[FICTION] “Engagement” by Greg Solomon
Greg Solomon on his story: One of the things I enjoy about Hong Kong is the diversity of people who live, work (and love) side by side. This is the social embodiment of yin and yang: Caucasians and Asians, the wealthy and the struggling, the modern and the traditional, finance professionals and artists, talkers and listeners, 識中文同埋唔識中文 (Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers).
Whether I’m eating in a restaurant, working in a coffee shop or strolling through the streets of Hong Kong, I always devote part of my attention to observing how this interplay of yin and yang unfolds. Watching people interact across these divides, listening to their conversations and interpreting their dynamics is an enjoyable pastime, one that sometimes inspires my writing.
The story “Engagement” presents one such scenario, highlighting some of the nuances that are present but usually remain well hidden. However, in keeping with the advice to “show, not tell”, I won’t explain any further and will simply leave you to listen in on their engagement.
Engagement
Photo © Greg Solomon
The restaurant, Maison Bao, looked like the kind of place that would want to call your bank manager when you made the booking, just to be sure you could afford to eat there.
Maison Bao occupied the second floor of one of Hong Kong’s oldest converted colonial buildings, just a few minutes’ walk from the Central finance district. As Abi walked across the carpeted floor towards her table, she was aware that the room gave off a sense of the hush of money. The tablecloths were ivory linen, the candles were actual candles, and a sommelier moved between tables with the unhurried ease of a man who had long since concluded that most people were ordering the wrong wine.
Abi arrived at five past eight, slightly late only because she had been on time but spent a few minutes outside, scrolling, not quite wanting to be first. She confidently made eye contact with him from several paces away, a skill she learned from spending her days managing classrooms full of challenging teenagers, and was therefore unlikely to be fazed by anything an adult might do in this place. She wore a tight navy dress because initially she couldn’t decide whether she cared, and in the end had decided that she did, a little.
He was sitting at a corner table, sending one last rushed message before she reached him.
“Abi.” He smiled and kissed her once on each cheek. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten.”
She hadn’t forgotten. “Not at all,” she said. “And you found it easily?”
“Oh, I know this place well,” he said, sitting down. “Been coming here for years, even before they got the Michelin. It’s better now, actually. They’ve tightened the menu, got rid of some of the nonsense. Tell you about it in a second.”
She had met Robert just three weeks ago at Priya’s engagement party. Even before that dinner, Priya had mentioned him in the way that well-meaning, yet meddling friends do. “He’s smart, he works in finance, I think you’ll like him.” Although Priya had intended them to sit together, he’d arrived late and ended up sitting quite far from her, so they didn’t really get much of a chance to chat that night. He wasn’t particularly good looking, although not bad either, but certainly his confidence, the way he seemed to own the room that night, definitely helped.
They swapped numbers that night, and he messaged her around 7 am, while she was asleep and he was on the way to work. “Yes,” she typed an hour later, “Dinner on the 22nd is good.”
❧
She liked his stubble, and the fact that he must have grown that in less than a day. Nice. The suit was clearly expensive, and fitted him perfectly. His watch caught the candlelight.
“I took the liberty of asking them to hold our table till quarter past,” he said. “Just in case. But here you are.”
“Here I am.”
A waiter appeared with menus, and Robert opened his without looking at it. He addressed the waiter in what sounded to Abi like a slightly forced French.
“Bonsoir, Sam. Nous sommes prêts pour le… uhm… l’apéritif. Oui?” He paused, probably planning the next sentence in his head, then continued, “Et… et… peut-être le champagne pour commencer?”
Sam, who was from the New Territories but had studied in France for four years, replied in a more fluent French, something about la carte des vins.
“No need,” Robert said. “The Billecart-Salmon. Blanc de Blancs.”
“Yessir, I believe we still have that one.”
“Good. We’ll take that.” He looked at Abi. “You drink champagne?”
“I don’t drink much.”
“Good,” he said, looking back to Sam, “then let’s have this French champagne.”
“Don’t bother with the à la carte,” he told her, taking the menu away. “I’ll walk you through it. There are two or three things worth having, and the rest is for people who don’t come here often enough to know better. What do you feel like? Fish? Meat?”
Abi glanced across the table at the closed menu in his hands. She had briefly seen sole de Douvres was on the menu, and that looked really good. “I was thinking the sole, possibly.”
