Hong Kong (10 page)

The more prejudiced British thought the Chinese irredeemably dishonest. The simple Chinese thought the British daemonically evil. British doctors, it was whispered during the plague of 1894, scooped out the eyes of Chinese babies to compound them into medicine, while the decennial census of 1921 was no more than a means of finding suitable children to bury under each of the ninety-nine piers of a proposed harbour bridge. As late as 1963 rumour said that the Government was looking for infants to sacrifice beneath the foundations of the new Plover Cove dam.

The fear and loathing is not apparent now, but occasionally the association between the two races still strikes me as unnatural, or forced. Sometimes the symptoms are merely endearing. How pleasant for instance to discover that the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in Hong Kong has been printed by Mr Y. F. Lam of Ye Olde Printerie! How entertaining to recognize the Hong Kong derivative of London Underground’s ‘Mind the doors, please’ – ‘Mylerdoors, Central next
stop, mylerdoors!’ What an agreeable surprise to hear the children of a Lantau elementary school, housed in a venerable Manchu fort, singing dutiful Chinese words to the tune of
Red River Valley – ‘Remember the Red River Valley, and the cowboy that loved you so true …’
!

But sometimes the sense of jar or anomaly can be perturbing. Sad but scary, for example, is the spectacle of an Anglicized young Chinese financier in his cups, talking in London upper-class slang, speaking of old times in England, of racehorses at Newmarket, balls at Oxford, but now and then, if crossed in argument, allowing his face to reset in the stylized convention of malice that we recognize from Chinese villains in old movies – or from photographs of the Cultural Revolution. And disconcerting can be the contrast, still often experienced, between westernized appearance and oriental reality.

Not far from that school in the old fort, I was once held up on a sea-shore track by the unloading of live pigs from the Chinese mainland. This is a familiar ugliness of Hong Kong. The pigs are conveyed in narrow cylindrical cages of wire or wicker, into which they must be jammed so tightly that the mesh often catches them cruelly, sometimes crushing a folded ear, or cutting into a leg, so that they lie there grotesquely squashed and distorted, and frequently in pain. On Lantau that morning the pigs were squealing heart-rendingly as they were bumped in barrows at speed towards their slaughter, and I stood helpless and grieving beside the track. At that moment there came in single file in the opposite direction, on their way home from school, a line of small girls in almost exaggeratedly English uniforms, crested blazers, pleated white skirts, small neat knapsacks on their backs. Demure and dimpled they filed past, their faces exuding school pride and team spirit: and they took not the slightest notice, as they walked daintily by, of the doomed animals screaming in their torture-chambers.

Such moments of culture shock can still upset the westerner in Hong Kong. For all that mergence of the races, the impact of the place can still be traumatic, and it often takes time for foreign residents to adjust. The American Chamber of Commerce has published a book for the benefit of newcomers,
¹⁹
and in it Dr Mildred McCoy, a psychologist at the University of Hong Kong, suggests the four stages of reaction that foreigners may expect. First they feel a fine euphoria, so exciting and interesting is the spectacle of Hong Kong, so reassuringly familiar are many of its aspects. Next they became tense and bewildered, as they
realize how vastly foreign the territory really is, and experience a growing feeling of isolation. Then, sensing their own ethnic identities challenged, they endure a period of irritability, grumbling a lot and being hostile to Chinese. And if all goes well, finally they relax into the environment, accepting its essentially alien nature, developing new tolerance, greater objectivity and, says Dr McCoy, ‘appropriate coping skills’.

Coping skills are undoubtedly required. The pressures of Hong Kong are violent: another handbook of guidance for newcomers is subtitled
How To Survive In Tough City
.
²⁰
There is something at once invigorating and exhausting to the relentless opportunism of the territory, expressing itself constantly in new astonishments – huge new shopping centres, powerful new tunnels, enormous power stations or wide blue reservoirs, ever more expensive apartment blocks, hotels, offices!

