfast. There was only one bright aspect to these urgent demands. While she got a head start, her international editors—McDermott and his merry band—were sleeping soundly twelve hours behind her on the other side of the globe.

Cecilia arrived exactly at one minute to ten and, smiling with the fresh calm of someone eating delicacies prepared by her mother for the last five days, took her place at the spartan desk near the front door. She was fine-boned, pale-skinned and petite, making a sharp contrast to her lanky, flame-haired boss. Dressed in pressed khaki slacks with a damask vest over a short-sleeved silk T-shirt, Cecilia looked as precise as her filing. Her severe black bangs framed wide-set eyes and a small mouth innocent of lipstick.

Her eyes met Claire’s over Vic’s empty chair. Nothing needed to be said.

Claire sat down in front of her computer the same way she had been trained as a child in Berkeley thirty years before to sit at the piano every day. ‘You are a little red-haired Busy Izzy and if you don’t slow down long enough to concentrate, you play like a music box, all wound up too tight. Take a deep breath, now, and stretch the spine, stretch, up, up. That’s good,’ she heard the Viennese accent of her beloved music teacher, the late Miss Frankenberg, coach her.

She stretched and took a deep breath. As the machine booted up with the day’s work, she gazed northwards out the window. Between the high rises on Queen’s Road East, she could just make out the colony’s gray harbor awash in mist. February wasn’t Hong Kong’s best month. The entire city was stuck inside a cold, wet cloud.

Yet for most of its six million Cantonese, the last ten days had been the biggest, and for many, only holiday of the year. Claire loved Hong Kong as the lunar calendar shifted from one mythic animal to the next—rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. She loved the smiles on the faces of everyone around her but was even happier when they disappeared. During the annual exodus, the city fell quiet and abandoned, nearly hers alone to savor, as everyone flocked to see relatives in Guangdong Province just across the busy border with the British colony, or by plane to beaches in Thailand and the Philippines.

The two women worked in silence, Claire re-reading the more important traffic from her editors and Cecilia reviewing her stack of Chinese-language newspapers, her yellow highlighter poised to pounce on any tidbit of insider Chinese political news. The pressure to use the day well was palpable, but manageable. If Vic presented his hung-over mug soon and wrapped up the stringers’ contributions on the Chase Bank feature by noon, if Claire could manage to wangle a briefing on China’s inflation from the Hong Kong Bank economist at three and do a sidebar on Chinese boom-bust economics by six or seven, they’d slide into home base in time for New York’s story conference—at ten p.m. Hong Kong time.

Someone knocked on the door. Vic would have just barged in, and the Wan Chai mailman always knocked, flung, slung, and collected bundles in a single balletic pirouette that didn’t disturb the ashes dangling from the end of his ‘555.’

A polite knock was so unusual when there were no appointments Claire raised her eyebrows and stretched around the sliding office partition to check out their caller. It was a Chinese man of medium height wearing cheap polyester trousers and an acrylic sweater topped by the lank collar of a white nylon shirt. He glanced around quickly and when he saw Claire, stared for a moment at her un-coiffured strawberry mane and blurted, ‘Miss Raymond?’

Claire rose to greet him, noticing immediately that the visitor was so nervous that he was having trouble with the simplest of all local urban rituals—presenting his calling card. She took his hand and led him to the two rattan chairs at the back of her small space that constituted Business World’s ‘conference corner.’

‘My name is Dr Liu Heng Han. I didn’t telephone ahead because your office was closed for the holiday. It’s urgent and I am leaving this afternoon for San Francisco. I . . .’

‘How can we help you?’ Claire looked over his shoulder and saw with mixed feelings that the well-trained Cecilia was automatically boiling water to offer him tea. There was no time today for socializing. Only the man’s obvious stress kept Claire from asking him to state his business on his feet and leave.

‘Father Fresnay, your priest friend? He urged me to talk to you.’

