During my five-year stint with IBM Global Business Services, I managed to get myself flown around the world several times - for a total of 200,000 miles or so. I was part of a team developing certain consulting methodologies, and then charged with flying to the far corners of the IBM Earth to help get local teams up to speed on the concepts and methods application.
But who cares about all that now? All I take with me are the trips to so many wonderful cities, glimpsed from a hotel room or cab (or tuk tuk1) to and from IBM offices. Hamburg, Mumbai (where the locals often used the name Bombay), Hanoi (where the locals suggested I visit Saigon someday. Yes, Saigon was the name used…), Sydney (where I spent a few amazing days on the rim of the Megalong), Paris, Beijing, Shenzhen, and - the title of this piece gives away my favorite - the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR). You know it as Hong Kong, but since the 1997 departure of the British government, it has been known as the Hong Kong SAR. For reference, that clarifier also applied to Macau, handed over in 1999 and ending 442 years of Portuguese rule there. Macau was actually the first European settlement in the Far East, as we used to call it.
But Hong Kong? The ill-gotten product of an imperial invasion of Chinese interests that led to a “Century of Humiliation”? Closest to my heart these days. Hong Kong was ceded in 1997, and established as a SAR - with the promise that it becomes part of mainland China after 50 years pass from that date. For those bad at math, we’re not there yet. But China is. After years spent putting pressure for years on local police forces, local activists, and attempting to inject the CCP perspective into classrooms - China dropped all pretense following the 2019-2020 protests and has all but subsumed this gem of a city.
During my visits, even as I walked past Chinese police outposts in the Wan Chai district, the pretense of CCP’s intention was below the surface for the most part. Over lunches, I would ask the young team members what their plans were for the future. Unspoken but obvious was my asking when they planned to leave Hong Kong. Often the answer was “no plans,” but in the same breath they would offer that their parents had already departed. Australia. Germany. Anywhere but the mainland. One young woman told me her perspective was more necessarily short-sighted (and poignant) than most: “I am from the mainland, and I am my parents’ retirement plan. I think it’s why they had me in the first place. Can’t really think past that.”
My observations of Hong Kong are surface only. This is true for me in many cities: I say I love Chicago, but I’ve only really been to what I call Disney Chicago - the North Loop. Business travel to a hundred destinations for me will reveal little more than hotel atria and bars, local food in tourist restaurants, and double-decker bus views of a city (highly recommended). These nuggets are offered as points of interest, as passing as I was through their shadows. I don’t have words for the gentle yet intense Hong Kong population, who to a person told me they weren’t Chinese. They were Hong Kongers, or after a glass of wine; Cantonese.
The dominant dialect is/was Cantonese versus Mandarin in the Southeast regions of China. Chinese dialects are tonal, in that a change of tone indicates meaning. Written Vietnamese includes diacritic marks to indicate what tone is expected, Chinese does not. Further, as it was related to me, Cantonese has nine tones, while Mandarin has five. I hope a native speaker can correct me here if I am mistaken, but the tale told to me was the one has to be raised Cantonese to speak it “correctly.” Also seems Mandarin speakers may be at a bit of a disadvantage in the Southeast regions, where Cantonese has historically been the dominant dialect. Perhaps related, the dominant language in the Southeast city of Shenzhen is now Mandarin. Shenzhen was a small fishing village as recently as 1978, located in Guangdong province across from Hong Kong. As China’s first “special economic zone,” Shenzhen is today a leader in manufacturing (Huawei and Foxconn among others located here) and its economy is a global wonder. Somewhere along the way, the Cantonese dialect gave way to Mandarin among the new population.
Fifty years ago, Hong Kong was the destination for Westerners seeking the finest in bespoke suits. Upon landing there, I was told to head to Shenzhen instead for such wares. It appeared to me that the middle class had been hollowed out by the attraction of a subsidized Shenzhen to its North, leaving an astounding income gap between the wealthy and the servant class behind. Real numbers were hard to obtain, as there was no official poverty level in Hong Kong. I know what I saw on Sundays, as the household staffs gathered in shaded storefronts. Seated on large cardboard pieces and engaging in the only social life they knew on their only day off. This is as it was told to me, but also as I observed.
Once things became difficult there in early 2020, I reached out to a woman who had been my peer in that office. She assured me that she was safe, and had moved to Singapore. That conversation led her to ask if I was safe, a fair question in the moment and an expression of concern that touched me deeply. A week or so later, surgical masks arrived in unmarked boxes to my home, postmarked Singapore. Unmarked as reports of seizures for personal protective gear were rampant. It’s hard to realize how much I’ve forgotten from just four years ago - but my former colleague sussed out that my concern was overlooking the danger that the U.S. was about to experience.
My last evening in Hong Kong, the team asked me how I enjoyed hot pot for dinner. I confessed I had not tried it, and they were aghast. These delightful young people dropped their plans and we all trooped out for a hot pot dinner. I have photos of the evening I will not share to preserve their privacy, but which I treasure all these years later. Ok, just one picture of the table.2
I took hundreds of photos, but will share only a few here. On a driving tour of Hong Kong one weekend, I remarked that the architecture included holes in buildings. I was informed, somewhat offhandedly, that these are termed “dragon gates,” deliberately included so dragons may fly to the water unimpeded by human structures.
Founded in 1832, Jardine Matheson Holdings Limited is a British multinational conglomerate with significant interests in Asia. Their headquarters in Hong Kong is a distinct architecture featuring round windows throughout. The tale told is that Jardines was well known for hard bargaining with Chinese interests throughout its long history. How beloved was Jardines among their negotiators across the table? The punchline of this tale is that among the Chinese the Jardines headquarters is a building with a “thousand assholes.”
Other photos of interest for the truly bored:
The Internet is profoundly unhelpful here, referrring to tuk tuks as “auto rickshaws.” These are motorcycles with a sidecar affixed to the rear.
This photo was first cropped and then I used a screenshot of the cropped photo here. Posting cropped photos does not always prevent someone from retrieving the un-cropped content.
Thank you for this. I’m so sorry that I never got to Hung Kong before it all happened. Hope the people you knew there are still ok now (and that you are as well)
I finally got around to reading this, John. Very interesting, especially as Formula 1 returns to Shanghai to race this weekend for the first time in five years.