On a sweltering afternoon late last year, I sat in an ice-cream parlour in Suva, the capital of the remote Pacific nation of Fiji, and ate a croissant waffle topped with vanilla ice-cream, chopped peanuts and honey. Despite the parlour’s unpromising location, on a street crammed with second-hand shops, boarded-up pharmacies and tropical-themed cafes, its interior gleamed: large, illuminated snowflakes dangled from the ceiling, and a wall of giant white letters spelled out the words “Snowy House”.

A Fijian waitress in a floppy white beret served coffee to a pair of young women on their lunch break. Two teenagers, seemingly on a date, sat shoulder-to-shoulder and flipped through a menu. I leaned over to interrupt a conversation between a local businesswoman and one of her employees. I’m sorry, I said, but had the businesswoman heard the stories about the ice-cream parlour’s South Korean owners beating their followers? “I’ve seen nothing,” she responded. “I think it’s people making stories.”

The Economist