by Pico Iyer
On TV, one channel was showing a live image of the lobby, and another some still life of an apartment building. O. J. Simpson was on one channel, and on another the London Monarchs were playing (American) football against the Rhein Fire. Somewhere a woman was talking of rape.
I called up a Chinese friend whom I’d first met in Nepal (where he’d been working on an Anglo-Italian film about the Buddha), and his Japanese-American wife picked up.
“What time is it in California?” she asked me sweetly.
“Four p.m.,” I said, looking out at the early light.
Already, behind the TV screen, workers were moving poured concrete on the forested hillside to erect the future.
• • •
Basil suggested we meet at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, on Lower Albert Road, in the heart of the area still known (on the maps) as Victoria, and when I opened the heavy institutional doors, it was to walk into my school again, decorated in the local style known as “Anglo-something.” The notices on the board offered club ties and cuff links and umbrellas; the crested letter paper reminded members to place their orders soon for mince tarts with rum butter and sliced smoked Scottish salmon: this part of Hong Kong belonged to Graham Greene’s Abroad.
All around the slightly dusty dining room, wooden boards listed the names of club officers through the ages much as, at the Dragon School in Oxford, they’d listed the winners of prized scholarships to public school.
But the characters living and working within this museum case belonged, more and more, to the Empire that had made all this redundant. Basil, coming in stylishly from the ferry—having dropped his daughter off at school—and ordering breakfast for us in Cantonese, was just off the road after spending most of the year past traveling around the world with a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus; he was now about to spend a few months photographing hotels around Asia. His wife, an expert at finding Philippine settings for Hollywood movies set in Vietnam, had just found a Bhutanese boy in Hong Kong to act as the Dalai Lama in one of the latest international productions. Thinking of his daughter’s schooling, as his Chinese compatriots moved in on Hong Kong, Basil was wondering whether to move his clan to Singapore, to Seattle, to San José in Costa Rica.
We had much in common, if only because we’d both grown up with a sense of half-belonging everywhere (Basil had been cast around the world by his exile family); we spoke of our faraway English schools—and the (Kenyan) schoolfriend Basil had met by chance in the Rangoon market—as if one of us was not Chinese, and the other was not Indian. Occasionally, worn Chinese waiters in stained white jackets—identified by their name tags as Carson or Edmond—dropped off on our table plates of baked beans and fat sausages, or triangles of toast. Scholarly old women and pink-faced colonial types resettled themselves with their faded copies of The Times in thick leather armchairs.
“Hong Kong,” I said, “must have been a lot more English when you were a boy.”
“A lot more Chinese, too,” said Basil.
After finishing breakfast, I made my way down the steep sidewalk, past the New World Centre, to Queen’s Road Central, walking up tall flights of stairs, through passenger bridges, in and out of a never-ending web of walkways, across access buildings, up ramps, past a whirl of foreign faces until, quite without meaning to, I found myself in the Worldwide Building, which stands at the heart of Central, between Alexandria House and the Prince’s Building.
Inside was as poignant a network of little shops as ever I have seen, and, shaken out of my imperial daydreams, I was brought up against the force of a much more urgent form of wistfulness. The Worldwide Building is a virtual monument to the fact that a world with a hundred kinds of home will accommodate a thousand kinds of homesickness. Its shops—stalls, really—were brightly emblazoned with names like Filipino Shop and Worldwide Filipino Club and Little Quiapo and Romance Boutique, and on every side were young women from the Philippines, most of them in tight jeans, with gold crosses above their Hard Rock Café and Planet Hollywood T-shirts, at home in this Little Manila. The signs on the storefronts told them when they could catch a Filipino star on ATV-World, or how to “Apply for Peso Loan” or convey Tele-Money to their children back home. Posters of the beaches of the Philippines were hung up in the windows, and smiling Filipinos invited you to BRING A FRIEND TO THE PHILIPPINES; stores were stacked with “Legal Love Romances” and offers of “Christian Song Love Song Karaoke,” and they were called Your Shoppe and Fanny and Friendly Remittance Company.
