Hong Kong (8 page)

If you find all this difficult to imagine, as you stroll home through a balmy summer evening from some agreeable function, where Mr X, the well-known investment broker, has been so very charming, Mr Y, the property millionaire, has inquired so kindly if he can be of any help to you in your work, and that perfectly delightful trainer from Happy Valley has invited you out on his junk next Sunday, lift your eyes beyond Statue Square to the top floor of the Garden Road multi-storey
car-park. There is sure to be a light burning up there, however protracted your dinner has been, because it is the headquarters of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, a body established in 1974, rather in desperation, to fight squeeze,
cumshaw
and tea money in the colony.

Its powers are immense – it can act without higher authority to inspect any institution, public or private, it can hold suspects without trial indefinitely, and it receives an inexhaustible flow of intelligence about the private lives of everyone, from the Governor down. In 1988 its agents arrested the chairman of the Stock Exchange itself, on suspicion of corruption. Its interrogations are said to be severe, and quite likely some poor devil is being questioned up there at this moment. Brokers and property developers are likely suspects of course, but you would be surprised how many Jockey Club trainers have been invited to the ICAC car-park too.

Many foreigners, especially perhaps Japanese and Americans of a certain age, think of Hong Kong primarily as a place of sexual licence, where a business trip is easily lubricated by adventures on the town, and painted girls in topless bars are always ready to ease the tension after dark.

Indeed it is a louche and lascivious city. Sexual gossip abounds. A judge is observed in a red-light district, a well-known Chinese lady is seen in Macao with an influential administrator. Illicit relationships true or imaginary are staples of conversation, and several thousand people, including Heaven-knows-who, are said to be on a secret police list of homosexuals. It was always so. From the beginning Hong Kong seems to have been more prurient even than most such colonial settlements, partly because of the climate perhaps, partly because European males have always been attracted by nubile Chinese females, partly because the early settlers were often men of vigorous appetite and flexible morals, and partly because the air of Hong Kong somehow seems to suggest that in sex, as in most other things, anything goes.

Even in High Victorian times, it appears, English gentlemen might acceptably flirt with Chinese women, as they certainly might not with Africans or Indians. The London
Graphic
reported with amusement, in 1872, the response of an Englishman disembarking in Hong Kong
when a pretty Chinese girl asked if she could wash his clothes for him: ‘Yes! and me too, if you like, my duck of diamonds!’ Many nineteenth-century Europeans took Chinese mistresses. From their liaisons sprang a Eurasian community which still survives, though nowadays its members tend to think of themselves simply as Chinese, and which has produced some distinguished citizens – notably Sir Robert Ho Tung, said to be Hong Kong’s first millionaire.

Very early in the colony’s history we read of brothels flourishing in the area off Hollywood Road, west of Central, staffed sometimes by Chinese, but often by Europeans and Americans. ‘Clouds and rain’ was the Chinese slang for sexual intercourse, but the English equivalent was ‘honey’. The Beehive Inn, a well-known bordello of the mid nineteenth century, hung out a sign saying:

And when in 1851 an Australian ‘actress’ opened an establishment in Lyndhurst Terrace she advertised it thus in the Press: ‘At Mrs Randall’s – a small quantity of good HONEY in small jars.’ Church-going colonists, leading merchants, senior Government officials, were not ashamed to visit these houses, and visitors were often shown them. Kipling, when he visited Hong Kong in 1888, spent a night inspecting the stews, and wrote about it freely in
From Sea To Sea
. He declared it ‘Life with a Capital Hell’, being especially perturbed by his discovery of Englishwomen among the whores.
⁷
Even in the 1930s the best-known of the contemporary madams, the Russian-born Ethel Morrison, was a familiar figure of Hong Kong society, and when she died there was a memorial service for her at the Anglican Cathedral.

