Hong Kong

"Jan Morris has an interesting background. She’s a transgender travel writer, and I had already read her books about Venice and Trieste when I discovered a book by her about Hong Kong. It was written in 1997, just before the handover, and the book gives you a good impression of colonial Hong Kong. It’s a collection of her observations about its history and culture, focusing on the expat communities and how they interacted with the locals as well as her quirky observations about the Cantonese way of life. Although some of the characters can be stereotypical, I read it with great interest as it offers a different perspective from my own. I particularly like the way she portrays Hong Kong as a land of contradictions. One of her observations is that there’s such wealth in the city – the rich who lived on the Peak or by the bay – and then there’s abject poverty on the streets, and the two simply coexisted. I also love her prose, which I find beautiful and fluid. Not long ago, Hong Kong was no more than a sleepy fishing village. The name means “fragrant harbour,” and the fragrance came from a particular type of tree called Agarwood that people harvested for its fragrant resins. Even now there are smugglers who come from mainland China to chop down the trees and take them back to sell. That was the origin of Hong Kong, but in 1842 it was ceded to Britain after the Second Opium War. For over 150 years the city was a British colony, and that has influenced everything from our food to our architecture and language, but most importantly our government. “Our biological parents are Chinese, but we were given to white foster parents for 150 years” Looking back, that is the one thing I think the people of Hong Kong appreciated the most – the Western constructs of governance that wouldn’t have emerged if we had stayed part of China. I think of us as a foster child. Our biological parents are Chinese but then we were given to white foster parents for 150 years – after which we were told we had to go back. You can imagine the upheaval of that. A few years ago there was a scandal when Jackie Chan said in a TV interview that the Chinese people “need to be controlled.” He said that to justify some of the heavy-handed policies by Beijing, and he came under a lot of criticism for it. Well, Hong Kong has always been controlled as a colony, and so those comments felt quite ironic to me. It can feel like Hong Kong is always destined to be controlled by people who don’t understand us."