Hong Kong

(Note: this is excerpted from my book Journey to Jogya, written about sever years ago.)

After my several-hour flight from New York, after being seen off by my cousin Wilhelm, Charles greeted me with a big hug in the HK airport. It is a thoroughly modern airport with lots of pale blue glass and stainless steel. It has an embarkation and disembarkation unit that is separate from the flight terminals that is linked by tram. It departs about once every four minutes, though travel fanatics invariably will rush with the utmost heedless urgency to get on so that they may inevitably wait on the other end.

These modern airports are like a trip to the mall. There are numerous fancy retail establishments, which fail to get my blood pumping as they are wont to do for the committed shopper. I’ve never understood the airport shopping “experience.” Why people seem possessed with the urge to purchase perfume, ties, chocolates, and booze just because it bears the emblem of “duty-free” is beyond me. Of course, no airport experience would be complete without McDonald’s. It has a kiosk located in the arrival area, immediately visible as one emerges from baggage pickup. Such a sight is probably a comfort to the first-time traveler, perhaps a bit homesick even after only a few hours from home. For others it must elicit the question, is there no escape? After all, we mainly travel to see different things, not what we can find essentially in any godforsaken strip mall or highway stop in North America.

Hong Kong is on the northern edge of the tropics, about the same latitude as Havana. Huge elephant ears, the length of one’s arm, grow here and there, along with palm, pine, and hibiscus to provide greenery to what would otherwise be a concretely urban setting, comprised of banks, schools, hotels, and trade buildings.

Charles lives on a quasi-remote island holding the airport, scattered among ancient and prefab communities crowding the coast… and wild cows, which roam aimlessly along the undeveloped stretch of mountain. He lives in a retirement community of sorts, an enclave called Discovery Bay, Disco Bay for short or derisively Delivery Bay, since a wealth of ex-pats with children have claimed the development for themselves. Disco Bay is ½ hour high-speed ferry ride from congested Central Island, the hub of HK.

Disco Bay features a beach, a grocery store, video shop, and bank. A few Asian restaurants, the beach and a quaint plaza rests only a hop, skip, and a jump from the ferry landing. No one but a stubborn old Danish geezer dares swim in the water for fear of pollution. Many whites sun themselves there, though the Chinese and other Asians tend to hide out beneath the nearby pines, which stop at the walkway demarcating the residences from the beach. On evenings, people gather in the plaza in to drink beer by the droves, particularly on weekends. During the day, the plaza is a proxy playground for munchkins and a gathering spot for their Filipina and increasingly Indonesian nursemaids.

Hong Kong is a series of mountains. Kowloon, one island, is Cantonese for nine dragons. The dragon reference is to the mountains themselves, each hill being a hump in the spine of the dragon’s back. Given its hills, walking around HK can be a chore. On Central, there is an escalator assisting pedestrians up a sharp incline: the higher up the mountain, the more exclusive the residences. Disco Bay hasn’t an escalator, so one must catch a bus, shuttle, or huff up steep alabaster stairs, reminiscent of some polysyllabic Mayan ruin but for the lead-pipe railings and verdant drapings of well manicured vegetation. Disco Bay permits no automobiles. A finite number of golf carts, commanding a handsome price, are allowed. The carts add much to the retirement-community feel.

The stifling pollution of Central pushed Charles from his former abode on North Point. Accessible by thoroughly modern subway, North Point is like the rest of HK, situated tightly on the back of one or another dragon. It is a gathering of high-rise upon high-rise, old and slightly moldy from a perpetual sea dampness. Some seasons are worse than others. A friend told me of his first time in HK when his hanging suits grew mold in the closet from the omnipresent wetness. This is why air conditioners tend to run constantly, particularly after March, when temperatures are warm enough to ensure a good deal of mold-growing. There are about four AC free months at most. For the modern age, AC has become something of a necessity, like fire. During the sweltering months people shrink at the notion of going into the dense sardine packed spaces where even ocean breezes are reluctant to go. There’s a lot of shui and very little feng. The AC exacerbates the problem by acclimating people to abnormal frigidity given the tropical conditions. Moving indoors out is a warp from July to January, a shock to the system to which no body can become properly inured, though the professionalism of the town necessitates that most are dressed for January anyway-- more clothes is more civilized, after all. The indoor-outdoor divide is a marked contrast from the way things use to be in China. For example, during my time at the Beijing school for diplomats a teacher colleague, some years older than I, had taken a Chinese wife, inheriting, as it were, a Chinese mother-in law in the transaction. This mother-in-law insisted on opening the windows in the freezing season as well as in summer, due to a traditional belief that harmony between the outer and inner was necessary to avert illness.

