Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  THE MORNING AFTER the party on the Peak, I got up very early and walked into Georges’ living room to find him doing what most expats do on Saturday mornings—calling his office in New York. On the other end of the line was another Old Etonian who was busy complaining that he could find no Old Etonians in New York, in part perhaps because nearly all of them were out East. “What we need here,” this fellow bulled, “are more people like you—capable, confident, knows what he likes.”

  For British public school boys, of course, the Crown Colony had long been a first-class finishing school, or at least a tolerable halfway house fairly close to the tropics. Indeed, the expat life had first acquired its air of raffish glamour when I was at school, and nothing could seem more glamorous than raffishness. For though the best of our brightest might be expected to follow their paters into the Foreign Office or the City, the rest—the adventurers and apprentice ne’er-do-wells, the black sheep and white mischief-makers—were much better advised to respond to the ancestral call of “Go East, young man.” In the East they could put to good use all the noble savagery they had mastered through flogging and fagging and firking at school; in the East, they could be rulers of empires. The East was opportunity, the East was escape. “The East,” as Disraeli wrote in another context, “is a career.”

  At the only school reunion I ever attended, my daydreams of the expat life had come even more sharply into focus, in the shape of Charles, who had just flown in from Hong Kong, outfitted with a new air of knowingness, a matter-of-fact ease with the mysterious. As we gathered for drinks in the warm Berkshire evening, he entranced us all with schoolboy fantasies of the Orient. Working for Swire’s, he began with practiced casualness, he received a free flat, free holidays, free flights on Cathay Pacific. How did he spend his weekends? Oh, usually, he flew off with a few expats to Bangkok for the night life and sometimes, that same night, they went on to Manila; on long weekends, they went to Bali. In the winter, expats went skiing in Japan; in the summer, they took over some forgotten fantasy island in the Philippines. And the food in Asia was terrific, and the weather was amazing. As for the girls, they were ravishing, and compliant, and dreamed of nothing but a British boyfriend! Even the miseries Charles described—dysentery in Kashmir, con men in Phuket, social diseases in Manila—sounded impossibly exotic.

  In the years that followed, I often caught updates on the latter-day nabobs, supported by their Old Etonian ties and sustained by their imperial authority. Giles was a stockbroker in Hongers, Michael was a solicitor. Dominic from Tokyo and David from the Colony had just been on holiday together in Thailand. Mike had actually gone native and married a Chinese woman. Jamie was swanning around China playing free-lance writer. Jock was living it up in Bangkok, and Paul was starting his own company in Jakarta. Tim was in Seoul, which he loved—he kept one girl for official functions, one for more private occasions and a third for his visiting friends.

  By 1985, moreover, as every other country in Asia had shaken off the fetters of colonialism, Hong Kong, the “Pearl of the Orient,” seemed the last treasure left in the oyster that was the Old Boys’ world. Etonians still crowded into the FCC, an American journalist complained, chattering away in their incomprehensible code of housemasters’ initials and Latin tags; cocktail parties still buzzed with pukka talk of “bashes” and “punters.” And one day, as I drove into town, I saw the Eton E. T. Language School hardly more than a scone’s throw from the Anglican church, standing upright in the afternoon sun.

  A couple of mornings later, I turned on the radio, and got another whiff of Empire in the commanding colonel tones of a well-educated Brit, calling up some chatty chappie on a talk show. Had the host happened to see the beauty contest on the television three days ago? he began with authoritative politeness. Well, not exactly. “I see,” said the man, meaningfully. “Well! They gave the winner fully four seconds more than the others to do her toe touches!” The professionally euphoric host was not sure quite what to make of this. “So naturally,” went on the caller, as if preparing his letter to The Times, “the girl won the aerobics section. Then they refused to release the score of the runners-up!” Half baked in the tropics, he warmed swiftly to his topic. “I was wondering whether you could perhaps use your good offices to look into this.” Stunned, the host laughed nervously, and played for time. But the loony was unstoppable. “And do you know what the hostess was called?” The host did not know what the hostess was called. “Doh-doh!” said the voice triumphantly. The host rallied gamely. “Do-do.” “Well, she said it Doh-doh, and, you know, that makes me think of …”

