Saturday 28th February 2009
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Sometimes memories are like those party trick tins, where if you open the lid an entire array of spring loaded cloth worms come flying out at once. Landing in Hong Kong was like that, even though we didn't have the familiar death turn over Kowloon, the lines of washing hanging out over balconies of flats crammed on top of each other just off the wing tips as adroit pilots used to bank their way in Kai Tak airport. Neither could you even see Hong Kong island from the newish (10years maybe?) airport purpose built on reclaimed land some 15kms from the old Star Ferry, itself no longer where it used to be. But the smell. So distinctive. The smell you smell in any Chinatown. The smell which accompanies duck or chargrilled pork...a spice, damned if I can recall what it's called. That smell hits you like a freight train the moment you disembark. It is the catalyst for setting off a whole load of other synapses which then trigger off so many more in my brain, memories one on top of another taking me back 28 years ago where it all began. Me, a callow youth and my bride of less than a year. We had escaped from New York after a year of the tough grind of the Chase training programme, a Darwinian boot camp where 20% of those hired didn't make it through. By some miracle, had been chosen to teach the very same course to Chase employees from all over Asia.
Then, for my first overseas post working (having been born Venezuela, lived in Colombia, grown up in North Carolina, and studied in England and Geneva), my eyes saw things through the prism of my job. We stayed then in the Hilton (no longer there), near Central, and I worked in the World Trade Centre (nothing to do with the World Trade Centers, of course not on the planet either) across from the Excelsior Hotel in Causeway Bay. Everything then was subsidised by Mother Chase, according to a well-worn recipe of expat life.
By way of preparation, we (Steens and I together) had completed a training programme in New York called Cross Cultural Living, designed to prepare Chase neo-expats for the challenges of living overseas. This consisted of the class being divided into groups, each group being allocated beads of a certain colour, given a set of characteristics for the culture your team was supposed to represent (acquisitive or passive, smiling or scowling, tactile or stand-offish, obsequious or dominant,etc.) and then going back into the classroom and interacting with the other teams who had each been issued other instructions and seeing how the chips (or rather beads) fell. All this by way of warning that people are different, and when I say different, I mean completely different. The way you are and perceive the world (and conversely how others both perceive and are) is a function of many influences (parents, education, society, wealth, race, weather, circumstances etc.) of which you have no idea or comprehension. So therefore be prepared, and be flexible.
These were the instructions we were given as new expats, and thus my initial impression of Hong Kong so many years ago was coloured by my status as a neophyte (both professionally and in my marriage) in this expat world.
Once an expat always an expat though, and now, 28 years later and having lived in 15 places and travelled to 65 countries, my eyes are different and clouded by a new fact...competing memories. Thomas Wolfe, who lived in Asheville North Caroliina not far from where I grew up, said you can't go home again. What he meant , I think, is that the picture you paint on a blank canvas can never be the same when you repaint the same scene later. Not only may the scene have changed, but so have the paints, the brush, the hand, and most importantly, the senses. Plus you have to paint over the same scene, and the smudges and the fading that comes with time make you wonder if it ever was like that in the first place.
And whereas back then the first thing that assaulted the senses was the sheer amicable chaos of a steamy autumn day, the red taxis, the traffic jams going under the tunnel to Hong Kong Island from Kai Tak, the harbor with boats toing and froing, the skyscrapers perched on the island which seemed impossible close, the bustle of it all, the sound and the clatter....all that has been replaced by a modern and brutally efficient airport. It is gargantuan, but unlike, say the Madrid Barajas aiport which is of a similar size, baggage arrives before you get to the carrousel, the ticket to the trains is quickly obtained, and suddenly you find yourself heading into the city on a new high-tech train, passing new buildings on a newly built island.
The weather is misty, and allowing for being bleary-eyed after an 11 hour flight, the scenery, with calm waters and a few fisherman (not professional boatmen in junks as before, but sport fisherman with rods and reels perched desultorily on rocks which have been placed there artificially) is surreal.
There are only two stops before reaching Central, but at each stop there are luggage trolleys arranged in place by the doors, lined up and ready to go. Was the old Hong Kong ever remotely like this?
And then you arrive, straight out some doors, straight into a taxi, and boom!, straight onto a freeway which has been constructed on reclaimed land where the harbour used to be. The old Bank of China building looks careworn, dwarfed by new towers everywhere.
I turn to Steens and say: "You know, you can go to London, or Paris, or Geneva 15 years later and things are more or less the same. There may be a few additions around the edges here and there (things like the London eye or bendy buses) but on the whole it will be the same, the same District Line, the same taxis, the same views. The last time I saw Hong Kong was 1995, and you know what? These boys have been busy here."
We are staying at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Wanchai (give it a miss, will you?) across the so-called street (ie. freeway) from the Happy Valley Racetrack. The road leads directly to the Aberdeen tunnel which goes under the mountain. After a quick shower, we are picked up by our old friend Steve Marzo, a fellow Chase cohort who has remained in Asia ever since, first with Phillips Brothers, then Salomon, Goldman, and now with the Noble Group. We go to his flat in Pokfulam where Karen Koh-Marzo (his Australian-Chinese wife who is a TV journalist) has prepared us a feast, and meet his three sons, all active sportsmen. For three hours we reminisce over pork and beef with an absolutely scrumptious dipping sauce. Back in a taxi through the tunnel to the hotel. It is a Sunday about 14 hours after we left the UK and due to the quirks of time zones we are 22 hours into a familiar but strange world.
The next day Steens points out a billboard of a Chinese girl sticking her tongue out, but the tongue is the Union Jack. This sums up for me what has happened to Hong Kong. The old colonial girl has gone. Forever. And the new babe speaks a new language, a weird mixture of the old and the new proto-modern world. It is not her mother tongue either.
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