Stuart Wolfendale

(Written for the Hong Kong Society’s newsletter in December 2006)

In an evening in November I was helping celebrate a friend’s fiftieth birthday by sitting with a drink in the grounds of the United Services Recreation Club. When it comes to place name dropping in this piece, that is about as giddy as it is going to get. I found myself talking to an American. It happens all the time. He does what a lot of qualified people in manufacturing find themselves doing in these parts these days. During the week he manages a factory in Shenzhen and sleeps in his own room at the end of a dormitory. At the weekends, he comes back to Hong Kong and the opulent privacies of his own flat in Tsimshatsui. I have never once in twenty five years thought for a moment of living in Tsimshatsui. I don’t know why. Pick your spot and you could be fluent in Yoruba in months. Perhaps it has been the prospect of being briefed on copy watches by Sub Continentals every time I slipped down stairs for a carton of milk.

The American and I were gazing serenely across at the traffic biting itself on the Gascoigne Road flyover. “Do you know what makes Hong Kong so different from the Mainland?” he said. I was glad that was a rhetorical question. We had covered the obvious earlier. It had been “bathroom culture” and what you could culture in a Mainland bathroom.

“When you’re in Hong Kong, you feel part of it all,”  he declared. And with that gentle, metaphysical slap across the chops, I knew exactly what he meant.If you are an expatriate living here and you push on with your life in a gentle sort of way, keeping expectations on a pretty level heading and put behind you early bullish days when you sought out gates and china shops, you will find yourself carried into the mainstream of Hong Kong life without much ado.

The city is so tolerant (in preference to sympathetic), so accessible (but not necessarily generous) and so increasingly urbane (but not at all “cultivated”) that it doesn’t take a lot of effort and certainly not years of Cantonese and culture classes to feel really quite at home. Admittedly I have never spent a fulfilling afternoon in a licenced mahjong parlour in Yaumatei, tipped in my lot with North Kowloon estate wives in a pyramid loan scheme, watched girls overdose on ecstasy in Mongkok dance clubs, lived next door to a disintegrating Mainland immigrant family in a Tin Shui Wai “sink” housing estate, or seen  a schoolboy who has only known cold parents and a callous classroom, fall past my window on his way down from the roof.

One evening lately, I short cut my way through a lane that was a tributary of Temple Street and the restaurants were open fronted, fat smattere — and roughly furnished. The customers were working to under class or on methadone. The staff had faces framed for objection. I would genuinely not have been welcome. A “gweilo” who did not already know the urban peasant menu and didn’t have Cantonese hard enough to shock an ox would be trouble not worth the profit margin.

These are all features of Hong Kong 2007, there in the mainstream too but, as anywhere you can select what you swim with. Buy a modest apartment with a breeze and some hours of sunshine and the sight of a tree in a busy district with shops and all sorts of transport downstairs. Beware of zones of pretension (Soho), zones of exclusion (The South Side), alternative zones (Tung Chung) and the Outlying Islands - which are very quickly reached now but still define you.

If you end up in Saikung, consider that you might really be looking for Borocay. Although I speak as a man without children or a future, if you are set up in Wanchai, North Point, lower Tai Hang, Western, or the tonier parts of Jordan or Tai Kok Tsui (honestly!- Kowloon is too serious to joke about), you are about to have Hong Kong as it should be lived licked and run. A  comfortable, convenient and stylish life in the centre of a renowned city which you can not manage  for the same money in central London or Manhattan - or even Muswell Hill or Brooklyn.

How has living in neighbourhoods down in the weeds by the Harbour become so desirable when at one time it was such a hardship and expatriates doing it were regarded as having “gone native”? I don’t entirely know but it is more than to do with airconditioning. It could be that Hong Kong is FU CITY! Do not concern yourself madam, I am not about to explete. This is just a catchy little slogan I am trying to foist on the Hong Kong Tourism Board to Death . The acronym is for Function and Utility and I suspect they are why life has become bearable in places that were once the burnt out wok bottoms of hardship living. If you put in cheery coherent shops and banks and post offices and dry cleaners on the streets and remarkable electronic gadgets in the walls that give you money, invest your stocks, place bets and issue e-tickets to Bangkok (ATMs will do all this soon), then people will flock to live around these things.

