Hong Kong, my reintroduction to Asia

Five months ago, when I first set foot in Europe, I wished I had a friend with me around every corner to share every new thing I saw. I’ve pretty much gotten over that now; every new thing I see, I see alone. Everything takes on a romantic haze, like I’m wandering alone in the wild, in a “Crouching Tiger”-like jianghu world.

But when I landed in Hong Kong three days ago, I wished again I had someone with me to witness the jarring discontinuity that Hong Kong represented against five months in Europe. How medieval and Gothic and Art Nouveau buildings hundreds of years old were replaced by towering skyscrapers, how languages that were impenetrable to me were replaced by another language similarly impenetrable but at the same time familiar and reassuring. Then also how there was a surreal, comforting continuity from London to Hong Kong in the place names — Salisbury, Victoria, Edinburgh — and in the zebra crossings, and in the electric plugs that I didn’t have to change. Sometimes, talking to fellow travelers from Canada and England, I forgot, as I often did in Europe, where I was and that I am in fact an entire continent away now.

The first night here, off to meet my Cousin Lindy, I hopped a ferry across the harbor and it was Venice all over again — water all around, the hum of the ferry, and across, the seduction of lights. Only this time, instead of Giudecca, it was Kowloon, and instead of the warm glow of the Santa Maria church dome, it was an undulating rectangular mass of blinking skyscrapers. I was entranced all the same.

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It’s the city of the future. You walk around without ever touching the ground, footbridge to lobby to footbridge, escalator to escalator, walkway to walkway, in a sort of air-conditioned shopper’s paradise. It’s like Hong Kongers are a futuristic metropolitan race of people, elevated permanently above the normal plane of existence, beeping from one place to another with their Octopus cards.

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And yet there are places like Chungking Mansions, a chaotic hulk of a building where African and South Asian entrepreneurs congregate, and also, incidentally, where some of the cheapest accommodation is in the city. It’s got a certain notoriety among Hong Kongers who see it as a shady market of drug dealing and who knows what else. This makes it all the more exciting.

My hostel is run by Taiwanese expats. The bed is too short, so my feet dangle over the edge while I sleep. It’s also abnormally narrow; I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in the last three days partly, I think, because of a constant fear that I might roll over the edge in middle of the night. Attached to the room, quite unexpectedly, is a tiny, unused kitchen. It doesn’t belong there. Or maybe the room doesn’t belong next to the kitchen. There isn’t so much a shower in this place as there is a shower nozzle attached unthinkingly above a toilet, in a bathroom that looks like it’s not meant to house anything other than a toilet. Living in this place is an exercise in patience and flexibility, but it’s also, as my guidebook calls it, one of the most “atmospheric” places I’ve ever lived in.

But let me just add this by way of afterthought: as fun as Hong Kong has been, I’m off now to Shanghai, for what might be an even better time.