“The sole’s good, but if it’s your first time here, you’ll want the duck. They’ve been doing the duck the same way for years, and it’s the best thing on the menu. Trust me.” He gestured to Sam. “I’ll have the beef, rare. And I mean rare, Sam. She’ll have the duck. And the terrine to start, for both of us.”
Sam didn’t write anything down; he just took the menus from Robert and walked off towards the kitchen.
She was generally fond of duck, which was lucky. The terrine, well, she decided to wait and see. Abi was still a little taken aback by the ordering process, and suddenly felt more like a schoolgirl than a confident teacher. This was not a familiar state of mind for her.
“So,” he said when Sam had retreated. “Tell me everything. What’s your week been like?”
This was, she would come to understand, a courtesy question. A door held open briefly before you stepped through it yourself.
“It’s been good, actually. Busy. We’ve got end-of-year assessments coming up and I had…”
“God, I know about busy.” He exhaled with theatrical weight. “I literally, and I don’t say this lightly, I’ve been in the office since six every morning this week. We closed a deal on Thursday. Tokyo. Three hundred and fifty million pounds, cross-border M&A, took four months to structure and the other side nearly walked on Tuesday. Nearly walked.” He shook his head in a way that was meant to communicate that he’d played an important part in keeping them at the table. “We were in the conference room till two in the morning. I’ve had about eleven hours of sleep in four days.”
“Goodness.”
“And then it’s done and we pop the champagne, and it’s all…” He mimed a fake smile. “…wonderful, everyone is best friends. Which is how it goes. But honestly? When I got home Thursday night, well, Friday morning, you know, I sat on the sofa and I didn’t move for about forty-five minutes. Just sat there. My apartment has got these floor-to-ceiling windows facing the harbour and I just sat there looking at the water.” A brief pause. “Have you been to Western Harbourfront? The residential side?”
“I haven’t, no.”
“The views are extraordinary. I mean, the property was an absolute arm and a leg when I bought it, obviously. The market was… well, 2019, you’ll remember, but it’s gone up absurdly since then. My friend James, who’s also in the industry, keeps telling me to sell and I keep telling him: where would I go? There are few places in Hong Kong with a view like that.” He tilted his glass slightly, swirling it out of habit, even though the glass was still empty. “But yes. Sitting there at three in the morning looking at the harbour, moments like that are why you do it, aren’t they?”
Abi wasn’t sure she knew why she did things, or whether she’d define her own best moments as the ones following the worst ones, but she said “absolutely” and the champagne arrived.
❧
It was very good champagne. She took a slow sip, and felt the bubbles move directly into her brain.
The terrine arrived in small, carefully shaped slices with the cutest little pieces of toast, and Robert ate with the kind of deliberation that showed he knew what excellent tasted like.
“Yes,” he pushed with finality, in a way that said if he wanted to know her opinion, he’d give it to her.
“So what is it you do? Priya said painting, was it?”
“I teach art,” Abi said. “Actually, I’m head of the Art Department for a senior school in Kowloon. I’ve been there seven years now.”
“Teaching.” He nodded patronisingly. “I think teaching is so important. I genuinely do. My mother was a teacher, actually. Junior school. She used to say it was the most exhausting job she’d ever done. And I’d think, and I never told her this, obviously, but honestly? I’d think, you have no idea. Banking makes teaching look like a holiday. But the vocational satisfaction must be something else.”
Abi waited a moment to make sure he was finished. “It’s brilliant,” she said. “I love it. Form Six especially, at that age they’re starting to develop a real…”
“You know what it reminds me of?” He put down his fork. “There was this analyst I had working for me a couple of years ago. Chinese guy, but straight out of Oxford, philosophy degree, total lateral thinker. I used to have him sit in on structuring sessions just to challenge the room. Because banking isn’t just numbers; people don’t realise that. It’s fundamentally about psychology. Understanding what the other side wants to believe.” He tapped the table. “I used to say to my juniors, if you don’t understand people, you can’t structure a deal. And they’d nod along and then go back to their spreadsheets.” He smiled. “Anyway. Sorry. You were saying, senior school?”
“The Form Six students, just that they develop their own visual language,” Abi said. “It’s the most interesting part of the job, watching that happen. One of my students this year has been doing these extraordinary…”
“Do you find summer holidays compensate for the salary? I’ve always wondered about that. Because the pay in education is genuinely outrageous, given the skill required, and how important teachers are for society. I’ve seen the numbers and frankly if I’d known at seventeen what starting teacher pay was, I’d have said to anyone: run a mile. But I suppose if you love it.”
