A Hong Kong Love Letter

New York City is the skyline of my past, and Hong Kong is the skyline of the present. But I live in Shanghai, which is the skyline of the very near future.



One night a few years ago I found myself hurtling through the soft Hong Kong night in a taxi, when I saw the bleary lights of the endless New Territories high-rises for the first time. I was on my way to Central from the airport, and as I hummed past these Cantonese corridors of humanity they came into focus, blinking and twinkling on either side of me. I cracked the window and was awestruck. Who lives there? I asked myself. What are they doing? I wanted to know.
I have never had that feeling about Shanghai. In fact I have often wondered, how can a city of twenty million souls have so little soul? And how can a small, overcrowded archipelago of concrete and jungly rocks have so much of it?
Having spent the best part of my formative years living on the jagged hemline between Chinatown and the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I got to know the habits – the smells and sounds - of an extended Hong Kong. In those days you never heard Mandarin spoken downtown, only Cantonese. The first time I ever heard Mandarin was on cable TV, and I got into an argument with my brother, who said it was ‘Chinese’. But this shushing, fluttering of birds’ wings didn’t sound anything like the long vowels or comedic groaning we heard from Bruce Lee and Billy Chong every Saturday morning on Kung Fu Theater. Somebody had changed the channel.
The Chinatown of my youth was the Pearl River Market on Canal Street, an inscrutable emporium filled with silks, teak wood and porcelain, and the Rosemary theater on East Broadway, where it joins forces with the Bowery and pours over the Manhattan Bridge; a place where you could walk in and be alone sometimes in the afternoon, watching a Kung Fu dazzler or a whacky screwball comedy. And there were endless jingly, smoky little shops selling Double Happiness and Year of the Tiger posters, along with huge red marriage candles and temple incense; a million little tsotchkes that snake charmed me and fired the wanderlust of my imagination. It was a constantly evolving place, Chinatown, and even though I lived there for almost twenty years I never got bored of walking around its grimy, rat-trap streets. Every single day I saw something that I’d never noticed before.
My morning ritual always involved a stroll around the neighborhood; down to the news stand for the New York Post I would walk in my sweat pants and sandals, by the F train at East Broadway and Canal. They had Hong Kong Playboy and Penthouse magazines there, and as if that wasn’t exotic enough they also had an array of brightly colorful boxes containing wild elixirs and unknown potions behind the counter. Being a man of habits they knew me well in there, and one day when I went to pay for my paper the sharp eyed lady who ran the place saw I had a cut on my hand where my cat had scratched me. In a flash she produced a bottle of mysterious brown liquid and rubbed some on the wound, and it smelled strange, tangy and sweet. I don’t remember if it healed the cut any faster, but I searched all of that afternoon looking for the formula, and finally found it in a cramped traditional medicine shop on Pell Street. The psychedelic sixties poster of its label read: Wong To Yick Wood Lock Medicated Oil.
After buying the paper I would usually cross the street and enter the Wing Shing restaurant on the corner of Rutgers Street, where they had the best gai mei bao (coconut buns) in all of Chinatown. Once, I had bought a small green jadeite frog on a bright red string and was wearing it as a bracelet when the little round man behind the counter spied it and asked where I got it. His eyes were twinkling as told him, this is Chinatown, it’s easy to find these good luck charms everywhere. He laughed and said how could I be sure it was good luck, as he opened his little black marble eyes wide. Remembering the story the lady I bought it from told me, I said ‘Well the frog is good luck - for money jumping into your pocket’. He was a moon faced man and he had a habit of flicking his unreasonable salt and pepper hair back into place with little jerks of his head as he spoke. He now reared back and chuckled deeply, winking at me as he said ‘How you know the mo-nay not jumping out your pocket? Maybe is a bad luck for youuu!’
The first time I went to Hong Kong, many years later, it instantly felt like home. Walking along the busy streets I smelled the famous Five Flowers Tea brewing in giant brass cauldrons; there in the windows of the innumerable chemist’s shops was the same Wood Lock oil, plus a million other potions and lotions in their old school floral boxes. The lady at the coffee shop laughed and elbowed her friend when I asked her for gai mei bao on that first morning, visibly pleased that I knew the local way to say it. It was a dream, it was déjà vu; going to a place for the first time that you already knew intimately. It was a kung fu movie.
