9pm, Sunday 12 March 2006
This is the stuff that science fiction was once made of. Eva and I are in a very comfortable sleeper compartment in an express Chinese train speeding from Hong Kong to Shanghai, having eaten pleasantly enough in the dining car, and I’m working on a computer.
The first time I was in China was 1978. I took the train through Hong Kong, past small farms and villages in the New Territories – one of which, Sha Tin, is now a suburban city of almost two million people – to the end of the line at Lo Wu. There we got off the train and humped our luggage across a wooden bridge over the nearly dry Shenzhen Creek, to a small brick border station where we were stamped into the People’s Republic by an unsmiling official who sat under a large poster of Chairman Mao handing something – the reins of power I suppose – to Hua Guofeng.
As we boarded the Chinese train on the other side, we could see farmers toiling in the fields, some of them with oxen, none of them with machines. They were being blasted by squeaky patriotic music and the occasional quotation from the Chairman, from loudspeakers on wooden poles scattered around the countryside. There was a speaker also just above our seats on that train. We could turn it down, but not off. We only took the train as far as Guangzhou (Canton) that time. We later flew to Shanghai.
I’ve been to China many times since, but not again to Shanghai. I feel as though we are heading for what will seem like another planet.
Hong Kong always feels like another planet. But it’s one I’m familiar with.
I was reminded at dinner in the dining car of how primitive the state of mobile phones is in the U.S. A man seated across from us simply picked up his mobile phone, pushed a button to dial a number, and was happily and clearly talking with someone in Europe while our train rumbled through the dark, rural night of China. No doubt it was the same cell phone that he uses in Europe. He simply bought a sim card, slipped it into the slot and was able to call as if he had a local cell phone. In the civilized, high-tech world outside the U.S. and Canada, you simply buy whatever phone you want then you have options to sign up with a specific service or purchase local sim cards wherever you go. Why is it that we can’t do that in the U.S.? Regulation? Quasi-monopolies? What?
The Hong Kong Literary Festival was a lot of fun and had a number of events of interest, even other than my own. It was remarkably well organized, ran efficiently, was very well attended and in every way was very impressive. I’m hoping they’ll invite me back again next year.
The Festival is a great deal more international than similar festivals in the U.S. I listened to and spoke with authors from Ireland, Britain, Australia, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, China, Canada, Mexico, South Africa and I think there might have been a Frenchman or an Italian. Among the continents only Antarctica was unrepresented.
I fear that in previous posts I may have given you the impression that I harbor no fondness for Hong Kong. There are many things that I truly love about the place, the international social life being the best among them. I recall numerous dinner parties at which the 12 people around the lazy Susan in a Chinese restaurant represented anywhere from six to a full-dozen native languages and countries. Something like that is very rare, even in Los Angeles where the inhabitants speak over 150 native tongues and come from every country in the world. Most big U.S. cities actually have a much more diverse population than Hong Kong. Most mid-sized U.S. cities do too for that matter. But, the social milieu is just not the same. I miss that – a lot.
Even so, it is rare to get together with a group like that and discuss literature or art or music or film or politics. The talk is more often than not of business or consumer goods or food itself or other such topics that would not make for a particularly interesting salon. I guess you can’t have everything.
Or perhaps the conversation is often not particulary deep due to the rather massive ingestion of alcohol that is common in nearly every expatriate gathering. I was reminded of this while being interviewed by a writer for the South China Morning Post. One of his comments about my book The Living Room of the Dead was that he realized very quickly that the hero was an American, ‘because he didn’t really drink all that much.’
It’s one of those ‘eye of the beholder’ things. Readers and reviewers in the U.S. have almost all commented with horror and disapproval on how much the hero of the book does drink. My sister-in-law told me that one of the things she found unrealistic about the book was that anyone who drank that much would be incapable of functioning in a normal way and would, if deprived of booze for a day or so, be incapacitated by delirium tremors. All I could say by way of defense was that she quite obviously had not ever worked in a largely British or Australian office in Hong Kong. Perhaps I should put her in touch with the Post’s journalist.
I was also interviewed by one of the daily newspapers in Macau. I’ll see if I can get a PDF posted on my website for those of you who might want to practice your Portuguese. If you just can't wait and want to read the original on the newspapers site, here's a link: http://www.pontofinalmacau.com (You'll have to copy and paste it, sorry.)
