Fresh Air Fiend (42 page)

Hurrying to an appointment to discuss a political or legal issue in the middle of Kowloon, I would see an announcement by a door, four Chinese characters on a scroll:
sun dou bak mui,
"New Girl from North," a phoenix just arrived from China. The karaoke bars varied from place to place, ranging from jolly lounges, where customers sang drunkenly and out of tune, to brothels, for which "karaoke bar" is a euphemism in Kowloon's Mong Kok and Jordan, areas of sleazy vitality.

In Jordan one day, I saw Jeremy Irons leaving Lucky Sauna, a
gai dao,
or "chicken house," known for its cheap rates for buccal coition. He was wearing a green Barbour jacket and makeup, and towered over the hurrying Hong Kongers as he took stock of the district in much the same way I did, making notes.

The Chinese actress Gong Li and the director Wayne Wang were not far away, for this disreputable spot was a location for the film
Chinese Box.
I myself had been here just a year ago, working on this same film, and so it was not really an accident that I had run into Jeremy Irons.

"Party tonight," he said. "Ruben Blades is leaving for the States tomorrow."

Irons's suite at the Peninsula Hotel faced the harbor, Hong Kong Island, and the Peak, dotted with long strings of lights that gave its upper slopes the look of a ski resort. The Peninsula's guests are mainly Japanese, who stay for the nostalgic reason that the Japanese commandant was quartered there after the siege, rape, and occupation of Hong Kong, which began the day Pearl Harbor was attacked.

In contrast to the parts he plays ("mainly weirdos" he says), Irons is an affable person, with the English actor's knack for doing funny accents, clever in conversation, and musical. After Ruben Blades had sung several boleros, Irons took the guitar and sang "St. Louis Woman." Sushi and smoked salmon were passed around, and champagne, and then coffee. Following Dr. Gwai's diet, I had a banana, offered by Irons's wife, the actress Sinead Cusack.

"Hong Kong is a superb place," Irons said. Sinead agreed. So did the rest of the cast. They had been there a month, and they had a month more of shooting.

But their Hong Kong was not my Hong Kong. They were shooting in brothels and atmospheric apartments. In this intensely social place of tit shows and racetracks, noodle shops, five-star hotels, Rolls-Royces, superstition, the streets aromatic with Chinese herbs and joss sticks, I spent most of my time debating issues of law and morality with policy wonks and passionate dissidents.

"I've got to go," I said. "I've got an early interview tomorrow."

"What are you doing in Hong Kong?"

"Playing a journalist."

"Me too," he said. "As you know."

The next morning, while Irons was doing a love scene with Gong Li, I was meeting her namesake, the defiant Martin Lee, whose father, Li Yinwo, had been a general in the Nationalist army. In
The Fall of Hong Kong,
Mark Roberti writes that although Martin Lee was born in Hong Kong, in 1938, while his mother was on vacation, his father, the "intensely patriotic General Lee, did not want his son to be British and prohibited his wife from registering the birth." Another interesting fact about Martin Lee's father: "Li disliked the Communists because they rejected the family as the basic unit of society." This is perhaps the reason Martin Lee has the reputation for being a family man. He is known to be stubborn, incorruptible, and insistent that the people of Hong Kong be guaranteed justice in a Chinese court.

Fearless and—uncharacteristic for a Chinese—confrontational, Lee has the intense and solemn gaze of a Jesuit. This demeanor changes completely when he laughs, which is often. His chosen path could lead to martyrdom, though when I asked him about this, he said, "I don't think it's likely that I will be thrown into prison, because I am known. But what of the people who are not known? The possibility is there."

Mr. Lee, who has recently been to Washington, where he met with President Clinton and several members of Congress, had just returned from a triumphant speaking tour of European capitals. It is a measure of the respect people have for his courage that he is usually greeted like a senior statesman. While on European tour he had continued to write and publish articles. In one, he summed up the Hong Kong situation, saying that the Joint Declaration "promised that Hong Kong's people would have their own elected legislature, an executive accountable to that legislature, an independent judiciary, and a 'high degree of autonomy.' Over a decade later this agreement is in tatters."

