The Global Soul

by Pico Iyer

  Richard and I had lived in the same house at school (and when his parents had moved to Washington, we’d been the only students in the school returning for holidays to America); we’d been to the same university, in the standard English way, and when I’d gone across the Atlantic for graduate school, Richard had suddenly shown up in the same university two years later. Sometimes I felt that our main formal ties were global ones, and our destinies twinned as those of actual neighbors might have been once upon a time (I went to Japan, and Richard showed up as the head of his Tokyo office): it was as if we were riding parallel horses on some cross-cultural merry-go-round, always about to meet up at the next departure lounge.

  “It’s funny,” he was saying now, giving me his access number in Kazakhstan. “I’ve just closed five bank accounts and I’ve still got six more. We don’t live in a normal world.”

  A little later, I would hear the same line delivered in almost exactly the same context by the Saint, in the ludicrous movie of the same name (“I don’t have a name, I don’t have a home,” the postmodern hero mumbles as he switches from an Australian to a Russian to a South African and then to a Southern self in the film’s opening scenes). Before I could respond, though, Richard was off to Singapore.

  Outside, as the lunch hour approached, the whole amped-up, fast-forward, quick-cutting music video of a city seemed to be going into overdrive, and I felt myself all but overwhelmed by the press and push of bodies, signs, beepings as I threaded my way through crowds ten times denser than in jam-packed Tokyo. I climbed a flight of stairs to a central walkway, linking tower block to tower block, and walked along a pedestrian bridge leading to a mall in which a moving staircase transported me to another walkway, and then down a ramp into another overpass, with people streaming everywhere in all directions all at once, out of Kodak Express, into Maxim’s Express, through a While-U-Wait color photo stall, into a place that sold Time Express (my employer turned into a monthly in Chinese).

  Sometimes, in this Universe Express, I felt like a digit spinning round in some calculator, a unit clicking over amidst a whirl of bar codes, area codes, and tracking numbers. Asked to identify myself, I’d press in my PIN number, or my password, key in my fourteen-digit World Phone number, or the sixteen digits of my Visa card: “What is the city over the mountains / Cracks and reforms / and bursts in the violet air / Falling towns / Jerusalem Athens Amsterdam/Vienna London / Unreal.” I could be in Toronto, in Wellington, in Sydney; I could be at home.

  This sense of abstraction, of moving through a city of ideas and images where the faces faded into the background and the people became units in some higher (and unseen) equation, was intensified by the allegorical nature of its names. The Chinese like to name their buildings after sturdy Confucian ideals, and when these are translated into English, they give main streets, often, the feel of a modern pilgrim’s progress, as one walks past the Sincere Insurance Building and the Efficient Building, with buses that say DOUBLE HAPPINESS and PROSPEROUS HOLIDAYS on the side, streaming past Filipinas and their grinning Englishmen, taking out their Happy Meals. On the same block, the Wesley Hotel, with the Methodist Book Store attached; down the little alleyway next to it, the Lofty Virtues Publication Centre.

  Even the certificate in the elevator I entered was signed by one Yu-Wing Law, whose signature looked like “U.U. Law.”

  In order to steady myself in the midst of such impersonalities, I stopped off in a mall and put through a call to a cousin who’d recently moved here with her family. They too, like so many now, were half-inadvertent internationalists, the husband living for years at a time on ships, my cousin recently moved from Sharja, in the Gulf States. Her parents were currently in Zimbabwe, having moved down from Nigeria. From her window, she said, she could watch the ships sailing across the world, carrying bodies to every continent; her own daughter had spent each of her six birthdays in a different country.

  As I waited for the elevator up to their apartment, I caught sight of a bulletin board by the parking lot.

  “I am a Filipina maid with release paper, looking for a job. I worked with the same employer for four years. Be released due to financial problem.”

  And “I am hardworking and can tackle all the household chores like cleaning, washing, cooking and marketing, and can also take care of children.”