Now I’d like to write a little about amahs – housemaids. I was wondering one day why there seemed to be a lot more Indonesian and Nepalese amahs in Hong Kong than in the past when nearly all of them were from the Philippines. The reason for it is shameful and indicative of the extremely ugly, elitist side of life in Hong Kong and its government’s utter lack of regard for protecting the underdog.
Not long after the Asian economic collapse of 1997-98, Hong Kong, for the first time in a while, found itself in recession. Amahs have always been underpaid, but Hong Kong had a minimum wage for them – around US$475 per month – that made them the highest paid in the region. (Besides their salary, amahs are usually given room and board, although a 12 hour day, six day week is considered a light schedule. By law they only have to be given two days off a month, and there are no limits on the hours they work.)
A group of wealthy and upper middle class employers of amahs, worried that their property values and stock portfolios were declining, petitioned the Hong Kong government to lower the minimum wage for amahs. It did, to something around US$340 per month. The government promised that it was temporary, only until the economy rebounded.
There was only so much that the Filipinas – coming from a society that had overthrown its longtime dictator Marcos not all that long ago – were willing to accept. Many of them protested. The government of the Philippines protested. A whole lot of amahs didn’t get their visas renewed and were sent home. They were replaced with more “docile” women from even poorer countries – Indonesia and Nepal.
The economy rebounded quite some time ago. It’s percolating at a very nice clip these days. There is, of course, no talk of reinstating the previous minimum wage, much less raising it. And, now that Hong Kong is part of the People’s Republic, a country ideologically (at least on paper) committed to creating a worker’s paradise, there is even less chance of change for the better than ever.
Perhaps if the amahs were Chinese, Han Chinese that is. In the booming cities of Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing there is an increasing demand for amahs. They’re paid even worse and protected even less than in Hong Kong. But then everything is cheaper in China. The Peoples Republic’s exploited domestics are coming from all the traditional places with young desperate women: the Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal; but also from Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan and the other “ethnic minority regions” of China itself.
And, speaking of the minority regions of China, Eva just got back from five days in Lijiang in Yunnan Province. She highly recommends it. It’s one of the most beautiful and interesting places she’s been. In particular she suggests: the Zen Garden Hotel and Li & Richard Travel Service for local forays to Naxi and Tibetan villages and areas of interest.
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Monday, March 13, 2006
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
Bookstores and a Scary Chart
This is a somewhat short and rambling post. I forgot to include a chart that my friend Dave drew for me while we were tormenting our livers the other night. It is a chart that was drawn for him by an investment banker friend who does business in China. According to the investment banker - who has worked in China for a dozen or more years, everything a business person does there falls into one of two categories: "Greed," the positive factors that motivate you; and "Fear," the negative factors that motivate. Here's how the chart looks (sorry that I couldn't figure out how to format a chart on the blog):
GREED
Money
Women
Power
FEAR
Family *
Bodily Harm
Authority (government / police)
Blackmail
Capricious regulation
* Family makes you vulnerable.
I was once arrested and held overnight in China for wandering into the wrong place with my camera. And I once had to pay bribes to get a vitally important interview. I never had anything much to do with money, women or power there. I don't think I've got the stomach to do business in China.
Hong Kong is a different matter though. It can be a real pleasure to do business here. At least on the low level that I have. Yesterday I was taken around to a couple of bookstores by Claudia, a very nice, well read and interesting woman who works with Pan Macmillan Asia - the distributor of THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD in this part of the world. It was fun seeing my book for sale in shops that I used to frequent when I lived here, even if it wasn't exactly huge stacks of it. Hardbacks are a hard sell here, the distributors are anxious for a paperback to come out. So am I. I was surprised at the price - less than I would have thought. The book sells for $22.95 in the U.S. and for HK$218 (US$28 approximately) here.
There are a number of new and bigger than ever bookshops in Hong Kong, but real estate is just too expensive to allow for any of the big box stores that we have in the U.S. I imagine a Borders or a Barnes and Noble would cause havoc in the book selling marketplace here. There is a huge Borders in Singapore, but that's a roomier place - sort of.
GREED
Money
Women
Power
FEAR
Family *
Bodily Harm
Authority (government / police)
Blackmail
Capricious regulation
* Family makes you vulnerable.