Because he is articulate and open-minded, hospitable to journalists, kindly and charismatic and highly intelligent, he is welcome everywhere. When C. H. Tung criticized Lee for "badmouthing Hong Kong," it was Tung who was put on the defensive for this crude remark, for it is well known that Martin Lee's concerns are for the rights of Hong Kong citizens.

In his law office in Admiralty, he explained to me how, by refusing to define such terms as "acts of state" or the key provisions of the Basic Law, China would be able to manipulate human rights. "There's a big hole in the common law now," he said. Theoretically, China had agreed to the articles in the Basic Law that ensured an independent judiciary. But while it was expressly stated in Article 82, for example, that "judges from other common law jurisdictions" would sit on the highest court, the Court of Final Appeal, there was no sign that China intended to abide by this. Indeed, as July 1 approaches, there is no court of final adjudication for the people of Hong Kong, who know that in China justice is swift, and a frequent punishment for wrongdoing is a bullet in the neck. Executions, sometimes five or ten at a time, often take place in provincial sports stadiums. The more pessimistic Hong Kongers wonder whether the race course at Happy Valley, with its vast TV screens, will serve this function in years to come.

Martin Lee is also gloomy on this point. He told me, "When you see clear provisions of the Basic Law and the Joint Declaration being violated, how can you guarantee any of the other clauses will not be violated?"

Speaking of the non-elected Provisional Legislature, Mr. Lee said, "How would Americans like an appointed Congress, with the promise of elections some time in the future?"

"Britain adopted a policy of appeasement," he said. He calls the United States' policy on China "single-faceted—just trade." People in Hong Kong who demanded the rule of law were regarded by American businessmen and diplomats as "just a nuisance." As for China's concerns with rights and freedoms, "There is only one right in China—the right to be fed. It's the sort of right all dogs and cats enjoy."

Governor Patten has voiced his concerns about these issues, and in a celebrated policy address late last year he emphasized that Britain will continue to monitor human rights in Hong Kong. This is a noble sentiment, but given Britain's indifference to Hong Kong's aspirations in the past, it offers meager reassurance. Anyway, Patten will go. The foreign businessmen are free to go. And many wealthy Hong Kong businessmen have foreign passports and a ticket out. But Martin Lee, in identifying himself with the humblest and most vulnerable people, seemed to me to be the conscience of Hong Kong; the man to watch, the man to listen to. His nature is uncompromising, and so there was little of the politician in him, but quite a lot of the moralist.

"What are your fears?" I asked him.

"My fear is the loss of freedom generally, and loss of the rule of law."

The great news was that Martin Lee had no plans for relaxing his vigil. Since arriving in Hong Kong, I had heard him praised and abused—mostly praised; but it is not admirable in traditional Chinese society to stick your neck out. For some dim folk he was an embarrassment, a bit of a nuisance, yet just the sort of person they would flock to were they not so terrified of the coming commissar culture. In the end, Martin Lee will be hailed as a hero, though it may take the equivalent of the twenty-seven years it took Nelson Mandela to achieve his goal—and for all those years you hardly heard a good word about him from any of the businessmen or politicians who are presently kissing Mandela's bum.

"I'm hoping for the best," Martin Lee told me as we parted.

He was the single most impressive person I met in Hong Kong, and the one I intend to listen to whenever something significant happens.

 

Nothing will change for fifty years
was China's cry. It was meant to build morale among the Hong Kong businessmen. In that it has succeeded to a certain extent.

But now, months before the Hand-over, there is uneasiness and quite a lot of change. It is not just the new flag, and the disappearing trash barrels that had colonial emblems on them, replaced by plum-colored bins showing the Special Administrative Region bauhinia, by now a familiar logo; and the rubbed-out word "Royal" that once appeared in so many club names has vanished even from police station façades. There is a self-consciousness about speaking the familiar Cantonese, and a definite apprehension about the official language of China, Mandarin or Putonghua, which few people in Hong Kong speak or understand. Residence requirements are changing, and so are the details of work permits. A vast number of Filipinos, mostly women doing menial jobs, are anxious; on Sundays in Statue Square they squat in their thousands and chatter, making the whole of Hong Kong Central sound like a rookery. And though China had said there would be only two thousand, there will now be four thousand soldiers based at Stanley, as soon as the last of the British Gurkhas leave.