  By 1985, however, the British presence in the city seemed all too easily represented by that voice of elegant irrelevance—a sort of polished character actor consigned to the margins of life and talking to himself unintelligibly in an enormous, echoing chamber. Hong Kong was still officially the Crown Colony, but the crown was slipping off and the Colony was slipping away. The greatest hong in the city, Jardine-Matheson, had already moved its headquarters to Bermuda. The storied Repulse Bay Hotel, great bastion of old fogies and Old Hands, had been replaced by an eighteen-story megablock. The Peninsula, which still collected guests from the airport in a Rolls, was about to undergo a radical refurbishing. In 1985, for the first time in history, there were more Americans in Hong Kong than Brits.

  Change, of course, was nothing new here; it had always been the only constant in the hyperactive Colony. Every seven minutes, the government erected a brand-new building, quite literally moving mountains and pushing back the sea and digging up new earth in its determination to keep up with the times. Nowadays, however, something else was changing, something deeper than the buildings. “In Hong Kong today,” explained a Chinese banker from Harvard Business School, “to be rich is to be powerful. The two are the same.” And as affluence had become the measure of authority, matter was superseding manner, and the great intangibles in which the British had long excelled—irony and wit, discretion and diplomacy, a sense of the mot juste and the vin extraordinaire—were fast being made redundant by the hard facts of money and technology. The ever-so-civil servant was being usurped by the stateless entrepreneur; the Empire was being eclipsed by the International Style.

  The age of the Impersonal Computer was bringing with it, of course, an entirely new set of values. Quantities counted more than qualities now, function overruled form. Suburbs were beginning to swallow up cities. And as fast as the sun was setting on the Empire, it was being replaced by fluorescent lights. The Empire had always stressed character and distinctions; in the new technoglobal village, however, convenience and communications were everything, and the world was being made generic. Everywhere could be home if everywhere was homogeneous.

  In 1985, therefore, Hong Kong, always one of the fastest places to adapt to the latest trend, was busy creating a new and serviceable identity for itself, sloughing off the superfluous niceties of Empire as it spun into a digital future. Already, the Colony boasted numbers as showy as the test scores of a teenage science whiz. There were more Rolls-Royces per capita here than in any other city in the world, more Mercedes-Benzes than in Berlin. The new sixty-two-escalator Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was reported to be the most expensive building in the world. And there were 1,500 men in Hong Kong worth more than $100 million, even though there were only 400 houses in the entire Colony.

  The greatest numbers of all, of course, were always financial; in the Multinational Age, the top priority was always the bottom line. And here too, Hong Kong seemed eminently well endowed. For money infected the language of Hong Kong: the best place to eat, I was told, was “the poor man’s nightclub” and the best thing to see was the “rich men’s ghetto.” Money colored the customs of Hong Kong: kung hei fa choy (“rejoice and grow rich”) was the greeting exchanged by the Chinese, together with bank notes, during their New Year. Money informed the very sound of the city: the song of the moment while I was there all too fittingly, was “Material Girl,” which I heard again and again and
again, pumped out by the sound system in McDonald’s, blasting out at a party in Central, crooned by an entertainer in a Malaysian restaurant. Money, above all, was the opium of the masses: more than once in Hong Kong, I heard people acknowledge, “I like money.” A little later, I read that up to 50 percent of all the Colony’s psychiatric patients, most of them expats, suffered from “affluence depression.” In Hong Kong, even the ironies were rich.

  ON MY FIRST weekend in Hong Kong, I ended up doing what expats do on Saturdays, sitting stranded in the traffic jam that paralyzes the city as everyone in the center of speculators heads for the races. For the next day, though, I arranged to do what expats do on Sundays, cruising around the harbor on a junk.

  As Sunday morning arose, however, a fine rain began to blanket the city, misting the quiet water below. And as I sat in Georges’ luxury flat, gloomily watching the harbor erase itself below me, my hostess rang up: on rainy Sundays, she explained, expats tended to gather for brunches rather than launches; could I taxi around to her house in Happy Valley? Outside, in the drizzle, clumps of bright young American couples in Lacoste shirts and blue blazers, pantsuits and Reeboks, were lined up by the side of the road, waiting to hail taxis. They too, I assumed, were on their way to their own Sunday brunches.

