 click to enlarge I spent so many afternoons in this room 20 years ago, I can still smell the musty fragrance of the building.
When you’re halfway across the world and 19 years old, it’s nice to have a place to go where you can feel at home.
I lived across the quad from the Office of International Studies Programmes (OISP), so I came here on a daily basis to check my mailbox (the only way of communicating with friends and family back in the US; I think I received a phone call once that whole year) and to hang out with other foreign students on my program.
OISP provided a great introduction to Hong Kong. I still remember their thorough orientation (day trips to Ping Chau and Aberdeen, a night tram tour of Hong Kong Island, and a necessary excursion to the Immigration Tower in Wanchai to apply for HK ID cards).
In this photo I’m passing through Hong Kong the summer I finished the program. My dad and I were on a two-day layover from Thailand, en route to Shanghai, and I was wearing one of three outfits I lugged around Asia that summer, along with my Lands End man bag.
 click to enlarge Yesterday I read with horror about the hostage stand-off in Manila, where a disgruntled ex-cop hijacked a Hong Kong tour bus. It sounded like something you’d see on a Hong Kong movie set.
And then something went terribly wrong and 8 tourists were murdered.
Like everyone else, I shudder; these lives could have been spared had negotiations fared better.
When I first arrived in Hong Kong and started wandering the streets of Central and Tsim Sha Tsui, I saw travel agency ads for trips to places like Vietnam, Koh Samui, and Bali, all within close proximity to Hong Kong. But other ads listed destinations like Johannesburg, Sydney, Cairo, and New York.
As I met friends and got to know people better, I saw something in Hong Kong that I didn’t see back home in the US: a universal love of travel.
Sure, many Americans have passports full of exotic stamps. But in the US, you need money to travel. That’s not the case in Hong Kong.
It wasn’t unusual for office clerks or people residing in public housing estates to jet off to Kenya or Istanbul for a couple weeks. Package tours are pretty economical in Hong Kong, but they still cost a couple months’ worth of salary. I used to think people in Hong Kong were so open-minded because of their colonial history. But after I got to know the place and people better better, I learned it also had to do with their love of travel.
This tragedy in Manila shouldn’t have happened. It certainly shouldn’t have ended the way it did. The tourists just wanted to see another country, to enjoy the food and the culture, and to build bridges between the two countries, which have a special relationship (Hong Kong is home to more than 100,000 Filipino domestic workers).
Of course, this tragedy could have happened anywhere. Things like this occur so often in the US that they fail to make headlines anymore.
 click to enlarge I took this photo 20 years ago next Monday, standing in Lok Ma Chau, the scenic border town with mainland China.
There’s not much going on here.
Back then, no one knew what would happen in China. Tiananmen had just happened a year before and Deng Xiaoping had yet to take his southern “to get rich is glorious” tour.
Before China opened to the west, foreign tourists flocked to Lok Ma Chau to get a glimpse of the mainland. Even in 1990, a full decade after the US normalized relations with the mainland, there was still a forbidden allure to the place, even for those of us who’d already traveled there.
Several years after I left Hong Kong (and before I returned for a second stint), I worked in an academic library in Washington, DC. A China watchers group met there once a month at lunchtime. We discussed China’s political and economic developments. Was it prudent to invest in China four short years after Tiananmen? What would happen after Deng Xiaoping dies? Did Li Peng have too much power? It’s fun to look back on those days with all that uncertainty.
Now Lok Ma Chau overlooks skyscrapers and a state-of-the-art train station. To alleviate the heavy traffic at the Lo Wu border station east of there, the Hong Kong government is encouraging people to cross over at Lok Ma Chau instead.
 click to enlarge I first arrived in Hong Kong 20 years ago this week. To commemorate this anniversary of sorts, I’m going to dedicate this week’s posts to my favorite memories of my favorite city.
I sent this postcard to my paternal grandmother in 1997, a few months before the handover.
My mom’s colleague and his wife are in town for 3 weeks, so I met them yesterday. We went out to lunch with some people they knew, then went to see the Governor’s house, which is only open to the public 2 times a year. Yesterday was the last time it will be open, but we couldn’t get in because there were already 10,000 people in line and many others who were also turned away. It was quite spectacular just to be there and see so many people.
While I wrote nothing about the picture on this postcard, it played an important role in my early adult years.
Shatin, a ‘new town’ in the New Territories, was a remote country village known for roasted pigeon when my mom and her brother traveled there in the early and mid-1960s. By the time I arrived as a naive 19 year-old, Shatin was a city unto itself and home to tens of thousands of people.
Since I lived near Shatin for five years, I spent many weekend there, crossing this bridge, devouring dim sum in palatial restaurants, attending Chinese concerts, going to the movies, and wandering the sprawling mall. I got married for the first time in Shatin and went to my first horse race there.