Robert Fresnay was a Jesuit priest—half Scottish, half French—who ran a China-watching operation on Mosque Junction, one of the few crumbling corners of Hong Kong’s ‘old’ Victoria Island yet to be yuppified with glass towers. Claire was a routine face among Fresnay’s regulars of journalists and diplomats who met singly or in groups to track and analyze Chinese political and economic developments. If Mosque Junction was the closest thing to a Vatican ‘intelligence’ service following Chinese affairs, Father Fresnay was ‘M’ and George Smiley combined.

Fresnay wouldn’t waste Claire’s time.

Cecilia placed two mugs of green tea in front of them.

Claire forced an encouraging smile, wondering where she would get the minutes to spare. Beads of sweat rolled down the doctor’s scalp between the strands of spiky black hair. It wasn’t that hot in their air-conditioned office.

Liu took the cane seat closest to the door connecting Cecilia’s reception area with Claire’s office and glanced at the main door, as if he half expected a posse of policemen to barge in any moment.

‘I have worked at the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University of Medical Sciences in Guangzhou for five years, mostly in sports medicine. Oh, yes, thank you,’ he took sip of tea and paused. ‘I carry out surgery from time to time, but my specialty was sports trauma and rehabilitation. I have even done some microsurgery, but not so much. Most of my work was a mix of traditional and western treatment of muscular injury.’

His English was good enough, with an American accent betraying either a stint in the States or a lot of American television viewed from across the increasingly porous border.

Claire’s eyes strayed to Vic’s empty desk. Where the hell was he? She could have been working on the inflation piece while he handled this.

Dr Liu continued, ‘I am a member of the Party, and I have never had any political trouble in my past. Now, well, I am leaving the mainland very suddenly because of something that happened last week. I haven’t slept very well and I finally decided I had to leave China, maybe forever. A friend of mine in Guangzhou knew of Father Fresnay’s writings and wrote me a letter of introduction—’

‘Dr Liu, I don’t want to seem rude, but I have a lot to do today. Our offices in New York—’

‘I’m sorry. Father Fresnay heard my story. He told me something I was never taught in China, that there are two parts to an act of cont—, contri—’

‘Act of contrition? Are you Catholic, Dr Liu?’

‘My brother belongs to the Party-approved Patriotic Catholic Association of China. Not a real Catholic, I suppose you would say. ‘

‘The Pope doesn’t speak for everybody. Anyway, go on.’

‘Father Fresnay says confession is only half way. Reparation is the second half. Telling you, a journalist, is my reparation.’

‘You want me to report something?’

Dr Liu seemed emboldened now that his awkward introduction was behind them. ‘Maybe it is useful to you sometime. So. Well. Last week I was awakened in my room at the medical dormitory before dawn and ordered by two policemen from the Guangzhou People’s Armed Police to accompany them. They insisted I bring a full surgical kit. I followed immediately. I thought perhaps some top official was in a serious accident. Of course I asked no questions.’

‘I understand.’ She also saw his hand was shaking too hard to hold the tea mug.

‘Two more officials were waiting for me inside a white van, the kind that the hospital uses. Something was odd. The van had no markings or identification of any kind. One of the PAP officers stopped me when I started to put on my white coat in the van. He said, You won’t need that. And I started to wonder, why didn’t they want the van or me to look medical?’

‘Who was the patient?’ Claire couldn’t see how his tale was going to end up in Business World. Her impatience was getting the better of her journalistic training to just listen.

‘Please wait. I must tell this my way, please. We started driving south, and when we reached the suburbs I noticed a lorry, you know, a truck, was always ahead of us. It was open in the back, the kind that farmers use all the time, with three people standing up behind the cabin. I saw one of the people resembled a young woman from my own village. The two men seemed to be guards. When I could glimpse better through our van’s window again, I saw they were carrying pistols. One was holding the end of a rope tied around the girl’s neck and her mouth was shut up tight with tape. When I saw that, I became quite frightened.’

