Stuart Wolfendale

Professor John Reich’s comments about Hong Kong in his lecture on the Queen Mary 2 as that Holiday Inn on a hull approached Hong Kong last week, were great fun. I have been thinking about them up here in Beijing staring out of my hotel window across a wasteland of concrete and car parks to the 2^nd Ring Road. It’s a vision of fascinating obnoxity

Yet do I condemn to obscurity a great capital city simply because I observe that it is ugly?

Do I suggest you should not come here because every one in my small group now suddenly has a sore throat or that every time I take a cab, I run the high risk being stranded with a strange man in a strange city with neither of us having any idea of which way to go? I do not.

People like me will come back and back to risk emphysema and disappearance because Beijing is hugely important and compellingly arrogant. So it is with Hong Kong. It really does not matter what a writer of cultural omnibuses like ‘A Survey of the Humanities’ like Professor Reich thinks of the Peak.

The view from the Peak in the greater scheme of things doesn’t matter. Neither for that matter does the tourism business which, as noted by better economists than me, puts very little cash into local people’s pockets. It’s the vivacity of the city that counts. And that is not undermined even by bad air or a paucity of framed paintings or dim waiters- two other of Reich’s objections to the city.I once lectured on a ship and I am glad I don’t any more because it is a sign that you are close to professional if not literal death and, given the gossamer thinness of hides to controversy in the travel business, I don’t think Reich will be lecturing Queen Mary, The Sequel any more.

Nevertheless, Reich is probably right in much of what he says. On the Peak, he could have gone further. It is an elevated shopping mall of tacky trinkets with an intermittent view. It has a splendid viewing platform but the designers ruined the concept before the polluters removed the spectacle.

For being low on master works, Reich could have gone onto explain to his audience that had elected to go to sea in a shopping mall that, over the 150 years of its existence, Hong Kong spent the first fifty being a nineteenth century Shenzhen, the second fifty as a backwater finally stuffed by the Japanese and the last fifty being a boom city driven by entrepreneurs with all the patronage instincts of a JVC earth mover.

What of the Hong Kong waiters who persistently serve Reich the wrong dishes, though?

Well, I have always regarded eating out in restaurants as an adventure which is why I normally eat at home, so, if you can’t take the confrontation inherent in the ordering process, don’t go in for it.

He also has to remember that most English speaking foreigners dither and self contradict over menus with such arrogant incoherence that for a working class Chinese waiter, it must sound like birds chirruping under water. Frankly I am surprised that QM2 cruisers, self made folk who normally move land vacations between Orlando or Eilat, should want to try out a shore restaurant at all when doubtless the floating Forte with gold trim lays on Chinese meals of its own with firecrackers and lion dances, entre-course.

Reich’s remarks are cause for neither panic nor pander and, by the way, I think the Euston Road 1960s architecture of the great ship itself melded perfectly into Kwai Chung docks. This is not a Reich to panic over or appease.

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