Hong Kong (9 page)

Sometimes it is true the walk is all but obliterated by those mists, everything drips with damp and there seems to be nobody alive up there but you. More generally all is fresh and dewy in the early morning. Butterflies waver about your path, kites and long-tailed magpies swoop, among the trees the racket of the cicadas seems to fall as a torrent all about you. As you progress terrific vistas reveal themselves below. Now you see the island-studded blue-green southern reaches, and the ships coming stately through the Lamma Channel. Half a mile later you are looking towards the Pearl River Estuary, and there lie the fleets of merchantmen at their moorings in the outer anchorage, and a jetfoil is streaming away towards Macao or Guangzhou, and the hills of Guangdong stand blue in the distance. Then, just as you are beginning to pant a little perhaps, through a sudden gap you see the city itself precipitously below you, stirring in the morning. The early sun catches the windows of Kowloon across the water, the ferries are coming and going already, and the traffic hurries to work over flyover and highway far below. Seen from this high eyrie it is like somewhere in another country.

And even better than the prospects are the people, for on a fine morning soon after daybreak Harlech Road and Lugard Road are full of exercisers like yourself. There are joggers in headbands panting rhythmically by, trim and muscular young Chinese, lanky indefatigable Americans. There are courteous Chinese gentlemen with walking-sticks, who smile and bow slightly as they pass, and elegant European ladies exercising dogs, and portly Englishmen, sweating rather too much, who look as though they are there under doctor’s orders. Sometimes I have encountered a tough and stocky Japanese, elderly, stripped to the waist and holding a long thin cane like a wand.

The Peak path follows the 400-metre contour line, and follows it discreetly, as though its old British engineers were obeying, consciously or unconsciously, the precepts of
feng shui
. It never disturbs the character of the hillside. It never seems to intrude. So it is only proper that the most numerous and dedicated of its morning pilgrims are the scores
of Chinese men and women, mostly elderly, who go up there to practise Tai Ji Quan, the Great Ultimate Fist – the measured position of the limbs, the controlled silent contortions, the expression of inner deliberation, which sometimes seem to me the most haunting of all symptoms of the Chinese mystery.

That it is a mystery, most Europeans in Hong Kong would concede. The vast majority speak no Chinese language, and are almost completely in the dark about Chinese attitudes and intentions. As was once written by A. A. S. Barnes, a British officer with long service among Chinese soldiers:
¹⁰

‘The Chinee [
sic
] is unlike any other man on earth, and can therefore be judged from no known standpoint, and not even from his own, if it can be found.’

Nevertheless in Hong Kong today there is an inescapable overlap of the cultures, which is partly simply an aspect of the general familiarization of east and west, but is partly specific to the place. Here more intimately than anywhere else, Chinese and Barbarians have been thrown together. The Chinese have never been exactly subservient, thinking of themselves at least as equals. The British have never been very adaptable, assuming their own ways to be a priori the best. Yet the result has been, in certain parts of Hong Kong society, an ironic blend of manners, usages and even appearances.

An unbalanced blend, one has to say, few Europeans of Hong Kong ever having ‘gone Chinese’, or even been noticeably orientalized, except perhaps in business method. Ordered British colony that it is, the place was never on the multi-ethnic hippie trail of the 1960s, and no young devotees found their gurus in the Daoist temples of Hong Kong. As for the expatriate residents, so different of build, so alien of mentality, they find it awkward to adopt Chinese ways – witness any solid European housewife in a
cheongsam
, the tight split skirt that elegant Chinese women wear so delightfully. However most of them have mastered the use of chopsticks, nearly all of them have mastered the use of Chinese food, the more cultivated among them have acquired a taste for Chinese art, and not a few have acquired Chinese husbands or
wives. The principles of
feng shui
are accepted, if a little bashfully, by many European residents, and a few Chinese words have entered the local English vernacular: for example taipan (literally top class, hence great manager or company head), hong (a merchant house), gweilo (literally a ghost or a devil man, hence a foreigner), or cumshaw (which is thought however by some philologists to have been itself derived from ‘Come ashore’, the cry that used to entice foreign sailors to temptation). Only the very crudest of redneck expatriates nowadays expresses any racial bigotry towards the Chinese.

