LET'S GET THIS straight. Contrary to what its publisher may suggest or insist upon, Hong Kong's latest satire Lo Mung Tung (Old Senile Managing Director) is all about you-know-who. The jokes are so blatantly obvious it is hard to miss the innuendo.
The character Lo Mung Tung is, as his name suggests, old and senile. He heads and runs a corporate business, simply known as 'The Firm', where he is surrounded by a bunch of losers. His wife is a formid-able shopper and his grey hair is cut in a crop. He is obsessed with the figure '85,000' (a reference to the on-off housing provision target perhaps?) and 'the third party' - the person alleged to have pressured pollster Dr Robert Chung Ting-yiu to stop conducting opinion polls on the popularity of the head of our Government.
OK. We'll say it. Lo Mung Tung is a caricature of the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Adminis-trative Region Tung Chee-hwa.
'No, he isn't,' reiterates the book's publisher Jimmy Pang Chi-ming. 'Lo Mung Tung's surname is Lo. He is just some managing director of a company who happens to make very bad decisions because the advisers around him are totally incompetent. It is not our intention to offend, or disrespect anyone. The book is just for laughs. It is not intended to be political.'
He says the idea for the book came from his writer friends who simply wanted to have their jokes published, and they thought this was great material. 'And I wanted it to be a gimmick to attract people to my stall at the Hong Kong Book Fair,' Pang says.
It sure did. Since Lo Mung Tung, costing only $25 a copy, appeared at the book market last month, where 600 copies sold out in double-quick time, its sales have been phenomenal. The initial print-run of 15,600 sold out in a week. An incredible feat considering that any local fiction that sells between 1,000 and 2,000 copies within a year is considered a huge success.