‘You guessed what was going on, didn’t you?’

Dr Liu nodded. ‘I’d seen such scenes many times when I was a teenager during the Cultural Revolution. I just didn’t understand what I was doing there. Any prison doctor can verify an execution.’

Liu sipped his tea and stared around the office, as if he was afraid even the furniture might betray him. He took a deep breath and gripped the teacup with both of his slender hands. Claire realized both his hands trembled almost beyond his control.

‘Then we drove through open farmland, just a few houses were in sight, and finally the lorry ahead of us pulled off the road. We stopped behind, and one of the policemen gave me the order: ‘Prepare to operate. We want both kidneys.’

They uncovered equipment in the back of our van. Under a canvas they’d hidden everything we needed for transporting fresh organs. Of course I protested, Miss Raymond. This was not my work. Call somebody else! Then suddenly I remembered that our urology team had used the lunar holiday to attend a world health conference in Geneva.’

Dr Liu’s hands were now shaking hard. His voice was growing softer, his eyes wider.

‘ . . . I felt sick, but I thought, maybe it would be easier to comply once the execution was over. It would be just a cadaveric transplant. My mind was racing, but I could present no resistance. Then they forced the girl down on a stretcher on the floor of the van. She struggled but her arms were tied and her ankles were weighed down with—’ he gestured toward the floor. ‘Jiao liao, and her hands had shoukao.’

‘Handcuffs and leg-irons,’ Cecilia explained from her desk. Claire nodded thanks. She used everyday Mandarin, but in fifteen years, she’d never needed to talk about leg-irons.

Dr Liu took a cigarette out of his pocket and with difficulty, lit it and took a deep drag. ‘They didn’t even remove the rope from her neck, just pulled it tighter. I hadn’t brought anything to anaesthetize a patient for surgery. All I had was a simple injection of morphine for pain, some bandages, and a little antiseptic. She was struggling hard but they managed to yank down her trousers, lift up her blouse. They gestured to their guns threateningly and told me to get started.’

‘I did protest then. I said this was against all rules of organ transplantation but they put a gun to my head. I wanted to give her an injection of morphine, but they grabbed it out of my hand. They didn’t want her system slowed down. I demanded to know who ordered this and they just told me that the kidney recipient was the daughter of an important Hong Kong real estate boss—’

‘Who?’

‘They didn’t say. But nothing was to go wrong. I started yelling like a crazy man, You’re supposed to kill her first! but they said . . . they said the orders were to remove the organs as fresh, as fresh—’

Liu put his head in his hands. His shoulders shook with remembered trauma.

‘That’s all right. Cecilia, please get Dr Liu more tea.’

‘It’s my pleasure,’ the girl whispered.

The visitor wiped his face off with a soiled handkerchief, and stared wild-eyed up at Claire. ‘Her screams were terrible, even through the gag.’

He clenched his hands to stop the shaking. ‘I thought the whole thing could be forgotten, pushed into the past like everything else. But there was one thing that made this worse than all the stories I’d heard around the hospital. The moment I sliced into her, I’d killed her, I’d murdered her and all the time, I knew she was innocent of any crime.’

Claire prodded him as gently as she could, almost more as reassurance than as a question. ‘How could you be so sure she was innocent? Because she resembled someone from your village?’

‘No.’ Dr Liu gulped for air. Claire waited. She felt both scared and moved by Dr Liu’s account, but just then, the ancient telex burst into clattering action, churning out copies of more messages from New York that were arriving simultaneously by e-mail into her computer. Cecilia came into the inner office as discreetly as she could to rip off the length of paper curling toward their feet so she could file it away for backup.

Goddammit, where was Vic? If he were here to back her up, she could spend more time with Dr Liu; maybe take him to a quieter place to finish his story. If Cecilia couldn’t reach Vic by phone, Claire was going to have to go out to his apartment and rouse him personally. It would only be the fifth time he’d partied himself though a long weekend into a stupor.

