Hong Kong (15 page)

Their social origins vary, as do their accents, which range from the heartiest Scots or Yorkshire to half-strangled timbres of gentility. They often have foreign spouses, Chinese, Japanese or European, but they generally send their children to school in England. They live very agreeably, in pleasant apartments on the mid-Levels (half-way up the Peak), or sometimes in comfortable villas with gardens. If of independent disposition they may commute from the more accessible of the outer islands, or at least have weekend retreats there. One successful lawyer and his wife have an apartment in Central and a pretty cottage, full of flowers and English prints, high among the hills of Lantau, from where they can supervise their second business, the nearby tea-gardens and riding-stables. For they are seldom idle, either the husbands or the wives – even in 1940 300 British women managed their own businesses in Hong Kong, and today one seldom meets a wife without at least a voluntary job. They do not however always share the taipans’ virtues of calculated self-control, running often to floridity and sometimes to sottishness.

All in all they are, at a generalization, rather less completely British than the taipans, and they live more free-and-easily. Earning as they probably do far more than they would in Britain, they are seldom in a hurry to go home, but often seem to be pursuing their careers in a pleasant state of half-speed-ahead, eating well, enjoying their friends, gossiping in the club bar, taking the junk out on Sundays – ‘whatever you do,’ they tell the visitor, ‘don’t go out with Bill (or Simon, or Ted), you’ll be drunk before you get out of the harbour.’ Many work hard for charities. Some grapple with the Cantonese language. Almost all leave the territory for an annual holiday somewhere, and they are familiar with much of the Far East, talking easily of Taiwan or the Philippines, Singapore or Tokyo, much as their relatives at home in Britain would speak of Tuscany or the Dordogne.

Nevertheless the lives of such people revolve around the intense goings-on of the territory itself, its coups and its scandals, its economic condition, its restaurants newly fashionable or in decline, and especially, as 1997 approaches, its future.

What is to become of the territory has become an obsession of their conversation. They read every word of the
South China Morning Post
, the Hong Kong
Standard
, the
Eastern Express
, the
Far Eastern Economic Review
, all written or edited by people they are likely to know, and because
many of them do business in China they are profligate with rumours out of Beijing.

There are always some mavericks in this community. A stockbroker named Noel Croucher, elder of the Hong Kong Club and well-known for his curmudgeonly attitudes and miserly ways, was found when he died in 1978 to have left the whole of his very large fortune to a trust for the educational advancement of Hong Kong Chinese – one of the most generous of private educational trusts anywhere in the world. And nobody could be more indomitably her own mistress than Mrs Elsie Tu (née Hume, in Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1913), who has been for thirty years the voice of Hong Kong’s liberal conscience, fearlessly championing the poor, defying Authority and exposing corruption. Most of the British bourgeoisie, however, feel no profound loyalty to Hong Kong. Some detest the place, and only the most assimilated are planning to remain after 1997. They are essentially transients anyway, and long ago many of them prepared for the future by buying one of those nice small properties in the vicinity of Grasse, where the food will still be good, the sun will shine a little like the eastern sun, and they can keep a boat in a marina somewhere.

There was a time when British companies in Hong Kong employed many Britons of a simpler kind. There were never poor whites living here, except in earlier years among the beachcombers and prostitutes, and few British manual workers of any kind, but especially between the two world wars an expatriate
petite bourgeoisie
flourished, as it did in many another colony. Lane Crawford’s department store, for example, used to employ British shop assistants, and they are shown in old photographs lounging in topees on the verandahs of the company mess, or enjoying themselves decorously at Christmas parties, moustachioed figures like characters from H. G. Wells – the assistant manager of the footwear department, the deputy supervisor of soft furnishings.

There are a few contemporary echoes of this now all-but-vanished society. At its less genteel level scores of pubs still provide an authentic football-pool-and-spilt-beer flavour, spiced nowadays with jukebox and Australianisms. At its more refined, to this day the English-language newspapers are rich in pedantically ill-written letters from people signing themselves ‘An Angry Customer’, or ‘True Brit’, and until very recently also went in for a jolly variety of comic verse, often Jingo or at least reactionary in tone, which would well have suited the
London penny press of fifty years before. Now however the lower ranks of commerce, as of Government, are filled almost entirely by Chinese; in recent years, if you ever identified a working-class Briton in Hong Kong he was likely to be a soldier from the British garrison which had been based here without a break, if for a time confined in Japanese prison camps, from the foundation of the colony. (In 1877 a sergeant from that garrison, apparently enraged by the advantages of the political and commercial classes, single-handedly attacked the Hong Kong Club with drawn sword, hacking away at lamps and chandeliers and threatening members with the dread phrase ‘You are one of them!’)

