Two months ago, socialite Susanna Chung made a guest appearance on a local radio programme - in the course of which she announced that her husband, Edmund Chan, was having an affair with one of her best friends. Chinese newspapers had been speculating about Chan's close friendship with another woman, but even they were taken aback by Chung's approach. Hong Kong's Chinese language media has been full of the saga ever since, running pictures of Edmund Chan with the other woman (who has, despite much evidence, denied the relationship but is divorcing her own husband). The story has a further, macabre twist: Susanna Chung says she is dying of lung cancer. Some of the papers speculate about this too.

You can see their point. She does the rounds of functions, looking ravishing, not remotely the gaunt image of illness one might expect. When I commented on this, she was pleased, but said, 'Some stupid Chinese programme interviewed people on the street and asked them, 'Why does Susanna look so good?' and they were saying that maybe I am not ill.' Then she leaned over and said, with some intensity, 'Do you have a cigarette?' I didn't, so we ordered a packet of low-tar Silk Cut from a passing waiter. By the time she lit up number three, I suggested, feeling desperately sorry, that perhaps . . . but she replied: 'My cancer is the type that usually happens to non-smokers. My doctor says that anything that makes me relaxed is okay. It is too late.' Cancer was diagnosed in summer 1995. Before that Chung had been successful in typical Hong Kong style: modelling in Paris, wealthy husband in garment industry, tai-tai lifestyle, two sons, now 16 and 12, at school in England . . . and illness wasn't on the social agenda. She had chemotherapy; the cancer went into remission. 'I was very happy until, say, July, when I know that something is wrong in my family and there's a third party involved, and it happens to be my girlfriend. I got physically abused from all this chemotherapy, all this pain. Now I'm mentally tortured.' The cancer has returned - 'out of control in both lungs' - and her oncologist told her in summer she might have six months left. 'I'm a cancer patient, a mother of two, and from the first day of marriage to the last I have devoted myself. I cannot stand that people betray me. I want to tell this story. I want women to understand that we are afraid to lose our husbands, we want to keep . . . our position in society and the frame of the family, we swallow all the tears, the unhealthy things. And this is not fair.' So she went on the radio. I told her I could understand why she did it (it must be the revenge fantasy of many women), but also that I felt it might not have been an altogether good idea. Revenge, too, can be a form of cancer, corrosive in its own way. Chung shrugged. 'When you are hiding something inside, that is more bitter than when you spit it out. If you were me, betrayed by people you love and you're facing death, do you care?' I replied, aware of a delicacy of position, that I thought as far as the press was concerned she would willingly unleash a tiger, and she nodded.

'The Chinese press is out of control, they do not believe you, they gossip, they ask all my friends, they have 40 opinions and it's a mess.' Later, she mentioned that she had faxed her medical reports to one suspicious television station to pass on to its astonished audience; there is clearly a sickness on both sides.