Hong Kong

by Jan Morris

  The principal Chinese contribution to the common delights has unquestionably been food. Willing as they are to eat almost anything and to cook it in every conceivable way, the Chinese have made of Hong Kong a permanent gastronomic celebration. There are said to be some 30,000 eating-places, licensed or unlicensed, or one for every 200 citizens. You can eat here in European styles, of course. You can eat elegantly French in the great hotels, predictably Italian among the usual fishing-nets and prints of Vesuvius, all-American with fried chicken-legs in plastic trays, and you may find a fair imitation of the Old English manner at restaurants like Bentley’s, a loyal scion of its London original, or Jimmy’s Kitchen, where the Chinese waiters in their black ties look almost like chop-house retainers.

  You can eat much more merrily, though, Chinese – and with infinitely more variety, because immigrants from every part of China pursue their own regional cuisines, delicate or hefty, spiced from Szechuan or sizzling out of Mongolian hotpots. There are Chinese restaurants of subtle discretion, appreciated only by gourmets or valetudinarians, where they cook abalone, snake or shark’s fin in manners all their own, and make sure elderly customers are served only the bear’s left front paw – thought to be the best for rheumatism because it is the one the bear most often licks. There are restaurants which take especial care of foreigners, and restaurants which are more or less clubs, and trendy restaurants that offer a kind of nouvelle Cantonese, and famously expensive restaurants where plutocrats like to show off their wealth. For me though nothing can be much more fun than to walk blind into one of the great popular Chinese eating-places, places like carnival railway stations, emporia of eating, palaces of gourmandcy, which flourish in every part of the territory.

  We will choose one of the largest, one of the loudest, one of the most brazen, at one of its busiest moments – Saturday lunchtime, say. Its ground plan is confusing, because there are restaurants on several floors, rooms opening one into another, rooms square and rooms circular, with balconies and staircases leading here and there, huge chandeliers like a gaming-hall, mock junks piled high with victuals. There seem to be a couple of thousand tables, and at them in uproarious enjoyment sits a vast multitude of Chinese, in families running the gamut from infancy to old age. Nobody is alone. Nobody is silent. The noise is deafening, all that talk and laughter mingling with the clanking of plates, the shouts of waiters from one side of the room to the other, the occasional cries of babies, the sizzling of woks and the Chinese music blaring from hidden loudspeakers.

  In we go, extremely European, all by ourselves, speaking scarcely a word of any Chinese tongue, hardly knowing the difference between a dim sum and a Peking Duck, certainly quite impotent to identify the Five Great Grains (wheat, sesame, barley, beans, rice) which offer a proverbial Chinese test of the palate. It is like sitting on the edge of a maelstrom, as we vacantly study the enormous menu (bound in gold and scarlet), offered encouraging nods and explanations perhaps from our neighbours at the next table, and smiling ourselves in a baffled and innocuous way across the Chinese mass. In a dumb daze we order, the waiter speaking no English, and as by a miracle our food arrives, piping hot and indefinable, green wriggly vegetables, sea-things in sauce, wicker baskets of dumplings, haunches of some greasy but delicious bird. In no time at all we are slurping it happily away, all inhibitions lost, as to the Chinese manner born.

  Sex apart, such is the one universal Chinese pleasure to which the Europeans of Hong Kong have found their entry, mah-jong still remaining beyond them. On the other hand there is scarcely a European indulgence which has not been avidly adopted by the Chinese. They have been for the most part outdoor indulgences, for here as everywhere the imperial British threw themselves with a hardy enthusiasm into sports and exercises, if only as a prophylactic against sickness.

  Even in the 1840s, we read, when Hong Kong was scarcely a town, its British merchants habitually went for two-mile walks before breakfast, to get the system working. Forty years later Kipling found himself dragged on a ten-mile hike in horrible wet weather from one side of the island to the other (‘behind, rose the hills into the mist, the ever-lasting mist …’). Horse-riding was never popular in the precipitous landscapes of Hong Kong Island, but after the New Territories became available the inevitable colonial hunt was founded – the Fanling Hunt, which chased the civet cat and the South China Red Fox across the stony wastelands with full paraphernalia of cap, horn, stirrup-cup and imported English hound.

  The British went sailing, of course – they had done that since the days of the Guangzhou factories. They went trekking, climbing and bird-watching in the empty islands. They played golf. They shot snipe and teal on the marshlands of the peninsula. They swam from the bathing-beaches of Hong Kong Island, which they eventually turned into small resorts of vaguely Mediterranean ambience. They played cricket on the cricket pitch between the Supreme Court and the Hong Kong Club. In short they did everything that Britons were expected to do, to keep themselves properly British in foreign parts.

  An old tale tells of the Chinese gentleman who, watching a pair of Englishmen sweating away at a game of tennis, inquired why they did not hire coolies to play it for them. Certainly we may imagine Chinese residents observing the early colonists with a bewildered air, as the foreign devils hurled themselves around tracks on ponies, clambered up unnecessary gradients or disturbed the water-spirits by diving in cold wet seas. Presently, though, Chinese were not only gambling on, but actually riding ponies at Happy Valley, and in the end all those imperial pastimes, except possibly cricket and rugby, were to be pursued at least as vigorously by the indigenes. Today there can be no spectacle more redolent of mens sana in corpore sano than the sight of a group of young Hong Kong Chinese hiking somewhere in the outlying islands. They go there in their hundreds, every fine weekend, wearing spotless anoraks and neat clean boots, all spick and span, all gleaming, all smiles, all Walkman radios, all mens sana, swinging boisterously along the country tracks, waving flags sometimes and singing. They look like figures in a propaganda poster; and though in fact this particular enthusiasm came to Hong Kong out of China proper, and the real inspiration for that hearty gait was probably Mao’s Long March, still one cannot help thinking that the old British colonists, as they set out for their two-mile walk before the morning kedgeree, would have liked to think of it as a legacy of their own.

  10

  And talking of two-mile walks, for myself there is still no greater pleasure of Hong Kong than the most familiar of all such promenades: the walk around Victoria Peak, crowning massif of Hong Kong Island. The British Empire was expert at pleasaunces, and a classic example is the circular path around the Peak, through its bowers of jasmine and wild indigo, daphne, rhododendron and shiny wax trees. Part of it is called Harlech Road, part of it Lugard Road, but it is really hardly more than a bridle-track, and though here and there along it villas lie half hidden in shrubberies, cars are parked discreetly in lay-bys and the little red Suzuki Royal Mail van sometimes trundles by, for the most part it is to this day a secluded country walk of the sub-tropical imperial variety, a languorous ramble on a Sunday afternoon, or better still a marvellous stimulant before breakfast.

  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 itse
lf 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.

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  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:

  China’s still evolving culture, grateful, we retain

  East and West, through fully sharing, further strength obtain.

  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.