Hong Kong made me. I was like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon and drying my wings before moving on. Unfortunately the years that followed were far less interesting, panned out at greater length and in less concentration than the heady times I experienced there.
When I lived there Hong Kong was also marking time to its 1997 handover back to China, which weighed heavily on the mind of its people. We were both in a state of flux and came together in a magnificent explosion, at least on my part. It was a privilege to witness the waning days of the independence of this colony as it thrived under the supervision of a democratic nation before it slid into the grip of its communist patriarch while, at the same time, I emerged from the pall of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and panic attacks. It was a time lived with such colour and clarity that nothing has ever eclipsed it.
Hong Kong had always intrigued me from the time I was a child. A friend of my mother visited there regularly as she had become firm friends with the female cousin of her ex husband. The woman was very wealthy and had, indirectly, become that way because she had hidden the documents of a well known Hong Kong bank from the Japanese in WWII. She spent time in a prisoner of war camp but the bank rewarded her with a sum of money with which she started printing the colony's first telephone directory and made her fortune. The story fascinated me and, when she visited Australia one time, she came to our house when I was very young. I was allowed to meet her fleetingly before I was hidden away as she wasn't fond of children.
My mother recounted a story about her on one of these visits in which she went to Newport Beach on Sydney's north shore wearing an extremely valuable and long string of black pearls into the water when she went for a swim. Happily she didn't lose the necklace but such is the stuff I was told. She was an Australian by birth and Caucasian but Hong Kong was her home where she lived on the Peak.
As well as this connection I was also exposed to shows such as Hong Kong, starring Rod Taylor, and the movies 'Love is a Many Splendored Thing' and 'The World of Nancy Kwan'. These were set in the Hong Kong of the fifties and early sixties but the exotic nature of the place just called out to me. It was my dream place to visit and, while I had made it as far and Fiji and New Zealand, hadn't gone further.
I am very affected by the atmosphere of a place. When my husband and I moved to Melbourne shortly after we married for his work, we drove there from Sydney. As we approached the city by car and the view of skyscrapers came into view rising above the flat landscape my heart sank. The vibe was wrong. Once a vibe sets in with me it stays and, hard as I tried I hated the place. I can see its good points today but nothing would drag me back to live there.
Sadly the same thing happened with Perth, Western Australia, when we moved there, again for my husband's work. It is sunny, it has beaches, a big, wide blue river and is flat as a pancake. The trouble is that it is too sunny, sometimes so much so that my eyes would water. There were trees and foliage but they struggled in the sandy soil. The greenery didn't have the verdant yellow green lushness of Queensland nor were there the hills of Sydney that provided contrasts and shade. When my mother arrived in the place she actually said, "There's so much sky here". I couldn't have put it better. It is a pretty place but I hated it and I know this fault lies with me. I am a 'place' person and, as I have already said in another blog post, I was spoiled by my early environment. One reason, however, that I loved my childhood environment is that I do pick up an affinity, or otherwise for a place. It is simply my nature and I feel for anyone who is subject to my whims.
Due to my absolute loathing of Perth, doubtless aided by post natal depression as I was pregnant when we arrived there, after three years my husband took a Civil Engineering job in Hong Kong. We flew in at night on May 24, 1981. Kai Tak on the island was the airport at that time before it was moved to its recent position on the island of Lantau, which is now connected to the city by a bridge. Landing at Kai Tak was a treat that rivaled all the best theme park rides in the world as you flew in amongst high rise buildings and could actually see people watching their televisions in their flats. We flew in so that Hong Kong island was on our right and lit up in all its densely populated glory. My throat felt like it was closing up seeing this. It really was crowded but by gosh it was spectacular.
The next morning I woke at the Hilton on the island feeling a little nervous until I opened the curtains of our room and, lo and behold, outside down below was a large group of people performing Tai Chi in a square opposite . I calmed down immediately. I was home. The Hilton also became a bit like a home for the next three years. We only stayed there a week until the company flat became vacant but we gravitated back to it regularly even when we'd found numerous other brilliant restaurants to go to. We particularly liked it's cafe as well as a restaurant outside on the ground floor. In fact it was one night in its Ball Room at a function given by the Australian Association that we won a trip to Hawaii. There is a new Hilton now that I don't know and many more things no doubt since we were there.
