Fresh Air Fiend (37 page)

"In the nineteenth century," Michael Lind wrote in
The National Interest,
"corporations in European lands of settlement would actually import coolie labor from China and India by the thousands to compete with home-country nationals for jobs, driving down wage rates. In the twenty-first century, corporations may take the jobs to the coolies, as it were, rather than bringing the coolies to the jobs. The result is the same—the lowering of developed-country wage costs towards Third World levels—only the rhetoric is new."

This has already happened.

 

What next? is never asked in China, but outside the country the question is on everyone's lips. That the answer is unknowable does not stop people from speculating. I am one of those speculators.

When countries modernize these days they become Americanized and often lose their cultural identity. China is exceptional. The more China develops, the more it seems to be turning back into the old China—just as regional and unequal and busily self-sufficient and hard to read as ancient Chung Guo. As it modernizes, it reveals a greater complexity and a deeper Chineseness. The difference is that while in the past there had been an ethical sense—Confucianism or else patches of Christianity—it seems now completely materialistic, cannier, wiser, even selfish. The provinces of Guangdong and Fujian may have the oily, muddy look of old China, but except for filial piety they have few of China's old reverences, the Confucian virtues of refinement, gentleness, decency, and good order.

And there are the throwbacks that show in something as simple as tipping. In Maoist times it was not done. With the influx of tourists and businessmen in the 1980s some tipping was acceptable. Now a gratuity is expected when a transaction takes place or service is given. There can be an ugly scene when a tip is not offered, and in a new permutation, for many services the tip comes before any act is performed. In a very short time in China tipping has turned into bribery. Or is it bribery? After all, this is the East. Perhaps a tip has become what it has been in this hemisphere for thousands of years: baksheesh. Not a reward, but grease.

The pressure to get things done quickly has bred crime. With bad roads and slow services and backed-up deliveries, grease helps. Many people I spoke to in China, foreign and Chinese alike, said that payoffs were an absolute necessity for a smooth business operation. Their view was that prosperity without crime is almost unthinkable. Obviously, corruption is not new in China, but it has become pervasive, and China's biggest single social problem will continue to be crime. The triads, crime syndicates, and secret societies that flourished in China for centuries, and seemed to be stamped out, have returned—many from Hong Kong and Taiwan, where these ritualistic brotherhoods and protection rackets were reconstituted. The highwaymen and cat burglars are back, too. As recently as seven or eight years ago, you could have confidently sent your eighteen-year-old daughter traipsing all over China alone. No longer. China has become unsafe; I feel it will become even more so. But then, for thousands of years it was a country famous for its perimeters—behind the Great Wall were more walls, walled compounds and fortified cities. These days, look at any new housing development of condominiums, apartments, or single-family dwellings and you will see high perimeter walls.

Outside these walls are the poor, some of them predatory, most of them simply pathetic. The poor subsistence farmers in neglected provinces have never known prosperity in the whole of Chinese history. It is doubtful that life will change for them. In the cities, the struggle will go on, but such extreme class divisions will certainly re-create even more of the old China—more conspicuous wealth and ownership and a deeper oppression, of which the client and his prostitute are one version, the factory owner and his sweatshop another.

No one owned gold in Maoist China—there was none to buy—but before Liberation the Chinese had always been great buyers of gold and jewelry. The habit is back. It is not greed, just another technique of survival, a Chinese way of concentrating wealth. In the past, during periods of famine or war or repression, the Chinese—the most portable of people—picked up a small bundle of their belongings and fled for their safety and well-being. Not all Chinese have gold in their little bundles, but some do. Others pay it in advance to men who smuggle them out of China and into other countries. As recent events have shown, the United States is a prime destination for Chinese illegal aliens. U.S. immigration officials estimate that 100,000 undocumented Chinese arrive each year on our shores, and the number is rising.

