Work, Eat, Shop, Return

In Lonely Planet’s just released Blue List (which my friend Albert describes as “another addition to the slew of things to do before you die books”) Hong Kong’s pithy three word summary (all the places listed have ‘em) is Work, Eat, Shop. As a denizen of Hong Kong, I propose that a fourth word be added to the summary – Return. In other words, return at least half of the crap you acquired following the third word – specifically electronics – within three months, as chances are good that the damned things have stopped working by then. I do a lot of this. Whether through humidity or just shoddy workmanship, electronics do not live long, useful lives in this thick and busy climate. The Creative brand Zen Micro lasted two months before giving up the ghost, so I headed up to Kwai Fong to get it fixed. (Creative gave me a new one, and even threw in a new battery, bless ‘em.) The CD door on the Hyundai CD / DVD player that PCCW (the local phone company through whose wires and good grace this screed is being transmitted) gave me as a sign-on bonus neither opens nor closes, making it more of a paperweight than anything else. Somewhere in a stack of papers is a warranty, and somewhere in the New Territories is an office where said warranty may or may not be honored, since its been six months since I got the damned thing. And of course, the battery life on the Asus laptop I’m writing this on is slowly dribbling off into the sunset – good timing to, as I still have a week and a half left on the warranty, meaning a trip to the Kowloon Asus office is on the agenda by Friday at the latest.

So yes, Work, Eat and Shop, that’s what Hong Kong is all aboutt. But for electtronics geeks, shop needs tto be followed by retturn, witthin 3-6 montths.

Uh-oh…hope the keyboard is sttill under warrantty…

Bad Air Day

Was watching Ron Howard’s latest movie “Cinderella Man” last night when one line jumped out at me. The always brilliant Paul Giamatti is a depression era boxing coach visiting his once-star but now down and out boxer (played by real life pugilist Russell Crowe). Giamatti is beating around the bush about the purpose of his visit. “Did it ever occur to you that I just came out here for some fresh air?” Giamatti asks Crowe, who replies skeptically, “this is New Jersey.” The message of course is that even in the 1930’s, New Jersey (that part of it anyway) was no place for fresh air fiends. And in 2006, neither is Hong Kong – or anyplace around The Pearl River Delta, for that matter. Though always in the back of my mind, this has become all the clearer to me over the past week as I’ve taken up running.

I live on Lamma Island, which is car-free by design and separated from the main part of the city by a few miles of channel and some fairly steep mountains. Lamma is also home to one of the cleanest burning coal plants in the world, and its here that all the electricity is generated for Hong Kong island. On a clear day you can see the backside of Hong Kong’s famous Peak from the top of any hill in Lamma. On an average day, its appears as an indistinct outline against a background of blue-gray haze. Today it’s completely swallowed by nearly opaque haze, and even the much closer buildings of Repulse Bay on HK’s south side seem like indistinct shapes across the channel.

Its no secret that one of the major prices being paid by China for its rapid economic rise has been a hideous rise in pollution, and in the Pearl River Delta, where the boom first started, the problem is all the more extreme. For Hong Kong, which boasts strong anti-pollution laws, its especially ironic. Sitting as it does on the end of the Delta, the quasi-independent territory is perpetually downriver and often downwind of the massive industrial engine that the entire region has become. Since a good number of the factories of Southern China are owned (at least partially) by Hong Kong business interests, some might see the unstoppable pollution migration as chickens coming home to roost. Not being one of the businessmen getting rich from the boom, this brings me little comfort as I wheeze my way through an otherwise-pristine chunk of Lamma landscape, choking on the gray haze. Most Hong Kongers opt to get their exercise (if you can call it that) inside of an air conditioned mall. Bad air is just one of the reasons why.

Over the Border and into the Breach

Not to harp overmuch on the whole absence making the heart grow fonder thing, but another thing about Hong Kong I appreciate is just how easy it is to get out of the place. With a good tailwind, a hawk might make it from the Lan Kwai Fong to the Lo Wu shopping center in Shenzhen in half an hour, though what it would be doing in either place is beyond me. It took me and the Lamingtons twice as long yesterday, but Emma Lamington insisted on stopping at one of the malls in the KCR station to look at some shoes. I explained to her that she’d be better off waiting until we crossed the border – “Shenzhen is, among other things, a colossal shoe store,” I told her – but she seemed enthralled by some hideous pair of black boots, expressing doubt that she’d be able to find her size someplace where big noses are so much less prevalent than they are in Hong Kong.

Being Australian, the Lamingtons were able to get themselves a “visa on demand” for 150 HKD. This five day visa entitled them to visit Shenzhen, but only the three districts directly across from Hong Kong proper. I had initially planned to take them over to Longgang to check out the old Hakka enclosures, an excellent example of Ming dynasty paranoid architecture. The massive stone structure in which the local Hakka tribe once lived before migrating to Taiwan has vertical arrow slits, allowing for quick dispatch of unwelcome guests. Once upon a time, there’d been internal border controls inside Shenzhen; these have been mostly done away with, but there are still occasional spot checks at highway toll booths. We decided not to risk it, and instead spent the rest of the day shopping at the massive Dongmen pedestrian mall, where Emma bought a pair of Converse from a quick-talking elf of a boy who’s English sales pitch was peppered with phrases like “whatever you want in shoes I got it, man” and “Hey man, no pressure.” Matt and I split a ten pack of boxer shorts.

