Once Upon a Time There Have a Place Called Hong Kong

When I left Hong Kong in 2016, I wanted to write a love letter to the city. I wanted to wax poetically about the skyscrapers, the ocean, the jungle, the dim sum, the mountains, the cultural mishmash. But as I started typing, it felt wrong. The words were so sappy and my perspective felt too shallow. So much had already been said about this place, what could I add? 

Since then I have lived in three other cities and visited dozens of others while Hong Kong has come under existential attack. What once felt over-the-top now felt therapeutic, and the time away allowed me to offer a knowledgeable yet outsider perspective. With the intense protests beginning in 2019 followed by the pandemic, during which strict quarantine requirements for arrivals reaching as much as 21 days were enforced, Hong Kong became this far-off unreachable place where no one went in and only bad news came out. 

They finally dropped the quarantine in October 2022, and I returned in December. Though the intense Covid protocols had turned the airport into a medical site, the consistency of the city amazed me. That simple jingle of the MTR (subway) brought out a feeling of internal dissonance, as my soul struggled to reconcile how this MTR station had operated unchanged while I had changed so much, like when you return to your high school and see strange young faces doing what you used to do. Returning to find the city so resilient after several traumatic years and aware that the future may call for further resilience gave me some courage to at least put out that love letter.

I believe there are hundreds of cities in the world where residents who love their home can argue in good faith that they live in the best place on earth. When you get to know the nooks and crannies, the founding mythologies, the juicy political scandals, the hole-in-the-wall restaurants, the hidden walking paths, the generational stories of family-owned businesses, the cheapest happy hour deals and the best sunset view, you feel a sense of earned personal attachment. Each city has its own story that makes it like nowhere else.

Even given this caveat, Hong Kong objectively stakes a singular claim. It is a true creation of merging civilizations, the type of place that made the English language steal a word like entrepôt. Hong Kong has as complicated a colonial legacy as anywhere, but is unlike most former colonies where either the indigenous culture was dominated or dominates. In Hong Kong the colonized Chinese maintained an independent identity but English law, customs and know-how were thoroughly integrated. Many aspects of English rule, starting with its origins in the Opium Wars, remain despicable, but the small fishing settlements did soon transform into a major outpost for maritime trade. Not only did many more Chinese move in, but many whose ethnicities had left them essentially stateless - Armenians, Jews, Parsis alike - found a home in Hong Kong. Their legacy is largely forgotten today but remains in institutions and place names, like Kadoorie Hill, Mody Road, Chater House. Hong Kong was a place of all nations and no nation, a stateless city state.

Hong Kong retained geographic continuity with Cantonese culture, even after China became the People’s Republic of China and legal migration became limited. During the turbulent early years of the PRC, Hong Kong benefitted as a haven of relative stability and its population nearly tripled from 1.75 million in 1947 to 5 million by 1981, driven largely by migration from the mainland. The migrants found a capitalist society with a bustling harbour and accentuated it with industry and manufacturing. Aided by English rising to global lingua franca status, entrepreneurial people of many nations found their way to Hong Kong.

And so Hong Kong became this city of contradictions. Its cityscape inspired futurist films like Blade Runner, while its preservation of Buddhist rituals and Tin Hau temples make it a bastion of traditional Chinese culture. It’s a city where you can walk from a luxury mall allergic to blemishes directly into a filthy back alley with exposed pipes and chefs on their cigarette break. It’s a finance hub that still runs on cash. It’s a city operating at breakneck speed but filled with slow walkers. It runs on the most intuitive, efficient subway system but also a semi-lawless minibus with its own special jargon. It's filled with skyscrapers of steel and glass built using bamboo. It’s half concrete jungle, half actual jungle. It’s overwhelmingly cosmopolitan and also 95% Chinese. It can feel so global and simultaneously so parochial. It's a place where many people find freedom, despite not being particularly free.

Immersed amidst all those contradictions, living in Hong Kong is inescapably a love-hate relationship. The incessant fighting through crowds and the cost of the cramped housing gets to everyone, and these two struggles join forces when air conditioner condensation (aka building juice) drips over you on a Mong Kok sidewalk. Many Hong Kongers are fiercely pragmatic to the extent that dreams are not entertained. Sometimes it seems all people talk about is buying a flat. It is a society particularly glued to their phone, that loves the pre-packaged tour industry. And it's easy to walk into a dinner party where everyone works in finance and complains about their job.