For their part the Chinese, especially Chinese of the educated classes, deftly and shrewdly absorb Europeanisms. At the end of the nineteenth century the Chinese reformer Zhang Zi-dong enunciated the precept ‘Chinese learning for essentials, western learning for practicalities,’ and it is still honoured. As a college song at the Chinese University of Hong Kong has it:

At least 400 practical English words have been adopted by the local Cantonese vocabulary, and many a western influence has been assimilated to perfect naturalness. I was walking one day down one of the most tumultuous shopping streets of Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon-side, amidst the tireless pandemonium of your archetypal Chinese market, when I heard familiar music coming from a record-player in one of the shops. It was the allegro movement of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, and there amidst the crimson banners and the neon ideographs, the jostling Chinese crowds and the unforgiving Chinese traffic, its exuberant confidence sounded absolutely right.

Nobody is more at home in a Rolls-Royce than a rich Hong Kong Chinese woman, reclining with such befurred complacency in its back seat, all cash and condescension, while her chauffeur drives her stately up the hill to her mansion on the Peak – an almost Victorian match, like the wife of a self-made Lancashire millionaire going home to her country house in the back of a landau. Nobody can look much more ineffably Ivy League than a young Chinese merchant banker home from Harvard Business School, with his hands in his trouser pockets, his head held back, a signet ring on his finger and an air of unassailable certainty. Chinese judges look very well in the wigs and ermine of the High Court, and there is something about the British naval uniform, with its trim jerseys and jaunty round ribboned caps, which exactly
suits the Chinese physique. I once watched a Chinese family absorbing a minor facet of westernization right before my eyes – for the first time in their lives they were eating oysters with a fork, in the coffee-shop of a Holiday Inn.

Chinese magnates of Hong Kong have never been slow to accept British titles, so that the names of exotic-sounding knights – Sir Robert Ho Tung, Sir Sik-nin Chau, Sir Run-Run Shaw – have long entered the ranks of the imperial chivalry. Western given names, too, are very common, originally bestowed by European schoolteachers unable to tell one Chinese name from another: idly scanning the noticeboard at Hong Kong University one morning I discovered Chinese students named Angela, Philomene, Karen, Belinda, Selina, Jackie, Denise, Silvia, Cindy, Tracey, Ivy and Queenie.
¹¹

Not long ago European culture in the exacter sense hardly showed itself in Hong Kong, so that Chinese citizens were almost as ignorant about western arts as westerners were about theirs. Books were scarce, music was scarcer, there was no proper theatre until 1962, and the only museum was hidden away inside the City Hall.
¹²
Hong Kong was never on the imperial round of professional actors, writers and musicians who found their way to India, to Singapore and even to Shanghai. By any reckoning it was a dismally Philistine colony. The painter Luis Chan says that when he was a young man in the 1930s nobody in Hong Kong knew about any art more modern than the Impressionists, and when the composer Ravel died in 1938, the
South China Morning Post
commented: ‘A writer of many excellent works, Ravel’s name came much before the Hong Kong public recently because of the popularity of
Bolero
following its incorporation into a film starring George Raft.’
¹³

Today, almost at the end of the colony’s career as an outpost of the West, things are different. Philistinism is still alive and well in Hong Kong – the territory’s highly profitable television services seem to me on the whole the worst I have ever watched – but nowadays the
territory is at least on the frontiers of western civilization. It has always been an exhibition of capitalist economics: now it provides its Chinese citizens with a potted version of western culture – force-fed culture, as the writer David Bonavia once described it.
¹⁴

