One day he observed a young girl taking a sack of surplus flour into a bakery, then paying the baker to convert it into noodles. The simple incident stayed in his mind, nagging at him. Later, while riding across the harbor on the Star Ferry, the answer to a gigantic riddle came to him in one reflective flash; the little girl was paying to have the flour made into noodles because her mother, like most refugee mothers, had no way of turning the flour into an edible meal. The same was true of com meal; there was neither space nor cooking facilities for it in the average refugee cubicle. In their raw state, the surplus foods were alien to a Chinese palate. Why not convert these foods into noodles? No colony baker was equipped to handle the job on the scale Monsignor Romaniello envisioned. On any scale, the cost was too high for the refugee feeding program. Monsignor Romaniello, helped by other Maryknoll fathers, constructed a noodle-making machine out of scrap parts and an old engine. It looked like nothing ever designed by engineers, but it rolled out the noodles. The Maryknoll noodles caught on at once with the Chinese, who found them easy to prepare and agreeable to eat. With funds provided by Catholic Relief Services and the Hong Kong Junior Chamber of Commerce, the first noodle-making contraption was replaced by a production-line model. Within four years, Hong Kong noodles were pouring out of the machines at the rate of 5,000,000 pounds a year, and welfare organizations like the Church World Service had adopted them. Noodle machines were exported to the Philippines, Macao, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam as the noodle mania grew. Another Catholic priest, working in a phase of welfare work wholly unlike that of the “noodle king,” has achieved a degree of success comparable to that of Monsignor Romaniello. He is Father P. J. Howatson, an Irish Jesuit who has become a key figure in the colony’s youth leadership program. Welfare workers will tell you, holding their breath as they do so, that gangs of young hoodlums have not yet infested Hong Kong. Widespread poverty, overcrowded housing, and a predominantly young population seem to offer fertile soil for their growth, but welfare people believe juvenile gangs have not appeared primarily because of the integral unity of the Chinese family, with its respect for parents and elders. There is a second line of defense, the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs Association, which embraces 13,000 of the poorest youngsters in its recreational and leadership programs. Father Howatson is the prime mover in the Association, doing some of its finest work among rooftop squatters in Wanchai, a waterfront jungle of bars and cabarets where shiploads of pent-up sailors are regularly turned loose.