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> The party's over, 2
D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet
Mondo Weirdo
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Tuesday, June 17 Gonzo Congo
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low hills unfolded, range after range, deep green in the foreground, pale
misty blue beyond. There were the wide acres of water meadows below, a cluster
of mango trees around the old tiled clan house, a line of yellow bulbuls
perching on the telegraph wires, frogs gurgling from unseen streams, wisps of
smoke rising from village fires, a few white cottages dotted among the rice
paddies and, in the far distance, a beguiling triangle of sunlit, coppery sea.
It was a geomancer's ideal. The feng shui of it all was quite perfect -- a
harmonically balanced scene of valleys, mountains, sky and ocean that all had
the artistic grace of a classical Qing water color, unaltered in 300 years. Nothing intruded to suggest that we were anywhere other than
China: On the hills there were the ochre scars of old Chinese graves, their
occupants' spirits gazing across at the sea just as I was, savoring the peace
and beauty of it forever.
This view was why I had taken the house. Each
morning when we lived in O Tau I would drink it in -- be it sweltering hot or
dark with typhoon clouds or even chilly, in the uncommon January mists -- and
I would know why it was I stayed. And now again, on this bittersweet
pilgrimage, I knew it was what I most missed about Hong Kong. For I like
changeless things -- and this, in look and feel and mood, was a part of China
that had remained happily unchanged. It was an island of slow permanence, in a
territory for which evolution was otherwise hectic, unstoppable, terrifying.
These unspoiled hills, the stands of uncut trees, the herd of ponderously
shifting cattle, the new-season smell of lychees, the croak of springtime
frogs, the upturned eaves of still surviving clan houses -- all this seemed to
be a part of a China that elsewhere has long since vanished. It was a reminder
of the continued existence of a 19th century China -- of a China that,
when compared with what has followed -- pace those who remember bound feet and
pigtails and the cruelty of the mandarins -- is much missed by many. Almost
everything is exactly the same, in aspect, in attitude, in atmosphere, as it
was when the representatives of the Qing emperors signed it over on loan to
the British 99 years ago. This is still Qing dynasty China, by any
other name.
China herself, and her millions, have suffered terribly in this past century.
Hong Kong, by contrast, has suffered hardly at all, and this vast tract of
land here, though it has certainly not enjoyed or weathered the material
benefits that are so gaudily obvious down on Central Hong Kong's Chater Road
or among the shopping arcades of the Prince's Building or Pacific Place, has
been utterly insulated from most of the miseries north of the frontier.
Consider, after all, just what has not happened here.
The 1911 Revolution that swept away the Qing emperors, the Manchus -- this
revolution never affected the New Territories, never affected this lease-held
part of the Chinese Empire. Pu Yi, the child-emperor of the day, still in
theory ruled here -- his land was simply rented out, and remained his, and that
of his successors, to reclaim one day. Then again, there were no warlords in
the New Territories in the '20s and '30s. The Long March never passed
this way in 1935. There was no Civil War in the Hong Kong New Territories. No
Communist Revolution in 1949.
There was no Great Leap Forward here. No one in O Tau had to suffer the
lunatic indignities of the mass kitchens, or toss their pots into the backyard
furnaces, or suffer hunger, rationing, famine. No hungry ghosts off Sai Sha
Road. The Cultural Revolution, crashing just 10 miles away, sounded among
these hamlets as little more than the occasional waftings from a distant
loudspeaker. No echoes of Tiananmen Square played themselves out in places
like O Tau.
Yes, of course, it is true that the Japanese came here in 1941, and they stayed
for four hard years -- and not far away on one of the nearby beaches there was
an execution ground, old villagers say. But that was all. Otherwise the
countryside that was ruled by the Qing in 1898 has remained essentially Qing
in most other senses ever since -- it has existed much as the old China,
preserved in amber.
And in large measure it remained so by virtue of colonization, of the
generally benign rule of the British. We were quite happy if, in some corners
of our little possession, nothing very much changed. Perhaps we found it all
rather charming, an inheritance that we never quite understood, but whose
rhythms and traditions we tried to cherish, not change.
Elsewhere in Hong Kong change has been running wild for 30 years or more.
If a turning point can be identified, when sleepy colony started to become
go-getting megacity, it was probably that day in the early '80s when they
demolished the venerable Hong Kong Club building and put up instead the
current office block of miserable vulgarity, from which the club could derive
extra income. Its managers had decided, with coldblooded prescience, that the
money from the lunch-time pink gins ordered by expatriates from Bexleyheath
would not go on forever. That was the first harbinger of coming change, I
always used to think.