I was once arrested and held overnight in China for wandering into the wrong place with my camera. And I once had to pay bribes to get a vitally important interview. I never had anything much to do with money, women or power there. I don't think I've got the stomach to do business in China.
Hong Kong is a different matter though. It can be a real pleasure to do business here. At least on the low level that I have. Yesterday I was taken around to a couple of bookstores by Claudia, a very nice, well read and interesting woman who works with Pan Macmillan Asia - the distributor of THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD in this part of the world. It was fun seeing my book for sale in shops that I used to frequent when I lived here, even if it wasn't exactly huge stacks of it. Hardbacks are a hard sell here, the distributors are anxious for a paperback to come out. So am I. I was surprised at the price - less than I would have thought. The book sells for $22.95 in the U.S. and for HK$218 (US$28 approximately) here.
There are a number of new and bigger than ever bookshops in Hong Kong, but real estate is just too expensive to allow for any of the big box stores that we have in the U.S. I imagine a Borders or a Barnes and Noble would cause havoc in the book selling marketplace here. There is a huge Borders in Singapore, but that's a roomier place - sort of.
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
Second Impressions of Hong Kong
It’s an exciting place, I’ve got to give it that. In the right mood I enjoy surfing the crowds in Mongkok or Central. In the wrong mood I nearly split my teeth gritting them to endure it. I’ve been in the wrong mood a little more often than the right one since I’ve been here. But I have caught some pretty good human waves on occasion.
There’s a lot of new buildings, built on a lot of newly reclaimed land. You’d think that sooner or later vacancy rates would start rising, but they never seem to. Hong Kong works on the assumption that “if we build it, they will come.” And so far the place has been right about that.
Other than maybe the new Disneyland. I hear it’s not doing so well, at least initially. (Although, yesterday I was nearly trampled by a mob of Mickey Mouse ear-sporting Mainland tourists on a rampage through a super-glitzy new shopping mall.) But then, if what someone is looking for is brand name, pre-packaged faux culture and amusement, it’s awfully hard to compete with Hong Kong itself.
One of the things I didn’t like about living here is that the launch of a new designer wristwatch is (mis)taken for a cultural event. The introduction of a new-style Rolls Royce is the Hong Kong equivalent of one of those blockbuster art museum shows – like the greatest hits of Van Gogh.
Who needs art when the city itself is one giant conceptual work in progress. It’s a strange place. It’s solid. All those buildings and crowds are not figments of anybody’s imagination. But increasingly, Hong Kong is more of an idea than a reality. And to me, it’s beginning to feel dated.
Nothing much is actually manufactured here anymore, it’s too expensive. As a trading hub it’s beginning to decline as Chinese companies can increasingly ship directly to the rest of the world rather than transshipping through Hong Kong. As a financial center? Who cares? Nowadays most financial wheeling and dealing take place on an intangible cyber-plane, it doesn't require a geographic location. Hong Kong always had a bigger reputation than it deserved for finance anyhow. It has certainly never been a center of innovative economics. To the local tycoons, everything really boils down to property deals.
Economically Hong Kong is one huge shopping mall in which nearly everyone sells stuff to everyone else. The guy who runs the Rolex shop sells watches to the guy who runs the Guy Laroche shop next door who sells his clothes to the watch guy. It’s not unlike the Eskimo potlatches I studied in college anthropology class. Everyone brings everything they’ve got to the party and then they trade it to each other. Here they use money to facilitate the exchanges, but it’s pretty much the same thing.
That’s worked great for years. When China and the world required Hong Kong’s services as a port; when the region’s most important stock exchange needed a trading floor; and further back in time when you could still make cheap t-shirts and running shoes in the New Territories; Hong Kong’s economy kept expanding. Tourism pumped more money into the place, especially as China began to open up and Hong Kong was its gateway. But in the world that is rapidly developing, is that sustainable?
My guess is no. In 1992 I wrote a long cover story that nearly got me fired from my job as deputy editor of Asian Business magazine – and was never published. It was an attempt to gaze into the crystal ball and catch a glimpse of China and Hong Kong in the year 2010. In it, I predicted that by then Hong Kong would be just another big city in China, replaced on the world stage by Shanghai. It would certainly not be “Asia’s World City,” as the civic boosters here are currently trying to promote. I still believe that. I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next four years, but I’d bet on it happening by 2020.