I wasn’t the only foreigner who lived in Shatin, but there weren’t that many of us back then. Still, I always felt at home there.
 The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai Earlier this month I came across a new author, Ruiyan Xu, on GoodReads.com. I’m always on the lookout for new Chinese authors, so I entered the raffle for her debut novel, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai (St. Martin’s, 2010).
Lucky me. I won an advance readers’ copy.
So this week I read Xu’s novel about a Shanghai business tycoon, Li Jing, who suffers brain damage in an accidental explosion at a posh Shanghai hotel. Li spent his first 10 years in the US, so spoke English as his first language. After his father took him back to Shanghai, Chinese replaced his main language and he rarely, if ever, spoke English.
After the accident, he loses his ability to speak–or re-learn–Chinese. But he rediscovers English, which had been hard-wired into his brain since it was his first acquired language. When Li’s wife Meiling discovers her husband can no longer communicate with her, she withdraws from him. Their young son, Pang Pang, speaks some English, as does James’ elderly father (who later suffers from a fatal heart attack). Li also has a translator, who helps him communicate with his Chinese doctors and his wife.
But the person who Li Jing gets along with best is his American neurologist, Rosalyn Neal. Over the weeks that Rosalyn spends working with Li, the two develop a close, touchy feely relationship. And then things spiral out of control.
Xu has a beautiful writing style and the descriptions of Shanghai seem to flow effortlessly. I wish she’d reflected more on Meiling’s aversion toward learning English. To me, that would seem the logical response, especially since everyone was studying English in Shanghai back in the late 90s. It’s not like it was Russian. Instead, Meiling retreats and I never really feel sorry for her because she seems to give up (although she dives head first into Li’s business and spends all her waking hours keeping it afloat.)
Rosalyn Neal’s character is three dimensional, but there’s a recklessness to her that I think Xu could have explored further. Sometimes she’s a serious medical professional, while at others she’s an aloof flirt. And in the end she seems heartless and flighty. I’m sure it’s possible to be all three, but if we knew more about Rosalyn’s hopes for the future, we’d understand her better.
But other than those two areas, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai is sure to be a favorite autumn reading choice for people who are interested in cross cultural relationships, modern Chinese society, and the importance of language.
 click to enlarge  click to enlarge I loved traveling through Southeast Asia in the 1990s because so many places seemed like they hadn’t changed in decades. Vietnam was one of those places and Cambodia another.
Take these hand-written boarding passes. My mom used one in 1965 and I used the other in 1991.
We both flew Vietnamese airlines to and from Phnom Penh, and then went on to Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat.
Can you tell which pass is from which year ? (If you click to enlarge, the caption lists the year.)
 The annual Chicago Air and Water Show dominated the city’s lakefront this weekend. While I didn’t have time to go out and enjoy it, I did find myself stuck in traffic and got a quick peek and the show.
My brother-in-law did go down to the Air and Water Show and on his way back, found Flight 001, the funky travel accessories store, on North State Street.
When I took a mini-break to New York a few months ago, I perused Flight 001′s offerings in their Boerum Hill shop.
Although Flight 001 doesn’t sell retro airline bags like this one from Pan Am, it displays a nice sampling of bags from airlines past as part of the store’s decor.
But it does sell a cool passport cover displaying a 500,000 Vietnamese Dong note, complete with a smiling portrait of Uncle Ho. I also found toiletry bags and passport holders with Cyrillic and Chinese writing.
I love retro travel!
 click to enlarge When I look at this photo, I want to cry.
It’s not because I’m appalled by the living conditions or the monotonous architecture. Or the fact that many people have no choice but to live in these buildings. (In fact I’m not appalled by any of this. I love the architecture.)
When I say I want to cry, it’s because these public housing estates represent a miracle like no other.
In the early 1950s, Chinese refugees poured into British Hong Kong by foot, boat, or swimming across the Shenzhen River. Once safely in the British colony, the refugees built shanties constructed from corrugated metal and cardboard–not an ideal shelter anywhere, especially during the typhoon season.
Then on Christmas Eve in 1953, a devastating fire swept through Shep Kip Mei in Kowloon, leaving 53,000 refugees completely homeless. The fire blazed into the early hours of Christmas Day. (December 25th hasn’t exactly been an auspicious date in Hong Kong history. It was also the day, in 1941, when the Japanese invaded the territory, occupying it until the end of the war.)
But back to the Shek Kip Mei fire. The government, headed by Alexander Grantham, built public housing blocks in 1953 to resettle the displaced refugees. The government also spearheaded a drive to settle all shanty dwellers. The public housing boom started in the early 1960s, around the time my mom first visited Hong Kong.