  As soon as I arrived at my friends’ rambling home, I was led out onto the veranda, where expats were sitting around in wicker chairs, munching corn chips and drinking Carlsbergs as Elvis Costello songs floated between the ferns. Some “belongers” were working on the crossword in the Saturday Herald Trib, the closest you could get, I was told, to the Sunday New York Times. Someone assured me I could watch the NBA championship series on Tuesday evenings, someone else that I could hear the Top 10 of two years earlier on the radio. Someone else discussed the four-mile jogging track along Bonham Road and somebody reserved a block of tickets at the local cinema so that we could all go see the latest Woody Allen.

  “Last night at a dinner party, a man told me how he’d just made a hundred thousand dollars U.S. A jockey rang him up before the race and told him he owed him a favor.”

  “When I came here, I really wanted to immerse myself in the Chinese community, speaking only Chinese, doing everything Chinese. And I was earning six thousand dollars U.S. and living on an island and all of my friends were Chinese. But then I started moving up in the world and earning more and more and now—well, now I live in an expat world.”

  “Ah, it’s such a comfortable life out here. A car. Lots of rooms. A maid. It’s so hard to move back to New York.”

  WHEN FIRST I visited Hong Kong, I could hardly imagine why anyone would want to go back to New York. For as the Colony threw over its imperial ties, it was coming more than ever to resemble a sweet-and-sour version of the capital of the modern world. Like New York, in its way, the orphan city was full of the street-smart bravado of a strutting young man in a hurry, a rags-to-riches Seventh Avenue shark who takes the world on, but only on his own terms. Like New York, “Chinatown East” valued volume and velocity; people moved quickly through the streets, and with purpose, pushing for space, shoving, struggling to get a step ahead. Like New Yorkers, Hong Kongers seemed to pride themselves on their rudeness, their impatience with the slow or sentimental (“Am I being courteous?” said the badge worn with black irony by the conductor on the Peak train who barked out orders and trampled on children as he kept the turnstiles spinning). Like New York, above all, Hong Kong seemed to prize energy before imagination and movement more than thought. The place had a one-track mind—and it was decidedly the fast track. Hard-driving and fast-talking, it ran on hard cash and quick wit, hard heads and quick kills. In Hong Kong, even Maxim’s was a fast-food joint.

  In that sort of environment, where statements were mostly associated with banks, values were rarely sentimental; everything, in fact, was a commodity. When first I visited, in 1983, the biggest deal in town and the center of the most furious bartering seemed to be the city itself; Hong Kong’s very identity was being placed (as once Manhattan’s had been) on the marketplace. And no sooner had China won the bidding than the world’s most famous marketplace turned into a wholesale store feverish with the activity of a closing sale (Low prices! Moving soon! All stocks must go!). By the time I returned in 1985, the hottest place for young professionals was called 1997. A leading local racehorse had been christened 1997. And in the prime location of the Harbour Ferry departure lounge, the prize novelty of the store called 1997 (where every item sold for exactly HK $19.97) was a lumpy and ill-favored creature named the Rice Paddy Doll, a macabre variation on the Cabbage Patch Kid. This one, however, was not an orphan but an exile, equipped with a Hong Kong British passport and a sign that read: “I want to Emigrate” or “Immigration Department” or “I would love Australia.” Already, so it seemed, the city had undertaken to turn its death to profit; already, it was flogging tickets to its own funeral.

  Among the people of Hong Kong too, I met a pragmatism more no-nonsensical than any I had ever known before. In Hong Kong, cabbies were not the self-styled political pundits I had met elsewhere in the world, but self-appointed economists. And in their abacus vision of the world, even matters domestic were reduced in the end to matters economic. On my second day in the Colony, a driver took me around the main island, and when we stopped for lunch, I asked about his family. In the inimitable staccato English of the Chinese—spitting out syllables as if they were indigestible dumplings and speaking with the rapid urgency of a man holding on to a slippery bar of soap while fearing a fire alarm at any moment—he briskly filled me in on his principles of cost-efficient growth. He did not have child, because child cost money. Child also make wife stay at home, cut down income. He must take good care of wife, because wife bring good income. He need income. He work every day, twelve hour, but sometimes take Sunday off. He only have one job. Many people in Hong Kong have two.

