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.