The flat the company provided for us was in a block only four stories high and four flats wide. It dangled from the side of a hill overlooking the Lamma Channel and was situated between Central, the central business district of Hong Kong on Victoria Island, and Aberdeen, the former fishing village further around to the east. We were fortunate as a lot of expatriates lived in high rises in the mid levels above Central and below the Peak. These towers could be over twenty five stories high and situated among great clusters of other towers, not to mention among the pall of smog that often settled over the city.
The Company Flat.
Our view was of an expanse of deep blue water past which, on the left, could be seen Lamma Island, which looked like the front half of a platypus lying in the water atop whose head was a pipe. I never found out what the pipe or chimney was. In winter when fog sometimes settled over the water we would hear the fog horns of the great ships that made their way into Hong Kong harbour and, once a year, the three level Jumbo floating restaurant in all its red and green Chinese decorated glory, would be towed from Aberdeen to the harbour for maintenance. Such was the magic of living in this brilliant and exciting place that had mushroomed from an island for fishermen before the Opium War between the British and Chinese into one of the world's great cities within the space of one hundred years.
When we first entered the flat with our two and a half year old son to inspect it there was already some furniture in it including a cane sofa and two armchairs, all with white upholstered cushions. Our son ran straight across the parquetry floor and climbed onto the sofa. To our horror his feet were blackened and left marks all over the white fabric as some over zealous cleaner had thought to polish the varnished floor. That wasn't the first of our woes. The next was trying to find a store at which to buy groceries. We'd managed to have a car lent to us in the interim but finding a grocery store just wasn't as simple as it had been in Australia and so our first week proved quite harrowing. We also discovered that the infant food that came in jars or tins came from the USA and was absolutely tasteless. My notoriously picky eater son would have none of it until I managed to add some flavour to it. These were, however, all but small road bumps and part of adjusting to a new culture. Until we managed to be self sufficient food wise, we just ate out a lot.
Food.
That, of course, brings me to food. The sheer, unutterable joy of Hong Kong is its food. It doesn't matter what type or from what national cuisine it originates, the best of every kind is to be found there. I have never eaten as well again and, in thirty seven years, that's saying something. I spent three weeks traveling in France and came back unimpressed by the food I ate there. I've been to many other countries too and Hong Kong remains my peak dining experience whether the cuisine be Chinese of any variety, Italian, French, Indian, Vietnamese, Thai or whatever.
Markets and Shopping.
Where to begin with shopping? One of our first experiences was at a night market in the city where there were also fortune tellers. The city never sleeps and, after Perth, Western Australia, that closed at nights pretty early and on weekends, the atmosphere was electric. There is shopping in Wanchai and Causeway Bay, both in shops and street markets. In Central there were fewer street markets but plenty of shops and laneways that were for specific products. Wing On Lane had masses of fabric shops, Little Stanley Street had shoe shops and I forget which lane had handbags and bags exclusively. All merchandise was priced at a fraction of what you would pay in your home country and the variety would be from cheap but well made to high end goods.
Central and Causeway Bay also had department stores. At that time there was Wing On, the exclusive Lane Crawford and Japanese department stores such as Daimaru. I practically lived in Wing On, which was just a little way out of Central heading to Kennedy Town on the south east of the island. There were also factory outlets on Kowloon side and in Mong Kok that you could visit. A lot of these produced silk clothing but I didn't find these as interesting as just shopping at various stores. Some factories specialized in jeans and some in manchester.
I would frequent Wing On Lane for fabrics and found a tailor through a Scottish friend who was married to an Australian engineer. While I can sew, I need a pattern and the tailors there can produce an item from a picture in a magazine. I would buy the French version of L'Officiel magazine, the couture magazine of France, and have my tailor copy things for a fraction of the price I would have had to pay a seamstress at home.
Work.
The company for which my husband worked as a civil engineer did a lot of entertaining and would take the staff out regularly for dinners and wives and husbands of staff were always included. That is, unless the fellows were taking a business client out to the bars in Wanchai. There were quite a few girlie bars and they could have that on their own. Some of these were Japanese, very expensive and many a naive young man has left some of these with their drinks costing them the price of their holiday.