Before then -- as when I first came to the colony, on a flying visit in 1974 --
there had seemed a measure of stability and style and swagger about the place,
at least about its looks. The old banks, the old shipping firms, the old
hotels, all gave the place an ornately grand look, as though this was the kind
of colonial outpost that Britons all wanted to know existed out in the further
reaches of our empire. It was an advertisement, it seemed, for the grandeur of
ourselves.
To our good fortune, the place was populated by a Chinese citizenry -- poor refugees
from the nightmares up north of the border, by and large -- who were properly
grateful for us and respectful to us, who did what they were told -- chop,
chop! -- who provided us with the cheap labor by which some of us could make
great fortunes and with which all of us could live like kings, and who allowed
us, though we never dared admit it, to bask in a feeling of racial
superiority.
We all knew this was merely window-dressing, of course. The place was never
quite as good as it seemed. Back then Hong Kong was still mired in its
reputation for cheap plastic toys and corrupt coppers ("The Best Police Your
Money Can Buy!" read one unfortunately worded government recruiting
advertisement). Its British population was classically colonial -- consisting
mainly of the failed younger sons of half-noble families and seedy arrivistes
for whom there was an unkind acronym, Filth: Failed In London, Try Hong Kong.
There was a Shanghai-in-the-'30s recklessness about everyone's behavior,
a sort of sense of half-realized wretchedness among the Britons who lived
there, as though, in all the heat and the alien ways, they knew they were
having to make the best of life's rather raw deal.
Yet even so, that era's Hong Kong did have some grace -- at least in its
structures, its traditions, its public monuments. And it possessed a degree of
charm, if mainly of a raffish and sozzled variety. One felt affection for the
place, rather as one felt toward the bar in the Foreign Correspondents Club,
at which it was said, and still is said by some, that all the women have a
past and none of the men have a future. It was Eastern, careless, exotic,
temporary. A borrowed place, said the FCC's best-known member, Richard Hughes
-- the man Le Carré caricatured as Old Craw -- a borrowed place, on borrowed
time. One felt affection for the Hong Kong of those days -- and yet felt rather
sorry for it all the while.
But then began the changes, and sympathy evaporated. In the mid-'70s and
'80s, Hong Kong all of a sudden ended its role as merely a white man's
gin palace, and it started -- under the influence of the new generation of
Chinese who, no longer so respectful and subservient as their parents, were
turning out to be much, much cleverer and much more ruthless than we ever were
-- to become efficient, profit-conscious, cost-conscious, competitive.
Its bosses -- and by that I mean the commercial bosses, not the old colonial
bosses, the governors and chief secretaries and their kin, who were slowly
becoming marginalized, redundant, mere figureheads -- realized that the
territory had a new role to play. It had to stand up against Asia's new
tiger-cities, Seoul and Singapore and Tokyo, and in due course it had to hold
its own beside brash newcomers-in-waiting like Saigon and Manila and Bangkok.
And so in those decades Hong Kong began to turn its corporate back on the
traditions that the Britons had so liked to immerse themselves in, and it
began to turn its back on the British too. This happened, so subtly that it
wasn't readily recognized, long before 1984, when the diplomats agreed to
hand the colony back to China: It was being handed back to the Chinese long,
long before that. On the day when the old Hong Kong Club came down, the
process was already well begun.
Ever since, commerce and competition and a ruthlessness known in few other
places in the world has steadily robbed Hong Kong of much of its old identity,
its old charm. True, there is plenty of glitter nowadays, plenty of cash, lots
of good housing and wide freeways and fast cars and fancy restaurants. But the
old things that were once so cherished, and which marked Hong Kong as so very
different from Seoul and Tokyo -- the old peak-top chummeries, the ancient
banyan trees, a cluster of grand colonial hotels -- most of these were
bulldozed out of the way when the change got going.
Now there is almost nothing left: a few good-sized mansions on the Peak and in
northern Kowloon, the old trams, the Peak funicular, a barrack-block or two, a
cathedral. Today Hong Kong looks very similar, barring its tremendous and
spectacular topography, from the other Asian cities with which it has
competed, and against which it has, in many cases, triumphed. It hasn't looked
like a colony for years. It looks like its boosters like to regard it --
modern, dynamic, energetic, a vital hub of the new Pacific.
