As office workers hand dollars over for cartons of corporate coffee, it is all too easy for them not to notice the elderly gentleman sitting nearby. The issues of the moment for John Tang Kai-tan are not rushing to work or lounging in the shop's cosy chairs to share gossip. His thoughts are of a priest who saved hundreds of lives.
Asking the 76-year-old to cast his mind back to wartime Macau is difficult in such an unlikely setting. For John and fellow schoolchildren and orphans who survived those years, it is only a certain bright light of faith that serves to defeat dark memories of near starvation and the hardship they endured.
Yet the intrusive clatter of orders being made at the counter suddenly fades as John looks up and speaks of Father Mario Acquistapace, the man who saved his and hundreds of other young lives in Macau.
Speaking through a friend, who acts as an interpreter, John recalls Father Acquistapace. 'Without the arrangement that Father Acquistapace had made, many of us would have starved. There was no food at all, people were starving. There were hundreds of children and orphans with nowhere to live and nothing at all to eat.'
Imperial Japan had struck terror into Asia after invading Manchuria in 1937 and effectively cutting off Macau and the Pearl Delta after taking Hong Kong in 1941.
At the time John was a six-year-old pupil at the Instituto Immaculada Concecao, a boarding school where children and orphans were taught. Father Acquistapace, a Salesian missionary, had arrived in Macau 11 years earlier at the age of 20. In 1937 he was prefect of studies at John's school. 'Many families had fled to Macau from the mainland and Hong Kong,' John recalls. 'At first, things were all right but the situation became worse. My family moved back to Canton in 1942 because there was nothing in Macau. I was left, with my brother, at the school. We stayed there because it was the only place that we could eat.'
As the situation worsened, children and staff at the school soon became aware that food supplies were diminishing. It was through the actions of Father Acquistapace that the 500 children in the school were able to survive the following summer.