Video Night in Kathmandu (35 page)

ON MY FIRST
weekend in Hong Kong, I ended up doing what expats do on Saturdays, sitting stranded in the traffic jam that paralyzes the city as everyone in the center of speculators heads for the races. For the next day, though, I arranged to do what expats do on Sundays, cruising around the harbor on a junk.

As Sunday morning arose, however, a fine rain began to blanket the city, misting the quiet water below. And as I sat in Georges’ luxury flat, gloomily watching the harbor erase itself below me, my hostess rang up: on rainy Sundays, she explained, expats tended to gather for brunches rather than launches; could I taxi around to her house in Happy Valley? Outside, in the drizzle, clumps of bright young American couples in Lacoste shirts and blue blazers, pantsuits and Reeboks, were lined up by the side of the road, waiting to hail taxis. They too, I assumed, were on their way to their own Sunday brunches.

As soon as I arrived at my friends’ rambling home, I was led out onto the veranda, where expats were sitting around in wicker chairs, munching corn chips and drinking Carlsbergs as Elvis Costello songs floated between the ferns. Some “belongers” were working on the crossword in the Saturday
Herald Trib
, the closest you could get, I was told, to the Sunday New York
Times.
Someone assured me I could watch the NBA championship series on Tuesday evenings, someone else that I could hear the Top 10 of two years earlier on the radio. Someone else discussed the four-mile jogging track along Bonham Road and somebody reserved a block of tickets at the local cinema so that we could all go see the latest Woody Allen.

“Last night at a dinner party, a man told me how he’d just made a hundred thousand dollars U.S. A jockey rang him up before the race and told him he owed him a favor.”

“When I came here, I really wanted to immerse myself in the Chinese community, speaking only Chinese, doing everything Chinese. And I was earning six thousand dollars U.S. and living on an island and all of my friends were Chinese. But then I started moving up in the world and earning more and more and now—well, now I live in an expat world.”

“Ah, it’s such a comfortable life out here. A car. Lots of rooms. A maid. It’s so hard to move back to New York.”

WHEN FIRST I
visited Hong Kong, I could hardly imagine why anyone would want to go back to New York. For as the Colony threw over its imperial ties, it was coming more than ever to resemble a sweet-and-sour version of the capital of the modern world. Like New York, in its way, the orphan city was full of the street-smart bravado of a strutting young man in a hurry, a rags-to-riches Seventh Avenue shark who takes the world on, but only on his own terms. Like New York, “Chinatown East” valued volume and velocity; people moved quickly through the streets, and with purpose, pushing for space, shoving, struggling to get a step ahead. Like New Yorkers, Hong Kongers seemed to pride themselves on their rudeness, their impatience with the slow or sentimental (“Am I being courteous?” said the badge worn with black irony by the conductor on the Peak train who barked out orders and trampled on children as he kept the turnstiles spinning). Like New York, above all, Hong Kong
seemed to prize energy before imagination and movement more than thought. The place had a one-track mind—and it was decidedly the fast track. Hard-driving and fast-talking, it ran on hard cash and quick wit, hard heads and quick kills. In Hong Kong, even Maxim’s was a fast-food joint.

In that sort of environment, where statements were mostly associated with banks, values were rarely sentimental; everything, in fact, was a commodity. When first I visited, in 1983, the biggest deal in town and the center of the most furious bartering seemed to be the city itself; Hong Kong’s very identity was being placed (as once Manhattan’s had been) on the marketplace. And no sooner had China won the bidding than the world’s most famous marketplace turned into a wholesale store feverish with the activity of a closing sale (Low prices! Moving soon! All stocks must go!). By the time I returned in 1985, the hottest place for young professionals was called 1997. A leading local racehorse had been christened 1997. And in the prime location of the Harbour Ferry departure lounge, the prize novelty of the store called 1997 (where every item sold for exactly HK $19.97) was a lumpy and ill-favored creature named the Rice Paddy Doll, a macabre variation on the Cabbage Patch Kid. This one, however, was not an orphan but an exile, equipped with a Hong Kong British passport and a sign that read: “I want to Emigrate” or “Immigration Department” or “I would love Australia.” Already, so it seemed, the city had undertaken to turn its death to profit; already, it was flogging tickets to its own funeral.

