Leaving Hong Kong

March 26, 1994

The lines were interminable at the Hong Kong airport this morning, but everyone was quiet and the passengers were orderly. This is in stark contrast to the disorganized crowds I typically see in the Buenos Aires airport or the howling mobs in the Cairo airport. But even though they're quiet, the Hong Kong passengers seem just as determined to get out. Indeed, they're referred to by the local citizens as "astronauts," for many of them shuttle back and forth between Hong Kong and Vancouver, or Hong Kong and Sydney. Back and forth they go, sometimes as frequently as bi-monthly, leaving their families in a safe haven overseas while they return to do more business, make another dollar, close another deal ... while watching the clock all the while, waiting for 1997 to arrive. Every plane leaving Hong Kong is full; it doesn't matter where it's going -- every seat is occupied. My family and I were lucky to get four contiguous seats on the flight to Tokyo, where I'm now sitting in the midst of a six-hour layover before our connecting flight leaves for Honloulu.

I first visited Hong Kong in 1976, and have been here another half-dozen times since then; my wifei has been here only once, in 1980. It's one of those places we've described to the children endlessly, to the point where many of the stories have become apocryphal -- lurid tales of the sampans and junks in the harbor; the streets crowded wtih teeming hordes of people who are all shorter than my tiny wife; the markets filled with strange herbs and spices and hundred-year old eggs; the scenic tram ride up to the top of Victoria peak, where a picturesque restaurant serves Chinese dim-sum, complete with chicken's feet that are actually edible. I'm sure the children can recite most of it from memory, but we thought we should show it to them before it all disappears when the new masters in Beijing take over a few years from now.

Alas, it has all changed. We should have known it would be so, for we've had the same experience when taking the boys to see Ayer's Rock in the middle of Australia last year, after having visited it ourselves in 1973. What had been an isolated monolith in the middle of the country, visited by only two or three tourists, was now surrounded by dozens of Japanese tour buses and new luxury hotels whose blond-haired Australian bellhops spoke fluent Japanese for the benefit of their guests.

As for Hong Kong: well, nothing seems to last long in this city. During my week of business work prior to the arrival of my wife and children, I was told that the average building in Hong Kong only lasts for 12 years. After that, even if it's in perfect working order, it's almost certain to be torn down, replaced with a newer, taller, more expensive building. The people who organized my computer seminars told me that a 3,000 square-foot apartment in an upper-middle-class section of town (but definitely not the most prestigious area) sells today for approximately $4 million. Our apartment in Manhattan is 3,800 square feet and cost only a small fraction of that price ...

We took the boys to a vast shopping arcade by the Star Ferry, where everyone rides back and forth between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island; when my wife was last here in 1980, it was filled with small shops selling watches, radios, brand-new Sony Walkmans (which had just arrived the year before from Japan), and various other cheap forms of electronic junk. No longer: when we went back last week, all the shops were gone, and expensive fashion salons had taken their place. Giorgio Armani, Cartier, etc, etc -- it's a whole new world.

The Star Ferry hasn't changed, thank goodness, but just about everything else on Hong Kong island has. We ventured across to the other side of the island, to the small village of Aberdeen, which used to be a home for thousands upon thousands of floating sampans and junks with those odd triangular sails. There are still a few, but most of them have disappeared somewhere else. Back on Kowloon side, we went down to Typhoon Harbor, where there's supposed to be another floating village of sampans. All gone: the harbor area has been filled and reclassified as "reclaimed land," and dozens of low-income apartment buildings have sprouted out.

The tram ride up to the top of the peak was okay, and the view from the top was pretty impressive -- but the small, picturesque restaurant had been demolished; in its place is a tourist souvenir shop, a Haagen Dasz ice-cream shop and a fast-food restaurant that sells lasagna and American hambugers. So much for local culture. Even the foray to the shopping area on Market Street turned out to be a disappointment. Most of the stalls and shops were gone. The few that we found did indeed have some strange fruits and vegetables to observe, but they were mixed in with crates of Sunkist oranges from California, apples from Washington state, and various other signs of the global marketplace.

Despite all this, the harbor of Hong Kong is as impressive as ever. The sheer mass of humanity is as overwhelming as ever. And the pervasive buzz of capitalism is as frenetic as ever. Everything here has a price -- everything! Even the toll-free call to reach USA Direct, in order to make a call back to the U.S., has a price: 20 Hong Kong dollars, or some $2.50 in our currency -- and that's just to make the connection between the phone in your hotel room and the AT&T switch in Hong Kong.

Was it worth it? Yeah, I think so -- but probably for reasons that we won't be able to identify for a few more years. On the surface, the kids were pretty bored with it all; after all, to them it wasn't much different than Manhattan, and none of the exotic sights we had promised were still there to be observed. Well, actually, there was one: the fresh meat market just a few blocks away from the ferry. It's a 3-story open-air building where you can wander through and pick your choice of chickens, ducks, beef, fish, etc. -- all of which are in the process of being killed, plucked, gutted, cleaned, skinned, sliced, and prepared right in front of you. It's pretty overwhelming, though it was even more so when my wife and I last saw it in August of 1980 -- on that visit, the temperature and the humidity were both about 98 degrees, and the smell and the chicken feathers wafting through the air were almost more than we could handle.

So the kids will probably remember the meat market, and they'll certainly remember the harbor. And I assume that various other visual images, sounds, smells, and nuances of the city will have made an impression. For all I know, they too will have aprocryphal stories that they'll pass on to their children, years from now, about "the way Hong Kong used to be." I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if they remember the ubiquitous presence of cellular phones in Hong Kong: everyone seems to be walking around clutching his or her phone, chattering away in Cantonese to someone on the other end. (Obviously, cellular phones exist in the U.S., but if you walk down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, you would probably see only one person in a hundred talking on his phone; in Hong Kong, the ratio seems to be closer to one person in ten.)

For my wife and me, though, one thing we've learned from this trip is that many of the tourist experiences that made such an impression on us in the 1960s and 1970s are gone forever. Much of Europe has changed irrevocably, as has Asia and South America and the rest of the world. The quiet villages are gone, the local customs have been homogenized, and the result is that cities all over the world tend to look more and more like Cleveland. Or Dallas. Or Phoenix. They all have MacDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken; they all have CNN and MTV; they all have the latest fashions and the latest movies. So if you see something that's unique and memorable, better get a picture of it. Write it down and memorize it, for it will be gone ten years from now, converted into a shopping mall -- or in the words of the old Joni Mitchell song, turned into a parking lot.