Almost nothing seems built to last. It is said that no city in history has grown so fast as has Hong Kong in the past thirty years, and the place has little time for posterity. The anguished efforts of conservationists have failed to preserve any but a handful of historic structures: the look of the territory changes kaleidoscopically from one year to the next, and generation by generation the landmarks disappear into the dust – the Victorian and Edwardian buildings have nearly all gone by now, and the nemesis of demolition fast approaches the proud new skyscrapers of a decade ago.

For years a showpiece of the town was a house called Euston, one of three Gothic mock-castles built in the 1930s by the eponymous millionaire Eu Tong-sen. Every visiting grandee used to be taken to Euston, every picture-book showed it, and it stood lordly above Bonham Road like another Governor’s Palace, furnished with turrets and castellations, and backed by hanging gardens at various levels on the rising ground behind. In 1985 I set out to explore the state of this famous folly, and found it vanished. The World Development Co., in association with Metro Realty Co., had just completed its demolition, and nothing was left but fragments of its garden grottoes – a classical pediment here, a plinth there, a lonely nymph or goddess holding an urn. Big trucks rumbled dustily in and out of the ruined gateway, and
when I spoke of the mansion at a nearby shop the people seemed almost to have forgotten the existence of Euston already, as though by some Daoist precept they had deliberately expunged it from their consciousness.

When old buildings do survive, they seem sometimes pathetically, sometimes ridiculously anachronistic. In Tsim Sha Tsui stands Signal Hill, from which until 1933 the dropping of a hollow copper ball from a mast signalled one p.m. to the ships lying in the harbour – a token of order and efficiency in an up-to-date imperial seaport. Today the signal-station is still there, with its white lattice mast beside it, but all is hemmed in and landlocked. The hillock has a quaint backwater air. Chinese boys birdwatch in the woods that have grown up around its flanks, Chinese lovers dally in the little pavilion near its summit. There are two guns on a rampart, posted to command the harbour long ago: but one of them now finds itself aligned upon the New World shopping centre, and the other, if fired, would demolish the lobby of the Regent Hotel (five-star de luxe).

Sometimes it seems that only the temporary is permanent here. Nothing is rooted. Everyone is trying to move on – to bigger apartments, to better-paid jobs, to classier districts, often enough out of the territory altogether. The national flower of Hong Kong is the Bauhinia, a sterile hybrid which produces no seed.

As I write there is a Chinese living on the sidewalk at Sung Wang Toi Road, near the airport. Everyone in the neighbourhood knows him, a tall, very brown, handsome but emaciated man with a short black beard and a high forehead, always carrying a stick, who strides incessantly around his patch of pavement with a stylish strut. His name is Tse Pui-ying, and he is mad. Everyone knows him, but nobody can get near him – make the slightest attempt to approach, and he will threaten you with his stick, swear at you, or throw stones. He has no identity card, he has no address. He spends all his days scavenging the gutters for food, and watching the aircraft come and go deafeningly above his head.

He is one poor citizen alienated for ever, from his kind and from his own humanity, by the relentless personality of Hong Kong. Another was the wife of an itinerant goldfish hawker who briefly entered into the news when, faced with imminent eviction from her miserable
tenement flat, suffering from protracted post-natal depression and the aftermath of an abortion, she hanged her two children, cut her own wrists and jumped to her death from a fifth-floor window.

