Hong Kong (14 page)

PEOPLES

F
OUR HUNDRED AND TWENTY TIMES A DAY, IN THE
Hong Kong of the 1990s, from 6.30 in the morning until 11.30 at night, the double-ended diesel ferries of the Star Ferry Company cross the harbour between Tsim Sha Tsui, at the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, and Central, old Victoria on Hong Kong Island. They are green-and-white boats of thirty-nine tons, travelling at an average speed of twelve knots and all named for stars –
Lone Star, Morning Star, Meridian, Celestial, Northern, Shining, Day, Silver
and
Twinkling Stars
. They and their predecessors have been making the trip since 1868, and they are now among the most famous ferries in the world. Every visitor to Hong Kong travels on them, thousands of commuters use them every day, and when during a strike in 1925 the Royal Navy took over their operation, there were many complaints about inferior boatsmanship.

The ferries certainly move into their wharf with a practised ease, after so many years on so short a route (hardly more than ten minutes even in choppy weather). Chinese sailors in blue cotton uniforms deftly handle the ropes, the Chinese helmsman has all the time in the world to move from one wheelhouse to the other for the return voyage, and many of the embarking passengers too, when the iron concertina gate
is lifted to allow them to board, do so laconically, some of them reading the paper as they come, others carelessly reversing a wooden seat-rest in order to face the right direction. There are two classes, first on the upper deck, second below, but people of means often prefer to travel second class because they can get off the boat quicker when it docks.
¹

We ourselves will travel on the upper deck, on our initial voyage across the harbour of Hong Kong, its clientele being more useful for our purposes. We throw back our own seat with a casual clatter, as though we have been doing it all our lives, we settle in the shade of the canvas awning which is keeping the hot sun off the starboard side, and as the boat wallows away from the pier we prepare to inspect our fellow-passengers. We shall sacrifice the passing view of the harbour, one of the most interesting on earth, but the passengers are revealing too.

They are very different from the passengers on the
Xinghu
, being wonderfully varied in manner as in race. Beside us now, for instance, there sits a young Chinese woman, eighteen or nineteen years old, dressed with exquisite neatness in yellow track suit, sneakers and white cotton jacket, wearing a plastic hair-clip and horn-rimmed glasses and reading
Sister’s Pictorial
. Beyond her four very large and red-faced European tourists – Swedes? Germans? – are comparing video cameras, and beyond them again an elderly Chinese man in a dark baggy jacket and high collar is staring short-sightedly into what ought to be a volume of Confucianist ethic, but is more probably a thesis on computer-aided investment.

Here come three Japanese businessmen – young businessmen, very smooth, smooth of face, smooth of dress, carrying briefcases, hitching their trousers decorously when they sit down, after making sure the seat is clean, talking very earnestly to each other and examining sheaves of graph paper. Pallid by the rail sits an English couple, well out of the sun – an army private and his wife perhaps, but recently arrived on station, for they are feeling the climate badly, and look rather cross and listless. Violently in contrast behind them, a couple of local toughs bear themselves like characters from a Kung Fu drama, long-haired, slit-eyed, heavily muscled around the shoulders.

A tall Briton in middle-age scorns a seat and leans against a stanchion. He is the very image of the English gentleman, erring if anything
towards caricature: now and then he peers over the top of his half-moon spectacles to inspect the rest of us, and as he does so the glimpse of a smile softens his face, and makes it look at once imperturbable, aloof, well-disposed and condescending. Americans, too, are scattered here and there around the deck – companionable groups of tourists from the cruise ship moored at the Ocean Terminal, a couple of plump bankers or brokers, tight-buttoned in tropical suits over the
Asian Wall Street Journal
, a solitary emaciated and scholarly looking young man on his way, we guess, to a seminar.

Who else? Half-a-dozen badged and blazered Chinese schoolchildren, carrying satchels and tennis-rackets. A party of Filipina housemaids, all flounce, giggle and plastic bags. An Italian hotelier we happen to know, who grins and waves his hands in a floppy way to indicate extreme heat. And filling in all the interstices between these varied stereotypes, the less distinguishable mass of the general Chinese population, well-behaved, polite, mostly young, not at all sweaty, either very serious of expression or else it seems lost in dreams – solid but non-absorbent, like the rough-edged crinkly paper on which a water-colour is painted.

As on the ferry, so in the city: a small but prominent selection of gweilos leavening the overwhelming mass of Hong Kong’s Chinese population. The first two names in the Roman-script Hong Kong Island telephone directory, 1995, were Ana Aaron and Hans Aartsen; the last two were Thomas Zwicky and Milana Zyler.

The oldest foreign hands are of course the British, of whom there are in 1996 about 33,000, including soldiers of the garrison and their wives. Except in the city centre they are not especially visible these days, constituting as they do at most 0.5 per cent of the population, but one is reminded constantly of their long residence here if only by the place-names on the Hong Kong map. Soon these may all be swept away, but for the moment they are like a public roster of the old association – Elliot Crescent and Pottinger Peak, Mount Davis and Bonham Strand, Shelley Street of course, Lady Clementi’s Ride and Aldrich Village and Hill Above Belcher’s … Every Governor of Hong Kong has something named after him, and today Percival, Irving, Anton, Landale, Matheson, Paterson, Johnstone and Keswick Streets, not to mention Jardine’s Lookout,
Jardine’s Bazaar and Jardine’s Crescent, all commemorate British taipans.