For the time being, it’s still a very good place to tie one on. Last night I met an old pal at a new bar in a new shopping mall in Hong Kong’s newest, tallest building – the International Finance Center – which is, of course, built on newly “reclaimed” land that has obstructed the view of the buildings that came before it on then newly reclaimed land that is now quite a ways inland. (What is it with “reclaiming” land anyhow? Newly “created” land is more like it. So far as anyone knows the harbor never was dry.)
The bar is called Red and to get to it you enter through the Pure Fitness Club. At the top of the stairs you can turn left, change into your designer gym clothes and work out. Or you can turn right and pay exorbitant prices for cocktails in a truly beautiful bar with a great outdoor patio space.
I met Dave in the bar. Many overpriced single malt whiskys were downed. I recall having done a lot of that when I lived here. Inebriation seems to be the natural state of many, if not most, expatriates in Asia after work. We had a great time talking and catching up. I heard numerous unrepeatable tales of corruption, crime, greed, sex and violence in the course of Dave’s simply conducting his business in China. It was a good evening. My liver, however, is very pleased that I now live in California.
There’s a lot of new buildings, built on a lot of newly reclaimed land. You’d think that sooner or later vacancy rates would start rising, but they never seem to. Hong Kong works on the assumption that “if we build it, they will come.” And so far the place has been right about that.
Other than maybe the new Disneyland. I hear it’s not doing so well, at least initially. (Although, yesterday I was nearly trampled by a mob of Mickey Mouse ear-sporting Mainland tourists on a rampage through a super-glitzy new shopping mall.) But then, if what someone is looking for is brand name, pre-packaged faux culture and amusement, it’s awfully hard to compete with Hong Kong itself.
One of the things I didn’t like about living here is that the launch of a new designer wristwatch is (mis)taken for a cultural event. The introduction of a new-style Rolls Royce is the Hong Kong equivalent of one of those blockbuster art museum shows – like the greatest hits of Van Gogh.
Who needs art when the city itself is one giant conceptual work in progress. It’s a strange place. It’s solid. All those buildings and crowds are not figments of anybody’s imagination. But increasingly, Hong Kong is more of an idea than a reality. And to me, it’s beginning to feel dated.
Nothing much is actually manufactured here anymore, it’s too expensive. As a trading hub it’s beginning to decline as Chinese companies can increasingly ship directly to the rest of the world rather than transshipping through Hong Kong. As a financial center? Who cares? Nowadays most financial wheeling and dealing take place on an intangible cyber-plane, it doesn't require a geographic location. Hong Kong always had a bigger reputation than it deserved for finance anyhow. It has certainly never been a center of innovative economics. To the local tycoons, everything really boils down to property deals.
Economically Hong Kong is one huge shopping mall in which nearly everyone sells stuff to everyone else. The guy who runs the Rolex shop sells watches to the guy who runs the Guy Laroche shop next door who sells his clothes to the watch guy. It’s not unlike the Eskimo potlatches I studied in college anthropology class. Everyone brings everything they’ve got to the party and then they trade it to each other. Here they use money to facilitate the exchanges, but it’s pretty much the same thing.
That’s worked great for years. When China and the world required Hong Kong’s services as a port; when the region’s most important stock exchange needed a trading floor; and further back in time when you could still make cheap t-shirts and running shoes in the New Territories; Hong Kong’s economy kept expanding. Tourism pumped more money into the place, especially as China began to open up and Hong Kong was its gateway. But in the world that is rapidly developing, is that sustainable?
My guess is no. In 1992 I wrote a long cover story that nearly got me fired from my job as deputy editor of Asian Business magazine – and was never published. It was an attempt to gaze into the crystal ball and catch a glimpse of China and Hong Kong in the year 2010. In it, I predicted that by then Hong Kong would be just another big city in China, replaced on the world stage by Shanghai. It would certainly not be “Asia’s World City,” as the civic boosters here are currently trying to promote. I still believe that. I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next four years, but I’d bet on it happening by 2020.
