Fresh Air Fiend (41 page)

 

The next person on my list was the party man, not so much a capitalist roader as a consummate opportunist. As hardly-middle-aged Richard Hoare was ending his career, David Chu Yulin was beginning to soar.

"You are talking with the most colorful and physical person in Hong Kong," he told me on the forty-ninth floor of Exchange Square Tower Two, all of Kowloon spread out before us across the harbor. "I do amazing things." One of the things this Shanghai-born, naturalized American citizen had done was flamboyantly renounce his U.S. nationality, and he placed his discarded and voided American passport in a time capsule that was publicly buried.

He had driven to see me on his motorcycle, he told me. He owned three Harleys and had just ordered a Honda Blackbird 1100, which could do 180 miles an hour. It was very expensive. Mr. Chu was very rich. He had paraglided from Hong Kong to the Great Wall of China. He held three paragliding records. He was a spelunker, but his exploits took him beyond mere spelunking to cave diving. He made a solo descent in Silver Fox Cave in Fung San, down 650 feet, then into the water and down another 70. He almost died. "I was trapped! The ultimate challenge! Stuck in a conical hole! Under water!"

"Sounds like a nightmare, Mr. Chu."

"Nightmare!" Then he smiled. "Fortunately I have a tendency to go around in circles. I have an uneven kick—that is my normal swimming tendency. I go in widening circles, and that is how I saved myself."

On another occasion, in the Wu Yu Mountains Chu had gone down a river of rapids, alone, wearing a helmet, a wet suit, and a snorkel, flippers, and mask. Just tumbled from top to bottom, a vertical drop of sixty-five hundred feet. It had taken eight hours. He had been bruised but otherwise unscathed, and it was worth it: "I was the first man in the history of China to do it. My picture was in magazines!"

He was a marksman. He had a custom-made .45, made in Texas. He had shot grizzly bears, elk, mule deer, a red stag in Scotland, a moose.

"But a moose is a lovely, trusting thing as big as a house," I said. "Why is that such a trophy?"

"A moose is hard to find!" Chu said, and continued to tell me of his exploits. Now he was in Montana, then riding with the Harley Club down Nathan Road in Kowloon, and then up the Zambezi.

The Hand-over was his opportunity for political advancement. In the time I spent in Hong Kong, I was to meet many people who cursed the British and hailed the coming of the Chinese, but none wagged their tails so briskly as David Chu. Except for his cowboy boots, to which he called my attention, he did not look like Action Man. He was pudgy and pale and middle-aged, an unlikely member of the Hong Kong Harley Club.

I would have thought that Sweetwater Avenue in Bedford, Massachusetts, in the 1950s could aptly be described as the wrong place and the wrong time for a Chinese boy from Shanghai. That was David Chu's neighborhood after his parents emigrated. But David was ambitious. He went to Cambridge Latin High School, graduated in 1960, went on to Northeastern University, got a job, and then his company sent him to Hong Kong in 1977. He had stayed and prospered. He had been elected a member of the Legislative Council, and later selected by the Chinese to be a member of the Preparatory Committee. He had been chosen to be a member of the Provisional Legislature, the parliament that China had contrived to enact legislation after June 30.

He was said to be one of the most pro-China legislators. I tested him by asking about the recent death of Deng Xiaoping.

Chu gave me the Deng-inspired eulogy he had written. The three-page piece compared the departed Chinese leader to Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Peter the Great, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Zhou Enlai.

I asked him whether he had any anxieties about the Hand-over.

"The Hand-over of Hong Kong is the beginning of the new China and the renaissance of Chinese civilization."

What about the subversion clause and press freedom?

"Our freedom is appropriate to our culture and current stage of development."

What about Chris Patten's attempt at reforms?

"Ha! It's easy to be a nice guy when you're leaving—when you're giving away the future."

Surely, I said, people in Hong Kong came here to get away from the Chinese.

"Yes, but things have changed, and in reality now China is not Communist. It is modified socialism."

I wondered whether he had any feelings about the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

"Demonstrations have a special meaning in China," he said. "China is having a difficult time controlling minority groups. And we don't want the U.S. rocking the boat. Current U.S. policy is wrong. U.S. interference put Wang Dan in jail. They promoted him to a hero."

