Hong Kong (17 page)

Ex-President Grant dined at Government House in 1879 (‘the most illustrious guest that ever sat at this table’). Admiral Dewey used Mirs Bay, debatably within Hong Kong’s territorial waters, as a base during the Spanish-American war. Emily Hahn the writer was an outstanding personality of pre-war Hong Kong, boldly defying pretensions grandiose and petty, living in a cheerfully unmarried state with the chief intelligence officer of the British garrison, and announcing the birth of her child, in the
South China Morning Post
, with a defiant: ‘To Major Boxer and Miss Hahn, a daughter.’ Kipling, on his visit to the colony in 1889, thought the whole town ‘dressed by America, from the hair-cutters’ saloons to the liquor bars’, while the girls of the bordellos talked in an American argot (‘I stood appalled at the depth and richness of the American language’): he went on one of the American river-steamers, too, and thought it not at all like the British boats of the Irriwaddy flotilla, being composed ‘almost entirely of white paint, sheet-lead, a cow-horn and a walking-beam’, with a stand of loaded Sniders to repel pirates.

Whenever there has been a tragedy, a scandal, a financial coup or an adventure, there are likely to have been Americans somewhere about. Americans have kept pubs in Hong Kong, staffed brothels, married into Government House, fought pirates and for that matter
been
pirates. One of the most famous pirates of all was Eli Boggs, a renegade American matelot, who preyed upon the Pearl River traffic with a fleet of thirty armed junks. A reward offered for his capture by
the Hong Kong Government was won in 1857 by another American, Captain ‘Bully’ Hayes, who took part in a Royal Navy raid on the pirate fleet and personally arrested its commander. The subsequent trial was a sensation of the time – Boggs, though almost tenderly good-looking, was alleged to have led his Chinese ruffians in the seizure of countless ships, murdering their crews or forcing them overboard. No witness could be found who had seen him actually kill a man, but he was found guilty of piracy and sentenced to transportation for life. (However although ‘Bully’ Hayes got his $1,000 all right, Boggs never went to the penal colonies, for after three years in a Hong Kong gaol he was released because of ill-health, and disappeared, it seems, simultaneously from Hong Kong and from history.)

During the Americans’ Asian wars, in Korea in the 1950s, in Vietnam later, their servicemen fell upon Hong Kong in their thousands as they had fallen upon Tokyo in the 1940s – it is no coincidence that the modern soubriquet for a Hong Kong madam is
mama-san
, as in Japan. A generation of American males was conditioned then to think of Hong Kong as a paradise of hedonism, just as their successors today, the tourists who arrive for their own R and R on package tours and cruises, stereotype the place as the greatest of all shopping centres. Except for those of protectionist views (people in the textile industry, for instance), most American visitors and residents eagerly embrace the mores of Hong Kong, seeing in the territory no doubt some esoteric mirror-image of their own ideology, and buying in their hundreds of thousands a succession of popular novels about the place.

As for the Chinese of Hong Kong, so readily do they adapt to American tastes in return that the busiest of all McDonald’s hamburger joints are those in this territory, and recently almost 4,000 people ate pizzas in a single day at a Pizza Hut in Kowloon.

Today there are almost as many American nationals living in Hong Kong, official statistics say, as there are Britons: but probably half of them are Chinese-Americans, many from Hong Kong in the first place, and are thus invisible.

This is very proper, for the Americans’ stance in Hong Kong has not always been what it seems. On the face of it their residency has been straightforward enough. They have their Chamber of Commerce and their International School. They have a gloriously luxurious American
Club on the forty-seventh floor of a waterfront skyscraper in Central, one of the best places in the world to enjoy a vodka martini to Cole Porter in the piano bar, together with a sumptuous country club. They have their State of Illinois Asian Office, their State of Michigan Agricultural Department Office, their Asian edition of the
Wall Street Journal
. There are American presenters on Hong Kong television, and American enterprise is active in everything from the generation of electrical power in gigantic power stations to the construction of model ships in upstairs Kowloon workshops. There is a very large Consulate-General in a prominent position half-way between Government House and Statue Square, and in 1987, to cap it all, an American briefly became managing director of Jardine, Matheson itself.