The grander brothels presently moved to the Happy Valley area, the rougher ones further west, so that the area called Kennedy Town entered the naval vocabulary for a generation or two (though Her Majesty’s ships were also served by a peripatetic corps called The Midnight Fairies, who used to climb their hulls at dead of night). Later the red lights shifted again, and for a time made the name of Wanchai,
a hitherto seedy district surrounding Lockhart Road, a soldiers’ and sailors’ synonym for roister:

During the wars in Korea and Vietnam, when Hong Kong became a centre for Rest and Recreation (‘R and R’) for the United States forces, Wanchai was like a wildly liberated Las Vegas. All along Lockhart Road and down the dimmer side-alleys, girls offered their wares at the doors of bars, music pulsed across the sidewalks, soldiers and sailors staggered drunkenly along the pavements, whistled the wolf-whistle which was the contemporary signal of
machismo
, and were skilfully fleeced by bartenders, restaurateurs, madams and whores alike. To this day there are many Americans to whom the name of Hong Kong suggests first of all
The World of Suzie Wong
, Richard Mason’s novel about a golden-hearted Wanchai prostitute in a waterfront hotel: it was made into a famous film,
⁹
and can still bring a nostalgic look into the eyes of veterans far away.

Today Hong Kong’s night-life is concentrated over the water in Kowloon, and a relative peace has fallen upon Wanchai – even Suzie Wong’s hotel, the Luk Kwok, has been reborn as a popular family hostelry. It is the area of Nathan Road that now more often summons the end-of-day businessmen, mostly Japanese nowadays, and the visiting seamen (though there is still no shortage of Midnight Fairies among the sampan people). There the topless bars are the most topless, and the honey is most overtly for sale.

A vast panoply of neon advertisements casts the whole area into a gaudy glow, like a nightmare disco, their huge signs in Chinese and English marching one behind the other far up Nathan Road towards the mountains. Like all advertising displays in Hong Kong they are obliged by law to be motionless, to avoid confusing the navigators of ships and aircraft, and this unwinking stillness of them, their reds and golds and purples staring so gigantically sterile down the street, seems to emphasize the calculated nature of the pleasures to be found below.

Yet heartless and loveless though it may sometimes seem, Hong Kong by and large is a remarkably festive place, and a general sense of having a good time is shared by all races, at all levels of wealth and poverty.

The principal Chinese contribution to the common delights has unquestionably been food. Willing as they are to eat almost anything and to cook it in every conceivable way, the Chinese have made of Hong Kong a permanent gastronomic celebration. There are said to be some 30,000 eating-places, licensed or unlicensed, or one for every 200 citizens. You can eat here in European styles, of course. You can eat elegantly French in the great hotels, predictably Italian among the usual fishing-nets and prints of Vesuvius, all-American with fried chicken-legs in plastic trays, and you may find a fair imitation of the Old English manner at restaurants like Bentley’s, a loyal scion of its London original, or Jimmy’s Kitchen, where the Chinese waiters in their black ties look almost like chop-house retainers.

You can eat much more merrily, though, Chinese – and with infinitely more variety, because immigrants from every part of China pursue their own regional cuisines, delicate or hefty, spiced from Szechuan or sizzling out of Mongolian hotpots. There are Chinese restaurants of subtle discretion, appreciated only by gourmets or valetudinarians, where they cook abalone, snake or shark’s fin in manners all their own, and make sure elderly customers are served only the bear’s left front paw – thought to be the best for rheumatism because it is the one the bear most often licks. There are restaurants which take especial care of foreigners, and restaurants which are more or less clubs, and trendy restaurants that offer a kind of
nouvelle Cantonese
, and famously expensive restaurants where plutocrats like to show off their wealth. For me though nothing can be much more fun than to walk blind into one of the great popular Chinese eating-places, places like carnival railway stations, emporia of eating, palaces of gourmandcy, which flourish in every part of the territory.

We will choose one of the largest, one of the loudest, one of the most brazen, at one of its busiest moments – Saturday lunchtime, say. Its ground plan is confusing, because there are restaurants on several floors, rooms opening one into another, rooms square and rooms circular, with balconies and staircases leading here and there, huge
chandeliers like a gaming-hall, mock junks piled high with victuals. There seem to be a couple of thousand tables, and at them in uproarious enjoyment sits a vast multitude of Chinese, in families running the gamut from infancy to old age. Nobody is alone. Nobody is silent. The noise is deafening, all that talk and laughter mingling with the clanking of plates, the shouts of waiters from one side of the room to the other, the occasional cries of babies, the sizzling of woks and the Chinese music blaring from hidden loudspeakers.