There was a pause while he waited for her to confirm that yes, she supposed it was fine if you loved it.
“I manage,” she said pleasantly.
❧
The main course arrived, placed on the table with a little flourish by Sam and another waitress at the same time. Abi watched a couple at a nearby table share a joke and felt a small pang of envy.
“This all looks lovely,” Abi said. He started explaining the importance of using grass-fed butter when making a good glaze for vegetables, but she realised at that moment that she still needed to buy a birthday card for her sister whose birthday was in three weeks and who was also, more pressingly, getting married in a couple of months. The wedding was the thing she’d been thinking about all week, because her sister had asked her to read something during the ceremony, but she hadn’t yet decided on which poem to read. The words of Tammy Lai-Ming Ho’s “This May Be a Love Poem” filled her head for a moment: We are ugly but we have the words, / even if no one reads th…
“…ess?” He was waiting for a response.
“Sorry, what?”
“Chess. Do you play?”
“Oh. No. I mean, I learned as a child, but haven’t touched a board since I was like ten.”
He looked amused. “You just have to commit. Anyone can memorise the rules and move their pieces around the board, but to really play you need both ongoing intellectual engagement and enough experience for the patterns to start to settle down in your mind. Of course, I didn’t really understand how the mind worked when I was young, so I didn’t understand why I was beating everyone in school chess tournaments.” He looked privately pleased at the memory. “I still play online a few times a week, just to keep the brain sharp.”
Abi took a big sip. She thought the champagne was excellent, but was disappointed in herself when she found herself wondering if Robert would say it was merely good.
❧
Her duck was, she admitted to herself, perfect. Crisp skin, flesh the colour of dark wood, with a cherry sauce and something underneath she couldn’t quite identify, some kind of herb that was familiar yet distant.
“Good, yes?” he said. “I told you.”
“Very good,” she agreed. She didn’t really want to admit it to him, perhaps out of the smallest amount of spite, because she really had felt railroaded into having that dish. He ate a piece of his beef, considered it lovingly, and nodded.
“So, you know Priya from school? University?”
“University. We teamed up on a group project near the start of first year, and have been friends ever since.”
“I know Roshan, obviously. Well, through work originally. He was two years behind me at Magdalen College, we’d cross paths at various events, and then he joined the firm I was at, and that was that. Small world. It’s actually spelled m.a.g.d.a.l.e.n. even though we say maw-dlin,” he added.
“Did you know he and Priya nearly didn’t happen? He told me once that he almost didn’t go to that first dinner she invited him to. Some rowing thing. Can you imagine? They’ve got two kids now.”
“I know,” Abi said. “I was at their wedding.”
“Were you? Right, of course.” He continued without pausing. “I gave a speech at that wedding. Did I tell you that?”
He hadn’t told her. “I don’t think so.”
“Twelve minutes, with a carefully planned structure: three anecdotes, two jokes, one sincere bit at the end. That’s the formula. People remember the last thing they hear.” He sat back. “Got a standing ovation. Roshan actually cried a little, which I wasn’t expecting. Grown men crying, you never really get used to it.”
Abi thought back to the wedding, which she’d attended four years ago, and whether there had been a best man’s speech that prompted a standing ovation. She remembered the venue, the flowers, Priya laughing so hard her mascara had run, the zebra xylophone the band played, the marigolds on each table, her henna tattoo. She couldn’t remember a standing ovation.
“It was excellent,” he reiterated. “Anyway. What have you been watching? Reading? What does one do in… where do you live?”
“Tai Po.”
“Typo,” he approximately repeated. “Right, there’s a lot going on there now, isn’t there?”
“I love it. It has been home for years. The harbour, the hills.”
❧
She loved reading and wanted to continue talking about books, but felt her window to talk about her own reading habits had closed. “What about you, do you read much?” she compromised.
“I try. I mostly listen to things, podcasts and audiobooks, because by the time I get home, reading feels like effort. In my job I’m always reading lots of important information. But on my rare holidays I’ll do a few books, mostly non-fiction. History, economics, banking crises, the occasional biography.” He paused. “Actually I’ve been reading something on sleep. Fascinating. Walker the neuroscientist, Why We Sleep. Do you know his work?”
“I think I’ve heard of the book.”
“Changed my whole approach to sleeping. I track my sleep now: REM cycles, deep sleep percentages. I wear an Ōura ring.” He brandished his right hand briefly. “What’s your sleep like?”