We ate out with the company at least once every fortnight and would take ourselves out on weekends to explore cuisine. Everybody in the expat community also entertained and there was an endless round of dinners and lunches. What I always loved about the meals in Chinese restaurants was that the dishes were in the centre of the table to share. At the start of each meal the tablecloth would be clean and white but by the end a complete mess. As soon as tables emptied, a pristine new cloth replaced the old one. Nobody used a fork at a Chinese restaurant and it amused my husband and I when we returned home and ate at a Chinese restaurant and had to ask for chopsticks.
We ate at high end, medium and low end restaurants and it was all delicious. My only disappointment occurred at one of the two top restaurants in Hong Kong, Gaddi's in the Peninsula Hotel on Kowloon side. I have devoted a whole other post to that experience titled, 'The Worst Restaurant Experience I've Ever Had', if you are interested in reading about it.
One of the best restaurants there at the time was not high end but had the best Chinese food I had ever eaten and was hugely popular with both locals and expats. It was situated in Wanchai and called The American. It had pale green walls on which Botticelli type prints hung, laminex tables and harsh fluorescent lighting. The Chinese waiters all looked like they had been there for decades. We went there regularly, often with friends or the company. In our last year there it closed after being there, I believe, for many decades. The New American across the road remained open, but it just wasn't the same.
Lamma Island.
A lot of companies had their own junks but ours wasn't one of them. These boats were great for entertaining and we were invited on them sometimes by people who had access to one through their companies. Bankers were generally the best looked after expats in Hong Kong and I envied them their junks. These boats are large, wooden and beautiful to look at. At the time we lived there Aberdeen still had a large population of people living on junks in its harbour, moored side by side. If you took a Sampan ride to get to a restaurant in Aberdeen you went right past them. There were families living on board with televisions and all the mod cons. By the time we left three years later the boat people were gradually being moved to high rise housing estates. I couldn't think of anything worse after living such a life, but I suppose the harbour pollution lessened. Mind you, given the state of the water in Hong Kong Harbour, Repulse Bay and Clearwater Bay, sewage treatment was obviously not a big issue at the time.
Hong Kong as it was originally spelled meant 'fragrant harbour'. It was fragrant for a whole other reason when we arrived there. Swimming at Clearwater Bay in the New Territories one day, a piece of toilet paper wrapped itself around my calf and there were no boats nearby. At Repulse Bay on another day the Manager's wife of the company and I took and American tourist to the beach. He went swimming and came out covered in red algae bloom. He was horrified thinking that it was faeces and ran to the showers. It was no doubt the putrid water that gave rise to the algae so he wasn't far wrong. Mostly we swam in the pools of the large high rise housing flats of the other expats.
While it may have been fetid, the waterways of Hong Kong and the New Territories were pretty and the views spectacular. One of our favourite weekend outings, and sometimes they were company outings, was to the restaurants perched above the water on piers along the water's edge on Lamma Island.
The restaurants there were basic and to get to a toilet you usually had to walk through the kitchen and find yourself at the back faced with two cubicles. One cubicle offered a hole in the centre of the floor, the other a shallow trench along its back wall. As I waited for the one with the hole in the floor to be vacant I watched, just outside and squatting on his haunches, a man washing an eel under a running tap.
The food, however, in all the restaurants there, was delicious. It was all fresh seafood and, on weekends, every table was packed with both Chinese locals and expats. We usually took a ferry there from Aberdeen where we parked our car and returned the same way. It was a very large ferry and it only went a few times a day. Our son would often play with other children in the restaurant in which we were eating and one day, within a split second of having him in my vision, he disappeared. All the men at our table went off to look for him and sent me to look for police. I went off into the backstreets of the very small village and could find no police or anyone for that matter. After a while I returned to our table where the women remained and they couldn't believe how calm I was. I wasn't. I just couldn't do anything but wait. There was water all around us but he didn't fall as there were barriers and I knew he wouldn't go down onto the sand to the water's edge because he simply hated it. Nothing would make his little feet touch the stuff. After thirty minutes the men found him. He had walked off to follow a Chinese child. He was only four and I feel guilty to this day but somehow my mother's instinct told me he was fine and I was happily right. What I couldn't understand, as my husband was watching him too, was just how fast he disappeared. The trouble with having a sensible child is that one can trust them too much.
