Hey it's my first post in Hong Kong, a full week into my time here. It's been a whirlwind month, one that's taken me from the comforts of Washington DC all the way to Hong Kong via Boston and San Francisco, but this past week has been a hurricane at the end of the whirlwind. I find it odd that when one first arrives in a new city, one has the most tasks to do but is least prepared to do them. So after an initial trip to Disneyland, I've spent this week running around the city looking for housing, filling out work forms, setting up bank accounts, cell phone plans, seeing relatives and getting lost. I needed a local bank account to go to work, needed an address to get a bank account, and thought I could use a loophole to get a cell phone plan without an address and set up my bank account with it. Turns out I wasn't able to do that but I was able to set up a bank account with proof my US address and my uncle's local address. I eventually found housing by walking around areas I was interested in and finding real estate agencies on the street, walking in and telling them my price range and needs. Here was perhaps my biggest culture shock.
The real estate market in Hong Kong is perhaps like no other, and certainly my experience craiglisting apartments in DC did not prepare me for this. Space is a premium in Hong Kong (more on this later), the 4th most densely populated sovereign territory in the world, and so apartment prices approach and often exceed Manhattan's prices. A key difference however lies in the more affordable markets. In the United States, real estate operates by location location location. A cheap place usually means a small place in a bad neighborhood. The quality of the place is generally pretty standard. In Hong Kong it's all about quality - the neighborhoods all tend to be pretty safe, especially by my standards. Most of the places I saw were in the range of 250-450 square feet and in older buildings. Older buildings is an important characteristic - structures that are 25-40 years old were built in a different era of Hong Kong, back when it was very much a developing country but already dealing with overcrowding. The people then were used to a cramped way of life. It's difficult for me to describe quality here, but you can see it in the material. Even when the tiles and tables are clean, they look dirty. Many kitchens did not have built in stoves but portable gas or electric ones. One of the bathrooms I went into had a toilet, a hose and a sink - no shower curtains - in a space that wouldn't fit Governor Christie. I was initially surprised and dismayed by what I found. My apartments in Beijing, despite being in a developing country, were more sizable and of better quality than everything I was seeing. In addition, my experience in Hong Kong was that it was a first world city, filled with flashy skyscrapers. Real estate prices in Beijing, though still stingy, are less exorbitant than Hong Kong, and recent growth has led to an influx of new buildings. Those two factors and a friendly exchange rate all contributed to my comfortable living there. Eventually I lucked into a one bedroom apartment in a new building on the 27th floor right by the subway in Kowloon, and after talking the price down by nearly $2,000 HKD a month, the place became affordable. I'm still kinda amazed that I found and rented this place, which is not pictured above.
Anyways in just a week I've realized that my previous impression of Hong Kong had only scratched the elite surface of this city. Though it had served as a respite from mainland China for me in previous summers, it is much closer to mainland China than I had realized. English is considerably less widespread than I thought, inequality more so, and the food actually makes me sick. Anyways I think this is a good time to go into what is Hong Kong for my American friends.
HONG KONG 101 - as requested by Kerry Burke
Hong Kong refers to both an island and a Special Administrated Region of the People's Republic of China. Located off the southern coast of China, Hong Kong is just south of the Tropic of Cancer and just incredibly humid. Today, October 17th, had a high of 83 and a humidity of around 60%. It's modern history starts in 1842 when the island of Hong Kong given to the United Kingdom in perpetuity as a result of the First Opium War, which when seen as a war against drugs won by the drug dealers, seems pretty bizarre now. 1898 saw Britain obtain a 99 year lease on a larger swath of territory adjoining Hong Kong on the Chinese mainland. The ensuing 99 years saw an immense deal of change to the region including the overthrowing of the Qing Dynasty, the end of thousands of years of Chinese dynastic rule, the Republic of China, World War II, the Chinese Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, the rise of the Four Asian Tigers, and the life of Bruce Lee. As a result when it was all said and done, there was a giant gulf between the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong. The 1997 Handover technically only required the UK to hand over the New Territories that it had obtained in 1898 and not the island of Hong Kong. However authorities figured the island couldn't stand on its own and agreed to return all the territory. For decades the way this handover would go down was very uncertain, and many people immigrated from Hong Kong for fear of upcoming Communist rule. Negotiations though resulted in a relatively stable transition that has preserved much of the way of life in Hong Kong.People in Hong Kong have a different system of government, speak a different language, use a different currency, different dialing code, drive on the other side of the road, and have considerably more political freedoms than their mainland counterparts.
About the languages, Hong Kong is primarily a Cantonese speaking area. In older times, all regions of Chinese had their own dialects, most of them unintelligible with each other. When traveling, people could communicate through a standardized written language and even sign language for numbers. After 1949 when the PRC came into power, they instituted a policy of Mandarin, the dialect of Beijing, as the national language. Though Chairman Mao himself did not speak Mandarin, it did come to dominate the country. While they do exist, especially with non-Han minorities, I have yet to meet a PRC citizen who could not communicate in Mandarin. Taiwan, also known as the Republic of China, was also dominated by a minority of mainlanders retreating from the Civil War, who also mandated Mandarin as a national language. Though I've heard of elder people who only knew Taiwanese and Japanese, the language of the colonial power at the time, I have also not met a citizen of Taiwan who does not speak Mandarin. However I've met many a Hong Konger who could not speak Mandarin, and even more who spoke it extremely poorly. It seems that the massive spread of Mandarin pretty much past Hong Kong right by. Cantonese is still widely spoken in the neighboring Guangdong region, as well as by Chinese expat communities in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Canada, the United States and the UK etc. The written language, as mentioned above, is the same for all Chinese dialects. However standard Chinese writing now closely approximates spoken Mandarin and drifts significantly from spoken Cantonese. Also, the PRC adopted a whole new set of characters which they call simplified characters as opposed to traditional characters. Maybe half of the characters were changed, and this was the writing which I learned in college. Taiwan and Hong Kong have not adopted simplified characters, and most overseas communities still use traditional.