As the end of the colony approaches, though, a new kind of blue-collar Briton has made his appearance in Hong Kong – a last category of imperial adventurer. Unable to find work in Britain, or just disillusioned with life there, hundreds of young people have turned up willing to turn their hands to any sort of manual work for undemanding wages – supplemented perhaps, among the wilier practitioners, by social security payments from home. If the Hong Kong expatriate housewife now wants a paint or plumbing job done, a door rehung or a bit of gardening looked after, she is likely to turn to one of these willing drop-outs. They may not be very skilled workers, but by one of Hong Kong’s last paradoxes they charge far less than the Chinese.

On the other side of a metaphysical fence stands the British official in Hong Kong. He comes in all kinds, and nowadays he mixes freely with the commercial and professional classes, but he remains by the nature of his office consciously separate.

He has probably been recruited for some specialist skill, as an engineer or a port manager, a journalist, an accountant, a botanist or a meteorologist – even in 1996, when Chinese had succeeded to most Civil Service jobs, there were still some 1,800 expatriates on the Government payroll. He may however be a career member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Service, which absorbed the remains of the old Colonial Service in 1968 (there being by then a distinct shortage of colonies). Perhaps he reached the territory by way of other British possessions, now independent. Or perhaps he may be, if of a certain age, one of the last of the officers trained specifically for service in Hong Kong.

There was a time, and not so long ago, when very few British
members of the Hong Kong administration spoke any Chinese language. Today they include a strong cadre of linguists, and a handful of men whose very passion is the civilization of China, in the old imperial tradition of the scholar-administrator. Since the senior administrator of contemporary Hong Kong is likely to be virtually the last of the line, let us accept an invitation to dine with one of these enthusiasts, and his no less enthusiastic wife, and drive out of the humid heat of Central, between the towering blocks of mid-Levels where the lights of evening are beginning to appear, up the winding twisting road to his white official house above the harbour.

‘Did you know,’ he says with a diffident shuffle of his feet, as we stand with our drinks on the terrace surveying the spectacular scene, ‘did you know that last year 15,000 ocean-going ships came in and out of that harbour? What’s that now, thirty-five, forty a day? Not too bad, is it?’ He says it as a man might refer to the progress of his roses, in a gently proprietorial or even creational way. Up there on the slopes of the mountain, so far above the frenzies of the city, one does have a certain divine sensation, and God-like, he cannot resist a complacent rider, ‘And that doesn’t, of course, include small craft from China – another 80,000 or so of them …’

When we move inside for dinner we find his house, though colonially grand of architecture, furnished with restraint, English in décor with touches of Chinoiserie like wall-scrolls and dragon-decorated vases. Dinner too turns out to be an Anglo-Chinese meal. ‘How do you like the fish?’ asks our host urgently. ‘It’s carp from a pond, you know, sent to us by old friends in the New Territories. Don’t you think its taste is quite extraordinarily subtle?’ ‘What do you think of the tea?’ asks our hostess. ‘It’s from Fujan, probably the very tea Li Yu referred to in the
Cka-jing
, very good for the digestion, too …’ The bottle of Riesling seems an intrusion upon the cuisine, added especially for us perhaps, and we feel almost ashamed to decline that familiar of all Chinese gastronomy, a toothpick.

As for the conversation, it centres upon historical Chinese inscriptions on Lantau, a subject on which our host is an acknowledged expert, and on social arrangements in South China in the eighteenth century, upon which he has written a couple of monographs, while his wife intervenes now and then with comparisons and illuminations from her own rather superior command of the Tanka dialect, and her experiences as honorary president of five or six charitable societies.

