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.