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travelgirl March 2006 |
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This cosmopolitan consumeropolis was once a pirate outpost, then a port trading in tea, silk and opium. Old habits die hard, it seems. The tourism board has been “heavily advocating the proper treatment of tourists, asking citizens not to rip them off when they are purchasing electronic goods,” reports the South China Morning Post. Prices are high, given the current exchange rate (US$1 = HK$7.75). I yearn for the digital cameras, but warranties and unintelligible instruction manuals make any purchase foolish. Plus, the phrase “rip off” echoes annoyingly in my head. I can't haggle a $10 discount on a torn dress in Soho, New York. I'm quite sure these merchants would drain my piggybank and pension in record time. Nevertheless, I tack close to the wind. A friend drags me to a jade boutique in the Peninsula's arcade; the hotel is easily the toniest address in Hong Kong. A simple nub, set in silvery metal, seduces me. Surely this humble piece is within my budget, given a little imminent-30th-birthday splurging? Cue hollow laughter. The price? Two thousand US, but just $700 with a “special deal.” My tai tai eye settled upon a quality apple-green specimen, framed, in fact, by white gold. “Barter, BARTER,” my buddy hisses. I squirm: the coveted jewel still costs $125 more than my rent check. Reality hits home. “I haven't been to the dentist in five years,” I announce, plunging the ring back into the silk display. “I need to spend strategically.” Everyone, down to the lowliest jade clerk, shares the same expression: a cocktail of disdain and disappointment. Hong Kong is a city of indulgence. I have failed the test. I slink from the glorious hotel – past the largest private concentration of Roll Royces in China – and lurk in a bookstore off Nathan Road. Here I'm a big spender. I buy several travel anthologies with my $14 racetrack winnings. I have rarely felt so virtuous … or so broke. Money management, it emerges, is something I must learn. Hau Yat Keung, a fortuneteller, prods my palm with a nail manicured to a slight point. A torrent of Cantonese flows. His wife interprets: “You have strong will. Try to not stress your future husband. No work together.” However mild, this man doesn't pull punches. “Start making baby soon,” he declares. “You have trouble.” I blanch. At 29, the ole' bio-bomb is ticking faintly. Dire predictions I don't need. Hau tries to reassure me. “But you have house after marriage! Not live with parents: this bad for strong-willed woman.” Such news probably provokes rapture in Hong Kong, one of the world's densest cities with seven million residents in 1,100 square kilometers. Laundry festoons water-stained concrete tower blocks, where entire families squash into 3x3 meter apartments. Space is at such a premium, politicians may ban singletons under 35 from public housing, forcing them back to their families or into work-sponsored dormitories. I scowl. Hau scrambles: “You have good fortune. Find balance work and family. Control emotions. In two years time, you are smooth,” his hand mimes an airplane taking off. Inspired, I go for an acupressure massage. My pursuit of smoothness knows no bounds. I paddle in the pool and roast in the sauna. I experience childlike delight over the bathing-suit-wringing machine. Zen is just around the corner, I'm sure … except tai tais in the locker room destroy my equilibrium. One wears underpants and a flesh-colored bustier, the other a thong. Her esteem is enviable: I certainly couldn't – no, wouldn't – bend like that in public. Talk about bad feng shui! They parade back and forth, pumicing their feet, applying thick make-up, styling their hair. Thong-Also-Rises Woman complains loudly: “this hotel so stupid. The sauna is wood, so dry. Practically no steam. Never have I seen such a thing in the whole world. Everybody know sauna should be wet.” I bite my lip. The new amenity is a Finnish-style sauna, not a steam room. But I don't disrupt her “face” – her social standing – with a reprimand. No way. I am a smooth operator. That evening, I walk through the streets – blurred by smog, sub-tropical rain and scarlet neon signs – of the Temple Night Market in Kowloon. A pink glow filters through tarps, brightening cheap beaded slippers and padded silk jackets. Mao T-shirts and digital cameras jostle in the slapdash booths. Watches hang in strips like drying jellyfish. Sequins glitter: on the patrons' shirts, on beaded bags, on antebellum baby dolls with Carmen Miranda hats. Everything's rosy, mainly because I'm wearing pink aviator glasses and a scarlet China-girl wig. Random shoppers stop to admire the Jennifer Garner Alias effect. “Bangs aren't for you,” remarks a colleague, who works for a style magazine. She's right, but I argue anyway – curse of the strong-willed. “Bangs aren't the point,” I insist. “It's hysteric glamour. It's Kowloon night markets and Hong Kong disco.” The fashion editor goes to bed. I go dancing. With two friends, I slink the alleys of Lan Kwai Fong, Central's nightclub district. First, we drink gin-and-tonics at Club 97, bobbing to reggae. Jackie Chan and Zhang Zi Yi aren't at the Dragon-i tonight, so patrons are left speculating about my bright red bob and starlet sunglasses. Eventually, we close down the trendy lounge, sodden after sake cocktails and cheesy salsa moves. I'm not the first foreigner to succumb to products and posturing here. Jan Morris described the colonizers in her travel classic Hong Kong: “often [they] seem to be pursuing their careers in a pleasant state of half-speed-ahead, eating well, enjoying their friends, gossiping in the club bar, taking the junk out on Sundays.” Christopher New was far more damning in his novel The Chinese Box, twisted into a 1997 film by Wayne Wang. The bestselling author - and Hong Kong resident for nearly three decades – described the city as a drainage system for the country's capitalists. “Every one of them worshipped the golden calf with brutal enthusiasm,” he wrote, “hoping only for enough time to fill a foreign bank account before the communists at last swept over the Kowloon hills and in their own no less brutal style stamped out the cult and replaced it with their own.” Of course, the expat scene is fading, post-handover. The Brits' 99-year lease expired on the commercial outpost of Hong Kong and China resumed control of this special administrative region in 1997. Little has changed, locals reassure guests, except the exodus of the “gweilo”, which translates either as white “ghost people” or “foreign devils,” depending on your mood. I am a gweilo. Well, strictly speaking, I am a “gweipo,” a girl ghost. A quick look in the mirror confirms this – the ghastly bit anyhow. Then again, most party people look dead at dawn. |
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