I felt drawn into this world for all the ways it contradicted everything around it—a Trojan horse, it seemed, of romance and sentiment and devotion; of escape, really—and all the ways it grounded what my time in Pacific Place suggested: the lucky go around the world to find the props of home available round the clock; the less lucky stand at the service entrance staring through the railings for any piece of home common to Makati and Manhattan.
In some of the shops were piled precarious towers of jars, containing Phil brand purple yam jam and sweet jackfruit and sugarplum; in some, there were greeting cards offering “Christ Is Born Today” and letter-writing paper with “Remember to Pray” on every sheet. There were signs offering DOOR TO DOOR REMITTANCES TO CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY, and others listing all the ships sailing to Manila; with a few adjustments, I could have been in a Vietnamese shopping mall a friend from Da Nang had introduced me to once in Melbourne, or any of a hundred minimonuments to Iranian/Guatemalan/Korean plaintiveness in LA.
The girls were everywhere, no taller than my shoulder, mostly, holding hands, staring at Panasonic radios or National blenders in the windows, counting out coins to get “Talk-Talk” cards to call back home. At one of the remittance centers, the line was eleven deep—as if outside a U.S. embassy—and young women were chatting about four-year-old tyrants who dragged them into Kentucky Fried Chicken, and children a thousand miles away. The windows of the cashiers’ kiosks were plastered over with handwritten messages on scraps of notebook paper: BECAUSE FULL NO MONKEY BUSINESS AROUND OUR SHOP OR NO BUYING-SELLING OF PESO. A Lebanese trader in the next booth had pinned up signs that said WANTED URGENT: 3 HOUR PER DAY. GOOD LOOKING. BELOW 25 YEAR and WANTED GOOD-LOOKING POLITE HONEST.
• • •
The Filipinos who live and work in Hong Kong—130,000 of them in all, most of them rented mothers and vicarious housewives—tend to get lost in all the official equations involving Empire and Emporia; “domestic outsourcers,” as the chilling euphemism has it, they tend to fall between many of the publicized categories in a city that conjugates all the ways one does not belong, as expat or exile or refugee or stateless person. They’ve come here by choice, after all, to support the families they’ve been forced to leave at home, and, like Filipino nannies and nurses and go-go dancers everywhere, they belong to a kind of unofficial economy, which provides the human services that the official world likes to delegate. I’d seen Filipinos running most of the stores and security checks at San Francisco Airport and spinning the roulette wheels in Reno; in Osaka’s airport, I was used to seeing Filipinas from the local bars perfectly imitating the inflections of fourteen-year-old Japanese girls as they giggled their good-byes to the gangsters who kept them, and boarded planes with stuffed animals in their arms. In Hong Kong, gathering around the fifty-story glass towers, they could seem the most visible and voluble inhabitants of Central, stuck in the throat of the global metropolis like a piece of the global village.
The next day in the paper I read an article headlined DEATH-LEAP MAID COMPLAINED OF SHOUTING, and describing how a local professor had slept through the night while her Filipina maid, on only her fifth day in the city, had thrown herself out of a twelfth-floor window (“Police found a pair of scissors and a chopper lying on the maid’s bed”). The professor told investigators that her worker seemed happy, and protested, “I had no time to shout at her as I was always away till nine o’clock.” Another incident to get filed next to the numberless cases of Filipina maids attacking their e
mployers and molesters in Singapore and Arabia, where local values were not always made for pious Catholic girls from Asia.
Here in the Worldwide Building, though, the women were smiling, mostly, as they snapped up copies of the souvenir Filipinos in Hong Kong yearbook, and sparkled back at Instamatic cameras as they flashed. You could almost hear them preparing stories for the sweethearts back home, or anxious parents, about the city where there were more Rolls-Royces per capita than anywhere else in the world, and where even a spot in the local cemetery could cost eighty thousand dollars. Study Bibles, wedding dresses, cream for removing stretch marks; a sign near Best Friends Jewelry saying NO PRETENDING FRIEND.
