We know from a popular song that people have left their hearts in San Francisco. I left mine in Hong Kong, along with my children and grandchildren.
Recent events have refocused my thoughts on the former British Crown colony, home to my late husband and myself for more than three decades of our most productive years, and to our two children and two grandchildren even now.
You could say my husband and I “grew up” in Hong Kong. It was our first window to the world outside the Philippines and our de facto classroom on interracial harmony. Where 10 of us coworkers (editorial staff of the now defunct Asia Magazine), might be together as a group, you could almost lay bets that we would consist of nine different nationalities. And that was only because Bert (my husband) and I were both Filipinos.
Hong Kong in the early ’60s was a “village.” The original Kai Tak Airport was little more than a huddle of Quonset huts, vintage relics from World War II. The only link between the Kowloon Peninsula and Hong Kong island (or Victoria) were the Star Ferry and the vehicular ferry, both of which ceased operation around midnight and during typhoons, with the slack taken up by frail, covered craft known as sampan and walah walah, which plied the harbor after hours.
The reclamation, which was to extend the Victoria shoreline to where it is today, had yet to start, and the Star Ferry lay where the Mandarin Hotel now stands (it has since been moved further west, near the site of IFC, the tallest building in Central).
In Wanchai, “Susie Wong” was a palpable presence among topless girlie bars and teahouses that listed the names of bargirls, rather than potables or comestibles on their menus. Up on Conduit Road in the Mid-Levels, the celebrated setting of the hospital scene in the popular Hollywood film “Love is a Many Splendored Thing,” was hanging on to its last few years as the elegant Foreign Correspondents Club before falling to the hammer to make way for a high-rise residential block. Already, Hong Kong was gaining a reputation as a shopping paradise.
I never saw it, but I was told that on Kowloon’s “Golden Mile” (Nathan Road), a tailoring shop directed lady customers to the fitting room with a sign: “Ladies have fits upstairs.” Nearby, a clothing store proclaimed its wares as “Silk and Lenin.” The pig-tailed black-and-whites, especially the “one-foot-kick” general amah, ruled the roost, well before our OFWs took over. Elvis was King in Memphis and around the world, and a bunch of mop- haired youngsters from the UK were about to make musical history as The Beatles.
Those were Camelot Years, carefree and heady with optimism. The specter of 1997 and the expiration of the New Territories’ 100-year lease seemed light years away. A dim and distant future that as yet held no fears for the locals, let alone for the group of young Filipino, Indian, Chinese, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, British, Canadian and American journalists, admin and marketing support staff who assembled there for the launch that summer of the first issue of The Asia Magazine (July 1961).
My first impression of Hong Kong was that people were always in a hurry, always in a rush. They never walked, they strode, they swarmed, they jostled, but they never just walked. I once had to go up and down a lift (elevator) twice, because in-rushing crowds pushed me back before I could get off at my stop. Rude! I thought.
Later, I came to know and appreciate local “Hong Kongers” as a peaceable, law-abiding, and above all, pragmatic lot. They concerned themselves little over politics, and so long as they could get on with their lives, and their jobs, and continue to conduct business, it mattered little who was at the helm.
Then, as now, the bureaucracy was a model of efficiency, with nary a whiff of corruption. In the journalistic profession, even the gift of a fountain pen (pre-ballpoint days) would have raised alarm bells. Especially in government offices, everyone gets the same service with equal facility, efficiency and speed. There used to be suggestion boxes where one could lodge complaints. Yes, they were the envy of balikbayans like me, who grumbled at waiting for hours unattended, bristled at being told to come back the following day, and blanched at the sight of rice cookers on office desks well before noon break in some government offices.
I have never known a more trusting breed. I once paid with a check for the purchase of a small item from a pushcart and for my taxi fare when I found myself without cash in my wallet.
Our first office in Hong Kong was at Queen’s Theatre Building in Central. Right next to it was/is a little alley called Theatre Lane where the original Jimmy’s Kitchen used to be (now the site of Shanghai Tang store). A virtual Hong Kong institution, the prestigious non-Chinese restaurant welcomed us to sign for our meals there (pre-credit card days)—with no references whatsoever. The bills were brought to our office and presented to us at the end of each month!
There are few other places in the world as safe as Hong Kong, though I am told things have changed since the influx of visitors from the Mainland after 1997. But even today, women traveling alone in a taxi at say, 2 in the morning, have little reason to fear for their safety. There is only one other place I know of where one might relax one’s guard even more—Cyprus. (I am told by my sister, who once lived there with her Reuters correspondent husband, that there was a time people didn’t even bother to lock up their kitchen doors at night, in case some passerby might be hungry and need to come in for a snack. Now, that is utopia!)
It says a lot about how Hong Kongers viewed the impending reunification with China pre-1997, that sufficient numbers of locals fled to populate and raise property values overseas to such an extent that some communities came to be known, for instance, as “Hongcouver” (for Vancouver)! Of course, many of these would-be émigrés promptly returned to Hong Kong, on the promise of “One Country, Two Systems.”
And that is where matters stand today. The objective and aspiration of Occupy Central and the peaceful and incredibly disciplined “Umbrella Revolution” is for China to honor its promise of “One Country, Two Systems.” That’s not really too much to ask, is it?