The Hong Kong Philharmonic is Government-supported, and so is the Academy of the Performing Arts, dedicated equally to western and to Chinese forms. The Hong Kong Arts Festival has brought famous performers from all over the world; scarcely a week goes by without some cultural opening, a play, a concert, an exhibition – a parade of Henry Moore sculptures brought out at colossal expense and displayed along the Kowloon waterfront, a visit from Michael Jackson or the Swiss Mime Mask Theatre, a performance by the St Louis Symphony Orchestra. Exchange Square, home of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, is decorated with pictures by Sidney Nolan and larger-than-lifesize bronze buffaloes by Elisabeth Frink, and the Cultural Centre at Tsim Sha Tsui occupies the most desirable stretch of the whole Kowloon waterfront.
¹⁵
Many Chinese visual artists express themselves in western modes as well as oriental. There are of course innumerable Chinese concerts, exhibitions and operas too, more every year, but few are the Europeans who attend them: look though at the bemused earnest faces of the young Chinese at the City Hall or the Hong Kong Arts Centre when Kiri Te Kanawa sings Mozart, or the Manhattan Ballet comes dancing!
¹⁶

And among the tycoons, the richest of Hong Kong’s rich, it sometimes seems to me that a kind of osmosis has set in. Foreigners and Chinese share the uppermost ranks of business and finance, and it is a back-handed tribute to the personality of the place, honed by so many generations of astute commercial practice, that whatever their private attitudes, in public the descendants of the Celestial Empire behave so like the Outer Barbarians.

Those suits help of course – those beautifully cut English-style suits, figuratively admired by Auden so long ago, which are worn by rich Chinese and European alike, and which proclaim all their wearers in some sense members of a club. Then there is the language. Few of the foreigners are likely to speak Chinese, but the Chinese all speak Oxford-
or Harvard-accented English, the lingua franca of business Hong Kong. The mannerisms of the two sides are curiously alike – self-deprecatory, restrained. The same jokes may not always amuse both parties, but common to both is the jovial tolerant laugh with which they make allowances for each other’s inadequate sense of humour.

Most tellingly of all, they seem to share a sense of permanently watchful calculation. By heredity at least they have all been making money on this China coast for a long, long time. They are wise to all ruses of profit, cognizant of all legal loopholes, and they are wary not only of every supplier, customer, diplomatic innovator or Government inspector, but not least, Chinese or gweilo, of themselves. They understand each other very well, and this makes a subtle community of them.

Whether there are underlying racial prejudices and dislikes, waiting for events to unleash them, I cannot tell. I can only say that I have never myself felt any inkling of ethnic ill-will from a Chinese in Hong Kong, while most of the Europeans I know profess admiration, if often baffled admiration, for the Chinese. In most Hong Kong homes the races never mix, but it is usually because of lack of opportunity, the language gulf, varying boredom thresholds, plain shyness or the restraints of ‘face’ – the Chinese reluctance, so pervasive in all circumstances, either to lose it oneself, or to make others lose it.
¹⁷

It was not always so. For much of Hong Kong’s history a profound mutual suspicion divided the two communities, and was crossed only by the very rich, the holy or the truly innocent – the good-natured entertainer Albert Smith, visiting Hong Kong in 1858, made friends so easily among the Chinese that when he left they saw him to the quay with anti-demon music and banners emblazoned with his praise.
¹⁸
A
Governor of the 1850s could describe social intercourse between the races as ‘wholly unknown’; a Governor of the 1860s said it was his constant concern to preserve Europeans and Americans from the injury and inconvenience of mixing with Chinese; a Governor of the 1920s said the Chinese and European communities moved in different worlds, ‘neither having any real comprehension of the mode of life or ways of thought of the other’. The very jargon by which the races conversed, when they conversed at all, was a barrier between them. Pidgin English really meant no more than ‘business English’, and was devised in Guangzhou in the days when miserable foreigners were forbidden to learn Chinese, but its comical and child-like phrases – ‘Missee likee more tea? Massa likee whisky now?’ – paradoxically made the British feel all the more contemptuous, and put Chinese at a permanent disadvantage.

Even when I first went to Hong Kong, in the 1950s, I noticed that Britons habitually spoke to Chinese in a hectoring or domineering tone of voice: a few years before, during the Japanese occupation, British civilian internees had been reluctant to dig sewers in their camp, despite the appalling risks of disease, because as the Camp Health Officer put it, ‘the typical Hong Kongite still regarded menial work as being the birthright of the Chinese …’ These attitudes were deeply ingrained – even institutionalized because for generations the races were kept apart by administrative system, besides being estranged by personal preference.