‘I’m sorry for the interruption, Dr Liu. How could you be sure she was innocent?’

Dr Liu looked Claire straight in the eye for the first time. His fear had hardened into anger. ‘Because she didn’t just resemble someone from my village, I knew her. She was my stepsister, Gu Weng-kin, the daughter of my mother’s second husband. My own father was sent to a work camp in the interior and starved to death—we heard he was eaten by other villagers—during the Great Leap Forward.’

There were rumors reaching Hong Kong these days, terrible tales of cannibalism in the hardest hit provinces of those years, but still impossible to confirm. Claire shook her head with pity. ‘What do you think I should do? We’re a business magazine, and our readers expect us to report business stories.’

‘This was business first, justice last,’ Liu retorted, spilling his tea on the carpet. ‘Weng-kin was found in possession of some documents, some scientific research on radar equipment, but she wasn’t guilty of espionage. The date for her appeal hearing was set. She’d agreed to keep the documents for a friend at the Guangdong Provincial offices of the Ministry of Electronics, just an innocent favor to a former schoolmate. The Party lawyer had arranged that she would plead guilty and we were told the court would be lenient. She was going to get maybe ten, fifteen years. But the appeal was delayed and delayed, and when we tried to visit her at Women’s Detention Center in Guangzhou, she wasn’t there any longer.’

‘Where had they taken her?’

‘I never found out. Even her lawyers weren’t informed of her transfer and they’d been assigned to her case by the state. I heard the guards talking in the van on the way back. They thought I was too upset to pay attention to their chatter.’

He laughed ironically. ‘I heard them say an order had come through from this Hong Kong billionaire to our hospital in the form of a charitable donation—more than five million yuan—for two kidneys for his daughter. For immediate delivery and no mistakes, no infections, no rejections. One of them joked, there was only one place to be sure of really healthy specimens; Club Med, he called it, for medical.’

Dr Liu practically spat the words out in contempt. ‘But I didn’t dare ask where they meant. I figured if I knew too much, I was next.’

‘You’re saying she was killed on command from someone in the medical system or prison system—just for her kidneys? Murder for money? Who at the hospital pocketed the five million?’

‘I don’t know. A few months ago, some of the doctors were gossiping at the hospital canteen. A renal specialist complained that prison cadres are getting fat on organ sales and that the doctors should get a bigger cut. But we were always told that the money received from dead prisoners’ organ sales went to purchase expensive drugs to reduce tissue rejection. And anyway, we were told that the executed prisoners signed papers donating their organs to the motherland as transplants after their death.’

‘Gu Weng-kin had not agreed?’

Dr Liu looked at her wide-eyed. ‘No! If you could hear her screams: What are you doing? What are you doing? She had no warning! It was delivery on demand. I cannot live with this. Her screams keep me awake every night. Her eyes watching me, me holding the scalpel.’

Claire laid a hand gently on his wrist. ‘Where are you going now?’

‘ I spent two years in San Francisco as a student about ten years ago. Now I’m going back. I told our department head I was going for a seminar and bought a ticket with all my savings. Father Fresnay arranged someone at the Catholic University there to meet me.’

The telephone rang. Cecilia gestured to Claire that the caller was insisting on speaking to the bureau chief. Claire cursed, ‘Jesus, Mary and—’ and walked over to her desk to take the call.

‘Claire Raymond, may I help you?’

‘This is Mr Paul MacGinnes’ secretary at Brainchild Company calling. Mr MacGinnes would like a word with you.’

Claire raised her eyebrows at Cecilia who shrugged in ignorance. A confident American male voice took the line.

‘Miss Raymond?

Reviews for The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries, Vol. I)

[jennaelf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There's not much I can say that hasn't been said by the other reviewers here. There are some syntax hiccups, but those are forgivable in light of the compelling read!