With crime and class and immigration linked, it is not hard to envision the future of Chinese tensions. Already China is corrupt and its provinces unequally rewarded. Although the Tibetans are oppressed and occasionally volatile, and there are discontented Muslims in Xinjiang, it is hard to imagine any change in their status. China does not thrive on chaos, because the Chinese are not blame shifters, not confrontational, not litigious. These days the Chinese who are aggrieved or ambitious can travel throughout China in search of work. Many yearn to emigrate, the perennial solution to Chinese misery. This fact, of many millions of people out of sympathy with the destiny of their country and eager to come to America, seems to me to be of overwhelming significance. But if emigration becomes impossible in a climate of economic confusion and rising or thwarted expectations, then I believe there will be real chaos in China. It will be hell for them. It will be hell for the whole world.

H
ERE COMES
the ghost man," someone muttered in the herbalist's waiting room on Sugar Street, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong Island, as I limped in, foot swollen, toe joints inflamed. Piled high with trays containing bark and twigs and leaves, Dr. Gwai's office smelled like a hamster cage. The mutter went around the room, "
Go gor gweilo lay lai.
"

The word
gweilo
is usually translated as "foreign devil." The non-Cantonese speaker thinks of a little red monster with horns and a pitchfork, but no,
gwei
means "ghost" (a
gwei gwu
is a ghost story). The ghost can be malevolent or benign. It is invisible. And now that Hong Kong has begun to seem haunted, and foreigners (especially the British) have become more and more invisible, the word
gweilo
has acquired an aptness and a novelty, and ever more suitably describes the white folk on these last imperial days before the 234 offshore islands (Hong Kong Island is one, some others are mere rocks) and the parts of the mainland known as Kowloon and the New Territories cease to be British Hong Kong and would become (as specified in the 1984 Joint Declaration, the Anglo-Chinese hand-over agreement) the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. After that, the
gweilos
will definitely be ghosts.

"People here have used the word
gweilo
more freely since the signing of the Joint Declaration," a Hong Kong woman told me, as she explained the meaning. "It used to be our secret word for white people, but now it is used in a sort of friendly way."

Like "Chinky-chonk,"
gweilo
is basically affectionate.

The white people (for whom a politer term is
sai-yahn,
"Western persons") number around 124,000. Hong Kong's population is 6.2 million, spread over 413 square miles, nearly all of the people Cantonese-speaking ethnic Chinese. The present paradox is that in almost every case, these people—or their parents or grandparents—came to the colony to escape the political convulsions of the People's Republic, from the late 1940s, just before China's independence, to the subsequent reigns of terror—the Campaign for Religious Reform, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Hundred Flowers Campaign, and others. The Great Leap Forward (1958–62), chronicled by Jasper Becker in
Hungry Ghosts,
produced pure horror: wide-scale famine, murder, even cannibalism. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese at a time rushed to Hong Kong, as they were to do some years later, during and after the Cultural Revolution. Typically, when people flee China they head first for Hong Kong. They are still sneaking over the border: almost every day an illegal immigrant ("eye-eye" in local parlance) is captured in Hong Kong.

This makes the Hand-over on July 1 like an Asian version of an Appointment in Samarra, in which the escaped Chinese find themselves in the wrong place, entangled after all with the very government they had sought to avoid.

Some of these refugees comprised the long line of the walking wounded ahead of me at the herbalist's, and like them, to kill time, I read the papers. We were not the only ailing people. It was mid-February, and the
South China Morning Post
was reporting the deteriorating health of Deng Xiaoping. There were subtle hints that it was serious. The previous day the Chinese authorities did not say Deng was well, which meant he was ill. "No big change" today meant a definite change. Share prices fell with the headline "Leaders Gather Amid Fears for Deng."

No one in the waiting room seemed to care very much that Deng was sick. Hong Kong newspapers are among the freest in the world, distinguished by vigorous political, business, and investigative reporting. But it was the crime stories that riveted the readers in the herbalist's waiting room. Serious crime is low in Hong Kong; the streets are generally safe; there is hardly any graffiti. But when a crime is committed, it is nearly always bizarre.

That morning it was "Worker with Criminal Face." Mak King-man, a harmless computer worker with "a criminal-like face," had run amok after years of persecution by police, who had repeatedly picked him up on suspicion, because of his "sinister looks." He was now being tried for running through a housing block "setting fires to umbrellas." In the previous days I read "Shouting Woman Hacked to Death" (slashed forty times for yelling); "'Voices' Drove Father to Chop Baby Girl"; "Man Rapes Step-Daughter on Toilet"; "Boiling Oil Victim" (angry wife deep-fries husband); "Teenager Had Sex with Sister" ("because they were curious about sex"); and "Toilet Charge" (buggery in a toilet stall in Taikoo Shing).