For the time being, it’s still a very good place to tie one on. Last night I met an old pal at a new bar in a new shopping mall in Hong Kong’s newest, tallest building – the International Finance Center – which is, of course, built on newly “reclaimed” land that has obstructed the view of the buildings that came before it on then newly reclaimed land that is now quite a ways inland. (What is it with “reclaiming” land anyhow? Newly “created” land is more like it. So far as anyone knows the harbor never was dry.)
The bar is called Red and to get to it you enter through the Pure Fitness Club. At the top of the stairs you can turn left, change into your designer gym clothes and work out. Or you can turn right and pay exorbitant prices for cocktails in a truly beautiful bar with a great outdoor patio space.
I met Dave in the bar. Many overpriced single malt whiskys were downed. I recall having done a lot of that when I lived here. Inebriation seems to be the natural state of many, if not most, expatriates in Asia after work. We had a great time talking and catching up. I heard numerous unrepeatable tales of corruption, crime, greed, sex and violence in the course of Dave’s simply conducting his business in China. It was a good evening. My liver, however, is very pleased that I now live in California.
Sunday, March 5, 2006
First impressions after an absence and a communist takeover
Hong Kong & Macau - 06 March 2006
It’s dirtier, a whole lot dirtier. It’s noisier than I recall and I remember it as the noisiest place I’ve ever been. It’s more crowded than ever and it was always the most crowded place I’d ever been. And, strangely, if you think ideologically rather than realistically, it is more nakedly, aggressively, greedily capitalist than ever. The people of Hong Kong, never shy about turning a buck, have ramped it up to yet more awe-inspiring heights than ever. Perhaps they’ve been egged on by the supposed quote from that great Chinese Communist leader, Deng Xiaoping: “To get rich is glorious.”
I lived here for 11 years and left one week after the “handover” back to China in 1997. I was last here in 2000. Then, the place seemed sort of depressed, not so sure of itself or where it was going. In spite of British colonialism it has always been a chinese city, but it didn’t seem quite so sure how it was going to do as a Chinese city. It seems to be doing fine, sort of.
There are a few, not so little, problems.
Before the handover the Chinese government promised; or was it that they implied; or was it simply an outright convenient lie that Hong Kong would have a democratically elected government before too long, maybe even as soon as seven or so years after 1997. That hasn’t happened, nor, to be honest, should anyone in their right mind really have expected it to. But there are plenty of people here who are not happy about that, who feel betrayed. There are plenty of others who seem to have the attitude of: ‘get over it, you’re making money aren’t you?’
The air quality here, while not so bad as the other eight Chinese cities that are among the world’s ten worst, is truly awful. And I know bad air when I breathe it. I grew up in Los Angeles when it had the world’s worst air. A lot of the bad air is blown on the prevailing southerly winds down the Pearl River from the north. There’s a whole lot of filthy factories up there. But Hong Kong’s contributing plenty of its own feculence to the stew. China, and by extension Hong Kong, actually has some of the world’s most advanced environmental regulations. Its auto emission standards are much stricter than the U.S. But enforcement is another matter. I’ve had a sinus headache since I arrived. I’m on a couple of Drixoral and regular fistfuls of aspirin daily and I’m managing it to within bearable parameters – just. Maybe if I lived here again for awhile I’d adjust. Maybe not.
One of the joys of living here when I did was that the territory has some of the world’s greatest transportation infrastructure. It still does. It’s fast, efficient and relatively cheap. But I’m getting the impression it’s verging on overwhelmed. When I lived in Hong Kong the population was around six million. It’s something around eight million now. And the place isn’t any bigger – well, other than all the newly reclaimed land in the shrinking harbor, but that’s all offices. So, traffic is a lot worse than it was. The subway, buses, trams, minibuses and ferries are much more densely packed than I recall.
As for the ferries, the rides are getting shorter. It’s not that the boats are getting faster. Developers are filling up the harbor and building on it and no one seems able to stop them, or even slow them down. They’re building a new Star Ferry pier at about the mid-point of what used to be the ferry’s crossing. When I first visited Hong Kong in 1978, taking the ferry from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui took about 12 to 15 minutes. Yesterday it took five. I won’t be surprised if within another 50 years or so the harbor disappears under new construction. After all, there’re a lot of ways to the container port. Ships can go around the south side of Hong Kong Island, why waste all that potentially valuable real estate?
