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Dragon banners fluttered from maple-leaf lamp-posts. A cruise liner's whistle echoed off glass office towers. Russian seamen dragged shopping bags stuffed with digital watches back to their freighters. At the continent's edge high-rise buildings stepped down from the wooded mountains to working wharves in a protected harbour. Vancouver, the largest Pacific port in all the Americas, was reminiscent less of other Canadian cities, more of Hong Kong. Its street-signs were written in Chinese. Its Star Ferry-like Seabus linked the downtown core with the Kowloon-side north shore. Its markets smelt of durian and its cafes click-clacked with the snap of mah-jong tiles. Yet beneath all the superficial similarities Hongcouver, as the locals called it, was unique.

A pristine white Rolls Royce cruised past the Balmoral Hotel and turned into Keefer Street to spill a Chinese family into the On On Tea Garden. Along East Hastings petite Thai prostitutes lounged on stretched silver Lincolns. Japanese tourists bowed to one another and snapped photographs of totem poles.

At the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club the forest of masts rose from boats with Haida names. There were seaplanes and salmon seiners moored to the piers. The Oriental busker outside the Marine Building played Scotland the Brave on the bagpipes.

Beagan recognised the sturdy mansions in Shaughnessy, the strip joints on Granville Street, the busy quays of Saskatchewan potash and prairie grain. He remembered summer Sundays with his father watching the ocean-bound container ships sail past the Stanley Park cricket pitch. Sometimes if a good batsman was at the wicket the ships were hit by sixers. Behind him he saw the Rockies enfold the city, before him its waters ran out into the oceans of the world. Tokyo, Sydney, Shanghai and San Francisco were just a boat ride away.

"A hundred or so years ago this was all coastal cedar forest," said Elsie as the Dodge rolled along the Grandview Highway. Across from a 7-11 convenience store a homeowner trimmed his corner of paradise with a lawn mower. "The Tsleilwaututh hunted white-tailed deer around where the airport is now." A hoarding announced the development of dream apartments on False Creek's prime real estate. Above the sign Mohawk construction workers bolted together high-rise girders, as they had done on skyscrapers throughout North America, while at its foot a Musqueam brave slept, crumpled and drunk.

"His grandfather would have steamed mussels in their shells at the mouth of the Fraser."

"Maybe yours and Noah's too."

"Sure," acknowledged Elsie.

"It's different now," observed Beagan, her pain now his own, the country's own. "For us both."

"For us all."

Vancouver's population had quadrupled in fifty years, Pacific Rim business-immigrants bought citizenship in exchange for government-approved investment and half the city's children now spoke a language other than English at home. Elementary schools offered Mandarin immersion courses aimed at making the anglophones bilingual. Local estate agents boasted resident geomancers, experts in the art of feng shui which predicates a building's design and orientation.

"But cross the Lions Gate Bridge and beyond Capilano," Elsie gestured out over the yachts and bulk carriers in English Bay, "a man can still walk all the way to the North Pole and not meet another human being."

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