There are days when I feel that it is all too much, that the place has become a cruel parody of itself. The day of that woman’s death was one, and another occurred less heart-rendingly soon afterwards, when two items dominated the local news. First Mr Rupert Murdoch, controller of newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations throughout the world, bought what would soon develop into control of the
South China Morning Post
, ‘the most profitable newspaper company in the world, using the world’s most modern computer system’ – for in Hong Kong, sagely observed the
Post
itself, ‘everything is for sale … everything has its price’. Then the daughter of the chairman of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank married an Australian theatre manager at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, and all the rich of Hong Kong, all the powerful, all the fashionable (‘Government officials, judges, business leaders and other celebrities’) were driven Deflowered and grey-toppered in mini-buses to a reception at Skyhigh, the chairman’s residence on a high pinnacle of the Peak, which had a gatehouse like a Spanish castle, and could be seen like a fortress from far away. Thrust into obscurer columns by these great events were all the everyday occurrences and preoccupations of the City-State, the suicides, the pitiful petty crimes, the seizures of smuggled heroin, the scandals about insurance rates or housing conditions, the sad prevalence of traffic accidents at Tuen Mun, the debates about 1997 …

These are familiar provocations of Hong Kong, which has repelled visiting liberals for generations. Successions of reformers have sought to disturb the conscience of the world, and especially of the British, about the state of this colony – about its reactionary political system, its social inequities and its unlovely motives. Everyone feels that way sometimes – there are far more compassionate people in Hong Kong than you might guess from first impressions – and nearly everyone is intermittently chilled by the contrast between the splendours of mansions like Skyhigh, the spilling of money by billionaires, and the hardships of Hong Kong’s poor living in such fantastic congestion down the hill.

It is an abnormal city. Until our own times it has been predominantly a city of refugees, with all the hallmarks of a refugee society – the single-minded obsession with the making of money, amounting almost to neurosis, and the perpetual sense of underlying insecurity, which
makes everything more tense and more nervous. Only recently, as we shall presently discover, has the emergence of a new, educated Chinese middle class, born and bred in the colony, made one feel that Hong Kong is approaching some kind of social equilibrium, becoming a real, balanced city – and with 1997 closing fast, perhaps it is too late.

Yet for myself I find that in a place where for so long almost everyone, rich or poor, of every age and every race, has been frankly out for the main chance, a curious sense of liberation obtains. Hong Kong is not a place of pathos, not perhaps the right environment for very Godly people. It has always been the brazen embodiment of free enterprise, or as a Government official put it to me in the 1970s, of ‘Victorian economic principles, the only ones that have ever really worked’. ‘We are just simple traders,’ said Sir Alexander Grantham, Governor of Hong Kong from 1947 to 1957, ‘who want to get on with our daily round and common task. This may not be very noble, but at any rate it does not disturb others.’ Nevertheless the foreigner’s first response to this territory, Dr McCoy’s phase of euphoria, is justified. There are few places in the world where such a large proportion of the population is at least doing what it wants to do, where it wants to be, and in a poll of Chinese residents in 1982 only 2 per cent admitted to any ‘unmitigated dislike’ of Hong Kong. I would have been among the 2 per cent myself then, but the years have changed my responses.

Sometimes in the early evening I like to walk down to one of the city waterfronts, to watch the lights of the ships go by, share the pleasures of the couples strolling along the piers, or eat fried chicken on a bench in the gathering dark. The air is likely to be rich and humid, the sky is lit with the brooding glow of a great city’s lights, blotting out the stars. It does not matter where I am, Kowloon or Hong Kong-side; around me always, beyond the little pool of quiet I have made for myself on bench or bollard, the huge endless stir of the place, the roar of the traffic, the passing of the ships, the comings and goings of the ferries, combine into one gigantic sensation of communal energy. For the most part, I know very well, it is not energy expended in any very high-flown purpose, but still its ceaseless rumble and motion move me, and I sit there gnawing my chicken, drinking my San Miguel beer from the can, more or less entranced.

Among all the mingled noises of the evening, one is generally inescapable, thump, thump, thump, somewhere or other along the waterfront, across the harbour, behind me in the recesses of the city or far away in the dark countryside beyond. It is the sound of a jack-hammer,
the leitmotif of Hong Kong. It may be helping to pull a building down, it may be putting another one up, and in one guise or another it has been dictating the impacts and images of the place since the first developers settled on this foreshore 150 years ago.