To eastern eyes, I dare say, the British used to look as indistinguishable, one from another, as the Chinese mass looked to westerners. But you have only to examine the roll-call of Hong Kong Britons to realize that innumerable different kinds of expatriate have sought their fortunes in the colony during the past 150 years. We see a prevalence of Scotsmen, for example, in the names of the traders – Jardines, Mathesons, Inneses, Mackays, McGregors. We see a plethora of Evanses, Joneses, Williamses and Davises, not only in the St David’s Society and Welsh choirs of the colony, but also among academics and in Government. There were once five Anglo-Irish Governors in a row. And unmistakable are the signs that declare the presence here, down all the generations, of the lesser English gentry.

In particular that prime emblem of the English upper bourgeoisie, the double-barrelled name, has proliferated through the history of Hong Kong. Here are a few examples to be met in the records, old and new: Fairfax-Cholmondeley, Sawrey-Cookson, Peterson-Todd, Akers-Jones, Steele-Perkins, Hutton-Potts, Norman-Walker, Wesley-Smith, Norton-Kyshe, Webb-Peploe, Pennefather-Evans, Cave-Brown, Vaughan-Flower, Muspratt-Williams, Jackson-Lipkin.

They sound a picturesque company, whether street-eponymed, Celtic or merely hyphenated, but by no means every one has lived up to the hopes of his family, seeing him off to a new life in the East, or to the expectations of his schoolmasters. Power and profit equally corrupt, and the British in Hong Kong have displayed the imperial condition at its worst and at its best.

Nobody pretends that the British taipans and other business leaders have generally been very
nice
men. They have often been interesting, often courageous and generally enterprising, but not habitually overflowing with the milk of human kindness. In 1862 Louis Mallet, Under-Secretary at the Board of Trade in London, characterized the Britons then entering the China trade as ‘unscrupulous and reckless adventurers who seek nothing but enormous profits’ (though James Matheson, more cultured and affable than most of them, had been allowed by one contemporary ‘suavity of manner and the impersonation of benevolence’).

Today, though drug-smuggling is certainly not pursued by the big British merchant houses of Hong Kong, in many other ways they are still ready to cut profitable corners, and their top officials are still recognizably in the old tradition. They are a breed on the defensive, as Chinese, American, Japanese, Australian and other foreign businessmen challenge them for financial hegemony, the world perception of the 1990s debilitates them and Beijing awaits their subjection in 1997; but you would hardly know it, for in a sense they are in their prime. Through all the permutations of socialism and conservatism in Britain, they maintained in this far colony the spirit of free enterprise at its most absolute; they came home, as it were, through the congenial years of Thatcherism and Reaganism, of monetarism and privatization and takeover bid and conglomerate merger, years when the capitalist idea rode so high that it became half-respectable even within Communist China. Let us contemplate a group of these merchants (they like to be called merchants) meeting perhaps at a dinner party with wives elegantly in attendance, and see what 150 years has made of them.

The old hongs drew heavily upon family associations, recruiting cousins, nephews and marital connections as often as they could. ‘I can never consent to assist idle and dissipated characters,’ wrote William Jardine severely, ‘however nearly connected with me, but am prepared to go to any reasonable extent in supporting such of my relations who conduct themselves prudently and industriously.’ Today the big British banks and business firms rely hardly less, if not actually on blood-links, at least upon the extended family of class and background. These half-dozen men laughing over their coffees are of a kind, and a cool kind at that. Good-looking, some of them, alert every one, drinking moderately, probably not smoking, everything about them seems formidably under control.

The social historian Colin Cresswell, writing in 1981,
²
made a study of twelve such captains of the hongs. In six cases, he cautiously revealed, ‘kinship could be said to have been a significant career factor’. Eleven had been educated at English public schools and at Oxbridge. Nearly all had done military service in one of the smarter regiments of the British army (more recently one has done service in the French Foreign Legion, too, and written a book about it). We can assume from our own researches, as our subjects move on to coffee and brandy (ladies seldom adjourn to the drawing room in contemporary Hong Kong)
that they all vote Conservative when they are home in Britain, and that they probably have middle-sized but extremely well-equipped country houses awaiting their retirement somewhere within reach of London.

Although they all represent different firms, they are closely connected professionally, for the old British companies of Hong Kong often share directors and frequently collaborate on projects, making the whole system sometimes feel like a semi-secret organization of mutual advantage. Also they are all likely to be on the same club committees, and they doubtless share the pleasures of Happy Valley and the Shatin racecourse, and sail against each other perhaps at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, and go out in each others’ pleasure-junks, and are frequently pictured accepting each others’ hospitality in the pages of the
Hong Kong Tatler
.

When we add to all this the fraternity of wealth – they are all very rich men, by British standards – it comes as no surprise that they so obviously speak the same language socially, professionally, educationally and probably morally. If we eavesdrop upon their conversation we are likely to find it, for all its gaiety, larded with references to company mergers, Exchange Square rumours, someone’s recent bankruptcy or joint projects to build nuclear power stations in China. It is also slightly Americanized, in vocabulary, in allusion, sometimes in pronunciation and almost indefinably in attitude.

Such are the men known generically, at least to novelists and visiting journalists, as the Hong Kong taipans – in the 1960s indeed, if we are to believe the novelist James Clavell,
³
they used the word a lot themselves, and actually addressed the head of a firm as ‘Taipan’, as in ‘Unless the market drops, Taipan, Chase Manhattan will never come up with the other half billion …’ Below them economically in the ranks of Hong Kong Britishry is a much larger class of the less plutocratic bourgeoisie, business executives, brokers, advertising men and women, lawyers, doctors, academics, journalists. They form a more heterogeneous community than the taipans and their wives, and besides a sizeable stratum of extremely civilized and kindly people, include a fair proportion of men one might prefer not to buy a used car from, a sufficiency of women one would rather not be stuck beside at a cocktail
party, and some children one is grateful one’s own family need not go to school with.