Dr. Gwai took my pulse, diagnosed
tungfung
(gout), put me on a radical vegetarian diet, and gave me three pounds of mulch in paper bags, which the Ritz-Carlton's room service (dial 3) obligingly boiled up for me, one pound a day. I drank the foul result, a bowl of black, twiggy-tasting water, which looked like essence of mud puddle.

I made more visits to the herbalist, and I felt that in treating my
tung fung
I was engaged in an intense process of Hong Kong acculturation—making friends, reading the papers, chin wagging, and learning things. The herbalist's waiting room was a cross section of Hong Kong society: tycoons and paupers, young and old, traditional and modern, most with cellular phones, lots with pagers and beepers. The new "Society" issue of
Hong Kong Tatler,
listing the billionaires and playboys, lay in Dr. Gwai's stack of magazines. Sample entry: "
Brenda Chau.
With her husband Kai-Bong, Chau is a party lover with a penchant for glitz. She favours bright colours, especially pink, and has a gold mansion..."

At just about the time I recovered my former nimble footwork, Deng Xiaoping died.

"You're lucky!" people said, regarding this act of God as auspicious: I was here to write about Hong Kong, and Deng does me the favor of dropping dead.

A deathwatch was exactly how I had envisaged any visit to Hong Kong in these latter days—"Contemplating the mysteries of death" was how Jan Morris had described her own view in her valedictory book on the place. But no crash followed Deng's demise. There was hardly a murmur in the stock market. Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index, which had been wavering with his illness, jumped 317 points as soon as Deng was confirmed cold, on February 20, and rose another 33 points the next day. "Sell on rumor, buy on news" is a Hang Seng rule. Some flags were flown at half mast, but all Union Jacks stayed at the top of their poles.

In the following days, many Hong Kongers lined up to sign the visitors' book at Xinhua, the New China News Agency, China's unofficial consulate in Hong Kong. At ten
A.M.
on the day of Deng's cremation the cross-harbor Star Ferries blew their whistles and some buses of the China Bus Company fleet were decorated with black bunting. But it was a working day like all days in Hong Kong.

The minute of silence in Hong Kong out of respect for Deng on February 26 was an utter failure in the screeching city of pile drivers and traffic and pop songs and human voices in crowds speaking plonkingly in Cantonese on cellular phones.

Some members of Hong Kong's small but vocal pro-China faction implored Deng's relatives to release a few spoonfuls of the paramount leader's ashes to sprinkle in Hong Kong Harbor. It was Deng's wish to be present for the Hand-over of Hong Kong to China at midnight on June 30 this year, and a portion of his ashes dissolved in the harbor could stand for him in a sort of watery way, as Tincture of Liquefied Leader on a State Visit.

In the event, the plea was ignored, and Deng's ashes were scattered secretly by his family on an unidentified stretch of China's coast.

 

It had seemed to me a matter of urgency that I see the British governor, Christopher Patten, "the last colonial oppressor," as he self-mockingly styles himself. This being tiny Hong Kong, Government House was just a few minutes' ride on a 25-cent tram, Causeway Bay to Central, from the herbalist's fourth-floor walk-up to one of Hong Kong's most venerable buildings, finished in 1855, and dwarfed by the skyscrapers around it.

The gate on Upper Albert Road had been flung open for me. I was greeted by the police and shown to a waiting room. On the wall were rows of portraits, beginning with Captain Charles Elliott, who had annexed Hong Kong but on such poor terms he was recalled and discredited; the rest were all the past governors since 1843, beginning with the first, Pottinger, and on through Bonham, Sir Hercules Robinson, Bowring, Pope Hennessy, DeVoeux, all of them looking like swashbucklers. The later governors looked duller, meaner, more politically sinuous: Young, Grantham, Black, MacLehose, Youde, and Wilson had the smugness of company directors who could be summed up in the pitiless word "suits."