But their presence in Hong Kong is more subtle than that. Some of the Consulate-General windows are eerily mirror-glassed, to prevent spying visual or electronic, and official American attitudes in the Crown Colony have often been similarly opaque. As recently as 1986 a senior American consular official was heard to tell a visiting bigwig from New York that there, right there in that Consulate-General, was where Hong Kong was really run. If the American financial interest in the territory is enormous, and growing fast, the Americans have also had powerful historical, political and ideological stakes in the place.

Early in this century they began to regard China as particularly their sphere of influence. Commercially their commitment was no more important than Britain’s, but emotionally, largely because of the proliferation of American evangelical missions in the Chinese interior, they felt themselves to have a superior lien upon the country. This conviction came to a head during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose maternal grandfather Warren Delano had been a partner in Russell’s, and who was interested in China all his life.

It was during his presidency that we first sense a growing American determination that the British ought not to be in Hong Kong at all. Roosevelt was against all Empires, as any self-respecting President had to be in the 1930s and 1940s, and just as he thought the British should leave India, so he thought they should hand back Hong Kong to the Chinese. Like Chiang Kai-shek, the Christian convert who ruled China from 1928 to 1949, he considered the Treaty of Nanking, under which the colony had become British, an ‘unequal treaty’, one of many forced upon the Chinese in the previous century by the overwhelming power of Europe. Most of those treaties were revoked by agreement in 1943, but the original Hong Kong cession, and the later lease of the New
Territories, were both upheld by the British, and were regarded by Chiang and by Roosevelt as iniquitous.

The later stages of the Second World War, when Hong Kong had been lost to the Japanese, and Chiang’s Kuomintang China was formally admitted into the ranks of the Big Five Powers, seemed the opportunity to set things right. Correspondence between Chiang and Roosevelt frequently proposes the return of Hong Kong to China after the war. To Stalin, at Yalta, Roosevelt suggested the internationalization of Hong Kong. To Eden, in Washington, he said Britain should give up the colony ‘as a gesture of goodwill’. Another suggestion was that the British should sell Hong Kong to China, the price being lent by the US Treasury, or that the Chinese themselves should be enabled by the Americans to liberate Hong Kong from the Japanese. Whatever the means, Roosevelt was confident that the matter would be arranged. ‘We are going to be able to bring pressure on the British to fall in line with
our
way of thinking,’ he told his son Elliott. ‘We’re going to be able to make this the twentieth century after all, you watch and see!’

But the American attitude changed when, in 1949, the Communists acceded to power in China, and Chiang Kai-shek moved with his refugee Government to another off-shore island, Taiwan. Now the British were no longer urged to hand the colony back to Beijing. On the contrary, when in 1950 the Americans found themselves fighting the Chinese Communists over the issue of Korea, Hong Kong became an outpost of their own power. The Consulate-General was enormously enlarged, becoming for a time the biggest of all American overseas missions, and was supplemented by every kind of skuldug outfit operating under the umbrella of the Central Intelligence Agency. An embargo was placed upon trade with Communist China, and in Hong Kong American officials pedantically enforced it as if the territory were their own, drawing preposterous distinctions between timber grown in China and timber grown in Hong Kong, or banning the export of processed prawns on the grounds that they might have been caught in Chinese territorial waters.

Now the ships of the United States Seventh Fleet vastly outgunned the few remaining warships of the Royal Navy, and the antennae of American radar aerials and electronic watchposts sprouted from the ridges of Hong Kong. For the next twenty years, through all the traumas of Chinese hostility and gradual reconciliation, through the agonies of the Vietnam war fought a few hundred miles to the south, Hong Kong was America’s lookout into China, swarming with American
servicemen, political and economic analysts, journalists, academics and plain spies. And when diplomatic relations were re-opened directly with Mao Zedong’s China, and the United States recognized Beijing rather than Taipei to be the legitimate Chinese capital, the colony may have lost some of its strategic value to Washington, but became a favourite place of American investment – the fifty US companies in Hong Kong in 1954 had become 1,000 by 1996.