Hong Kong seems to have done a great deal of this in recent times. As a radical example of what has been achieved, I travel on buses all the time. They have become a liberation from MTR steps for my crystallizing knee caps and an end to effete three blocks taxi rides. There are an awful lot of buses now, so many that at certain times they can queue laterally across the width of Queensway waiting to use a stop at Pacific Place. They don’t have to run on time because they come all the time. They are air conditioned. There are many hanging straps and colourful poles so there is an abundance of grab holds when the driver presses the stop button.

If you don’t know where they are going, there are impeccably clear route maps smouldered to bus stops. People actually live in buildings by bus stops which serve the airport direct. Tomorrow, I am going from Wanchai to Shatin on the non stop comfort of the 182. In the 1980s you didn’t know when the buses were coming or where they were going. On sight, you did not know whether you should get on them and once on them, how you could get off them and live. This change was clearly sensible in early 2002 when I returned to living full time in Hong Kong after a spell in Los Angeles.

This was in the abyss of public morale over financial loss. It was just before Sars. Yet history does not occur in neat  sequences . Despite the perceived despair over money followed by the dreadful upset of disease, I felt an onward moves in facility and utility. I sensed a serious shift in attitude as well. There was more civility and less coarseness. People were more curious and less curt. A lot of carpetbaggers, opportunists and vulgarians had gone. There was a sense that those aboard still were there for the duration. There was also distinct sense of aloneness. Motherland loving was not an easy emotional tap to turn. Heads were turned up to sniff the air. Rulers had to be watched. It was a change of attention, serviced by a tense media, which so many in the hapless apre Handover regime fell foul of.

I still find it very much that way in this New Year though how those shifting and untidy historical plates lie beneath us at the moment I do not know. To find out about that in say 700 words of absolute certainty you would have to go to an associate of an institute of Asian earth-moving thoughts, writing on the “op-ed” pages of the newspapers, practically any day of the week. Some also carry links to elixirs for bone marrow and the bowels.Two historical movements almost touched in public late 2006. Sir Jack Cater was memorialized in a service at St John’s Cathedral and Henry Fok was buried in the Buddhist cemetery in Chaiwan.

The Cater service was one of the last gatherings of the ancien regime. Elderly civil servants, businessmen academics, sentimental journalists and above all what historians describe as the gentry class of Chinese families which were so involved with British rule assembled under the ranks of ceiling fans and the crumbling regimental flags.

Henry Fok was buried following a lying in state and service at North Point that was a display of current power centres. Unfortunately such is the sartorial trend at high profile Hong Kong funerals that it looked like a Mob affair. The Funeral Parlour had managed a decor job that would keep most interior designers wired and awake for weeks. Everybody is in black of course but this notion that dark glasses on top add decorum and humility needs serious a disabusing of.

The tycoons came in their limousines with heavy drivers and looked conspiratorial. Civil servants in fixed income suits stepped out of limos they didn’t own looking nervous as though a cross-fire was waiting for them. The Mainland Heavy Gang arrived in people vans with sliding doors and security staffs forming perimeters. And there were all these young men with tight hair cuts and muscles on their eyelids with “heat” under their armpits and wires down their necks who could not possible have known Mr. Fok.

It only needed somebody with a violin case or wearing a fedora hat. Fok was one of the sweeter gentler tycoons, they all say. He began life as a very successful patriot whose philosophy “My country right or very, very wrong” helped him break the UN embargo on goods into China during the Korean War.  Do Fok’s fellow tycoons and pall bearers in attendance that day , caught in those Coppola like frames on the evening news, really represent role models and provoke aspirants amongst Hong Kong people any more? There was time when young men in white singlets, shorts and rubber sandals would flop around sweat shops and estate housing units saying , “I’m gonna be Li Ka shing,” which made everybody happy.