Hong Kongers tend to view Shenzhen with dread, a lawless no-man’s land rife with pickpockets, kidnappers, hookers and men with bad fashion sense. The attitude is understandable on one level: Though appearing chaotic to the outsider, Hong Kong is a well ordered city with all the legal channels and trappings that you’d expect in a society boasting rule of law. If a merchant in Causeway Bay does dirty by you, finding an authority to address your complaints to is simply a matter of knowing where to look. The situation might not get rectified, but the hope that it might is always there. Shenzhen is, by comparison, a frontier town, where Caveat Emptor is the only relevant law of consumer protection. That and the uncomfortable knack that the local criminal class has for spotting (and fleecing) their wealthy their slumming neighbors to the south makes Hong Kongers somewhat uncomfortable about walking the streets of Shenzhen for extended periods.

As a New York City boy, I get off on Shenzhen’s air of implied threat. In years of exploring the streets and markets of the city, the most uncomfortable occurrence I’ve ever been through has been a series of gang-beggings in which I was surrounded on all sides by hideously cherubic child beggars, elderly cripples, and people with various deformities all looking for spare change from the visiting round-eye. The Lamingtons had never seen this kind of thing, and seemed taken aback when we were attacked on mass just outside of the Shekou pedestrian mall by a small gang of kindergarten age children asking us to give them all a dollar. Stupidly I made the mistake of doing this (because I am, at heart, a sucker), and wound up having three or four of the runty swindlers hanging off of my arms and trying to relieve me of my wallet. These things do not happen in Wanchai.

We shook off the urchins and in a true show of bourgeois extravagance hopped a taxi to Brown’s Wine and Cigar bar in the OCT (Overseas Chinese Town), perhaps the swankest neighborhood in Shenzhen. At Browns Matt and I smoked a couple of Cuban cigars while Emma had a glass of red wine that cost almost as much as our dinner had. The bar was filled with Nuevo rich Shenzhen businessmen blowing the equivalent of a month’s wages for average Chinese urbanites on cognac and prosciutto ham. We spent the night at a Korean Sauna in Futian, where we all got massages and a place to stay for about 170 Yuan per person. In Shenzhen this kind of extravagance is pretty much de rigueur.

Balls and Little Whimsy

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, or so it’s said. Three months away has pretty much made my own swell with newfound affection for Hong Kong. My giddiness began the moment the plane touched down at Chek Lap Kok after an eighteen hour flight from New York. I had a strange urge to throw my thick coat into the trash and walk around shirtless, just because I could have gotten away with it. Going shirtless would have been a bad idea despite the weather, as public transport in Hong Kong is refrigerated year round, as are all public places throughout the city. But quirks of temperature, a source of consternation during the summer months (when stepping between the street enclosed malls and walkways IFC Mall from off the street is like stepping out of a sauna and into a into freezer) were not enough to put a damper on my general feeling of bonhomie for my adopted home city.

I’d left HK three months earlier for an extended trip back to America. A quarter of a year is a long time for a casual vacation, but for a couple of reasons I had no other choice. For one thing, my friends and family are spread out all over the vast and strip-malled plains of America, from Seattle to New York and a few places in between. For another, I was lucky enough to find suitable subletters, a couple from New Mexico who were adopting a child from China. They needed a place to chill, someplace within striking distance of Guangzhou so they could head over and collect their child as soon as the call from the agency came in, but only had a vague three-month idea of when that call might come.

Truth be told, I’d been well on my way to being burnt out on the place before I left. I’d begun to complain a bit too loudly; in one of the last columns for Canned Revolution I penned before leaving, I’d criticized Hong Kongers for not having a sense of humor, suggesting that they might have benefited had Benny Hill been appointed governor for a decade or two before the British pulled up stakes. Of course, I was only joking – mostly. So my long trip indeed did wonders for my appreciation of Hong Kong, as did an extended stay in the city of my birth, NYC.

An acquaintance of mine once joking referred to Hong Kong as “New York without the artists” (Not to go on a tangent here, but my favorite description of New York comes from the mouth of the Family Guy dog Brian, who called it "Prague without the whimsy”.) But the New York City in which I spent the last weeks of 2005 wandering was hardly the same city that I grew up in. New York City has been largely gentrified and sterilized. My friend Gordon put it more bluntly - “The city has been neutered.”

So back in Hong Kong, I find myself looking at the place with new eyes. Clinging tenuously to the underside of an ever-burgeoning Chinese dragon and fighting constantly to maintain a semblance of individual identity, Hong Kong can be excused for lacking whimsy. But nobody can accuse the city of not having balls.