I suppose one reason I had been drawn here was the same reason that had pulled the Filipinos: namely, that it was the rare city that had been built up almost entirely by people from abroad, and so had become a kind of Platonic Everyplace, the city-state as transit lounge: for foreign businesspeople at least, Hong Kong felt like a hyperconvenient luxury hotel, a shopping mall–cum–conference center–cum–world trade center where there were no taxes, few real laws, and no government other than the freest of markets. English was spoken, even minor credit cards were accepted and, just around the corner from me, there were three 7-Elevens and a Circle K, open at 4:00 a.m. Entering Hong Kong could feel a little like going on-screen, into a world buzzing with options and graphics, itself a kind of rough diagram of the digital city of the future.
The place meant something very different for the Chinese who swarmed through its back streets and outlying villages, of course, but for outsiders at least, the perpetual colony remained a curious artifact: less a capital of empire, increasingly, than an empire of capital, which, with a survivor’s versatility, had managed to change identities to fit the shifting of history’s tides. In the nineteenth century, the “little England in the eastern seas,” as the future King George V called it, had been the definitive Victorian outpost, facilitating the narcotics trade of Empire, and in the twentieth century it had turned into a Cold War listening post, at the heart of the American Century (and briefly occupied by the Japanese). In recent years, it had come to look like the next (postnational) century, a city without citizens in a world where ideology was obsolete and economics trumped all. The central question raised by the handover to China was whether this hybrid nest of Global Souls could pull the Middle Kingdom into the twenty-first century before the Celestial Empire pulled it back into the nineteenth.
And unlike most places, which grow organically into themselves and settle into their grooves as a person does, Hong Kong had based its identity on everything it wasn’t. For generations of British FILTH (“Failed in London, Try Hong Kong”), it had simply been an alternative marketplace where black-sheep sons could find the opportunities unavailable to them at home (not least in the company of pretty Filipinas); for the Chinese who’d poured in after the ascent of Mao, making it by some counts the fastest-rising city in history, it was a perfect counter-China, as free of politics as the Mainland was drowned in it. For the Filipinos who came here, it represented a job market unimaginable at home—especially with so many foreigners around, in need of domestic help—and for the more than 200,000 Vietnamese who had fled here on boats, it was simply—irresistibly—not Vietnam.
And what was the result of all this willy-nilly multiculturalism? Pure mishmash, till I felt, sometimes, as if I were in a city whose local tongue was Esperanto (or “fusion culture,” as Concierge, the magazine of the Hong Kong Hotels Association, more optimistically put it). Wasabi Mousse Caviar and Crème Brûlée flavored with lychee and pomegranate and mango; Matins in Mandarin at St. John’s Cathedral, and Holy Eucharist in Pilipino; “HK/British system when addresses given in English script,” as my map carefully informed me (distinguishing between ground floors and first floors), “American/Japanese and also the Chinese system when address in Chinese characters.” Hong Kong was the portmanteau city par excellence, identified by people called Freedom Leung and Philemon Choi and Sir Run Run Shaw—the perfect site for “market-Leninism” and all the other improvised hyphens of the age.
The latest artifact of Hong Kong, the superfashionable new movie Chungking Express, came at one much as the city did, in Mandarin and Cantonese and Urdu and Japanese and English all at once, giving one the jostling, indecipherable sensation of being on any of its mingled streets, and serenading one with a synthetic blast of “masala music,” Canto pop and “California Dreamin’.” Named for one of the city’s most infamous hotels for transients, it played out its quick-change scenes in all the classic Hong Kong locations—the convenience store, the fast-food stall, the check-in area: cities click by on departure-boards, Indians surrender their passports for cash, and the camera whirls back again and again to CD player and Coke machine, boarding pass and tiny toy plane. The three main female characters are a Chinese woman in a blond wig, a girl who works at a late-night junk-food outlet (that calls itself Midnight Express), and a Cathay Pacific stewardess who likes to make love to the sound of a safety announcement.
Now, as I walked behind the New World Centre—New Worlds were everywhere in Hong Kong—I saw a Chinese man kissing his short-skirted love, eyes wide open as his briefcase banged against her back. A group of Sikhs was seated in a circle on the ground, enjoying a picnic amidst the debris of McDonald’s containers and old beer bottles. An African was lying flat out on the pavement, his Chinese girlfriend brushing him tenderly with her hair.
