3 min.
How I long to sit beneath a shady tree
A LITTLE while ago, I found myself in the fair Far East again at the post office in Mui Wo, a village near Hong Kong.
The young man serving me from behind the counter went about his task in a businesslike fashion, that is until a colleague interrupted him. I assumed that she asked him to explain something to her, but my Chinese is terrible … seeing as there can be over 3,500 characters in the ‘alphabet’, and up to this point, I have learned zero!
Before he turned to answer her, he looked at me and humbly said, “Sorry, sorry …”
I was struck by this apology, here’s why: I was a foreigner and someone who, unlike him, didn’t have a heritage spanning thousands of years, yet he treated…
