Hong Kong – Island of a Thousand Stories

For a city-state that dynamited two mountains and pushed the shattered remnants into the sea to grow its airport, for an engine of global capitalism that brands its banks in neon like sports teams, Hong Kong is an oddly transient place. Ephemeral. A ghost zone.

People pass through here. They pass through again. Sometimes they stay, by accident, deliberately, for a while, a longer while, a few years more, a lifetime – imagine that, one day you’re passing through Hong Kong, the next day you’re on your deathbed, negotiating a rental niche for ashes.

And sometimes they intersect, crammed up against each other in an ear-popping elevator or a heaving subway carriage, or side by side in a chicken-rice joint or expat bar.

Yet so much happens here, amid the mercantile energy, the aggression, the barked, choppy, six-toned Cantonese consonants and the blare of entitled horns, the fat-bellied white guys sloping after young slim girls and the hustlers with their eyes on the main chance, I always wonder…

What’s your story? How did you get here? What did you hope for? And… how will you leave?

Like you, the beautiful African girl in your big, brassy wig, your perfect makeup, your slender thighs crammed into laceup over-knee boots, your tight black dress split at the front and the back, with a little bit of see-through in case that’s not enough. You’d look fierce by night. At three in the afternoon, you’re incredible.

You still look beautiful, out there, outside the 7/11, the home of shattered dreams, screaming at the police officers who are trying to move you on.

You look beautiful even when you shove at one.

It’s a theatre shove. Just for drama. Just to make a point. It couldn’t have hurt him. Didn’t even rock him. But it doesn’t matter. They’re on you, bellowing. It’s disrespect, and they’ve been waiting for it.

Two of them, three of them, then four, pinning you to the dirty monsoon-wet pavement, on all fours like a Jeff Koons sculpture, one of them forcing your hands into handcuffs, another prising a mobile phone from you, and at this moment you realise there’s no point in screaming, and you get up, and walk in front of them, sullen, hip-swinging, beautiful, your bare knees miraculously unbloodied, your eyeliner still not run.

Commuters flood, a ceaseless sea, along the Wan Chai walkway, a storey or so above the neon of the convenience stores and girlie bars, but they part for you. You’re 20-something, striking, sculpted, maybe Chinese, probably Chindian, with wise old eyes, a Buddha’s eyes, but the skin of a young girl.

And you’re there, bare-chested, cross-legged, Buddha-style, sat on the moist grimy concrete as the crowds part and flow around you. Below your denim cutoffs, your lotus legs are withered, thin as a child’s. You must have crossed them with your hands.

Did you drag yourself here? From the MRT? Up the streetside steps? Did someone carry you? How long have you been here? And why no sign?

The Western couple begging – grifting? – up the walkway have a hand-written sign. “We are Russian. Help us continue our journey around the world.”

And you have nothing. Are those wise eyes your sign?

And why, in a country where the rich go to hospitals with Kiehls products in the private bathrooms, does a man with withered limbs need to beg above the street?

Triads, I’m guessing. Somewhere round the back is a sleek black car with a dude in a suit so tight you can almost see his tats through it.

Two gloriously bouncy little boys spring out of the Shangri-La to the bubbular lifts that float down to a mall where Givenchy and Dunhill push up against Chopard and Chanel. Behind them, there’s a greying, tired dad, who still looks young, and a woman who’s covered her more longstanding grey with auburn, oozing practicality.

Is she grandma? A nanny? He looks like he’s grieving. Divorcing? Newly widowed? Brought his mum along to help with the kids? By the look of the brooch, the flatteringly loose jacket, she isn’t hired help. And he looks too well-to-do to have kids without a woman. At least for long.

“DAD!” says the bigger of the two, pointing at something.

He summons a smile. It doesn’t reach his tired eyes.

In through the hallowed portals, a cod-art-deco whirl of tropical woods and fake Murano that sits oddly in the clinical eternal daylight of the mall. A mainland Chinese couple, both with helmet hair, his a pompadour, hers a wave, neat in dark and unobtrusive suits – oh I wish I could look at their watches! — are eyeing up a sales stand for Australian investment flats.