Not far away, in one of the many new blue-and-gray high-fashion movies shooting in the colony, Vivian Wu was playing a Japanese girl who gets her British boyfriend to write on her back in French, English, Japanese, and, finally, Yiddish. The Italy France Japan Fashion Square was open till 2:00 a.m. around the corner and the Harbour City mall invited one to “Go around the world in one day” by sampling its six hundred shops. Everywhere, I felt, a crush of multicultural props offering one goodies that answered every need except for the ancient, ancestral ones that convenience and speed could not wish away.
When I arrived back in my friends’ apartment, my hostess (herself long a stateless soul of the more ancestral kind—when her family had been displaced, for the second time in forty years, by the Iranian Revolution, she found herself alone in London, thirteen years old, with nothing to protect her but some papers that said, not very ringingly, “Travel Documents: Citizen of the World”) was nowhere to be seen. When at last she returned, quite late, from the office, we turned on the TV to see when Richard would be back (Kai Tak arrivals were shown on Channel 6). That didn’t help, though, because neither of us knew which country he’d be coming from.
When at last he did come in, off the plane from Tokyo, he was hungry and tired, and the number of places where we could eat was diminishing quickly. “Anywhere,” he sighed, “so long as it’s not a hotel.” Hotels, though, were the most convenient option—so close and yet not closed—and so, sometime after 11:00 p.m., we found ourselves in the sixty-one-story tower block next door.
“How are things in the office?” Richard asked his wife.
“Everyone’s getting frazzled,” she said. “Having to work till six o’clock every morning.”
“Oh well,” said my friend, always a kindhearted manager. “I’ll go in and tell them to go home.”
It was long after midnight then—8:00 a.m. for me; who knows what time for him?—but Richard got up before dessert was served and went to tell his workers to stop working.
The next morning, when I followed him to his home from home, I found, as he had warned me, that he really did have no office other than his head; his only workspace, as the Asian head of a booming American company, was a tiny desk jammed against a window, with a map of Tokyo posted to his wall and a laptop somewhere under a pile of faxes from Coca-Cola Vietnam (transmitted, I couldn’t help but notice, by AT&T Easy Link Services Australia, Ltd.).
I also couldn’t help but notice, as an unbeliever, that most of the messages he received seemed to have to do with the difficulty o
f receiving messages—the state-of-the-art communications facilities seemed to be adept at communicating communications mishaps. “Resend” reverberated around the office, and “abort.” “Your call is being diverted,” said his phone; “Your call is being transferred.”
“Can you print out my itinerary?” Richard called out to a secretary, and when it came juddering out, I counted 139 border crossings in the previous year alone.
“I don’t know how you keep up with all this.”
“Nor do I,” he said cheerfully. “Last week I went to the airport to fly around the world, and simply changed my mind and came back home instead.”
“Sharon must have been surprised.”
“She was shocked.”
Richard had had to petition for special dispensation from the Foreign Office, he told me, to carry two passports simultaneously—he went through their pages so quickly; his money was deposited in some offshore account in Jersey, and he paid taxes everywhere and nowhere.
“You can call me in Hong Kong,” he said, showing me his Global Access number, and speed-dialing his secretary to fix up a breakfast appointment with his wife, “and get me in eighteen different countries.” When he got onto his dollar account in Hong Kong, though, and the thirteen countries where he’d be in the next thirteen days, I began to feel a little seasick.
To anyone who hadn’t known him for thirty years, I thought, to anyone who hadn’t seen him with his family, or read his warm and funny letters, Richard could seem like a creature out of science fiction; yet I kept thinking of the two portraits in his mother’s house of ancestors who’d served as governor-generals in India. On the other side, his grandfather had been Dean of Durham Cathedral, and his father a knighted civil servant who’d devoted all his extraordinary talents to Queen and country. Here, again, the same pattern as in the city all around us—service to the Church of England, and then Her Majesty’s Treasury, turning into a roaming job for an American consultancy whose international clients just happened to be everywhere (“ex-patriots,” as the Freudian misspelling had it).