Among the people of Hong Kong too, I met a pragmatism more no-nonsensical than any I had ever known before. In Hong Kong, cabbies were not the self-styled political pundits I had met elsewhere in the world, but self-appointed economists. And in their abacus vision of the world, even matters domestic were reduced in the end to matters economic. On my second day in the Colony, a driver took me around the main island, and when we stopped for lunch, I asked about his family. In the inimitable staccato English of the Chinese—spitting out syllables as if they were indigestible dumplings and speaking with the rapid urgency of a man holding on to a slippery bar of soap while fearing a fire alarm at any moment—he briskly filled me in on his principles of cost-efficient growth. He did not have child, because child cost money. Child also make wife stay at home, cut
down income. He must take good care of wife, because wife bring good income. He need income. He work every day, twelve hour, but sometimes take Sunday off. He only have one job. Many people in Hong Kong have two.

I could not help recalling the Hong Konger I had met on the road who was making a year-long circumnavigation of the world. I had asked him which places had moved or impressed him most. Thailand was good, he answered; it was inexpensive. Greece was great; it didn’t cost too much. Egyptians, they were all sharks. India, it was full of touts. With that, he cast his practiced eye around my room. This place was okay, he pronounced. But it should be worth a refund.

I did manage to find a snatch of romance in Hong Kong—at the Chinese opera.
The Cloud of Eternal Sorrow
was a ravishing pageant of water and air, through which was unrolled a watercolor vision of turquoise valleys and misty waterfalls. Swains chased sylphs through a brushstroked never-never land. Shaven-headed chamberlains and goat-bearded sages strode through a plot as brocaded and magical as that of
Turandot.
Every speech was fleet and fragile as light snowfall. A valiant warrior marched onto the stage, and English-language subtitles flickered on the blue velvet curtains framing the proscenium. “I am a hunter from Jade Mountain. My father’s silver-maned horse is faster than the army’s 3,000.” Imprisoned, the lovely princess of his dreams could only weep beside her casement. “The palace is dark. The palace is lonely. The valleys are draped in a lilac shroud.” The seasons drew on, and her pining grew more plaintive and more plangent. “The moon is so bright. These walls are so high. My heart is breaking.” The curtain came down, and I went out into the night. Two old men, in white vests and black shorts, were playing go beside the harbor, while the water, purpled by neon, slapped against the docks. The moon was so bright. The walls were so high.

In life if not in art, however, Hong Kong, long the largest metropolis in the world without a museum, had its head screwed on very tightly. What good was tradition, it implied, when it came to moving ahead? When did sentiment ever contribute to profit? Who needed poetry when prose was so much clearer?

“Son was the most valuable long-term investment they possessed,” writes Timothy Mo in his family portrait of Hong Kong
exiles in Britain,
Sour Sweet. “
On maturity, the realization of this asset would be worth far more than the business would ever return.”

IN
1985,
HONG KONG
was still, of course, much less advanced along the road to dehumanized pragmatism than Singapore, the
terminus ad quem
of the new order. The countries’ airports alone, great centers of the Intercontinental Age, revealed the difference between a Babel present and an Esperanto future—Kai Tak was smelly, slovenly, vital with the cheery hucksterism of a sidewalk vendor in an alleyway crowded with laundry and kids; Singapore’s Changi, however, with its automatic walkways and waterfalls lit by soft neon, its spotless jewelry stores and exquisite atria, its free telephones in fire-engine red and carpeted departure lounges, each with its own color TV, was the last word in flawless utopianism. Singapore, in fact, I always thought of as McCity, a perfect Platonic model of the Commonweal, as safe and efficient and convenient as McDonald’s, and just about as featureless. With its multiplex cinemas, its look-alike office blocks and its theme-park restaurants, the city-state had set up an ideal of anonymous comfort in which everyone could live like an expatriate. And with its leafy, ranch-style homes, its languid, white-tiled malls, a blue sea in the distance and the plastic lyricism of a soft-rock jingle, Singapore resembled nothing so much as a California resort town run by Mormons. Hong Kong, by comprison, was chaotic, clamorous, dirty-fingered New York.

But still Hong Kong was New York only by comparison, and that was the great expat sorrow. For if the horror of New York is that it knows that it is the quickest city in the world, the sadness of Hong Kong is that it knows it too. Everywhere I went in Hong Kong, everyone I met was talking about New York—whenever they were not talking to New York on the phone. And the tone they adopted had the agitation of someone who lives to get ahead and fears that he is falling behind. “This place has the same energy, the same hustle as New York,” a longtime settler told me at a party. “But it’s unadulterated. There’s no culture, no bohemians, no fringe. And in New York, people work so they can enjoy themselves. Here they work so—well, they don’t really know why they’re working. And in New York, people
enjoy life even if they don’t enjoy their work, or even if they’re not working at all. Here work is life. There’s absolutely no difference between the two.”