I exaggerate, but only in the detail, and parody only in affection. It
is a modest, kind and decent evening that we enjoy. Our hosts are very decent people. Before we leave we venture to ask where will they go on the day of the Great Denouement, 1997. ‘Go?’ they answer as one. ‘We won’t go anywhere. We’ll stay at home in Hong Kong.’
⁴

The British hardly even like to call Hong Kong a colony now, preferring to call it a territory. It plays no part in any wider British imperial system, and performs the statutory colonial rituals with perceptible embarrassment. But nostalgically, aesthetically perhaps, the British of Hong Kong do sometimes pine for the old sentiments. They show it particularly on Easter Day, when at the sound of the cathedral chimes (donated by the Hong Kong Club to commemorate Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953), a positive paroxysm of Anglican religiosity appears to seize the British community, as it used to seize such congregations across the Empire. All the pews are filled that morning with very British figures, together with properly Anglicized members of the subject races, and the expatriates revert to older forms. Hands are crossed meekly over paunches, as the executives line up to receive the Body and the Blood. Haughty eyes of
Tatler
wives are lowered in submission – even the ladies of the public-relations corps look maidenly.

Although there are, it is true, only two or three Easter bonnets to be seen (all worn, I suspect, by Australians), the whole scene is suggestively imperial. The louvred windows are open to the sun, as they used to be in Simla or in Freetown, the choir sings the old hymns, a Welshman preaches the sermon (‘Far as we are from home, my friends, still on this holy day of rejoicing …’), the Chinese acolyte in his surplice looks properly respectful, and all is as it should be beneath the comfort of flag and Establishment.

It is one moment of the year when the British of Hong Kong frankly proclaim their identity. It is also one of the few moments when they seem to be united, because this community has always been split not only by the fissures of interest that we observed in the 1840s, but also by the differences of class and calling that we have just been examining. Almost from the start everyone looked down on everyone else. Henry T. Ellis, a naval officer in port in 1859, defined
⁵
the general social
attitude of Hong Kong as one of ‘purse-proud stuck-upism’, and the definition has never been out-dated.

For many years, to a degree even now, the very attitude of one’s house was an infallible guide to one’s social status, and the position of a pew in the Cathedral was another indication of rank and self-esteem. Elaborate social protocols were upheld, involving precedence at dinner-parties, the leaving of cards and harsh dilemmas about who should first call upon whom; when in 1857 the warship
Tribune
put in to harbour, its captain never met any of the British taipans, so famous for their hospitality, because neither he nor they would so far demean themselves as to make the first visit. Officials looked down on businessmen. Wholesale merchants looked down upon retail merchants’ clerks. ‘The little community,’ wrote Alfred Weatherhead, ‘far from being a band of brothers, is split up into numerous petty cliques or sets, the members of which never think of associating with those out of their immediate circle.’

It was a familiar imperial phenomenon, and happened perhaps because the sea-change of empire made all classes more conscious of their own importance. The official became an aristocrat, when he was posted to the colonies. The dockyard foreman and his wife found themselves with underlings to command at work, servants to make the beds at home. Even the private soldier had a coolie to kick about. If the impulse sounds un-stylish, the truth is that by and large the Hong Kong British seldom were very stylish people. Once its rip-roar founding days were over, the colony cherished few outstanding men or women – no Orwells served in its administration, no Kiplings worked for the
South China Morning Post
. Even eccentricity was rare. It is a measure of this community that local historians like to record the birth in Hong Kong of P. G. Wodehouse’s elder brother, and the death of Thomas de Quincey’s second son.
⁶

Every Sunday morning, throughout the year, Statue Square is taken over by the Filipina maids of Hong Kong, who assemble here in their thousands to meet friends, swap news, cook al fresco meals, sell things to each other, read the Manila newspapers and sometimes dance to the
music of transistors. It is an extraordinary occasion, and suggests to almost everyone an assembly of starlings. The women swarm upon the square in mid-morning, pouring out of the subway stations, streaming off the ferries, and settling upon every bench, every patch of ground in a great eddy of shopping bags. If it is wet they occupy arcades, pedestrian bridges and shopping centres for half a mile around. A high-pitched chatter of Tagalog echoes among the skyscrapers, rival musics clash across the gardens, a vast tide of litter is swept here and there by the wind. Sometimes the excellent Filipino Community Symphonic Band plays in the closed-off street, and long after dark has fallen small clusters of friends still laugh and prattle on, reading one another letters from home, strumming guitars and eating small bits of fish.