Nowadays , young men and women don’t want to go into factories, graduate to owning great lumpy buildings and end up moving inconceivably large amounts of money which they could never spend anyway in and out of different commodities they have not the faintest personal interest in.

They want to design computer games or go into IT, or create clothes or make rock music or movies or act or be “in the media” or even a corporate lawyer or mess with people’s teeth. So they don’t  have much time for thinking about Mr. Li Ka shing. And all those men who were originally in those singlets and shorts and sweating a lot who never got to be him but ended up as “import/export” clerks are all a bit ticked off.

Given the real political power accorded to the cabal of property tycoons in Hong Kong, one wonders what the popular electoral support for these men would be if it was ever asked to show itself. Is there a true discrepancy between the power they play with and the support they have and is the population at large broodily conscious of it?

“Tycoon” is such an irritating word to coin for Hong Kong developers. It sounds like a cross between a weather phenomenon and a clown; a man who rotates rather than walks, booming out instructions, leaving buildings or ships in the wake of a great flaring overcoat and wearing a red button nose. Most of our gentlemen invariably wear very dark colours, no adornments of any kind, walk in short steps from cars to doors are rarely seen in public at all and leave behind only remarks. Some are thought to be nocturnal.

The difficulty for these hard to detect characters is applying the common touch. They give to charity but in a monumental traditionalist way. Buildings are put up. Institutions are founded, faculties are donated. If the Mainland is involved entire, communities are established or restored. Research centres, astronomical telescopes and childrens’ villages appear from nowhere. It’s a miracle. But they don’t know how to kiss babies. Spontaneity is a response that could probably only be induced by a cattle prod.

In December, Hong Kong’s principal and more or less only art movie house closed after 18 years to lamentations. They couldn’t negotiate a new lease with Sung Hung Kai. Nothing much was made of that small detail. No pressure groups formed, no questions formed on the lips of journalists and no voice came from the Giant in its Centre saying, “On this occasion we’ll give art a leg up. You can stay.” The theatre has gone. Star Ferry hasn’t gone this year. It has just moved closer to itself. The Central side has now been put 300 yards further north into the Harbour on the most heinous of environmental sins, a development on land made from filling in the Harbour.

