Last Days in Hong Kong

My last two days and nights in Hong Kong, SAR (Special Administrative Region) were spent meeting several more of Paul’s friends and, on our last night out on Saturday, visiting Lan Kwai Fong, the sister party district to Wan Chai, known more for its clubs than its pubs. What was supposed to be a long night out on the town, however, turned into a relatively short one, as many of the friends that Paul and I hoped to see stayed in because of exhaustion from pesky jobs and the anticipation of some inclement weather that evening.

Two things struck me about the crowd we were running with that night. One was the incredible variety of ethnicities, nationalities, and backgrounds that made up our group, much less the entire neighborhood surrounding us. And I don’t mean simply on a group level—some folks I met that evening had one Dutch parent and one Columbian one, one white parent and one Cantonese, one Chinese parent and the other was Thai, and there was more. There were kids from New Zealand, from Taiwan, India, Great Britain, Russia, and Australia. The mélange of cultures viewed while barhopping is associated of course with the city’s reputation for facilitating a mishmash of economies in the realm of international finance, and the sudden realization of the unfettered variety of ideas and boundless creativity that such mixing has begotten in Hong Kong left me smiling and inspired.

Secondly, I realized that, despite its variety, Hong Kong was in fact a very small place, and that residing there when all of your friends have made their way off to New York or London or Rotterdam or Paris for jobs could be a frustrating prospect. Having grown up in a place as distinct and as booming as HK seemed to imbue native Hong Kongers with an understandable sense that there’s not many other places out there that can beat their home. Surrounded on one side by the South China Sea and on the other by the People’s Republic of China, one couldn’t help but get a sense of a kind of claustrophobia in the midst of this bizarre place that I’ve described to another friend as a cross between New York and Fiji.

Regardless, however, I have never seen a place quite like Hong Kong. I feel as if the preceding paragraph paints a dour picture of it, but the minuses of the territory are far outweighed by the pluses. Despite the fact that Hong Kong enjoys tremendous economic and political autonomy from China, one can imagine how much pride it must generate in mainland Chinese even today to have regained such a phenomenally prosperous area in 1997.