New York has this belief that dreamers move there and non-believers move out - “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” However, for most born in Hong Kong, there’s really no moving to the 'burbs. Thus Hong Kong has to cater to everyone, including those who don't like the urban busyness as well as the elderly and disabled. Communities like Lamma Island and Sai Kung offer rural camaraderie just beyond the shadows of the skyscrapers, while top-notch facilities and a sense of community obligation make Hong Kong a good place to grow old.

After years I'm still amazed how much there is to do in Hong Kong. The skyline view from Tsim Sha Tsui Kowloon-side is the best in the world, matched possibly only by its reflection from the island-side. Central is a concentrated block of the fanciest shopping and offices mixed in with historical gardens, government buildings and prisons. There are kilometers of continuous elevated walkways through past Admiralty, even more kilometers of electric trams locals call the Ding Ding that somehow are still useful. There's a Times Square in Causeway Bay,  sketchy nightlife solicitation in Wan Chai, beach and market life in Stanley, artists working in warehouses in Aberdeen, a chill waterfront bar street in Sai Wan Ho and 100 trails from the Peak to Shek O. There's betting on weekly horse races in Happy Valley, and a jetfoil to Macau for even more intense gambling.  And that's just Hong Kong island! 

In Kowloon and the New Territories, collectively making up >90% of Hong Kong's total area, there might be 1,000 shops in the kilometer and a half between Yau Ma Tei and Prince Edward via Mong Kok. There's history and Thai food in Kowloon City, a Buddhist complex near Diamond Hill, and the former airport in Kai Tak that doubled as the endpoint of an aerial obstacle course. There's a street that sells goldfish, a street that sells toilet seats, one that sells dried seafood, one that sells kitchen tiles, one that sells elaborate funeral provisions, another that sells flowers and a bunch that sell electronics. There are scores of hiking trailheads accessible by public transit, and when it gets too hot and humid to hike, it's junk boat season. There are 10,000 Buddhas in the hills overlooking Sha Tin and the highest bar in the world in the ICC overlooking the whole city. There are African bistros, great South Asian food and the sketchiest backpacker stories all within the legendary Chungking Mansions. There are waterfalls and infinity pools hidden in the wilderness. And I can't even get started with the food for fear of salivating over my keyboard. Despite all this, swarms of tourists visit just for Disneyland.

For multinationals like me, Hong Kong was/is a dream city. Everyone could find bits of culture that made them comfortable and bits that piqued their curiosity. It was routine to attend at a large gathering where everyone had lived in multiple countries, where everyone spoke multiple languages. It never ceased to amaze me the range of people with whom Hong Kong resonated. The success and brilliance of Hong Kong was a celebration of internationalism itself, a celebration which has come under attack with the recent global rise of nationalism, a rise which has rendered Hong Kong a pawn in a much larger contest.

On my recent trip, I found in Tai Kok Tsui this graffiti saying "Once upon a time... There have a place called Hong Kong" from which I've taken the title for this post. I found it a simple and encapsulating work of sidewalk penmanship. Hong Kongers have never taken that their way of life for granted, aware that their city could be undone by political turmoil at any minute. Nor have they always written English with correct grammar. Once upon a time, there have a place called Hong Kong, and the world was better off for it.

Tourism beyond the Gram

The body heat remains far more vivid than any of the books. If I spent too much time at any particular shelf, someone from the swarm of other tourists would bump by and spread their warmth, and so I kept moving, vainly trying to find my own space within that crowded bookstore. I had thought the Livraria Lello in Porto would be a cool little find, a travel suggestion I'd come across in a random article about the most beautiful bookstores in Europe. Bookstores are fun! Never did it cross my mind that so many people might be interested in reading.

But they weren't interested in reading per se. The Livraria made the list because of its ornate cladding, the elegant gold accentuating its shelves, the central spiral staircase that branches and merges and branches back out, and its association with Harry Potter - JK Rowling once lived in Porto and reportedly frequented the bookstore. As a result, the Livraria Lello fame has skyrocketed, transforming it essentially into a small museum. Entering the store/museum now requires pre-purchasing a $5 ticket and still queuing for a long while. Once inside, all the tourists mill around undertaking the Herculean challenge of trying to photograph the bookstore's glory with as few human distractions as possible.