Okay, so Hong Kong’s sort of nightmarish, in an exciting kind of way. It’s still fun to walk around in the crowds, especially at night when you’re showered with multi-hued neon and assaulted with a bewildering array of sounds and smells – some of which are pleasing and some of which make you want to flee screaming.
In the past, Macau was my quick fix getaway from the frenzy of Hong Kong. It was a rather sleepy Portuguese enclave on the south China coast. It was filled with charming, quiet neighborhoods that were a quirky mix of European and Asian architecture and culture. It was a place for long, wine-soaked lunches and casual strolls through beautiful gardens or old temples. Some of that still exists.
But Macau now takes pride in calling itself, “The Las Vegas of Asia.” Arriving at the ferry pier, practically the first thing you see is a giant fake mountain of what looks like dung. I think it’s supposed to be a volcano and one of these days it will put on an eruption show no doubt. It sits on reclaimed land just in front of a Disneyland-style recreation of part of the Forbidden City, next to Tibet’s Potala Palace and a faux Chinese fishing village. Looming over all of it is the hideous glass and neon façade of the new Sands Hotel and Casino.
The taxi into the city center passes dozens of dull cookie-cutter office and apartment blocks and several more new, garish casinos and hotels. There is a large construction site next to the Lisboa Hotel. Part of the Lisboa’s charm, so to speak, has been its unconscious striving for the title of the world’s ugliest building. The addition going up next door is so remarkably horrible that it can only be deliberate bad taste. There goes the charm.
Eva and I took a taxi out to Coloanne Island. Or at least, what used to be an island. It is now attached to Taipa Island by landfill on which a Venetian Hotel and Casino are being erected. Somehow the southeast corner of Coloanne has been spared and Fernando’s, at Hac Sa Beach, is as peaceful and delicious as ever. In the midst of the lunacy it remains one of the world’s greatest restaurants.
After lunch we did manage to walk around some of the remaining old neighborhoods and through the Lou Lim Iok gardens. Some of all the development money in the city does seem to have a conscience. So far at least, the old neighborhoods in the middle of the peninsula have been largely spared from the wrecking ball. Some of them have even been nicely restored.
Tired from our walk, we decided to go get massages. Now Macau has long been famous for prostitution and it’s not so easy to find a legitimate massage. But in the past they had a good, workable solution at the Lisboa Hotel. There was the Sauna Fuji and the corridors of the shopping area around the coffee shop for men looking for sex; and there was the Lisboa Health Spa, with both men’s and women’s sections, for people who wanted a good, “real” massage in a place that also offered saunas, jacuzzis, steambaths, etc.
I left Eva off at the women’s section and then ran the gauntlet of hookers down the hall to the elevator to the men’s section. I took a shower and a steambath and then went to the sitting area for a juice and to wait for my massage. The first clue that things had changed was when the waitress asked if I wanted a Thai massage or a Shanghai-style massage. Both of those places have traditions of legit massage, so I didn’t think too much of it. Since we’re going to Shanghai after Hong Kong, I opted for that style of massage.
A young woman in jeans and t-shirt came and led me through a maze of hallways to the massage room. It looked just like it always has: a small room with a massage table, a pile of towels, some oils and a box of tissues. The door had a large, lightly smoked glass window in it. I lay down on the table and the masseuse hopped up and started walking on my back. This struck me as a little odd, since they usually work their way up to that, but I figured she had her own technique. She was good at it too. I didn’t worry even once that she was going to leave me a paraplegic.
She wandered around up there for about ten minutes. Then hopped off and I heard her oiling up her hands. Then she squirted a bunch of oil on my ass and thrust a hand up underneath me from behind. Huh? I thought I was getting a legit massage.
She started a hard sell – she didn’t speak any English so there was a lot of mime and demonstration involved – for sex. She spoke enough English to let me know I could fuck her for one thousand Hong Kong dollars – a hundred and twenty-eight U.S. And, she knew how to say – both demonstratively and verbally: “No condom.”
I was tired, jet-lagged, sore from walking around all day. And aghast. I like sex as much as the next guy, probably more than a lot of the next guys, but I wanted a massage, only a massage. Even if I had wanted sex, no condom seemed like a particularly dumb idea. I argued with her for a while. It was clear that she only makes any money if she has sex with customers and she didn’t want to waste her time giving me a massage. I finally talked her into it, but it wasn’t any good. She desultorily rubbed my back for a few minutes and then cut the session short.