“Honestly?” Abi said. “Terrible lately. I’ve been so tired I could…”
“The problem is most people think they’re actually managing on less sleep than they need, and they’ve just adapted to feeling that way. But the cognitive decline is real. I have to stay sharp all the time; I can’t imagine what would happen to my income if I wasn’t totally present in every meeting. Walker says people on six hours a night perform worse than people who’ve been awake for twenty-four hours, and they don’t even know it.” He shook his head. “I target seven hours. Blackout curtains, bedroom at nineteen degrees. It took about a month to recalibrate but now I wake up without an alarm.”
Abi looked at him. He had, she was beginning to realise, the rare and remarkable quality of making her feel lonelier in company than she did when alone.
She had, somewhere around the midpoint of his sleep monologue, quietly picked up her phone from her bag and started the voice recorder. She placed it face down on the chair beside her leg where the tablecloth fell to conceal it, as if she had simply checked a message. Her friend Donna, who had heard the Priya-arranged-a-dinner-date story with the sharp interest of someone who knew Abi’s dating history, had said: “If he’s a typical banker, record it. I want to hear.” She had said it as a joke. Or probably as a joke.
Abi was fairly sure she had enough material already for Donna to listen to in a state of hysterical disbelief, but she was also committed now, and she settled back into her chair with small sips and watched him cut his beef. She felt something shift inside her from mild disappointment to a sort of objective anthropological fascination. He was extraordinary, in his way. He was a fully formed specimen being observed in the wild, having a meal with something he had just killed.
“Did you see that film?” he was saying. “The Korean animation which Netflix dropped the ball on. KPop Demon Hunters. Everyone was raving about it. But apparently Netflix made very little of the total money that the movie generated. I guess artists don’t always understand the revenue potential.”
“I saw it,” Abi said, and felt a small spark of brightness. She had loved it. It was one of the best films she had seen in years. “I absolutely loved it. And not just from an art perspective, the story was fun, engaging.”
“Hmm,” he said. “I watched some clips on YouTube. It was OK, although I thought the character development was a little weak.”
“Did you?”
He carried on talking, although she wasn’t sure if he would have done so anyway, even if she didn’t ask.
“Just because they’re animated doesn’t mean they should have superficial personalities.”
Abi considered saying that she thought the characters did have depth, and that she was emotionally invested in their passions and their fears. She considered saying quite a lot of things.
“Interesting,” was all she let herself say.
❧
He had ordered a second bottle, although she was still nursing only her second glass by this time. He stopped talking while Sam poured a little for him. He took a slow and careful taste of the new bottle, thought a little, nodded, and quietly watched Sam fill the rest of his glass. It was in this moment of peace that Abi realised she had crossed some internal threshold. She discovered she was no longer trying. She was present, she was polite, she was making sounds at appropriate intervals, nodding, but she had stopped directing any genuine attention toward his words. It was not a conscious decision. It had happened the way sleep did, gradually and then all at once.
He had moved on to talking about the economy. She caught fragments, something about global rate cuts, and expressing the opinion that Hong Kong’s commercial real estate was a catastrophe waiting to happen. And she said “Wow” and “Really?” at what felt like reasonable intervals.
She was thinking again about the Tammy Lai-Ming Ho poem. Tell me … how, after all these years, / nothing else but you fills the air. Suddenly this line took on a very different meaning to her previous interpretation. Oh dear, she could never read this at a wedding with a straight face anymore.
“…which is exactly what happened in 2008, if you look at the structure of it,” Robert said.
“Structure,” Abi repeated.
She wondered if she needed milk. She had a vague sense that she had run out, or would soon. She should write it down, but her phone was still recording, and she didn’t want to pick it up. She ran through what she would need for the week. Milk, definitely. Some kind of vegetable. She’d been meaning to cook that mala soup thing with the wood ear mushroom.
“The problem is most people don’t understand compound interest,” Robert said. “I mean that literally. They lack the mathematical intuition.”
“Intuition,” Abi reiterated.
The dish would benefit from some cinnamon, which she was fairly sure she didn’t have, but also something else she kept forgetting to buy. Duh! Sichuan peppers. That was it. Sichuan peppers. She would write it down on the way home.
Robert had moved on to something else now, though she followed more the shape of his speech than the actual content.
At some point the cheese trolley had come and he had spoken with Sam about a Roquefort that was apparently not at peak ripeness, and Abi had eaten a piece of something crumbly and good, and stared pleasantly at a point just above his shoulder while her mind drifted in a quiet and not unpleasant way through the week ahead, through the soup recipe, through her sister’s wedding, through the poem, through what she would say to Donna later.