  I could not help recalling the Hong Konger I had met on the road who was making a year-long circumnavigation of the world. I had asked him which places had moved or impressed him most. Thailand was good, he answered; it was inexpensive. Greece was great; it didn’t cost too much. Egyptians, they were all sharks. India, it was full of touts. With that, he cast his practiced eye around my room. This place was okay, he pronounced. But it should be worth a refund.

  I did manage to find a snatch of romance in Hong Kong—at the Chinese opera. The Cloud of Eternal Sorrow was a ravishing pageant of water and air, through which was unrolled a watercolor vision of turquoise valleys and misty waterfalls. Swains chased sylphs through a brushstroked never-never land. Shaven-headed chamberlains and goat-bearded sages strode through a plot as brocaded and magical as that of Turandot. Every speech was fleet and fragile as light snowfall. A valiant warrior marched onto the stage, and English-language subtitles flickered on the blue velvet curtains framing the proscenium. “I am a hunter from Jade Mountain. My father’s silver-maned horse is faster than the army’s 3,000.” Imprisoned, the lovely princess of his dreams could only weep beside her casement. “The palace is dark. The palace is lonely. The valleys are draped in a lilac shroud.” The seasons drew on, and her pining grew more plaintive and more plangent. “The moon is so bright. These walls are so high. My heart is breaking.” The curtain came down, and I went out into the night. Two old men, in white vests and black shorts, were playing go beside the harbor, while the water, purpled by neon, slapped against the docks. The moon was so bright. The walls were so high.

  In life if not in art, however, Hong Kong, long the largest metropolis in the world without a museum, had its head screwed on very tightly. What good was tradition, it implied, when it came to moving ahead? When did sentiment ever contribute to profit? Who needed poetry when prose was so much clearer?

  “Son was the most valuable long-term investment they possessed,” writes Timothy Mo in his family portrait of Hong Kong exiles in Britain, Sour Sweet. “On maturity, the realization of this asset would be worth far more than the business would ever return.�
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  IN 1985, HONG KONG was still, of course, much less advanced along the road to dehumanized pragmatism than Singapore, the terminus ad quem of the new order. The countries’ airports alone, great centers of the Intercontinental Age, revealed the difference between a Babel present and an Esperanto future—Kai Tak was smelly, slovenly, vital with the cheery hucksterism of a sidewalk vendor in an alleyway crowded with laundry and kids; Singapore’s Changi, however, with its automatic walkways and waterfalls lit by soft neon, its spotless jewelry stores and exquisite atria, its free telephones in fire-engine red and carpeted departure lounges, each with its own color TV, was the last word in flawless utopianism. Singapore, in fact, I always thought of as McCity, a perfect Platonic model of the Commonweal, as safe and efficient and convenient as McDonald’s, and just about as featureless. With its multiplex cinemas, its look-alike office blocks and its theme-park restaurants, the city-state had set up an ideal of anonymous comfort in which everyone could live like an expatriate. And with its leafy, ranch-style homes, its languid, white-tiled malls, a blue sea in the distance and the plastic lyricism of a soft-rock jingle, Singapore resembled nothing so much as a California resort town run by Mormons. Hong Kong, by comprison, was chaotic, clamorous, dirty-fingered New York.

  But still Hong Kong was New York only by comparison, and that was the great expat sorrow. For if the horror of New York is that it knows that it is the quickest city in the world, the sadness of Hong Kong is that it knows it too. Everywhere I went in Hong Kong, everyone I met was talking about New York—whenever they were not talking to New York on the phone. And the tone they adopted had the agitation of someone who lives to get ahead and fears that he is falling behind. “This place has the same energy, the same hustle as New York,” a longtime settler told me at a party. “But it’s unadulterated. There’s no culture, no bohemians, no fringe. And in New York, people work so they can enjoy themselves. Here they work so—well, they don’t really know why they’re working. And in New York, people enjoy life even if they don’t enjoy their work, or even if they’re not working at all. Here work is life. There’s absolutely no difference between the two.”