Charles’s former North Point abode was on the ground floor of a 12 storey high-rise. There was a courtyard fenced on the sides by residential high rises. The dragon’s back, dripping constantly with water, formed an impassable wall off which voices echoed to the upper floors, necessitating polite parties… good parties even given the constraints on volume. By far the politest partier, resident par excellence, was Hitler, a three pound black carp confined to a shoebox-sized pool carved into the mountainside, his size being so large as to hardly allow him to turn around. Someone figured that for the fish to be in such incarcerated conditions it must be doing penance for heinous crimes from a past life. Hitler seemed to be atoning in earnest, flopping only on rare occasions.

Charles shared his living space with an Irishman and a Frenchman. Fintanne the Irishman reminded me of one of the blokes from the movie Trainspotting, a thin working-class UK type who forced countless nods and smiles for the impossibility of understanding a word he said. He had that expatriate go-getter spirit, getting into virtually any kind of business to get money to get any assortment of go-getter drugs, not the least of which was cocaine (to be inflected with a minimum of three syllables). His face seemed to bear the signs of this intensity, drawn and dry like leather, accentuating darting globular eyes and rodential teeth, stained from coffee, marmalade, and fags of tobacco and hash.

It was hard to spot Jean-Jacques without a cigarette or spliff in hand. He was far more subdued than either Charles or Fintanne and his cash-flow showed this. Evidently, being a wine broker in Hong Kong is not particularly lucrative. In over three years in HK, he had dug himself quite a hole of debt from having to constantly borrow money in order to share in the HK life. It’s the kind of town in which you can go out every night. There’s always this restaurant to try or that promotional to attend, always. But going out isn’t cheap even if you go cheaply. He looked as you might expect Eddie Munster’s French cousin to look, a rectangular head with thick dark eyebrows and a goatee, a bit of a paunch. He’d often regale me between inhalations and through a haze of smoke of this “splendid” occurrence or that “absolutely brilliant” exchange. Through a little finagling he had brilliantly arranged at no cost our entry into the Hong Kong Sevens, a world famous international rugby event. Being poor he always had an eye out for the hook up, the informal economy of friends helping friends at company expense.

Phillipe was another Frenchman who was the proprietor of a restaurant specializing in French wine as much as French cuisine. Phillipe was a diminutive blond who carried a thick French accent. He had a twisted fascination for blacks, which some may construe as racist. For instance, at a 70’s party he sported an afro wig and commented copiously about my own hair with a staid jocularity that perhaps amuses the easily amused. Perhaps, it is a French thing that I’m not apt to understand. On other occasions, perhaps around a spliff while marveling about his blond dancer girlfriend he would mention that he had previously always been with black women, either from Brazil, Cote d’Ivoire, or Madagascar. The marvel was in love’s ironies, for a blond Madonna-looking American was not his design. He was so French, speaking philosophically on the minutiae of love, of making love, the love of wine and, for my part, five o’clock shadows.

Natasha is my Uzbek associate from my days in Beijing. She migrated down after doing a bit of time studying law at Yale. She’s a sister of sorts, acting as my trusty dance partner and fun-seeker wherever. She’s a culture straddle: born of an Uzbek father and Russian mother, she spoke Russian, Uzbek, Mandarin, and English through smoky eyes, sandy red hair, and the fairest skin that one could imagine, all upon a lithe frame. Central Asians sit at the crossroads of historic conquest: before the Russians, it was the Muslims, still earlier the Mongols. These layers of history are evident in the faces of Central Asians, some looking East Asian, Arabesque, European, smatterings even resembling South Asians. She identified herself and her father’s people as one of the descendants of Chingis Khan, the alpha male whom she says disparagingly uttered that grass (vegetables) is for animals and meat is for men. I take her statement to mean something more than being an avowed carnivore, rather more being an attempt to anchor identity in a time before the Sovietism and Islam.

I hadn’t always liked Natasha, though this seemed to change sometime around the crazy days of Beijing a decade earlier when she was dating my Thai friend Achop. In HK, Natasha introduced me to a circle of associates whom I wouldn’t otherwise meet by kicking it exclusively with Charles. It was on one such occasion with Natasha, at some outdoorsy club cookout that I met Wendy, a healthy Indonesian Chinese girl who chewed meat from a skewer in such a manner as to suggest that she was indeed a fine meat-eater. I couldn’t stop starring. Even though I never shared this meat impression with her directly, it seemed uncannily to rear its head in other ways, such as when shesuggested the book, My Year of Meat, a witty indictment of the American meat industry, or when she offered me some pork broth as a remedy for my slight traveler’s cold.

It isn’t every day that I run across an Indo-Chinese in my wanderings, that she was Buddhist was especially appealing. She had this Burmese wall hanging of the Buddha’s footprint in her bedroom. It was a large three-dimensional tapestry of black cloth onto which golden threads and sequins were sewn. In the center was the footprint itself, puffy and glittery surrounded by auspicious Buddhist emblems. The design was very similar to the Thai hats of puffy sequined Elephants popular a few years ago. Before I departed for Thailand, she gave me a copy of Herman Hesse’s Goldmund and Narcissus, which is essentially a tale of a wayfarer during the time of the plague, a man who mainly contents himself with existential sensualism.