THE spines of the stout black ringbinders sitting on the shelves of Bobby Leung's office make sobering reading: Import Of Human Remains - Bones intones one in large block capitals, Export Of Cremated Ashes declares another joylessly. Two large, tagged urns carved from blocks of jaundiced jade occupy either end of his desk, while an ornate Chinese coffin, 60 centimetres long, is a bookcase's sombre crown.
Leung is an incongruous fixture among these lugubrious trappings. No tape-measure pokes sinisterly out the top of his breast pocket; his features are not craggy, his voice sepulchral nor his limbs spindly and creaking. There is no sign of a fusty black top hat and frock-coat. Instead, he is wearing a natty, light-grey double-breaster and cleaning the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses with an air of quiet concentration. He looks like your average Hong Kong businessman - which is, of course, precisely what he is.
The Universal Funeral Parlour Co Ltd, of which he is the director, successfully dispatches one-third of the territory's annual 28,000 mortalities. 'We average 24-26 cases a day. During big festivals like Chinese New Year, Ching Ming or Mid-Autumn, we handle up to 35 a day. If there are easterly winds,' he adds with the aplomb of a weather announcer, 'we do fewer. We arrange everything here.' Not surprisingly, one of the most important regular purchases for a thriving funeral home are coffins, the specifications of which vary according to the means of the client. Some are imported ready-made from China; others are 'tailor made' in the parlour's workshop using mainland-imported raw materials. Since this is one of the few Chinese funeral homes in the territory equipped to perform Western funerals - one or two a month, he says - it occasionally imports bronze and 'top-weight' Western coffins from the United States.
Still, in this town, a custom-built Chinese-style casket costing a coronary-inducing $800,000 is what constitutes a real Rolls-Royce of a box in which to cruise comfortably into the hereafter. 'But this would be for burial,' clarifies Leung, 'which often means spending more money than you can afford.' Now that cremation has replaced burial as the most favoured method of disposal - 85 per cent of bodies are incinerated rather than interred these days - most families opt for what Leung calls a 'simple model' (linings and pillows are, in any case, considered Western fripperies in local undertaking circles) and a more sedate average outlay of 'less than $20,000'.
Embalming, which was rare a decade ago in Hong Kong, has grown proportionally with the vogue for cremation. 'Sometimes, in peak season, there is a 10- or 12-day wait between collecting the body from the hospital mortuary and the funeral service,' explains Leung. 'So families are advised to have the bodies embalmed. If the person died of, say, cancer, a stroke or hypertension, the body deteriorates rapidly. This is not good for reposing [the local custom of laying the body out for relatives and friends to see the day before the funeral ceremony]. We embalm for two weeks or maybe more than one month in cases of export.
'We buy the materials necessary,' he says. He removes a hefty tome from an adjacent bookshelf. Its thin glossy pages are filled with black-and-white photographs of grisly-looking tools. It looks like a trade catalogue for plumbers but it would be too much to hope that he'd brought something like that in to taunt a squeamish interviewer; Leung may be many things but you get the feeling that a practical joker isn't one of them.