I tipped her, about what I would for a massage. She didn’t deserve it. But I felt a little guilty. We entered into the thing with different expectations and I could better afford the disappointment of mine than she could of hers. I complained to the management on the way out though. I told them I liked the old system better than the new one.
Is this all some sort of offbeat metaphor for the differences between the old Macau’s sleepy colonial system and the rapacious new Las Vegas of the East emerging from the fattened wallets of China’s so-called communists? I don’t know. I just don’t know.
It’s dirtier, a whole lot dirtier. It’s noisier than I recall and I remember it as the noisiest place I’ve ever been. It’s more crowded than ever and it was always the most crowded place I’d ever been. And, strangely, if you think ideologically rather than realistically, it is more nakedly, aggressively, greedily capitalist than ever. The people of Hong Kong, never shy about turning a buck, have ramped it up to yet more awe-inspiring heights than ever. Perhaps they’ve been egged on by the supposed quote from that great Chinese Communist leader, Deng Xiaoping: “To get rich is glorious.”
I lived here for 11 years and left one week after the “handover” back to China in 1997. I was last here in 2000. Then, the place seemed sort of depressed, not so sure of itself or where it was going. In spite of British colonialism it has always been a chinese city, but it didn’t seem quite so sure how it was going to do as a Chinese city. It seems to be doing fine, sort of.
There are a few, not so little, problems.
Before the handover the Chinese government promised; or was it that they implied; or was it simply an outright convenient lie that Hong Kong would have a democratically elected government before too long, maybe even as soon as seven or so years after 1997. That hasn’t happened, nor, to be honest, should anyone in their right mind really have expected it to. But there are plenty of people here who are not happy about that, who feel betrayed. There are plenty of others who seem to have the attitude of: ‘get over it, you’re making money aren’t you?’
The air quality here, while not so bad as the other eight Chinese cities that are among the world’s ten worst, is truly awful. And I know bad air when I breathe it. I grew up in Los Angeles when it had the world’s worst air. A lot of the bad air is blown on the prevailing southerly winds down the Pearl River from the north. There’s a whole lot of filthy factories up there. But Hong Kong’s contributing plenty of its own feculence to the stew. China, and by extension Hong Kong, actually has some of the world’s most advanced environmental regulations. Its auto emission standards are much stricter than the U.S. But enforcement is another matter. I’ve had a sinus headache since I arrived. I’m on a couple of Drixoral and regular fistfuls of aspirin daily and I’m managing it to within bearable parameters – just. Maybe if I lived here again for awhile I’d adjust. Maybe not.
One of the joys of living here when I did was that the territory has some of the world’s greatest transportation infrastructure. It still does. It’s fast, efficient and relatively cheap. But I’m getting the impression it’s verging on overwhelmed. When I lived in Hong Kong the population was around six million. It’s something around eight million now. And the place isn’t any bigger – well, other than all the newly reclaimed land in the shrinking harbor, but that’s all offices. So, traffic is a lot worse than it was. The subway, buses, trams, minibuses and ferries are much more densely packed than I recall.
As for the ferries, the rides are getting shorter. It’s not that the boats are getting faster. Developers are filling up the harbor and building on it and no one seems able to stop them, or even slow them down. They’re building a new Star Ferry pier at about the mid-point of what used to be the ferry’s crossing. When I first visited Hong Kong in 1978, taking the ferry from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui took about 12 to 15 minutes. Yesterday it took five. I won’t be surprised if within another 50 years or so the harbor disappears under new construction. After all, there’re a lot of ways to the container port. Ships can go around the south side of Hong Kong Island, why waste all that potentially valuable real estate?
Okay, so Hong Kong’s sort of nightmarish, in an exciting kind of way. It’s still fun to walk around in the crowds, especially at night when you’re showered with multi-hued neon and assaulted with a bewildering array of sounds and smells – some of which are pleasing and some of which make you want to flee screaming.
In the past, Macau was my quick fix getaway from the frenzy of Hong Kong. It was a rather sleepy Portuguese enclave on the south China coast. It was filled with charming, quiet neighborhoods that were a quirky mix of European and Asian architecture and culture. It was a place for long, wine-soaked lunches and casual strolls through beautiful gardens or old temples. Some of that still exists.