It has emerged from its colonial pupilage so rapidly for one good reason:
There is almost no sentiment on the part of most Chinese here, no romantic
longings for anything for which Hong Kong ever stood. The Chinese, after all,
have so much past of their own that they are not at all shy about eradicating
the pasts of others -- particularly the relics of foreigners who were so rudely
-- and yet so briefly -- imposed upon them.
The relics of British rule have been coming down for years. The Chinese will
consider it good joss no doubt, good luck, to continue: to remove the name of
Victoria from her peak, to take the queen's name from her road, to strip away
every other colonial title -- every other memorialized governor's name -- within
just a few months of their takeover. It happened in Shanghai -- a city that is
now coming, more and more, to resemble the new Hong Kong -- and it will happen
here.
And as the hardware is methodically stripped away, so will the software
crumble, too. The ethical standards of the place, the attitude to official
corruption, the well-protected freedoms, the deep-rooted and rather muscular
Christianity that has so abounded in Hong Kong for so long -- all will be at
risk over the coming months and years, without a doubt. I checked in at
Beijing airport for a plane to Hong Kong the other day. Four evil-looking
policemen pushed us all aside so that one of them could check his girlfriend
in. Such things would never have happened in Hong Kong. They will now, for
certain.
All that will remain intact in the territory of the future is the growing and
fanatic eagerness for money-making. The city will soon become no more than a
cold-blooded, machine-like place -- a statistical success, no doubt, but not a
place in which anyone with any kind of soul would wish to linger.
Most of my friends are leaving, or have said they will soon. My son Rupert,
who is 31 and has spent most of the last 10 years in the territory and works for
a radio station, imagines that before long the pressures from China will begin
to tell, will start to bear down on foreign journalists in the territory -- so
he is moving to England with his American wife, bailing out. I had a call
while I was writing this story, from an American journalist named Harry
Rolnick -- a nice Jewish boy from Yonkers who had made a respectable career
writing about music and the arts for the papers in Hong Kong. No more, he told
me: The climate is changing too fast, the possibilities for free expression --
so vital in the artistic community about which he likes to write -- are
becoming every day more limited.
For the time being those money-men I know -- the fund managers, the
accountants, the brokers, the Suits -- have said they will try to stay. To them,
Hong Kong's changing nature will be merely another cross to be borne, and so
long as they can continue raking in the loot, which they undoubtedly will be
able to, they'll try to hang on.
The white-jacketed waiters at the Mandarin's Captain's Bar will still have to
know their names and their tipples -- a San Miguel, or a gin-based stengah, or
a marvelously cool ginger-beer-and-ginger-ale-and-bitters-and-a-twist called
a Gunner for when it's too hot to imagine getting sloshed. The Cathay Pacific
girls, endlessly friendly and pretty, will still be around. It will
still be possible to get breakfast at transplanted
bangers-and-mash-and-Watneys pubs like Mad Dogs or at those rather more louche
dives in Wanchai where the sailors go -- and it will be no bad thing if the
off-duty British soldiers from Tamar aren't around any more, to get drunk and
fight. The new soldiers from the PLA won't be able to afford to drink in
Wanchai: If their commander only gets half the pay of the average Filipina
housemaid, how little can the squaddies get?
I wonder about the future of the British bosses, the taipans, though -- those
smooth and languid fops who populate the loftier ranks at Jardines and Swires
and the other great British trading houses, the older and more respected
hongs. New regulations have lately come out allowing Britons to stay in Hong
Kong for only six months these days, not a year as they used to -- and now they
must have a visa if they want to work. Beforehand a Briton would work without
limit, the taxes were low, the perks plentiful. By limiting the time allowed,
and by making you have a visa -- is this the way the Chinese are getting back
at the British, perhaps, for the Opium Wars, for all those decades of
imperial servitude?
Some at Jardines must wonder -- most particularly a tall young man of enormous
wealth and vastly cavalier racial superiority (to him all Africans are
blackamoors, and all Chinese worse), who stands at the helm of one of
Jardines' divisions. How long will the Chinese tolerate him? Will his visa be
granted, and then renewed? Will his stay be shortened? Will he have to pay for
the sins of his antecedents, and his own -- and so might he and his family
decide to leave, before they are asked or told to?
Questions like this are being asked in quiet, anxious voices by many these
days, and not a few senior pinstriped men with yachts and large houses in
Shek O or up on the topmost top of the Peak are starting to look rather
nervously over their shoulders.