Another thing about our son is that, at almost five, he would only say the occasional word. A sentence was just too much trouble and we awaited his first string of words with anticipation. It came on Lamma Island when he had obviously become bored. Suddenly he said, "Ferry come now. We go home." I was so impressed with his eloquence that I wrote it in his baby book of events when we arrived home. He has remained a man of few words all his life and only speaks when he has something to say. A few years ago I was at his Veterinary clinic one day waiting to see him for some reason, when he came out of a consultation room with a dog and its owner. He proceeded to talk to the owner at some length about the prescription he was supplying for the dog and how to use it. I listened entranced as I had rarely ever heard my son speak at length about anything. It's the little things that warm a mother's heart.
Walks.
Hong Kong island and the New Territories have some wonderful walks where there is plenty of foliage and no buildings. There was a place not far from our apartment where we could park our car and walk all the way up to the Peak. Lots of locals would take advantage of these walks on the weekend. We also found great picnic spots in the New Territories to go with friends. This gave the children some time with nature as our son's only play area around our apartment was the downstairs car park beneath the building, which was at least open, although under cover. The only other options were playgrounds where there were gardens but no actual grass.
What I didn't like were the high-rise housing estates in the New Territories. Once you drive out of Kowloon, you head through the Lion Rock Tunnel to arrive in the New Territories. One of the first places we came to then was Shatin, which was on flat ground and stood alone as a residential township consisting of numerous high-rise buildings surrounded by concrete with little greenery amongst it. It lacked the magic of the districts that, no matter how crowded, were set among hills and shops and vibrant precincts. Further on was Tai Po. Gradually the people living in the shanty towns on the hills on the island and in Kowloon were being moved into these modern high rises. No doubt this was better and safer for the residents and perhaps, with time, these estates would develop a vibrancy of their own. Frankly though, they made me shudder.
We were there during a powerful typhoon in 1983 and, at the bottom of our street, was a small shanty town hanging off the side of a hill. An elderly woman died there during this storm as did a young policeman who was trying to help her, so one has to be grateful the shanty towns were being cleared. It is terrible to admit that they added to the mystique of Hong Kong, but they did and most of them disappeared during our time there.
Public Transport.
The public transport in Hong Kong was a dream and there was so much choice. One of the great modes of transport were the mini buses that you could hail anywhere either in the city or residential areas. There were also regular bus services with allocated stops. There were ferry services that ran between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon as well as other areas. In the city there were trams and there was also the fabulous MTR, or Mass Transit Railway, that would get you anywhere in the blink of an eye. A tunnel ran between the island and Kowloon and this took cars, buses and the MTR.
One of my first journeys on a bus was from my street to the city via Kennedy Town. This meant I caught the bus as it went down my street then passed through Kennedy Town, which sat at the water's edge and then on into the city. Kennedy Town was very much a Chinese enclave and not cosmopolitan. The people who got onto the bus there looked at me as if I was an alien while I had the pleasure of sitting across from and facing a Chinese gentleman who was holding a live chicken on his lap while he blatantly stared at me.
There was something my husband and I noticed after a couple of months of residing there and that was that the locals began to treat us differently after that time. It is as if they could spot a newcomer on sight. As we settled in and looked more at home they took much less notice of us. They also didn't try to scam us as much in business. Quite often cab drivers would try the long routes on susceptible foreigners so we got around this pretty quickly by giving directions in Chinese or noticing quickly if they took the wrong route. The Chinese are honest people but business is business and bartering was commonplace.
One of my favourite trips was taking a ferry across the harbour. It is one of the world's great trips although only lasts a few minutes. On the island side the Peak rises up with the cluster of high rises beneath it and, on Kowloon side, Tsim Sha Tsui with the Harbour Centre and fabulous five-star hotels. Kowloon is basically flat and it isn't until reaching Lion Rock Tunnel that the hills begin. The ferries that cross between Central, Hong Kong Island, and Tsim Sha Tsui are large, double story and the fare incredibly cheap. There were two classes, one for the upper deck and one for the lower. I never minded which class I paid for as there wasn't really any difference in the seating. I relished the crossing each time I took it sometimes alone, sometimes with my son, or son and husband.
