HONG KONG

When you're infatuated with someone, all of their banal details become interesting.  Their nervous tics and arbitrary preferences are somehow charming, and boring details about their everyday life are fascinating.  This happened to me last month, not with a person but with a city, Hong Kong.

Over the past few years Hong Kong was swirling around in my brain, always near or at the top of the destination bucket list.  I've always loved places with some kind of abnormal status, suspended in geopolitical limbo.  For example, what's so special about cities like the Vatican and Monaco that they wound up with nation-state status?  Or how did a country like Lesotho, which is completely surrounded by South Africa, come to exist?

Among all of these obscure locations, Hong Kong is one of the most engaging to think about.  This is partly because it's still in a period of flux today, the last major colony to escape Britain's empire, only to be tossed back to an authoritarian and illiberal China.

In 1898, the Qing Dynasty government was forced to give the British a 99-year lease of Hong Kong.  In 1997, the British honored their agreement to return control of the city to China, under the condition that Hong Kong maintain some of its British-style political and economic systems for the next 50 years.  Now, about 20 years into that half-century of transition, Hong Kongers are still reluctant to accept their new relationship with China.  Pro-democracy protests known as the Umbrella Revolution took place throughout 2014 after China's National People's Congress decided that Hong Kong's chief executive would be chosen by China's Central Government.

According to Wikipedia, Hong Kong has the 35th largest economy in the world, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange is the world's seventh largest. The benefits of control over this metropolis are self-evident, especially for a developing country like China.  The city is like a glimmering coin, being flicked in slow motion from one government official to another, with the millions that actually live there having little to no say in the matter, only able to sit along for the ride.  I was excited to meet some of these people.

When I arrived, I did find myself infatuated.   Everything, even the everyday, was interesting, simply by virtue of the fact that it was Hong Kong.  The little details of life were as important to the experience as the tourist sights.  The brightly-colored paper money devoid of any political figures, the strangely shaped coins, the lack of menus at dim sum, and the Octopus Card, to be used for bus, tram, and subway transport, as well as in convenience stores.  The trams, a vestige of the past and a delight for tourists, but also a convenient way for locals to get up and down Hennessey Street.  The picturesque place names from the colonialist era: Percival Street, Causeway Bay, Possession Street, Hollywood Road, Victoria Peak and Harbor.

Part of the reason for my awed reaction was that I was coming from Harbin, in Northern China.  Where Harbin was cold and dry, Hong Kong was comfortably warm and just a bit humid.  The few, leafless trees of urban Northeast China's winter can't compare to the lush greenery of Hong Kong.  And while the squat buildings of Harbin were uniform and drab, Hong Kong's pastel-colored residential high-rises and steel-and-glass office buildings soared high above me.

But even when not compared to a lesser city, Hong Kong shines.  The people are friendly and multilingual, the city's transportation is well-organized, and the tourist sites are well-maintained and interesting.  But more importantly, it seemed to me that if Hong Kong suddenly didn't have any tourists, it wouldn't feel all that different.  The trams would roll along, the markets would bustle, the financiers would finance, and the horses would run.  I loved this, and I loved the feeling of the city more than any tourist activity, the simple feeling of being in a place that people from all over Asia look to for opportunity, a place that has seen titanic shifts of power including the effective end of history's largest empire, a place that sees momentous amounts of trade come and go from the harbor, day in and day out.  In a word, it felt like planet earth revolved around me for a week.  I've only ever gotten that feeling in one other city, New York. 

Also, it's just so photogenic.

Hong Kong Island's Northern coast, mostly reclaimed land, is choked with buildings.  But as you move away from Victoria Harbor toward the center of the Island you gain altitude, the slopes steepen, the mostly residential buildings are interspersed with patches of trees and shrubs, and the streets are quieter.

On my first day in the city I found myself mostly walking around Sheung Wan, which is one of those quieter, more residential areas.  Sheung Wan wound up being one of my favorite spots to have a stroll.  It's a quaint neighborhood that was witness to a 150-year-old Sino-British cultural estuary. It’s where the British first landed after the first Opium War, and the local Man Mo Temple was often the site of conflict mediation between members of the two highly segregated Chinese and British communities.

Sheung Wan today is home to traditional Chinese medicine shops, ancestral temples, and antique stores with objects dating back to the Ming dynasty (authenticity questionable). It also has trendy art galleries, millennial-friendly brunch spots, and upscale/eco-conscious/fair-trading cafes. After walking around the neighborhood for about an hour, I realized I was falling for a highly gentrified district.

In the earliest days of British colonialism, Sheung Wan became the core of the local ethnic Chinese community, while the British largely kept themselves away. The Sheung Wan community remained mostly Chinese for a while, but in recent decades its local charm and character has attracted wealthy residents, many of them westerners working in the city.

This becomes painfully clear at night, when a few streets just east of Sheung Wan, called Lan Kwai Fong, fill up with twenty-somethings, many of them expats and tourists, for debauchery extending into the wee and even the not-so-wee hours.  I walked through this scene on one of my last nights with phrase “cities are becoming playgrounds for the rich” replaying in my mind’s ear.

This made me think about my own role as a tourist in the city.  I don't think that as a tourist I needed to feel responsible for the rising rents of gentrification, and the hardship they can bring on poorer residents.  But as a tourist who visited that area and sat in a cafe in Sheung Wan, or had a drink in Lan Kwai Fong, I couldn't help but feel like I was supporting some of the symptoms of gentrification, the cultural loss and imposition of Western values and preferences.  I go back and forth over whether these are valid concerns that I have, or if they are overblown worries of a bleeding-heart liberal.  Part of what makes it difficult to figure out are Hong Kong's complicated relationships with Great Britain and China.  I also simply don't know what locals really think about what's happening in places like Sheung Wan, whether they like it or not, and if their perspectives on rising rents, increasing Western presence, and changes in socioeconomic status of residents are even what I might expect them to be.

Hong Kong does have many dark sides, like a huge income gap and problems providing its entire population with proper housing.  But this confrontation with gentrification and cultural loss was what broke the city's near infallible charisma for me, probably because it was the most visible problem and the one I felt most complicit in.  Sheung Wan did end up one of my favorite parts of the city, which I still hate to admit to myself.  And I think that many of the reasons I like it are effects of gentrification (cleanliness, low noise level, cafes...), which I hate to admit even more.  Seeing that side of the city dealt a deathblow to the infatuation.  But infatuations with anything, cities or people, always die somehow.