A lot of Chinese have already gone -- to Vancouver and Toronto, Sydney and New
York -- and if they have come back, as the government likes to remind us they
have, then it is with new passports, and with the ability to leave for good if
ever the balloon goes up. Other Chinese are fast contemplating going: My old
tailor, for example, has said he will leave, and that he may even go back to his
old Shanghai, since he believes the future will be brighter there, and he will
be back among his own people. Another man who made bush shirts for me, a
Punjabi who tailored half the British garrison in Hong Kong, is planning to go
as well. The Chinese, he said, look ill upon Indians like him. "A-chahs, they
call us," he remarked -- mimicking the Chinese pronunciation of a phrase of
assent that Indians like to use all the time. "They hate us. They despise us.
They despise half of the world."
But I know one couple who will stay: David Akers-Jones -- now knighted for
service to the colonies -- and his wife Jane. He is one of the last of the
empire's finest: He went from Oxford to the British India Steam Navigation
Co., then to the Malayan Civil Service, where he studied Malay and a dialect of
coastal Chinese called Hokkien; then it was out to Hong Kong where he rose
through the ranks to become secretary for the city and New Territories and,
eventually, colonial secretary and deputy governor.
He is a kind, gentle, contemplative man. He paints, gardens, walks -- does all
the very English things, in fact, that one would imagine of an Englishman for
whom, as Disraeli wrote, "the East is a career." And he is determined to
remain: He and his wife have a splendid house on Castle Peak Road, up on the
western side of the New Territories, where there is a fine view of the ships
coming down the Pearl River estuary. They have a good garden and a pool and a
host of books and paintings and elegant pieces from the China they both love.
They have no reason to go home, they say: Hong Kong is their home.
One hopes and trusts that the new authorities will look at things in the same
way. The right to stay now, after all, is essentially a gift of the
Chinese. Those who want to remain had better be quiet, had better just put up
or shut up. And that is all that the Akers-Jones family can do -- stay quiet,
and watch all their friends packing up to go, gaze idly up at the great jets
soaring out westbound overhead, and say with more trust than conviction: We'll
see.
Up on my side of the New Territories countryside, far away from the noise and
clash and glitter of the city that most think of when we talk about the coming
Hong Kong handover -- up in the country, what will happen?
Will the hills remain misty blue, unpeopled, unspoiled? Will fires rise still
from tiny villages, where cottages still have tiled and upturned eaves? Will
this countryside still seem, in a few years' time, a small piece of Qing
China, a place protected by her isolation and by all those long years of the
most benign of invigilations?
Or will the protections be lost -- and will these fields before long be
littered with golf courses and blocks of flats and pleasuring grounds for the
incoming cadres and their cronies? New figures say there will be 8 million
people in Hong Kong by 2010, 2 million more than today. Others say that
floods of Chinese immigrants will push it up to 10 million. With that kind of
crowding, with a steady loss of protection and care, and with an inexorable
rise in levels of corruption that will allow old rules to be bent and worked
around, I worry.
I have to say I care rather little about the fate of the city. It
is too far
along to feel too many regrets for what it might have been. In time Hong Kong
will become, put plainly, just another Chinese city -- and a city no more and
no less important to southern China, I think, than New Orleans is now to
Southern America. It will be much less charming than it is now, much less
inviting -- but it will be much more ordered, and much, much richer. And that,
to some, may be all that matters. It has been the fate of most Asian cities
these days: Hong Kong will become just another, a new Kuala Lumpur or Osaka or
Jakarta, crowded, prosperous, dreadful.
But I do worry still about the countryside -- for no better reason than that I
liked it so very much. As the final days of our protective and alien
invigilation tick away, I have to wonder whether that amber that long
preserved it will manage to remain, or whether before long, under the kinds of
pressures of Chinese rule that we cannot yet properly imagine, this will melt
away and expose our happy little village to unspecified, but crueler fates.
I wonder -- indeed, I fear -- just what I might find if I ever come back here
again. It might, I think, be best not to. So I walked back up the 99
steps, turned for one last look of farewell, and then sped away into the
afternoon.
Read about the "100 Days of Wonder" festival commemorating the handover or how
to get tickets to Hong Kong's favorite spectator sport, horse racing, in
Salon Wanderlust's thorough Hong Kong coverage.
To learn about books on China by Simon Winchester and other authors, browse through our China Booklist.
What do you think the future holds for Hong Kong? Will it be better off under Chinese
rule than it was under the British? Join the debate in Table Talk.
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