The new pier is a ‘cookie cutter’ shopping centre that’s meant to look ‘colonial maritime’. In fact it could be  a mall in Arizona. They say the ferry still takes as long to make the journey. It spends more time banging in and out of the pier wall trying to tie up in waters that lurch because the channel is so narrowed.It is such a mess down there you fear to look at it. So people don’t and they forget about it.  There are going to smack roads and office and living space and more restaurants and more ladies designer dress shops all the way along past Queens Pier and Tamar and whatever it is that comes after that right up to The Convention Centre. I am worn out tryin to remember what happens to the roads. There will be sitting out areas and designer drawing trees and terraces and walkways populated by designer stick people  and they will all turn out to be over exposed and windy and dirt clad because this is Hong Kong and Hong Kong does not know how to promenade. It has its instincts in walled villages amid paddy fields and it was colonized by the British, not the Portuguese. Donald Tsang, the Chief Executive, is imperturbable in all this. He is small but very calm for his size and a giant amongst illusionists. He is the ambitious son of a police sergeant- no gentry, he- with a background in successful service to a foreign power and continuing spiritual fealty to an elective prince in Italy. His administration has no real popular base in Hong Kong. Politicians with populist pretensions like the Democratic and Civic parties excoriate him. He derives his authority solely from the Central Government which nonetheless listens intently to people who don’t much like him including those property developers who have season ticket passes into the politburo. Fok was famous for his. Rumour has it that Li might even be on it, having donated his own chair. Yet Donald manages to carry on running the place and giving the brilliant impression that he calls the shots. I do not know how he walks the line all day and calms down enough to sleep at nightFrom time to time he makes it clear he has no idea what he is talking about which warms me to him because writers more or less function on that presumption. On the increasingly dense issue of atmospheric pollution, he has created entire fogs of his own launching into an amazing Heath Robinsonian line in waffle on live radio one morning, explaining the air’s molecular structure and the other day, saying that the air can’t be too bad to breathe because life expectancy here has increased. Tsang has been accused of a Napolean complex for his taste in grand schemes. This is most unfair. On the famous West Kowloon Arts Complex development he let all manner of proposals contend as long as they contained a see through canopy the length of an airport runway. Everybody eventually fell over exhausted and the site lies fallow collecting air molecules. Of airport runways, nothing organized happened about Kai Tak at all till a few weeks ago when a plan of many colours with more draftsmen’s delights appeared. The real purpose was to show serious intent over a passenger cruise ship terminal, with toy ships a-sailing. If it goes ahead before anything else, cruise passengers’ first impression of Hong Kong will be perforce, Choi Hung MTR which I believe will be a good and true one.The only construction issue on which the CE has seriously and steadfastly got his own way is Central Governmentopolis to be constructed over what was the Tamar Basin. This massive  complex will contain everyone from the government rat catchers’ central working group to legislative councilors who may have quietly let this one slip through on behalf of the people on the assurance they would have individual changing rooms with jacuzzis and running Vitasoy milk. My concern in this is not for CGO-opolis and an Admiralty area long ago lost to vulturous developers and idiot boy town planners but what happens to what is left behind.. It is what is has long been called Government Hill. It still has its Victorian identity. It is bounded by Garden Road, Upper Albert, Glenealy then Wyndham Street and Queens Road Central. It was bitten into a little by Cheung Kong as they fed on the corpse of the Hilton but they showed caution with a great flutter of landscaping as they gnawed towards the Cathedral and the Old French Mission.Yet with the CGO abandoned, the insomniacs in the dark suits could have their playtime up there. The CE may choose to close his eyes down by the waters, inside his Babylon.. The politburo might suck upon cold revengeful thoughts of the hated British administration buildings crushed under a million tons of glass and concrete. Nobody could stand up to that. The longue lip of land would see buildings of great heights arise. The Cathedral cramped now in its corner may lose faith and take a billion pieces of silver and a generous ‘worship site’ on top of one of them. The Anglican bishop would be so much more easily prized out of his ugly Victorian castle with bank wads to widen Lower Albert Road. The grace-and-favour leases to the Foreign Correspondents Club and The Fringe Club  in the old Dairy Farm building could be snuffed and that peculiarity could be taken down and its drinking journalists and media men and the lefy artists  dispersed. All that would be left would be a small easily scored church and a prep school going up Glenealy and at the top, well, well the ancient Ridley House apartments, an anomaly without with anomalies within and owned again by the cornered and compromised Anglicans.There would only be one entity left apart from the Americans in their visa and listening machine; Government House itself. Donald Tsangs commitment to the Civil Service and the symbolism he sees in ‘GH’ cannot be underestimated but the pure convenience of an apartment the size of a cricket pitch with carp pool atop the Tower of Babel may become impossible to overlook one day. Possibly the very last link with the ancient regime ever to sit in it may nod his head over GH and the storming of Government Hill would be complete.I should say that in Wanchai they have forcibly emptied some old streets below Queen’s Road East. The shops and homes stand shuttered by ‘Urban Renewal’. They are closing the street market. The market building, the only other example in Asia of   art-deco ‘streamline’ architecture besides the Central Market in Phnom Penh is to be destroyed. I live on Kennedy Road directly above the site of all this. I am facing away from it looking up towards Mount Kellet, whistling. When they redesign and redevelop and fit out the lines of ladies’ designer dress shops which will replace the ones where you could buy what you needed and install the draftsmen’s trees in damp piazzas  and a restaurant meal has doubled in price, my modest flat in that functional neighbourhood which I started out with will have risen in price to vulgar, carpetbagger levels.I have lived here too long, haven’t I?  It’s still lovely stuff though. A happy New Year to youENDSÂ

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