The signs are all in lucky red. Have they set the prices to include a lucky eight, or are these investors too street-smart for that?

Two stops down the MRT, an estate agent’s window has marker-penned listings, no photos, carefully itemising the space usable and in total. Most flats he’s renting are under 500 sq. ft. (less than 47 sq. m.) – there’s one that crams 6 bedrooms into 700 sq. ft. (65 sq. m.).

No wonder they’re moving their money over there, to the big country to the south. Will the dreadlocked Chinese hipster sipping wine after hours in the custom furniture store come join them? Is he a pop star? A silicon geek? A politician’s son? A tycoon’s spawn? The suit and trainers are textbook Cantonese pop star.

In Beijing, the news tells me, two 20-year-old lads have just been sentenced for totalling a Ferrari and a Lamborghini, street-racing at three times the speed limit. They’re not politicians’ sons, they insist. Just happened to make a fortune on the stock market. As who doesn’t, aged 20?

The blonde woman across the thali joint from me has survived cancer. This time last year, she thought she’d be dead today. She’s not. She’s in remission, she looks amazing, she could live for decades. Cancer has taught her what it teaches almost everyone, to seize the day, look after yourself, be loving.

The younger women with her aren’t listening half as hard as I am, but maybe they’ve heard her story too many times before. Or maybe I’m just closer to death than them.

On the next table, there’s a bunch of guys, four of them, two American, two not. They take their time to order, one of the Americans keen to show off his expertise in this alien cuisine to a dude who looks to me of Indian descent, an act that involves a lot of confirmation with the waiter.

He has a concept that’s going to redefine retail, like Woolworths redefined retail. To which I think – and I cast a sneaky glance at the Indian dude at this point – if your concept’s so strong, why are you pitching this guy in a curry house in TST?

The rain comes down heavy. Outside, I look across the harbour. The clouds are so low they’re obscuring the bulk of the skyscrapers. Or is it the towers that are tall?

Tall towers. Low clouds. That’s Hong Kong, in a nutshell. Its waters shade from grey to jade, but they’re always on the green side, never blue.

I’m irritated, entering the subway as the monsoon rain buckets in – across the border, airports and cities are flooding under clouds that dump an inch an hour – when a deflating umbrella almost takes my eye out.

I raise my hand in front of my face. The umbrella contracts, retreats, reveals the most perfect eight or nine-year-old girl, neat navy skirt, navy jacket, hot pink backpack, bright pink trainers and pale pink socks. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“No, no, it’s OK!” I say. I’m sorry to have made a snarly face.

Later on the subway, I sit next to a man of 60-ish, head raspy with white stubble, face and muscles tired and sagging in a vest top. Beside him is a round-faced girl, very young, her intrinsic prettiness masked by puppyfat and acne, and a beautiful baby asleep, sucking a dummy, in her pram.

Who are you? I think. You seem worried, concerned, the way a father might be, or a grandfather, as a girl who’s barely out of adolescence embarks on parenthood.

Then, Oh god. You’re not her partner, are you? Surely not!

Mainland China is not a culture that prizes individualism, at least, not in the way we understand it, but, you know, Yao Ming. Older mainlanders like to travel in groups, en masse – quite often, ironically given how rare queuing is on the mainland, as a queue.

I see a lot of them lined up in neat crocodiles, forming pairs like so many primary school children. Sometimes they have matching T-shirts, sometimes matching hats, sometimes matching badges – always there’s a guide with a whistle and/or microphone. Frankly, it’s a wonder no one asks them to hold hands.

They’re often stranded queuing outside the same godawful shop, with things bundled up in packages that, even to my untutored laowai eyes, can’t be worth a tenth of what they’re paying. You join a cheap Hong Kong tour from mainland China – or any ultra-cheap mainland Chinese tour – and the profit comes from the shops you’re corralled into, and HAVE to spend in. They actually make a loss on the hotel and the flights.