In we go,
extremely
European, all by ourselves, speaking scarcely a word of any Chinese tongue, hardly knowing the difference between a
dim sum
and a Peking Duck, certainly quite impotent to identify the Five Great Grains (wheat, sesame, barley, beans, rice) which offer a proverbial Chinese test of the palate. It is like sitting on the edge of a maelstrom, as we vacantly study the enormous menu (bound in gold and scarlet), offered encouraging nods and explanations perhaps from our neighbours at the next table, and smiling ourselves in a baffled and innocuous way across the Chinese mass. In a dumb daze we order, the waiter speaking no English, and as by a miracle our food arrives, piping hot and indefinable, green wriggly vegetables, sea-things in sauce, wicker baskets of dumplings, haunches of some greasy but delicious bird. In no time at all we are slurping it happily away, all inhibitions lost, as to the Chinese manner born.

Sex apart, such is the one universal Chinese pleasure to which the Europeans of Hong Kong have found their entry, mah-jong still remaining beyond them. On the other hand there is scarcely a European indulgence which has not been avidly adopted by the Chinese. They have been for the most part outdoor indulgences, for here as everywhere the imperial British threw themselves with a hardy enthusiasm into sports and exercises, if only as a prophylactic against sickness.

Even in the 1840s, we read, when Hong Kong was scarcely a town, its British merchants habitually went for two-mile walks before breakfast, to get the system working. Forty years later Kipling found himself dragged on a ten-mile hike in horrible wet weather from one side of the island to the other (‘behind, rose the hills into the mist, the ever-lasting mist …’). Horse-riding was never popular in the precipitous landscapes of Hong Kong Island, but after the New Territories became available the inevitable colonial hunt was founded – the Fanling Hunt, which chased the civet cat and the South China Red Fox across the stony wastelands with full paraphernalia of cap, horn, stirrup-cup and imported English hound.

The British went sailing, of course – they had done that since the days of the Guangzhou factories. They went trekking, climbing and bird-watching in the empty islands. They played golf. They shot snipe and teal on the marshlands of the peninsula. They swam from the bathing-beaches of Hong Kong Island, which they eventually turned into small resorts of vaguely Mediterranean ambience. They played cricket on the cricket pitch between the Supreme Court and the Hong Kong Club. In short they did everything that Britons were expected to do, to keep themselves properly British in foreign parts.

An old tale tells of the Chinese gentleman who, watching a pair of Englishmen sweating away at a game of tennis, inquired why they did not hire coolies to play it for them. Certainly we may imagine Chinese residents observing the early colonists with a bewildered air, as the foreign devils hurled themselves around tracks on ponies, clambered up unnecessary gradients or disturbed the water-spirits by diving in cold wet seas. Presently, though, Chinese were not only gambling on, but actually riding ponies at Happy Valley, and in the end all those imperial pastimes, except possibly cricket and rugby, were to be pursued at least as vigorously by the indigenes. Today there can be no spectacle more redolent of
mens sana in corpore sano
than the sight of a group of young Hong Kong Chinese hiking somewhere in the outlying islands. They go there in their hundreds, every fine weekend, wearing spotless anoraks and neat clean boots, all spick and span, all gleaming, all smiles, all Walkman radios, all
mens sana
, swinging boisterously along the country tracks, waving flags sometimes and singing. They look like figures in a propaganda poster; and though in fact this particular enthusiasm came to Hong Kong out of China proper, and the real inspiration for that hearty gait was probably Mao’s Long March, still one cannot help thinking that the old British colonists, as they set out for their two-mile walk before the morning kedgeree, would have liked to think of it as a legacy of their own.

And talking of two-mile walks, for myself there is still no greater pleasure of Hong Kong than the most familiar of all such promenades: the walk around Victoria Peak, crowning massif of Hong Kong Island. The British Empire was expert at pleasaunces, and a classic example is the circular path around the Peak, through its bowers of jasmine and wild indigo, daphne, rhododendron and shiny wax trees. Part of it is
called Harlech Road, part of it Lugard Road, but it is really hardly more than a bridle-track, and though here and there along it villas lie half hidden in shrubberies, cars are parked discreetly in lay-bys and the little red Suzuki Royal Mail van sometimes trundles by, for the most part it is to this day a secluded country walk of the sub-tropical imperial variety, a languorous ramble on a Sunday afternoon, or better still a marvellous stimulant before breakfast.