I seem to remember the tunnel link between the island and Kowloon for the MTR was completed while we were there and we decided to try it. The MTR was just so modern, efficient and fast and went almost to the New Territories. Driving through Kowloon and surrounds could be a long and tedious business but on the MTR you could get through it in no time. I did take trams a few times but wasn't very fond of them. If you drove beside them you had to stop when they stopped to let off passengers. Their ceiling were always a little low for the taller foreign expats as well.
Toilets.
I've mentioned the toilets on Lamma Island but the ones in the city in buildings were the usual western kind. If you happened to be in one of the many five star hotels for lunch or just passing through, you could easily access the toilets in them. These were as five star as the hotels and there was often a woman in attendance who handed out hot flannels for you to wash you face and hands after you had used the basins. It was customary to tip these ladies and I always did. The up market department stores often had attendants as well.
The truly appalling toilet experience I had was at Stanley Markets. The markets themselves were fabulous and ran along the streets surrounding Stanley Beach. Some stalls operated under canopies but there were many shops in buildings, all low level and one supermarket. There was a great restaurant some way done one street on the waterfront where we went a few times with friends but I wouldn't have used their toilet unless I was eating there. This left the public toilet block that was an experience I will never forget. There were cubicles through the floor of which ran a trench about twenty to thirty centimeters wide and the urine and excrement ran right under you as you straddled the trench to do your business. There was, of course, no seat. The first time I used the facility I foolishly put my feet both on one side of the trench and tried to balance my bottom over the top of it. I don't know what I was thinking but the smell must have made me unable to think. Somehow I managed not to fall in. The next and only other time I used it I realized what a dummy I had been on the previous occasion and put my feet one each side of the trench. After the first visit I developed a gastric upset and I really hadn't touched anything while I was there. I swear the smell was so rank it caused the upset.
Sights and Sounds.
Such is the variety of life in Hong Kong where you can experience the basic to the luxurious and high tech. I bought some beautiful things over the years at Stanley Markets in the way of lamps, a silk screen and ornaments. We also bought amazingly cheap and well made clothing as well as food. It was the first time I saw meat hanging outdoors, dead chickens and dried fish. I first thought I'd never get used to the sights and smells but very quickly found it quite normal. There was, however, one place in Central that I was never brave enough to enter and that was the fish markets. I had to hold my nose just to get past it. Supermarkets near to our unit were housed on the ground floor of a block in some of the housing estates. At Chi Fu, an estate a couple of kilometres drive from us, was a western style supermarket and, on some days, there was a wet market just outside with butchers and fish sellers. On one occasion I went past a vendor who sold live frogs that were tied in pairs by their feet and just had to grit my teeth and deal with it. This was normal to the locals and I was in their country.
In our first year there I was driving to a supermarket housed in a small high rise residential building, Scenic Villas, situated below and to the left of us on the waterfront. It was a narrow and winding road and I found myself behind a tray truck with a canopy. A bare chested man with a huge goiter on his neck was sitting in the back atop what must have been a dead pig or sheep whose entrails had fallen down between the end of the truck and the back flap that closed up so that I had a view of its stomach or whatever dangling out as I drove. It was these strange sights that I loved about the place. Things like an old Chinese gentleman doing Tai Chi on a tiny traffic island that held a traffic light in Kennedy Town oblivious to the traffic, noise and smell around him; peace in the middle of such chaos.
That sight alone helped me learn to be calm within myself. I had arrived in Hong Kong still subject to the panic attacks I had suffered for many years but I loved the place so much I forced myself to go out and explore everywhere. I had a massive attack one day at Stanley Markets when my husband and son left me for a while. I sensed all morning that it was coming and it did. The world began to turn and I leaned against a shop wall trying not to pass out. It was the worst I ever had but it finally passed without me pitching forward onto the pavement. Having survived that one, I never had another until my marriage started to break down ten years later. I'm completely over them now but Hong Kong was so overwhelming that I told my mother that it scared me more than I scared myself and helped me control my own inner fears.
Work.