At Hong Kong University most of the political science lecturers have left. The Chinese do not recognize political science as a subject, and the department will probably close. Other lecturers are worried about their retirement fund. What if it is taxed? What if restrictions are placed on its remittance to another country?

The Chinese have their own notion of world history, which was why I had sought out a history lecturer at the university. I was lucky in finding Jonathan Grant, an American about my own age, who had been in Hong Kong teaching history for twenty years. His special field was postwar Hong Kong history, and so he could recite a whole litany of colonial wickedness and hypocrisy. He knew the Chinese, too.

"On an academic level, the fear here is that the Chinese will do in Hong Kong what they do in Chinese universities," he said. "Put in political academics. They came in with the Cultural Revolution. They're the eyes and ears of the Party."

"You mean spying?"

"China takes knowledge seriously, unlike the West. So they feel it has to be controlled," he said. "People on the Preparatory Committee have made pronouncements saying that Hong Kong will have to know its history. Hong Kong history will have to be rewritten in terms of a national history. But all national history is skewed. I didn't learn about Indian massacres in school. China will put their own spin on Hong Kong history. It will be 'those fucking opium drug dealers.' The history that China will write will describe foreigners on the China coast, and the British drinking in the Long Bar while the Chinese worked. That will please the Hong Kong Chinese."

 

One day I was with a
gweilo
friend in the Hong Kong Club. He was American, a successful businessman who had lived in Hong Kong for more than thirty years. I knew a number of such people,
gweilos
all, sardonic and funny, but when the subject of politics came up, they were implacable.

"What do you think will happen?" I asked.

"We'll probably be all right," he said. "Not to worry."

That was another thing: Americans had picked up British colloquialisms.

"What if the shit hits the fan?"

"If Hong Kong folds, there's always Shanghai. The
gweilos
will head there. Shanghai's doing fine."

I laughed at this paradigm of Hong Kong's lateral thinking.

"But you're an American," I said.

"Not anymore. I renounced my citizenship."

And he disclosed to me his new nationality, and watched my eyes widen as he named a tiny, mostly illiterate equatorial country.

"So aren't you apprehensive about the Hand-over?"

He pursed his lips and, sipping, seemed to kiss the rim of his schooner of sherry.

"A non-event," he said.

W
RITING IS HELL
, especially in Hawaii, where it tends to turn paradise into purgatory. So on the sunniest days I try to finish my writing before lunch, then I load my kayak on the roof rack of my car, hurry to India Bazaar for a vegetarian curry, and afterward I go paddling out of Ala Wai Harbor (easy parking), looking for green sea turtles and listening to NPR on my waterproof Walkman. I return to the shore at sunset, take a shower nearby at Ala Moana Beach Park, and on the way home stop for a beer in Manoa Marketplace and discuss Skiing and Nothingness with my carpenter friend who is on his way to Vail.

A perfect day: I have written something, I have exercised, I have seen perhaps three green sea turtles, probably some dolphins, and always a brown booby roosting on the marker buoy a mile out of the harbor. All this has taken place near Waikiki, yet I have not seen a tourist.

The fact that I have been oblivious of tourists all day—none at the restaurant, none at the harbor, none at that particular beach, nor at that bar—is not so remarkable, even in a place that hosts six million visitors a year. Tourists always labor under a time constraint and are the unwitting victims of cost efficiency; so they stay together, travel within a narrow compass, and tend to stay put once they have arrived. This is the result of both accident and design; it is a favor and it is also a conspiracy. Tourists are contained, partly for their own benefit, partly for the benefit of locals. By being kept in one place, there is no risk of their interrupting the flow of local life.

So there is a sort of voluntary apartheid that keeps tourists and locals separate. It seems strange that this should be so, because locals know where the best fun is to be had and how to avoid being overcharged. Perhaps the oddest aspect of being resident in a tourist paradise is the way in which you seem to lead parallel lives.