English is also spoken in Hong Kong, similar to other former British colonies. While China was closed off from the world between the 50's and 80's, Westerners were much more common in Hong Kong. Just about all signs are bilingual in Chinese and English. English is taught in all schools though not always well. Most ex-pats don't learn any Chinese, and many that do only learn Mandarin. About 40% of Hong Kong can speak it proficiently which is often directly tied to class. It is rarely used as a lingua franca between Chinese, making its use very different from that of India. British English is traditionally in force, with words like lift, car park, colour, and rubbish in vogue. However nowadays America has a stronger influence and American accents probably more common. Hong Kong strives to become a "Biliterate, Trilingual society" and a fair amount of the population has gotten close. Most higher paying jobs, including workers at Disneyland, are expected to be trilingual to some extent.
With the help of British investment, the infrastructure of Hong Kong has really been built up. The most striking features, and my favorite, of Hong Kong are its skyline and transportation. Hong Kong has the most skyscrapers of any city in the world, and the IFC, Bank of China and Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Building are world famous icons. The skyline is pretty dazzling, culminating in a ridiculous synchronized coordinated light show. The subway system, called the MTR, is based off of the London Underground. However constructed about 100 years later, they learned from previous mistakes and created the incredible system we have today. A glass plate separates trains from the platforms, preventing people from falling onto the tracks. Trains come super often, 2 minutes apart even during non-peak hours. Octopus cards have served as touch scan, distance calculating check cards since 1997, and also work in buses, taxis, 7-elevens and many other shops. I know the DC transportation system extremely well and while it's quite good, it just doesn't compare to Hong Kong. I made a trip on Saturday which could be the equivalent of going from Arlington to Silver Spring. On the weekends in DC, you have to budget at least 75 minutes for that. Here I made it in 40. The buses here don't have schedules - instead they just come, faster than 1 in every 10 minutes, which is a huge change from waiting 30+ minutes on sidewalks in Georgetown. An online poll didn't have Hong Kong in the top 9 metros in the world (1. Copenhagen 2. London) which in my mind is a complete travesty. Helped by the small land mass, it's by far the best metro I've ever been on, which includes most of that list. Also, cell phones work perfectly on the subway, which is both weird and awesome.
Hong Kong is also a 3 dimensional city full of underground passages and skywalks and probably a consequence of its brutal summers. With all the walkways you can walk all over downtown Hong Kong around Central, through skywalks and malls, without every stepping away from air-conditioning. This actually involves a difficult adjustment for me because to get around, you need to know not just the streets but also the insides of buildings. In a city like this, GPS maps are of limited use. It's a complete opposite from the vertically challenged DC.
When you're walking around Central and its overly airconditioned structures, you might think you're in a futuristic city. Not even New York is this modern, this clean. When you go into a country club you might think you're in England. When you go deep into Kowloon or out into the New Territories and settle into a Dai Pai Dong, you might think you're in mainland China. It's the same type of restaurants, the same type of trash cans, the same crooked teeth, the same feel that I've yet to learn how to put into words. It's that kind of city, with the highest buildings and the highest Gini coefficient in East Asia. And because of Hong Kong's unique political situation, the poor people of Hong Kong are even less likely to have ever left their hometown than the poor people of China and the US.
After the handover, a relaxed policy of granting rights to its diaspora community resulted in my obtaining a Hong Kong ID card with a full 3 stars. Though I've never lived here, I have more rights than British expats who have been here for over a decade. I don't even need to show my passport at the airport, compared to China where I need to obtain a visa beforehand. My experiences in China had always been very different from my time in Hong Kong. China was legitimately a foreign country, with a language and customs that I only had a rudimentary grasp of. Hong Kong had been a city I flew into to get taken out to dinner by my relatives. Only now that I'm preparing to live here for the indefinite future do I realize how much I have to learn. I do speak the language, which is both extremely useful and rapidly improving. However, again I am not outwardly perceived as a Cantonese speaker, which I find both humorous and bothersome. My American manners and mixed looks shout out foreigner. A couple times, even when I'm speaking to people in Cantonese, but with their preset perceptions, they still don't realize I'm speaking Cantonese and respond to me in English. Due to the statuses of English and Mandarin, Cantonese is very rarely learned as a second language, though more so than I had previously thought. Furthermore, I find myself walking around the streets of Kowloon understanding stray talk unbeknownst to their speakers and find myself in a surreal world. I don't really understand the way of life of the people I'm listening to, yet somehow I understand them. Somehow, the language I learned in my kitchen in Newton, and practiced in the restaurants and shops of Chinatown in DC and heard on my iPod from Australian radio podcasts allows me to communicate with these people on the streets of Hong Kong. It feels almost like a loophole in the system, as if I found a clever way around the general rules of being a foreigner. In addition, I also speak Mandarin in a very different manner than the locals here. Most locals can understand Mandarin a lot better than I can, but butcher their pronunciation and don't know general slang. My unusual and imperfect command of Beijing Mandarin confuses people even more.
In short, it's been a jam-packed and unusual week. There is quite a lot I didn't see coming, and I haven't even started work or frisbee yet. I haven't gone out yet as I don't have any friends here. I've barely even had time for any touristy stuff, and thus have no interesting pictures besides the insides of apartments I saw. But life is an adventure, and this may be unlike any other adventure I've been on.
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