What about the right of assembly?

"The average education in China is low. A man can wave a banner and start trouble."

Just one man is no more than a pest, surely?

"The pest is a threat to stability. Listen, I can start a riot in China very easily. If the government didn't stop me, I could take over China."

It was interesting to talk to a hack who, having no hesitation in speaking his mind, perhaps said more than he meant to. It had seemed to me one of the oddest aspects of the Hand-over that, despite the slogan of "One country, two systems," a Chinese political structure and ethic was being imposed. For one thing, Chu himself was in a legislature that had not been freely elected.

"I was elected by a four-hundred-man committee."

But the committee was hand picked by the Chinese And they had said nothing was going to change for fifty years.

"'No change for fifty years' means capitalism—not law, not government, not politics." And the marksman, biker, diver, paraglider, spelunker, and traveler smiled and added, "They are evolving."

Almost everything he said was a crock And I had been warned "David Chu is a stuntsman," a pro-democracy activist told me, and said that I should not take him seriously. But really, he seemed to be just the sort of person the Chinese would need in Hong Kong if they were to get their way. He was loony and self-promoting, of course, but he also seemed to me as perhaps he seemed to himself: a Hong Kong man of the future. Still, there were annoyances, outside his control, and no sign that they would go away. Chu complained to me that he had applied to join the prestigious Hong Kong Club, and after seven years he had yet to be admitted. I told him that he should consider himself lucky to be able to apply—women could not join, women could not eat in the main dining room, indeed they could only show their faces in selected rooms. He took no comfort from this.

"Hong Kong is very Orwellian at the moment," an American said to me, and when I spoke to politicians and diplomats this struck a chord. "People here are conscious that what they say is scrutinized by the Chinese."

That was undoubtedly true, but an interview, far from being a conversation, is often a monologue and is often self-serving. Interviewing was not to my taste. Anyway, apart from my sitting at the size-14 feet of the king of Tonga in his wooden palace in Nukualofa, when in travel had I ever interviewed anyone? The way to the truth was the humbler route of anonymity, faceless me striking up conversations with strangers. Everyday Hong Kongers were worried, they giggled with apprehension, thinking out loud in a most un-Chinese way.

The people I spoke to in an interviewing manner could become animated and bare their souls, but after a spell of high spirits they would become self-conscious and say, "Don't use my name." One of the straightest talkers I met in Hong Kong was a reporter for a Cantonese-language newspaper. Seeing him meant traveling to the far end of a mass-transit line, past new middle-class apartment blocks (handsome and roomy by Hong Kong standards), to his office at the paper. He was young, hardly in his mid-thirties—though with the Chinese, you could easily err by fifteen years. He was small and attentive and unusually frank.

"If I said I had no anxiety about the future, I would be lying. But, for example, I felt no pressure covering the Deng death story, and we mentioned Tiananmen Square. The press in China would never touch that."

I asked my customary question about press freedom being guaranteed under the Basic Law.

"The Chinese constitution guarantees the same things—freedom of press, freedom of assembly, all those things. Promises on paper are one thing, practice is another."

At this point he urged me not to use his name, but that was all right: many other people in Hong Kong had requested the same thing.

Then he said, "You know, newspapers here have had problems with the British, too."

It was hypocritical for the British to be warning people of the erosion of press freedom, he said, when in fact the Hong Kong government had prosecuted local journalists. He was not trying to ingratiate himself with the Chinese; he was merely trying to be fair. He told me of a case in which the Hong Kong newspaper
Ming Pao
had published a detailed story about a scam at a real estate auction. Hong Kong's Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) asked for details of the newspaper's investigation. The paper did not cooperate—indeed, it turned around and published a story about the ICAC's interest, of their asking the paper to reveal its sources. And
Ming Pao
published the name of the investigator.

The newspaper was then taken to court by the ICAC for leaking the identity of the official. The newspaper won the case, but the ICAC appealed to a higher court and won. The case—by now it was costing millions of Hong Kong dollars—then went to the Privy Council in London, and
Ming Pao
won.

"So you see, even under the so-called democratic law of Hong Kong, under the British, a newspaper is prosecuted for what it writes. But no matter which government is in power, we are still watchdogs. The only question is, do we have the guts to go on doing it?"