Today the Americans officially welcome the impending return of Hong Kong to its motherland, while wondering like everyone else what will become of their money. Their concern nowadays is discreet, and in public at least they have taken no part in the approach to 1997: but their trading links with China could be a powerful lever towards democratic change in Beijing, and thus towards confidence and stability in Hong Kong. Their warships still often lie in the harbour, too, and to those of determinedly romantic tastes, like me, there is still a faint nostalgic stir to be gained from the sight of the Stars and Stripes flying there, as it was flown so long ago by the elegant opium clippers, by Russell and Co.’s chugging paddle-steamers, and even when the moment was propitious by Eli Boggs the pirate.

And so to the 98 per cent: first and last of the Hong Kong peoples, the Chinese.

I was walking one day along a track on the island of Lamma, which lies two or three miles to the west of Hong Kong Island, thinking as it happened of the seafood lunch I was planning to enjoy beside the waterfront, and thinking too how much the island reminded me of a semi-tropic Scotland, with its bare heathy hills and salt wind – I was progressing in an amiable distraction when rounding a grove of shrubbery beside the path I came across ten or twenty people dressed all in white hooded cloaks, heads bowed, chanting incantations over an open pit. Aromatic smoke came from the ashes of a fire, and beside it a man in a long black gown and wide hat stood silently, as in trance, holding a wand. It was like a macabre dream, on that sunny morning, and it was partly because I did not wish to intrude, but partly because I was slightly shaken, that I hurried shamefaced by towards my fried garupa with egg plant (the Lamma fish restaurants are among the best in Hong Kong).

Shamefaced because I knew very well that it was no more than a
Chinese funeral I had seen, conducted according to the old Daoist rites, and thus almost as natural a part of the local life as the wind off the sea itself. It is a disagreeable anomaly of Hong Kong that, thanks to the peculiar history of the place, the westerner thinks of the Chinese culture there as esoteric, something to be stared and wondered at, or hastened past, when it is of course the foundation of all else in the territory. The incidence of Europeans in Hong Kong is about one in every hundred persons, and what seems extraordinary to them, is of course overwhelmingly the norm.

It is however, in fairness to the ingenuous foreigner, even by Chinese standards a varied norm. Only rather more than half the population was born in Hong Kong, and even without counting its foreigners the colony is an ethnic hodgepodge. Its original Cantonese, Hakkas, Hoklos and Tankas are still here, the Hakka women still in their wide black-fringed straw hats, the Hoklas and Tankas still living by the sea, if not in their junks and sampans, at least very often in semi-amphibious huts or permanently grounded vessels. But there are also sizeable colonies of people from Shanghai – they used to call Hong Kong’s North Point Little Shanghai, so crowded was it with Shanghai-occupied apartment blocks, factories, restaurants, shops and offices – besides scatterings of immigrants from many other parts of China. Unless they happen to speak Putonghua or Mandarin, the central and official Chinese language, none of these peoples share a tongue, though they all share a written script. Some of them have traditionally been enemies; until very recently no self-respecting Cantonese would marry a Hakka, while Hakkas and Hoklas, it was said in the 1930s, ‘have little in common save mutual dislike’.

Nor is it anything like a settled populace. Like all else in Hong Kong, it is in a perpetual state of restlessness, and one of the most characteristic of all Hong Kong sights is that of a Chinese family on the move, deep with bags and baskets, with poles over its shoulders and multifarious tied parcels, with bewildered children and sharp-eyed crones, standing patiently in line for train or hovercraft, aircraft or ferry. Every day thousands of Hong Kong residents cross the border into China, by train, by boat or on foot over the border, and every day thousands more return, while there is a perpetual flow of emigrants to places far away – to join relatives in San Francisco, to start restaurants in Manchester.

Even within itself the Chinese community is never static. Nothing stays the same! Not long ago rice was the chief product of the New
Territories, now there is hardly a paddy-field left, and as the face of the land constantly changes, so the people too are on the move, changing their jobs, changing their names, changing the way they live. Tankas and Hoklas forsake crafts of the sea to become factory workers, Hakkas fight their way out of the construction sites, farmers become businessmen and people of all ranks and races move out of squatters’ huts into tenements, out of tenements into apartment blocks, out of apartments into villas in the hills. I would guess there is no community in the world in such a state of ceaseless ferment.