The Livraria is emblematic of Porto as a whole. Portugal's second largest city located in the country's north, Porto has contributed much to the world in its two thousand years of history, notably port wine. The Ribeira, the beautiful medieval square along the river caters entirely to tourists, is teeming with hotels, restaurants, bars, street performers and vendors. With bright orange tiled roofs, sweeping arching bridges and overelaborate gold-gilded clock towers, Porto might be the most beautiful city I've ever visited. But as I watched groups of Italians and French taking selfies, I pondered about how this charm came about. It must have originally evolved naturally as commerce grew along the square, but it was clear that today's neighborhood is artificially maintained to look beautiful and to encourage travelers to part with their money. The economic activity that spawned the Ribeira can ironically no longer continue, displaced by its own success.

Tourism as an economic driver has been called the devil's bargain. As the Ribeira neighborhood of Porto attracted more and more tourists, it became more profitable for businesses to cater towards tourists rather than residents. Another store, the Casa Oriental, encompasses this change. Founded in 1910, its storefront plaque depicts a "native" serving something to his colonial master and yeah somehow they've neither changed that nor its name. What they have changed is what the Casa sells, originally stocking groceries and meats but now peddling factory-made chocolate bars, canned sardines and kitschy trinkets. Tourists got a place to bring back souvenirs - locals lost their source for cooking dinner. This precipitates a feedback loop, causing locals to move out and clearing space for more hotels and tourism-based businesses. Eventually the area becomes so filled with out-of-towners ambling slowly, taking photos, not speaking your language and getting so rowdy late at night that no one wants to live there year-round. Additionally, the place becomes generically touristy, no longer displaying the daily culture of the Portuguese.

As I admired the river and soaked in the Portuguese summer, I felt a pang of guilt at contributing towards this devil's bargain. Was this an inevitable economic evolution, or was it a result of a fixable human flaw? I think there is a bit of both.

Porto, and the Livraria in particular, are extremely photogenic. Photos have become the dominant way of sharing information through our society.  Facilitated by Instagram, cool photos are how tourist sites effectively market themselves and how travelers share their trips. I don't find this alone intrinsically bad, and I personally love taking interesting pictures and sharing them on Instagram. But after arriving at the bookstore and getting the best shots I could, I was left wondering "what now?" I had little tangible interest in the Livraria other than its superficial beauty, and now I was bothered by all the other people in that cramped space. The photos ironically portrayed a special experience, belying my annoyance and discomfort at the time. I realized that the popularity in sites like the Livraria had blown up in recent years precisely because of Instagram and targeted advertising. Photogenic places that successfully attracted tourists then organically got more social media attention, thereby attracting more interest and more Instagram posts. 

Planning for Instagram has taken a disproportionate role in my travels. There are many great reasons to travel, and visual pleasure is only one of them. Sounds, smells, conversations and discovering different customs make traveling to new places so fulfilling, yet these are so difficult to share. There are even beautiful sights that don't fit neatly within a camera frame. Videos and stories can do their part, but most of the best aspects of travel cannot be truly shared. 

Part of the virtue of travel is growth by going far outside one's comfort zone, whether it's developing villages in Myanmar, rural Idaho, or Fort Lauderdale. I've found great joy in traveling to places to learn more about their history, with no clearer example than my Bosnia trip. Going there a week after Porto, the types and numbers of tourists I met in Sarajevo was juxtaposing. It seems everyone there was curious to know more about the unique history and present, not just to capture great photos. Furthermore, there's joy in simply satisfying the curiosity of what an unknown place is like. Sometimes, the joys of traveling manifest only after the trip. Now when I meet someone from Bosnia, we can more meaningfully connect. I'd likely have a less interesting conversation with someone from Porto because I only learned superficial things about the city.

If we are all collectively over-emphasizing shareable photos, we will find ourselves rubbing elbows with strangers and over-taxing a local ecosystem. Beautiful places are certainly worth visiting - I don't regret going to the Livraria bookstore, and it's likely that I would have regretted not going. The crowd was an experience in itself, and it ultimately inspired this post. My main takeaway is that anything pretty is likely to be popular, and it's worth counterbalancing these with other places that pique your interest. A little genuine curiosity and research can go a long way towards making a trip more distinctive and memorable.