Why is Hong Kong Interesting?

Chris Wallace is one of my favorite travel writers. He has a new book on Peter Beard coming out soon (pre-buy it here). I loved this piece on Hong Kong. More of Chris’s writing is here. -Colin (CJN)

A friend of mine who has lived in Hong Kong for just over a decade describes the city as a cluster of variously intact, utterly incongruous, distinct and separate worlds. A honeycomb matrix of lives and beliefs and values that exist next to one another but remain absolutely apart: from the country club crowd to the visiting mainlanders, the protesting youth and the Western-facing business set — all of these lives, these stories bubbling over in a proliferating multiverse of sorts around Victoria harbor.

In my short visit, just a week in town, I know that I cannot hope to see beyond the surfaces of these and any other bubble-worlds in town. I recognize that, even pressing my face to their iridescent surfaces, I will likely see little more than my own reflection, my projections, rather than any sort of profound truth within. But as I made my approach, in mid-December of 2022, holiday season, I had the sense that I was arriving for a sort of last supper in Hong Kong. The end of days for an open, Western-friendly port town and freewheeling money hub. Stories of expats and business interests fleeing (and more threatening to flee) in the face of increasing control from the mainland — and, with it, an erosion of human rights protections, and a growing autocracy — seemed to suggest Hong Kong was at an inflection point.

The changes had been at first gradual, almost imperceptible, and then, perhaps accelerated by the disruptions from and responses to Covid, sudden and overwhelming. So even as the city lightened its travel restrictions in the late fall (and I booked my ticket), with Beijing asserting more and more power over the former British colony and global trading hub, I got the sense that this massive and thrilling melting pot of food and culture and voices and architecture, was on the cusp of change. And I wanted to go and see and eat what I could of it before then.

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An entire battalion of hazmat-suited nurses greeted me and my fellow passengers at the airport, with a PCR test in a pop tent, before ushering us on our way to baggage claim, with all the information from our tests, vaccination history and travel plans uploaded into a government database — frankly, a bit of a breeze, accustomed as we have become to testing and visa controls. Then, by some trick of fortune, the Kafkaesque protocol for mandatory testing and color coding clearance for entry to public spaces was summarily dropped the day after I arrived, meaning that I was technically allowed to eat and drink indoors without waiting the full five-day quarantine that had been in place until that point. And so eat and drink I did.

At the beloved dim sum restaurant Din Tai Fung in Causeway Bay, a waitress put a napkin over my backpack, in case I splattered soy sauce and vinegar everywhere I guess, and seated me, like I was seated in most places, within a plastic-walled cubbyhole of sorts, to dine solo. And, while I waited for three kinds of xiao long bo, shrimp har gow, and some shu mai to boot, I sat staring squarely into a frosted plexi barrier before me, beginning to think that Hong Kong was taking the bubble metaphor a bit too seriously.

The famously dense building complexes around Quarry Bay too did nothing to break up the bubble image. Riding west along the tramline through Wan Chai, in rough parallel with the shoreline, I picked out pastel blocks of buildings and the basketball courts at Southorn Stadium that I knew from Instagram, now wreathed with white tents — testing sites — giving them a slightly dystopian feel. In Sheung Wan, around the Victorian red and white brick Western Market, in the area where the British first established their colony, a very international bubble (complete with a Soho House, Yardbird restaurant, and the kind of clean-lined coffee shops that would not be out of place in Melbourne or Nolita), sits adjacent to a bubble that is both older and more site specific. Here there are rows of shops piled high with sacks of herbs, fish paste, and the salted fish that gave Des Voeux road here the nickname Dried Fish Street.

As I am perhaps an obvious American, and because I had, like so many others, a kind of aesthetic awakening in the 1990s watching the films of Wong Kar Wai, I stumbled into a kind of ecstasy in Sheung Wan one day, reveling in the density of visual information, in cool, primary colored neon signs backed by heavily patinated pastel stucco, in the various candle lit temples thick with the smoke of dozens of coiled cones of incense, in the bric a brac shops and stalls around Cat Street, and in the anachronistic, 50s-diner-style Wah Lok café where I had spicy noodle soup and a pork chop for breakfast.

With neon and food on my mind, I took the old-timey Star ferry across the bay and walked up Temple Street, once a thicket of neon signs and market stalls, now somewhat thinned out. And I made a sort of pilgrimage to the site of that ultimate packed bubble multiverse, the infamous Kowloon walled city, now a bucolic park with colorful swing sets, and nearby had one of the best meals of my life — beef and chive dumplings in a kind of thin pita; firey rich pork tendon soup with rice noodles; spinach; and a beef stew — at the halal restaurant, Islam Food.

Back on Hong Kong island, in the Central neighborhood, I played games with the infrastructure, testing just how far I could walk without ever going outdoors in the steamy rain, not stepping into the Blade Runner immensity of a modern metropolis (“cells, interlinked”) where still there are banyan tress growing down brick walls, and deep jungle sounds of macaques howling in the sunrise. I made it some miles, it seems, from one mall to another, one mega structure to another, hotel to hotel, buying, along the way, some caviar for friends, as well as having my hair cut, before plopping down at the Captain’s bar in the original Mandarin Oriental to a frosted silver tankard of their signature beer.

Schools were just then letting out for the holidays, and there was a sort of tidal movement of people around the island: children toward the amusement park and aquarium at Ocean Park, office staffs to holiday parties and hot pot celebrations. The tennis set, though, seemed to have already gone, whether for good, or on vacation, I couldn’t tell: but all was quiet in the sprawling salmon stucco America Club. At the club’s pool, with its commanding views of the islands to the south and west, I looked in vain for the pink dolphins that once crowded the bay here. Something about the way the dolphins played together, lived together and mixed it up, it is thought, created a scar tissue that turned them pink, made them something singular and spectacular. Apparently they are now almost completely gone, pummeled under by the heavy traffic of cruise ships.

From the south end of the island, I climbed toward the peak. And, it is funny to think, now, that one of my favorite novels set in and around Hong Kong, The Honourable Schoolboy, begins with a mad dash to the top of Victoria Peak, whereupon, it is discovered that the English (in the form of diplomats and spies) have packed up and gone home. My visit to Hong Kong, at what seems to have been the tail end of a mass exodus from the city, during which time expats left Hong Kong in droves, ended with a similar, if less delirious, visit to the peak — an effort, like many others during my visit, to find a good vantage from which to better appreciate the place. To get some perspective. To see what I could see.

In the years since first reading that book, I had been dreaming about the views from the peak. I had been expecting clean sharp light, Tony-Leung-on-a-rooftop-in-Infernal-Affairs light, bright, illuminating, almost harsh light revealing the whole city in sparkling clarity. The kind of light in which I expect people to wear black suits and mirrored glasses like they do in Hong Kong gangster movies.

As it happened, my visit to the mountain top coincided with a kind of white-out of the harbor, a dense fog bank covering everything for miles around. “Like someone turned out the lights and closed the door behind them,” my friend said. Or like we’d walked into a cloud cuckoo land, I thought. A place where reality is obscured, blotted out. But then I like rather heavy-handed poetry. (CW)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Chris (CW)

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