In every café and penthouse, at every brunch and party, New York seemed to hover above Hong Kong as the sparkling apotheosis of all the values it enshrined: Speed, Money, Hard Dazzle. The hottest nightclub in town was Manhattan, the second best was New York, New York. A New York opera company came here once a year, said a Chinese girl from Harvard Business School, but they were never up to scratch; other cultural adornments of the
beau monde
never came at all. Luckily, she added, she would be taking a holiday next week in Manhattan. And some of this repeated frustration might only have reflected the glamour lent by distance, compounded by the wistfulness bred by exile. Part of it probably betrayed the congenital restlessness of the overachiever who finds himself at the top of his world and yet must find new worlds to conquer every day. Most of it, though, seemed to arise from the nervous self-doubt of the expat, who, ruling his small pond, can never forget that he succeeded only by seceding. Whenever I went to an expat party, I thought, with unkind irony, of the sign pinned up on every Hong Kong minibus—“For complainants, please call …” For everywhere, the lament continued. New York was prodigal, Hong Kong was only provincial; New York was cosmopolitan, Hong Kong was simply metropolitan; New York was everything, Hong Kong was nothing.

“This is a small town, amateurish,” said a chubby Brit at a party, joyful because the next day would find him moving to Tokyo. “I want decency. I want professionalism. The East? It’s awful here. I mean, I’ve been to Thailand and all the rest. But after one day of Asian villages, how much can you see? I know it’s terrible, but I’m a businessman. I’m not interested in Asia. If I go away for two days, I can’t read the
FT
.”

SOMETHING OF THE
great terror of the expat—to be trapped between the whirlpool of an incestuous foreigner community and the forbidding cliffs of an outer world that will always be alien—had come home to me in Brunei. Though the gold-plated sultanate was famous for its $350-million palace (complete with a telephone in each of its 2,200 rooms), its $15-billion surplus
spread among a population about the size of Colorado Springs’ and its per capita income, the highest in the world outside Kuwait, the only Neronian splendors I could find in its torpid capital were a multistory car park, a stadium, two overpriced hotels and a supermarket (which accepted American Express cards). Within two hours of arrival, I had exhausted its main sights—a tiny aquarium and a museum commemorating Winston Churchill on the grounds that Churchill had never been here—and was reduced to reading old copies of
Harper’s
in the local library. In the streets, I saw tired-looking Mummies in sundresses leading whining children by the hand, and in the Grill Room (a pubby place with barrels of sherry on its walls and place mats representing the churches of Albion), red-faced Brits sullenly knifed their steaks while their Malay mistresses gaily chattered away. By my second day in town, I was beginning to see the same faces in the same places, and by my second night I was longing for the days to end. I stayed up till 1 a.m. to watch
I Was a Mail Order Bride
on TV and spent much of a morning reading the local phone book’s essay “How to Use a Telephone” (Step #1: “Ascertain from the current issue of the Telephone Directory the number you wish to call”). That evening, at the Sheraton coffee shop, I saw the same Brit sipping what looked like the same $7 celery juice and paging his way through the same worn volume of Angus Wilson. I got on the next bus to the airport, and fled.

YET HONG KONG
, I told myself, was in a different league; Hong Kong was a large international city that offered something for everyone. But even in Hong Kong, after three days in town, I began to find spheres overlapping, lines converging, my life noosed into a very small circle. All roads led to home. As I made the rounds of the expat circuit, I found myself playing the same party game of “Do you know so-and-so?” and then remarking, with an ease that left me uneasy, “What a small world!” So-and-so was at Jardine’s and her friend was at Morgan Guaranty and she knew him from the
Asian Wall Street Journal.
At first I was excited to learn that a colleague from
Time
lived in the very next house to my school friend Georges. But soon it became apparent that everyone lived next door to everyone else. I had lunch one weekday—
chile rellenos
and Coke—at the place where expats
have their weekday lunch—the American Club, forty-seven floors above the world. That night, on the other side of the harbor, in another world filled with young Chinese couples romancing under the stars, I saw my two expat friends from lunch, dressed in black-jacket Gatsby splendor, reeling out of the Regent Hotel in a swirl of laughter and drinks, a sequined Daisy Buchanan teetering along between them. I told Georges I’d like to introduce him to a journalistic couple I’d met in Manila. “Sure,” said Georges, “I met him at a party two nights ago given by this girl who reads the news at ATV. Together with his friend Jack.” “Really? I met him at brunch last Sunday.”