Yet… corralled or not, you guys seem to be enjoying it. You two. The older couple, both of you, I’m sorry to mention, liver-spotted, him with a honking Beijing accent and a pair of fake Adidas trainers, both of you grinning from ear to ear. Imagine! You lived through the Cultural Revolution, survived all that, and now you’re here! In Hong Kong! In capitalist central! Who could begrudge you joy? Not I.

Hong Kong, in all its glory, in all its crazy mix of East and West, is a creation of my people, from one of the least laudable efforts of a colonial history filled with horrors. We took it from the Chinese after the Opium Wars, when we went to war to force the Emperor to abandon drug control and accept our opium. (That’s Opium Wars, plural.) We’ve left our names all over the islands, in the steep and winding lanes of Central, the chaos of Kowloon: Aberdeen, Duddell, Nathan, Victoria…

So, you, the Indian guy, the nice guy who showed me the way to get coffee, the nice guy with the big smile, the nice guy who’s, like many of you, well into middle age and still hustling tourists on Nathan Road, is it my people’s fault you’re here?

You’ve got to hate me, surely. Me, all of us. “No, thank you, no tailors, no leather bags, no dresses, no watches, no.”

Me, at least I do it better now you’ve helped me. “Hey! How are you?! No, I’m afraid not. I live on Bali, so I already have a tailor there.”

But it’s still a no. You must get so many nos a day. It’s got to suck, hasn’t it?

And how about you? You two bright, educated 60-something men, one Indian, one Anglo-Australian, standing in your underwear chatting by the door of a cheap guesthouse, long life stories about how you came to be here, starting from the very get-go, birth.

Hong Kong is somewhere other. It’s China, but not China. Some place in between. Or…. “Can I drink the water here?” “NO! It come from CHINA!”

Swirling up grandiose carpeted steps from the scummiest of malls to dine on stonefish dim sum and turn a blind eye to the shark fin pages on the menu. Chatting whisky with a Japanese kid on a working holiday in a Japanese bar. Sipping cocktails from a real live pitcher plant, like nectar.

Three British expat chicks, all in skinny jeans, head up in a lift to where the red and white of the HSBC sign glistens on a wet wood deck, high, high above the harbour. As my ears pop, the fat one is explaining to her slim and beautiful friend how, “He’s being very huggy, but I’m sure it’s just a friend’s hug.”

And I look at the thin girl’s face, in her genuinely skinny jeans, and I see the expression of so many beautiful women everywhere listening to their less attractive friends. As she nods and smiles, a think-bubble hovers above her head: “Of course he’s friendzoned you. He’s out of your league.”

Sat at the bar behind a mountain of cheese, the slick Hong Kong chick in the Chanel jacket is pitching a prospective client, not impressing a date. She’s paying, not him.

Late on a Friday night I’m stuffing my face with curry and my mind with the South China Morning Post. There’s a guy in a football shirt, looks Nigerian, across from me. He has a plate of biryani rice and a 200ml bottle of Absolut on the cheap ply-effect table, no glass, and he’s working his way through the pair of them, looking at no one, talking to no one. That’s his Friday night, I guess. His treat.

When I’m not fending off tailors and tout in Hong Kong, I’m getting pamphleted. A man forces a leaflet on me, support for victims of cults. Which would be very handy, I guess, and I’m never averse to reading stuff, except it’s all in Cantonese.

Wan Chai is like Speakers Corner – Cantonese ranters battle with gweilo buskers for ear space.

On the harbourfront, where the Star Ferry wends its way to Hong Kong island, pictures of victims of organ-harvesting are lined against the wall. They’re Falun Gong, apparently.

But doesn’t any post-mortem open up the chest and extract the organs? Isn’t that just what a post-mortem examination does?

On the MRT, there’s a crazy guy in an orange T-shirt, shouting at someone or something the rest of us can’t see, and humping the carriage wall like a dog in heat.

And we look away. All of us. Away and down. Don’t look at me down. Don’t catch my eye away. It is, for all the world as if his madness could be catching. And in Hong Kong, it probably is.