When she arrived in Hong Kong in the summer of 1962, she said no one believed the government could actually resettle all those refugees. They kept pouring in. As things in China fell apart with programs like The Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Hong Kong seemed like the Promised Land.
So as the public housing estates sprouted up across the territory, like the one in this photo, the refugees settled into fire- and flood-protected structures, even if they were tiny (some only 300 square feet for five people). Anything had to be better than those shanties.
I spent a lot of time in the ground floor businesses of public housing estates, shopping and eating. Many estates housed Chinese fast food restaurants like Cafe de Coral, Maxim’s, or Fairwood. The public housing estates in many ways were like small satellite towns, with a post office, hardware store, noodle and rice shops, clothing shops, and wet markets. When the weather grew oppressively hot and humid, or damp and cool during Hong Kong’s three weeks of winter, nothing mattered more than convenience.
Still, as I rode the bus from my home in the New Territories to the old Kai Tak airport, I always gasped after leaving Tate’s Cairn Tunnel. When we rounded a corner near Lok Fu in Kowloon, shanties covered a nearby hill like shingles on a roof. This was more than 40 years after the Shek Kip Mei fire. I’ve heard those structures are now gone and the people in them have been resettled. Housing is still in a shortage and many conditions are less than stellar.
But without the public housing estates, Hong Kong never would have come of age in the 60s, marking a place for itself in international commerce and tourism.
 courtesy of Simon Fieldhouse Continuing the theme of 1930s Shanghai (it’s not going away), I’m excited to see new images of the refurbished Peace Hotel.
Three years ago it closed for massive renovations. After much anticipation, it re-opened last month.
Built in 1929 by Victor Sassoon, the north building was called the Cathay Hotel back then (image on left). Just south of Nanking Road (Nanjing Lu today) stood the Palace Hotel (which was built on the site of the 1850s Central Hotel). Interestingly enough, the south building became a wing of the Peace Hotel in 1965, a year before the Cultural Revolution.
When I stayed at the Peace in 1995 (in the north building; but I ate in the nondescript ground floor restaurant in the south building), the greatest luxury in my room was a bathroom scale.
On that trip, my parents enjoyed listing to the Old Jazz Band at the Peace, one of the remaining throwbacks to the Peace’s glorious past. I remember standing on the rooftop terrace (just under the bottom of the green copper roof), looking over the Whampoa (Huangpu River) to the construction jungles of Pudong.
The Peace played up its decadent past even back in the mid-1990s. The postcards sold in the sparsely-stocked hotel gift shop featured sepia photos of 1930s Shanghai. So that’s what I sent to family back in the US.
 The Man in the Wooden Hat Several years ago I read a highly anticipated novel called Old Filth (Europa Editions, 2006) by Jane Gardam.
Filth, the acronym for Failed in London Try Hong Kong, is also the nickname of the novel’s protagonist. My memory is bit clouded, and I can’t remember all the details from Old Filth, but I recall finishing the book and wishing it had included more about Filth’s life in Hong Kong.
And now my wish has come true.
This week I read The Man in the Wooden Hat (Europa Editions, 2009), Gardam’s latest in the Filth installment.
Gardam is a beautiful writer and artfully traces Filth’s brief courtship, rocky betrothal, and stable marriage to Betty, a British national born and raised in pre-WWII China. The beginning of the novel reminds me of one of my favorites, The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham. Betty is 28 and desperate to marry and have children (she wants 10). When Edward Feathers, a dry London barrister (born in Malaya) asks for her hand in marriage, she accepts out of necessity, not love.
And then she goes and spends the night of her engagement with Feathers’s rival, Terry Veneering.
Feathers (whom Betty nicknames Filth) is a workaholic, but keeps secrets of his own. He begs Betty to promise to never leave him. She keeps up her end of the promise, remaining loyal–and faithful–to Filth, although her heart also belongs to another. Even on the eve of major surgery that will render her childless, she helps Veneering with a critical matter, all without mentioning a word to him about her own problems.
The Man in the Wooden Hat is a tragic love story that left me wanting more.
So before I’d dried my last tear, I rushed off to the library to re-read Old Filth.
I guess my memory served me right. Very little of Old Filth takes place in Hong Kong. Instead, it traces Filth’s childhood in Malaya (now Malaysia) and his subsequent years as a Raj orphan, when he’s sent Home to Wales, not knowing anyone.
Some of the details in Old Filth contradict those in The Man in the Wooden Hat, but fiction is fiction. I’d recommend reading The Man in the Wooden Hat first. Then if you’re hankering for more, pick up Old Filth to learn more about Feathers’s childhood.
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