The first time I landed in Shanghai a few years later was also like a dream, a very different dream. A dream in which an un-hurried, tanned DJ who’d been living happily in Bangkok’s sunny ennui for three years steps out of an airport into freezing grey March air in a short sleeved shirt, and sees a hundred odd people jostling in line for the taxis. After finally getting in one (wow, they weren’t kidding…people really don’t speak any English) I spent the next ten minutes trying, with increasing depths of desperation to pronounce the address of my friend’s apartment. The driver: How can I describe the driver? Unhelpful seems to not do him justice, and honestly it wouldn’t be quite right. After the first five attempts, Ruijin Lu…Ray-Jin Lu…RAYJIN LU! He calmly invited me to get the hell out of his taxi. ‘Ting bu dong!’ he screamed at me (I would find out later he was only speaking at normal volume) ‘I don’t understand you!’ Miraculously the taxi queue attendant stepped in and translated (a veteran of atonal Laowai attempts at guidebook Chinese), as he understood the address - hardly an exotic one right in the center of town. Amazed and confused as I was (the flight, the fight, the bone-chilling air) I kept thinking, as we pulled out that I’d said it exactly the same way as the taxi queue man. I would learn quickly that with Mandarin it’s all in the tones.
As the taxi came careening and screeching out of the gate, jostling with all the other dirty, squeaking vehicles, I realized in one all-knowing instant that China would be nothing like anything I had ever known before. To begin with my driver (fiftyish, wild-haired, in a shabby, tea stained captains jacket with, ironically, filthy white gloves on) was smoking and had his window open. Through a combination of charades and semaphore signals I got him to roll it up. The view outside the taxi’s window leant itself to my growing sense of unease. The hopeless February sky was the color of a dirty dishrag, and some cruel celestial hand was wringing it out, producing sooty pellet-sized explosions of rain that hit the cab with velocity and vengeance – producing a sound not unlike a BB gun being shot at a tin can. Ting, Ping, Ping…Ting. At first I assumed it was just a foggy day, and that was the reason I couldn’t see any countryside or skyline. But I soon began to realize (the odiferous air, my stinging eyes) that it was smog that was obscuring my view, and a nasty dose of it at that. My excitement at finally being in The People’s Republic of China was quickly giving way to serious doubts, and a simmering sense of dread. Oh, and the driver was now smoking again, and motioning to me with a smile – did I want the window up or down?
Things got better once I’d settled into my friend’s old lane house apartment in the French Concession area. I gradually began to find the rhythm and flow of Shanghai life – often fast and uninviting, but also filled with moments of well-worn indolence. I discovered wonders like Fuxing Park, with it’s Qigong nutters walking backwards and banging their heads into tree trunks, or fifty-something fox-trotters dancing to everything from Big Band to Classical to Disco, and the shrewdly contested Chinese chess matches and card games, with their large attendant peanut galleries. Yes, there was much to this Shanghai – much that was new and (more interestingly) much that was old. The dilapidated Art Deco buildings around Ruijin Lu were a revelation – allowing me to imagine that I alone was discovering them, and eliciting great opium dreams of future purchase and rehabilitation. The locals were easily as neurotic as any New Yorkers I’ve ever known. In my first two weeks in Shanghai I saw: Two men in pajamas fighting on the sidewalk, each carrying a small dog in one hand, and shoving with the other; an elderly couple waiting for the light to change in matching electric blue pajamas holding a white rabbit; a heavily made-up woman coming out of a salon in proud clashing animal prints and knee-high orange leather go-go boots getting into her brand new BMW and then refusing to pay the hapless parking attendant his ten yuan and almost running him over as she peeled out. She evidently felt she had paid enough already at the dealership.
There is also a lot about Shanghai that I will probably never reconcile myself to, and to be honest, that I will never understand. It is a city with a long history of bandits, millionaires and con men, and that’s still what makes it tick today. It worships money in a way that makes all other forms of human endeavor seem shabby and useless – the arts, history, social programs, education – are all second class citizens in Shanghai. The Shanghainese understand this about their city and themselves, and are renowned throughout China for being ruthless business people. It’s a city of high trickery, great fortunes, humor, striving and sorrow…surely it has its own soul, but I find that it lacks soul, because that kind of soul and money almost never go hand in hand. It’s tell-tale that the company I own is in Hong Kong, but I live and work in Shanghai. Shanghai is where the money is now, but for me Hong Kong has all the soul.