 

For many years Hong Kong has been one of the best vantage points for China watchers, who are unwelcome in China; a base for Chinese dissidents; and the locus for the dissemination of unbiased news about China. And this place, rife with skepticism, with anti-communism at its core, will soon be a region of China.

Lee Yee came to Hong Kong in 1970 to run a China-watching magazine, which he called
The Seventies.
Taking its title from the decade, it is now called
The Nineties.
Supported by a thousand shareholders and with a circulation of forty thousand (but a readership four times that figure), it is as independent as a magazine can be. Mr. Lee had contributed a tough article on the future of Hong Kong to the "Hong Kong Goes Back" issue of
Index on Censorship.
Among other things he had said that in Hong Kong "an intellectual can speak his mind on subjects forbidden in China without endangering his personal safety." His forth-rightness made me eager to speak with him.

I had agreed to meet Lee Yee at the China Club, the center of transitional Hong Kong, which was founded by the entrepreneur David Tang. "Cigar-smoking," "stylish," and "socialite," are the descriptions usually applied to this flamboyant and funny man, who keeps his scholarly side well hidden. Tang is a book collector, an omnivorous reader, and an art connoisseur who has single-handedly created a market for modern Chinese painting. I know him also to be an accomplished pianist, for on another occasion he sight-read the piano transcription of Elgar's
Enigma Variations
for me at his villa in the New Territories near Sai Kung.

Speaking of the Hand-over, David Tang had told me that he was an optimist. "I have to be, because if I become pessimistic, I won't act." Anyway, he went on, China, not Britain, was by far the biggest foreign investor in Hong Kong. Out of pride, China would not let Hong Kong perform worse in the next five years than it had in the past five years.

That was probably true. The Bank of China holds a quarter of all the money on deposit in Hong Kong and continues to invest here at an enormous rate, accounting for a fifth of the trade and a quarter of the cargo. Almost all Hong Kong's food comes from China.

"Want to check the truth of what you write about Hong Kong after 1997?" Tang said before he left. "Whenever you write a sentence about the Chinese, substitute the word 'Communist' for 'Chinese.' Then reread it. If it still reads well, it's true."

I had expected Lee Yee to be a firebrand. In his gray suit and tie he looked instead like a paid-up member of that ancient class in China, the scholar gentry. He was a gray-haired soul of about sixty—benign, even a bit phlegmatic, yet friendly.

He reiterated something he had said in his essay "Stick to the Facts," in
Index on Censorship:
that the most sensible thing the business community could do is encourage the free flow of ideas; that in the absence of freedom, commerce would falter, as it has done in so many countries. "Freedom of speech is essential to Hong Kong's role as an international financial center. If there is no free flow of information, how can you make decisions? Singapore cannot be a financial center, because there is no press freedom."

It rankled, he said, that the Joint Declaration had been a document put together by Britain and China, that the Hong Kong people were not consulted. Both China and Britain were afraid of free elections, for when given a chance to vote, the vast majority of Hong Kongers favored pro-democracy candidates rather than China's Pekingese.

"As for the future, I have two big worries," he said, "corruption and press freedom."

 

Another meeting, another ethical debate, but at the margins of my consciousness I was tantalized by decadent music, pretty perfume, and the lisping silk of women's dresses. A combination of vegetarianism and Dr. Gwai's potions had cured my gout, and I was walking again. It is a city of pedestrians. So many people thrown together in such a small area makes Hong Kong a profoundly physical experience, in which one is always in the presence of material goods and money.

Of the cost of apartments, locals said, "You get nothing for a million U.S." Not just cameras and binoculars (objects so common these days that the duty-free shops at Hong Kong's airport no longer stock them) but designer fashions of every kind dangle before your face, the way the food in Hong Kong restaurants appears in the windows—plump ducklings varnished with sauce like pieces of mahogany, slaughtered hogs still bleeding, pigs' trotters, trays of fish lips, and dishes piled high with chicken feet, or "phoenix feet." Hong Kong prostitutes enjoy the same lexical ambiguity, sometimes called chickens and sometimes phoenixes. Self-employed prostitutes are legal here, under a law known as
yet lau, yet feng,
"one room, one phoenix."