[arelenriel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was a really excellent mystery. Kung provides accurate and detailed descriptions of Asian culture and of the lives of Expatriates living in Asia. The scenes were so vivid the reader can also see them and the plot is excellent. this is a great book.

[riversong_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an interesting story about organ harvesting and business practices just before the handover of Hong Kong to China. The story moves right along and the characters are interesting. The editing leaves a bit to be desired, but I'd read more from this author.

[honoliipali · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I struggle with reviewing this book. My struggle is whether to rate based on the storyline or the quality of writing. More on that later.The storyline is morose and compelling. I have no doubt that the subject matter is accurate and indicative of what goes on behind the red curtain. From that perspective, this is a compelling story that we should all have the opportunity to read. Global reality is sometimes very hard to accept.The writing is obviously done by someone for which English is a second language. The author's English language skills are pretty good but that makes it all the more difficult to read a sentence when the syntax goes awry or extra words are inserted. I found myself re-reading sentences over and over trying to find the point. Sometimes I failed and had to read on. In addition, the author repeats storyline items over and over as if he is trying to remind the reader of the instant point he wishes to make. I found this redundance bothersome. I compromised my rating as a 4 for the storyline and a 3 for the writing style for an average of 3.5. Since I think the story is important for everyone to be aware of, I rounded the rating up to a 4 (except on Librarything where I can give half star ratings.)

[sudimatleon · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Wardens of Punyu (The Hanover Mysteries vol.1) by D.L.KungIn 1996, Claire Raymond is a smart, shrewd former journalist running the Hong Kong branch of a business magazine. Claire was born in the States but has lived in Hong Kong since the '70's. With her job, her hair color (in Chinese mythology red hair spelled demon), and her height, at 5'10" she was taller than many Asian men, she had a difficult time with long term relationships.Claire's friend, Father Fresnay, has sent a man to talk to Claire. This man, a doctor, tells a very strange and if true, an incredibly gruesome story involving the trafficking of viable human organs for transplant. What she hears is very unsettling but there is just this man's word and no collaborating evidence and she has a lot on her plate. Her New York deadline is looming and her reporter hasn't shown up, nor did he make an interview he had scheduled. Before she can look into the strange story the doctor has told her, she must find her reporter Vic. She has Cecilia, her Chinese assistant, send out feelers about the story, to see if any of her journalist friends have heard about this organ trafficking story. She needs to track down her wayward reporter Vic.Instead of Vic, Claire finds Chris Hager, her magazine's Bangkok stringer. A stringer is a reporter that works freelance, usually for several different papers and magazines. Claire's not sure what he's doing in Hong Kong, in Vic's room, but he gives her the old song and dance. She eventually gets a message, supposedly from Vic, saying he's fine, had taken a little holiday, but now due to extreme traffic, and tourists, he will be delayed getting back. As he often comes up with excuses, Claire is not surprised.A few days later, Claire goes for a hike with 2 of her friends. A body washes up on a nearby shore, badly damaged by marauding sharks, and a single bullet hole. Worse yet, Claire catches a glimpse of the man, its one of her reporters!After an autopsy, and a meet with other interested parties at the embassy, Claire is informed that one of her reports was spotted in China, which is horrible news! The embassy can't help him because they have such a fragile relationship with China. Claire is given a surprising suggestion.With the death of one of her male reporters, and having to sneak into China (if the Chinese find out she's entered without the proper journalist papers, it could result in a major incident) to get the other reporter out, Claire's time is running out. But as Claire soon finds out, things are just getting interesting.This has a great locale, very well described, right down to the bricks on the streets, credible and likeable characters (I can picture Cecilia in my mind easily), and an interesting mystery. I had really high hopes for this book because of the different locale and a rather gruesome mystery but it just didn't grab me tight. I would still give it a read as the author has a beautiful way of describing the locales, the scenes and the people.