  There were notices of Ikea goods and Habitat side lamps—the mobile props of people moving on; one ad was soliciting a new home for some puppies. Most of the little scraps of paper, though, were handwritten messages strikingly similar to the ones in the Worldwide Building, and ending, nearly always, “Thank you for your kindness and consideration.”

  That night, with Richard away and Sharon in the office, I went down the street to Wanchai, the area where foreign Hong Kong relaxes after work. The savory old domain of Suzie Wong and her sisters had been radically refurbished for a multinational age, and most of its habitués now were not would-be artists sketching Hollywood backdrops, but traders used to foreign homes. The street gleamed with new establishments made for every kind of business: Joe Banana’s, Carnegies, Big Apple, open all night, often, and spilling out blond party girls and tie-loosened stockbrokers into the early hours; “pubs and discos” called Neptune and Strawberry, with sliding entrance fees posted outside their entrances (“Lady $50; Guest $100; Armed Forces $100; Non-Member $300”) so that the boys on bar stools could decide whom to let in and keep out, whom to call “Guest” and whom “Non-Member”; the more discreet and elegant nightclubs down the streets catering to a more punctilious kind of expense-account being, called Kitty Lounge and Club Cherry and with a large neon sign of a geisha above them (the Wall Street Bar was in Kyoto Plaza); and, most conspicuous of all, jammed into Lockhart Road between streets named after forgotten dignitaries—Fenwick and Fleming and Jaffe—gaudy little bars called New Makati, San Francisco, Waikiki, some of them with video monitors at their entrances so you could inspect the goods inside without pulling back the thick velvet curtains.

  The dancers, on almost every stage, in skimpy bikinis and smiles, were Filipinas, and the deejays, very often, were American or Australian; the customers were in many cases Brits, murmurously talking of Unilever in their suits; and the ones behind the cash register were nearly always Chinese. The global marketplace in mufti, practicing supply and demand as ever, though with need inflected differently than in the daylight hours; the age-old transaction—unchanged since Maugham or Kipling—whereby the Third World gets its own back on the First once the lights go down.

  The next day, at lunch, I would hear the aftermath: “He came over here straight from Oxford, to work for Jardine’s, a bit wet behind the ears, father this classic cold-fish type who was a fellow of some Oxford college. She was thirty-five, a mother many times over, from the Philippines. He only wanted to be loved, of course. Never really had a girl before. Now they’ve got a child, so there’s more to be broken up if they do break up.”

  Englishmen sipped thirty-dollar drinks in the Firehouse and spoke in the language of school again (travel always a shortcut for moving back in time). “Get a look at those legs!” or “Even the wedding ring looks good on her.” A girl got up on tiptoes to wipe the lipstick off her customer’s mustache, so he could return intact to the missus. Another, pouting, turned her back on a man in a shabby jacket, who sat alone at the end of the bar, looking at her. Men in striped shirts and silk ties talked about closing prices and what might be a reasonable opening bid.

  I didn’t have the heart for much more of this, and as the night wore on, I knew, the smiles would grow more plaintive, the ones that said, Be kind to me, please, and I’ll take good care of you bouncing against the ones that said, How ever did my need bring me here?

  I’m sure the girls in thigh-high boots and G-strings were still circling lethargically to “You can ring my be-e-el, ring my bell …” when I woke up the following morning, in my hotel-room manqué, where Phil Donahue was discussing extramarital affairs on Channel 8 and another channel showe
d the building’s lobby. There were 282 British Airways flights to Europe, the morning paper told me, and article after article talked of “astronauts” and “parachute children” (in other words, Hong Kongers affluent enough to acquire second homes abroad). There is a putting green in Palm Springs Airport, the Asian Wall Street Journal told me, and a Massage Bar in Seattle. In Frankfurt Airport, you can go bowling or do your dry cleaning or see a porno movie. There is even a whole book—Stranded at O’Hare—that tells you where you can find a Russian-speaking nightclub between planes.

