Pushed along by the squirming masses in the chaos of the airport, I called the number for a "Mr. Kwok" Mary had given me and an excitable voice told me which bus to take.
Within a month Ms. Kwok had fulfilled a childhood desire to own a pink instrument, acquiring a ukulele in that color and adding it to her act.
In Hong Kong, the Elvis Presley Fan Club, founded in 1968, boasts about 120 members, including, besides Mr. Kwok, a female bus driver, a Japanese performer, a Burmese obstetrician, lawyers, doctors, businessmen — and another noted impersonator, Johnny Ma, also known as Hong Kong Elvis.
The metamorphosis of a round star into a planetary nebula is akin to a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, says Kwok, who did pioneering work on pre-planetary nebulae in the 1990s.
While looking for a new vocalist, Maia met Mulan Kwok, a performer at Barbados Cafe in Bilangan Kemang, Jakarta, in December 2004.
The catalyst is a sighting by Kwok Yun (Shi Ke), an unmarried peasant in her 30s, of what she believes is a U.F.O.
Consistent with this idea, several compounds that interact with human proteins have previously been shown to interact with a homologous C. elegans protein with a related function (Kwok et al., 2006; Petrascheck et al., 2007).
The money may be small beer for a man like Kwok – among the world's richest tycoons – but it has triggered a startling fall from grace for Hui, a former chief secretary of the local government and a bona fide member of the Hong Kong's great and good.
A particularly long session unfolded with Daniel Y. Kwok, an assistant professor who studies the interaction between materials at the molecular level as part of his research into nanotechnology.
"Oh my God, this is pretty fucking crazy!" shouted Kayi Kwok, a student at Hong Kong Baptist University.
So Mr. Kwok, a Harvard M.B.A., has devised one of the most ambitious Internet strategies of any old-line Asian company, creating a diverse portfolio of Internet start-ups related to his family's business.