“…which is why I got involved with the gala,” he was saying, when she tuned back in.
“The gala?”
“The charity gala. I mentioned it earlier, remember? Our bank supports orphans in China or something. It was at the Xiqu Centre.” He seemed very pleased by his pronunciation of the word Xiqu. “Seven thousand a head, but it’s for a good cause. I sat on the organising committee this year, which was a lot of work; people have no idea how much goes into these things. But I genuinely believe that if you’ve done well, you have an obligation to put something back.” He looked at her in a way that invited agreement.
“Obligation,” she confirmed.
“My friend James thinks I spread myself too thin. The committee, the mentoring I do at work, that sort of thing. I tell him: when I was a young banker, I had no one coming in to explain the best way for a steep trajectory at work. I worked that out myself. If one of those kids ends up a Managing Director because of a conversation we had, that’s worth more than any gala.”
Abi thought about her students, realising she hadn’t shared a single “you won’t believe what that one did” anecdote, which she usually liked to do. Indeed, she had not managed to finish a single story about her own life in the past hour and a half. Not one.
And she realised that she had not registered a single word Robert had said in the last ten or fifteen minutes. And he had not noticed. He had continued talking with the full confidence of a man who was surrounded by his team of direct reports who were hanging on every word coming out of his mouth.
She looked at him. He was telling a story about James again. Or maybe it was about himself when he was younger. He was gesturing slightly with his glass, talking at her.
She picked up her phone, being careful not to press stop. Yet. Donna was going to be absolutely beside herself.
Then she tucked the phone into her bag, reached into her purse, and placed two five-hundred-dollar notes on the table. She wasn’t sure what her share came to, as he had ordered everything and she hadn’t seen the menu prices, but a thousand dollars felt broadly correct for a couple of glasses of champagne and the food that was ordered for her.
He was still talking. He was, she thought, just reaching the climax of some story.
She waited for a pause, but when one didn’t come, she spoke up.
❧
“Sorry,” she said, smiling. She surprised herself that the smile was genuine, and that she felt no irritation at all. It had burned away somewhere around the cheese course, and what remained was something lighter. She was proud to be marking her own borders. “I’m going to have to go.”
He blinked. “Now?”
“I’m afraid so.” She took her bag from the back of the chair. “I should have said, I have an early start tomorrow.”
He looked briefly confused. “Right. No, of course. I was going to suggest the dessert menu but…”
“It was really lovely,” she said. “The duck was extraordinary. You were right about the duck.” This was true.
She stood, and picked up her bag.
“I hope your deal, the Tokyo thing, I hope the celebrations were everything they should have been,” she said.
“Oh, yes. Well. By the time we finished it was three in the morning, so definitely.”
“Amazing.” She adjusted her watch, patted her bag. “It was lovely listening to you talk all evening, Robert. Really. But I’m going to go home and get some sleep.”
There was a small silence. She could see him processing the sentence, trying to understand what it meant.
Then, she yawned.
It was not performed, or not entirely. The short evening had, in the end, been genuinely tiring. The yawn came up from somewhere honest: a long week, excellent champagne, the particular exhaustion of having listened carefully to someone who never once returned the favour. It was a real yawn, slow and complete, the kind that brings tears to the eyes.
She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth.
“Sorry,” she said again, and meant it. “Goodbye.” She meant that too.
She walked past the flickering candles, much shorter now, past the ivory tablecloths, past Sam from the New Territories, and through the door into the hot, humid air of Hong Kong, which hit her like a gift.
She stood on the pavement for a moment, took out her phone, and pressed stop. As she walked towards the MTR station, she looked back and could just see Robert at the back of the room. He was talking to Sam, maybe asking for the dessert menu.
She doubted he’d noticed she had left already.
How to cite: Solomon, Greg. “Engagement.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 11 Oct. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/10/11/engagement.
Greg Solomon is an actuary who has made Hong Kong his home for the past 16 years. Born in South Africa, he also spent many years living in the UK. As a creative outlet, he writes both fiction and non-fiction. Greg co-published The Prophet: Reimagined Through a Woman’s Voice with his then seven-year-old daughter, has had his fiction featured in an anthology by the Hong Kong Writers Circle, and developed the story-based HashtagYourLife.com system for self-improvement. His current project is a book about trust.