  I went out into the fresh subtropical morning, and stopped off in the Pacific Coffee Company for breakfast. Like more and more of the service industries in the heart of Hong Kong, it was staffed by “white coolie” waiters from Britain and Australia who’d taken over the menial jobs in Hong Kong now that the lines of power were being redrawn. As white sons of Empire danced attention on Chinese customers, I picked up a daily paper and read, “Being almost British is like being homeless” (next to a picture of a Chinese schoolboy in a British uniform); another paper featured ads for “Submissive Expat” and “Decent-Looking Chinaman.”

  It was such a vertiginous world here, sometimes, the American Restaurant serving Peking food, and Ruby Tuesday offering “authentic American food at genuine American prices.” Whenever a new customer walked into the place, I never knew what kind of voice would come out of her—Roedean, or University of Michigan, or pure Kowloon—and she, of course, was no less in the dark with me, not knowing whether to expect South London or Silicon Valley or Calcutta. Cabbies in Hong Kong used walkie-talkies so that passengers’ requests could be translated into Cantonese at HQ, and at the cinema, where I chose my seat by pressing my finger on a computerized hologram, Chinese-speaking Indians pointed me towards the auditorium. The Grupo de Teatro Macunaima, the paper informed me, was performing Little Red Riding Hood in “Gibberish.”

  “I begin to feel increasingly at home in big cities,” Kazuo Ishiguro once told me when I asked him if he felt himself a foreigner everywhere. “Perhaps because big cities have become the place where people of different backgrounds tend to congregate.” I think I know what he meant, though he, of course, is 100 percent Japanese, just as I, who’d seldom been in India, was 100 percent Indian.

  Almost everyone who lives in Hong Kong—6 million of its 6.2 million people—is 100 percent Chinese, and yet, I realize, I have written all these words without very much acknowledging that Hong Kong is a Chinese place. To this day, many local businessmen pay more than $1 million for auspicious license plates, and even the managing director of Cathay Pacific moved his office four floors because of a geomancer’s warning. In one temple alone in Hong Kong, there are 12,500 Buddhas, and on the streets of Kowloon there are 350 jade vendors. Two-thirds of the land in Hong Kong is parkland, and much of it is a bird-watcher’s paradise.

  And yet the fact remains that a foreigner can spend days—the better part of years—in Hong Kong and hardly take this in. If you fly Connoisseur Class, if you stay in a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-month apartment like my friend’s—if you’re a Global Soul thrown this way and that by the global marketplace—you dwell in a kind of floating International Settlement where you never have to worry that 98 percent of the people around you can’t understand a word you say. The word for foreigner in Hong Kong, gwei-lo, famously means “ghost.”

  I notice, too, that I’ve written all this without really making mention of the fact that Hong Kong has passed back to the Chinese. When I returned to the city after the change of management, it was to find that its puckishness—its nose for turning everything to profit—hardly seemed dented at all. The new cathedral of “Long March Chic” was the store Shanghai Tang, right at the heart of Central, with its motto of “Merrily Opened by Chinese,” and its photos, just past the Sikh doormen, of Margaret Thatcher and Prince Andrew kowtowing before its Hong Kong owner; the PRC sign I came across late one night in Causeway Bay was for a People’s Republic of Chic store offering 50 percent discounts until midnight. Club 97 had just changed its name to Post 97, and, riding on the Mid-levels Escalator one day—the Hong Kong contraption that climbs all the way from downtown to the mountainous suburbs, through a series of twenty connecting moving sidewalks—I bumped into a Red Star Café, opened the day after the handover and bright with campy Mainland videos and mock-propaganda posters (HEY, GIVE ME A RED) amidst its “Revolutionary Chinese food.”

  An old schoolfriend’s son was still going back to school in England on the “lollipop special”—soon to leave from what Norman Foster had called his “horizontal cathedral,” a new airport as large as Heathrow and JFK combined—and another cousin of mine had arrived here from Bombay, by way of Houston (and soon to be transferred to Cape Town). And at the luxury apartment complex in Repulse Bay where I waited to go up to a twenty-seventh-floor party, the sign said “MANY YEARS EXPERIENCED WORKING IN HONG KONG. I HAVE WORKED FOR ONE EMPLOYER FOR TEN YEARS.”

