Hong Kong Fragments

     I am sitting on a plane to Hong Kong. The trip is long, 21 hours, so to pass the time I wonder what I am doing on a plane to Hong Kong.
     The proximate cause is my having bought myself a ticket, of course, but I'm not sure why I've done that. I have given friends and family who asked a variety of conflicting answers - looking for work, visiting the people I met my last time there, taking a last look before China takes over.
     I arrange these replies, each partly true, so prettily that at first I don't notice that I don't really have any clear idea why I am going.

Hail Brittania, Brittania Rules the Waves:
Emulating their wild success with the East India Company, Britain commissions several companies to operate in Asia with their imprimatur. In China, these large companies, called hongs, operate trade routes in the South China Sea, including the routes servicing the increasingly lucrative opium trade.
     The largest of these hongs, Hong Kong, also becomes the name of the island directly south of Kowloon peninsula, home to the busiest deep water port in all of Asia.

Hong Kong is like New York died and went to heaven. It is more crowded, more driven, more frankly capitalist. There are more 24 hour stores, more neon, better transportation, the harbor is still a going concern, and if you want good dim sum you don't have to take a cab. (If you want good dim sum, you barely have to take a walk.)
      Hong Kongers are gadget-crazed and addicted to contact, or at least to contacts. There are more pagers, more cell phones, more miles of fiber optic cable per capita than anywhere else in the world. The competition for communication is so fierce that cell phone companies have put antennae in the subways, so being even briefly in transit won't put you out of touch.
      There are downsides - Hong Kong is far more polluted than New York; if your Cantonese is not of the best, the "point at what looks interesting" method of ordering in restaurants can have you ingesting more foods composed mainly of pig entrails than you might consider propitious; and anything you get attached to may be destroyed by the Communists in 18 months.

Even on the plane, I am still imagining ways this trip might yet fall through - I have forgotten my passport, I need a visa and don't have one, I have neglected to confirm my hotel and will have no place to stay. None of these things happen - the landing in Hong Kong is sublimely beautiful and aerodynamically improbable, flying in over the flattened mountains of Guangdong, an almost 90 degree turn over Kowloon, and a landing into a canyon of buildings so close to the runway that you can quite literally see into people's apartments, we stop and out my window is the giant "Double Happiness" billboard.
      Later, dazed from the almost day-long plane ride, I am standing in the 70 degree November weather and waiting in line for a cab, I recognize their distinctive red color, it is the first thing that tells me I am really here, and I begin to laugh.
      Suddenly I feel almost giddily light, I have arrived and what's more, perhaps what's most important, is that having left the tender care of Cathay Pacific airways, no one, absolutely no one, knows where I am.

The word for Westerners is gweilo, ghost people, and there is a gweilo rut running through Hong Kong. There are Western bars, Western restaurants, Western movie houses, Western neighborhoods, there are pubs called things like "The Bull and the Bear" where British traders can actually have bangers and mashers at lunch, a Scottish bloke I know who works there as a DJ actually dislikes Chinese food, he tends to eat at a tapas bar when he goes out.
      Most of all, there is a Western way of doing things, separated from the Chinese way by only the thinnest of social conventions. I often took the Star Ferry, which runs between Hong Kong island and the Kowloon penninsula, and I was surprised at how few other gweilo I saw taking it. I assumed they were taking the subway under the harbor.
      One day I discovered that the ferry also had an upper deck with a separate entrance. The lower deck fare is HK$1.40, and the upper deck is HK$1.80 (roughly 20 and 25 cents, respectively.) Upstairs, in an environment not much different to the naked eye, were the gweilo I had been missing. The nickel's with of difference in fare was enough to preserve the social distinction between steerage and First Class.

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