So what did I do with myself while my husband was at work? We had hired a Phillipina maid so that I could get out and about without our son and so that we could attend the numerous functions that the company put on. She was a lovely girl named Clare and only eighteen. She couldn't say our son's name, Asher, properly and the way she said his name it came out sounding like Asia. We offered her a normal size bedroom in our flat and she wouldn't hear of it. The flats all came with tiny rooms for maids or amahs with their own tiny bathrooms and she insisted she would stay in it. She was so adamant we had to concede. We also had to have a tiny bed made to fit the room as everything in the shops was too long. Clare was tiny too and seemed quite happy in her room. The maids in the unit blocks relied on one another for company and there were only twelve apartments in our block and the Chinese residents had Chinese amahs. There were only two other Phillipinas in our building and Clare left us after her contract was up two years later because of this I believe. We met up a few months later and I think she regretted it. I wonder to this day where she is as, even with the internet, I can find no trace of her.
At any rate, having Clare meant I could try to find work but it proved very hard. I didn't speak Cantonese and had too little experience as a programmer to find work in that capacity. I did some office work for an engineer in a company allied to the one my husband worked for and also took a disastrous job managing a high end dress boutique in Central. What I didn't know was that the staff were ripping off the designs of the well known designer whose shop it was and put me through an honesty test wherein I found a wad of paper money on the counter that wasn't entered in the books and rang around our clients trying to ascertain who had left it there. My mistake was apparently not offering it to the staff and keeping it a secret. It took my husband, I and a savvy friend back in Australia a couple of years later to twig to what had happened. I was fired a couple of days later on the most spurious pretext having only been there two weeks. Apparently I'd messed up the books as we were doing a stock take and the girls kept giving me wrong counts that I had to correct. The whole thing was a set up no doubt to test if they could keep stealing dresses right under my nose. The owner had told me they had a problem with shoplifting and to keep my eyes open. I wondered then how anyone could shoplift as it was a small boutique and we could keep our eyes on anyone in there and there were never many. Hong Kong has a huge knock off trade and the designer was one of its best known.
I was paid a full month's wages and took it. I was furious. A week later the accountant phoned and my husband took the call. He was asked some very odd questions and we realized later that the accountant was trying to ascertain if we'd caught on to them but this was too late to do anything about it.
Modelling.
I lost a fair amount of weight in Hong Kong, not that I was ever big, and decided to try film extra work and modelling. I had a portfolio done by a professional photographer who specialized in such things. I'm so glad I had it done as it's a record of me in my prime looking very glamorous. I did a few hotel brochures, an advertisement in the South China Morning Post and a housing estate brochure. One day I had a particularly riotous television extra job with a few other expat models for a Chinese crime show. One was a crowd scene where we were dancing in a club in Wanchai. In another we were by a hotel pool out in the New Territories in bikinis and also, in another scene, in hula skirts. I kept trying to hide and not be photographed in this outfit but ended up in some shots and also a Chinese language television guide. When the manager of the supermarket at Scenic Villas recognized me from the show I was mortified with embarrassment. I turned down another job where I would have been an extra in a scene on the Jumbo floating restaurant and starring Ali Macgraw and George C. Scott. I don't like being stranded for hours and had learned what a long day it could be from my previous, experience especially after we discovered no one had arranged for us to get a lift home.
Leaving.
It was a sad day when my husband decided that he'd had enough of working in Hong Kong. He refused to look for any other work beyond Australia before we left and arranged to work back in Perth, Western Australia with his old company even knowing I didn't like Perth one bit. We made friends in Hong Kong but gradually people would leave. We kept in touch with some for quite a while but our lives eventually diverged. I was stuck in Perth for another eight years before we moved to Queensland where I, my ex husband and son all still live although separately. My son is grown with his own family now and my husband and I divorced two years after coming to Queensland. The years in Perth, after the vibrancy of Hong Kong was like living in a morgue. I love Queensland and am grateful the openness, cleanliness of the air and lack of crowding in Australia but I will be forever grateful for my time in Hong Kong. It was a life changing and affirming experience. I would very much like to have experienced life in one more country as well but something tells me that I experienced the pick of the crop and it would have taken a lot to outdo it.
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