But Macau now takes pride in calling itself, “The Las Vegas of Asia.” Arriving at the ferry pier, practically the first thing you see is a giant fake mountain of what looks like dung. I think it’s supposed to be a volcano and one of these days it will put on an eruption show no doubt. It sits on reclaimed land just in front of a Disneyland-style recreation of part of the Forbidden City, next to Tibet’s Potala Palace and a faux Chinese fishing village. Looming over all of it is the hideous glass and neon façade of the new Sands Hotel and Casino.
The taxi into the city center passes dozens of dull cookie-cutter office and apartment blocks and several more new, garish casinos and hotels. There is a large construction site next to the Lisboa Hotel. Part of the Lisboa’s charm, so to speak, has been its unconscious striving for the title of the world’s ugliest building. The addition going up next door is so remarkably horrible that it can only be deliberate bad taste. There goes the charm.
Eva and I took a taxi out to Coloanne Island. Or at least, what used to be an island. It is now attached to Taipa Island by landfill on which a Venetian Hotel and Casino are being erected. Somehow the southeast corner of Coloanne has been spared and Fernando’s, at Hac Sa Beach, is as peaceful and delicious as ever. In the midst of the lunacy it remains one of the world’s greatest restaurants.
After lunch we did manage to walk around some of the remaining old neighborhoods and through the Lou Lim Iok gardens. Some of all the development money in the city does seem to have a conscience. So far at least, the old neighborhoods in the middle of the peninsula have been largely spared from the wrecking ball. Some of them have even been nicely restored.
Tired from our walk, we decided to go get massages. Now Macau has long been famous for prostitution and it’s not so easy to find a legitimate massage. But in the past they had a good, workable solution at the Lisboa Hotel. There was the Sauna Fuji and the corridors of the shopping area around the coffee shop for men looking for sex; and there was the Lisboa Health Spa, with both men’s and women’s sections, for people who wanted a good, “real” massage in a place that also offered saunas, jacuzzis, steambaths, etc.
I left Eva off at the women’s section and then ran the gauntlet of hookers down the hall to the elevator to the men’s section. I took a shower and a steambath and then went to the sitting area for a juice and to wait for my massage. The first clue that things had changed was when the waitress asked if I wanted a Thai massage or a Shanghai-style massage. Both of those places have traditions of legit massage, so I didn’t think too much of it. Since we’re going to Shanghai after Hong Kong, I opted for that style of massage.
A young woman in jeans and t-shirt came and led me through a maze of hallways to the massage room. It looked just like it always has: a small room with a massage table, a pile of towels, some oils and a box of tissues. The door had a large, lightly smoked glass window in it. I lay down on the table and the masseuse hopped up and started walking on my back. This struck me as a little odd, since they usually work their way up to that, but I figured she had her own technique. She was good at it too. I didn’t worry even once that she was going to leave me a paraplegic.
She wandered around up there for about ten minutes. Then hopped off and I heard her oiling up her hands. Then she squirted a bunch of oil on my ass and thrust a hand up underneath me from behind. Huh? I thought I was getting a legit massage.
She started a hard sell – she didn’t speak any English so there was a lot of mime and demonstration involved – for sex. She spoke enough English to let me know I could fuck her for one thousand Hong Kong dollars – a hundred and twenty-eight U.S. And, she knew how to say – both demonstratively and verbally: “No condom.”
I was tired, jet-lagged, sore from walking around all day. And aghast. I like sex as much as the next guy, probably more than a lot of the next guys, but I wanted a massage, only a massage. Even if I had wanted sex, no condom seemed like a particularly dumb idea. I argued with her for a while. It was clear that she only makes any money if she has sex with customers and she didn’t want to waste her time giving me a massage. I finally talked her into it, but it wasn’t any good. She desultorily rubbed my back for a few minutes and then cut the session short.
I tipped her, about what I would for a massage. She didn’t deserve it. But I felt a little guilty. We entered into the thing with different expectations and I could better afford the disappointment of mine than she could of hers. I complained to the management on the way out though. I told them I liked the old system better than the new one.
Is this all some sort of offbeat metaphor for the differences between the old Macau’s sleepy colonial system and the rapacious new Las Vegas of the East emerging from the fattened wallets of China’s so-called communists? I don’t know. I just don’t know.
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