  A few months before, the Black Watch (having played at a special banquet for sixty of our school’s alumni nine hours before) had struck up the melancholy strains of “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended” as the HMS Britannia set sail for the final time. That same morning, the outgoing governor had taken the new British prime minister—in what sounded like a carefully diplomatic vote for the kind of future the British favored—on a tour of Pacific Place.

  On one of my final afternoons in Hong Kong, I drove out to the farthest edge of the New Territories, not far from the Chinese border, to see how the Vietnamese boat people were faring. There were very few left here now—a far cry from the days when sixty thousand had been here, and twenty thousand had been kept in virtual cages, awaiting screening at the Whitehead Detention Centre—but what that also meant was that those who remained were the “hard cases,” in the apt phrase of the UNHCR official who briefed me. “Someone once said you never notice the rock when there’s a flood,” he said. “But when the water passes, you see the rocks below.”

  The rocks, in this case, were mostly drug addicts or convicted criminals who, as official undesirables, were not claimed by third countries, and not welcomed back by Vietnam. They lived now in long rows of numbered two-story blocks, out at the end of a long expressway, in a scrubland of lychee trees and tall housing blocks where Hong Kongers from villages and boats had been resettled. As my UN escorts carefully pointed out, their “open camp” was scarcely any different from the “temporary housing” of many of the local people, and many of the refugees, though not officially assimilated into Hong Kong, had regular jobs, especially in the construction industry, and especially helping to build the new airport nearby. Some of them even made a living by selling their refugee passes to real citizens, hungry for “refugee benefits.”

  The camp was by no means squalid. Because of the age-old racial differences that all the bureaucracy in the world could not paper over, it was divided into two areas, one containing Vietnamese refugees and the other “nonnationals,” which is to say ethnic Chinese from Vietnam who had been more or less pushed out by the Vietnamese government. Tall fences separated the two areas of blue shacks. But on both sides of the barrier there were cheerful schoolroom doors, brightly painted over with Santa Clauses and dancing bunnies and happy tigers, and when a Vietnamese interpreter led me round, he took pains to point out a piano room, friendly with Seven Dwarfs and Hello Kitty details, and even a computer room. Couches had been put out in the dust between the barracks, to make the place feel like home, and residents had even set up noodle shops and impromptu cafés. One woman had put up a table outside her small room where she sold pomelo and sugarcane and caramel corn, and outside nearly every room was a rusty washing machine with modern clothing (Santa Barbara Polo and Racquet Club) fluttering nearby.

  “We used to have a lot of violence,” the Durable Solutions officer from India who was showing me around said. “Even murders. It was sad: children were being used by their own parents as couriers—for drugs. But now we’ve installed the Gurkhas,
things have been much better.” A nice imperial irony: the Nepali hill tribesmen who’d so long been a fiercely loyal part of the British army, based in Hong Kong, were now working as private agents for Jardine’s Securicor; they waved at us as we passed, their small blue security kiosk covered with a huge poster of Princess Diana and her sons.

  As everywhere in the colony, there were signs all over reading POISONOUS RAT BAIT, but there were also signs, in Vietnamese and English, saying THE FUTURE IS IN YOUR HAND. The UN was eager now, I was told, to instill in the refugees a sense of self-sufficiency—not, in short, to look after them too much—but there was still a bright clinic run by Médécins sans Frontières and staffed by friendly Filipinos and young locals. “Our hope,” an official told me, “is that soon the children will be reciting classical Chinese poetry.”

  The only trouble was that there was no end in sight to the problem of the refugees’ official identity. Some had had the chance to leave a few years earlier, but, gambling that they could get on better here, had chosen to stay on, only to find the doors close behind them. A few women had married out of the prison of the detention center, only to find themselves living with junkies or hardened criminals. Even schoolchildren in Hong Kong had protested the presence of Vietnamese kids in their classes, feeling that the British were slamming the door on refugees from China while letting in those from Vietnam.