ROOTS:
VOICES OF
HONG KONG
Going North
&
Going South
Two stories by Jason Ng
William removed the laptop from his carry-on luggage and placed it in a grey plastic bin. In a swift, almost choreographed swing of an arm, he grabbed another one from the stack and in went his keys, loose change and Blackberry. As the thirty-five-year-old architect waited to walk through the metal detector, the Shanghainese woman in front of him set off the alarm with the cell phone in her pocket. William shook his head at the sorry display of inexperience. A few moments later, it was his turn to step through the gantry and there wasn’t a single beep. Of course not, he thought to himself with satisfaction.
William – or Ah Yick as he was known among family and close friends – went through this routine several times a month. He had relocated to his firm’s Shanghai office two years ago as part of the Great Migration of local professionals in search of better prospects in the Mainland. They called it bei shang, or going north. Twice a month the architect flew back to Hong Kong where he would spend forty-eight hours with his parents and girlfriend Gloria, before the Sunday night flight took him back for another grinding work week. The commute wore him down and he had his eye bags and sunken cheeks to prove it. When he wasn’t travelling, the veritable bachelor would lock himself in his one-bedroom apartment in the northern sprawl of Shanghai. Like many of his friends back home, he was happiest when left alone with his video game console. But on a sunny day like last Saturday, he would force himself to get out of the apartment for a walk around the city, followed by an early dinner at a nearby Cantonese restaurant called Hong Kong Café, a mistake he would regret and repeat.
William arrived at Gate 14 and found the usual mix of expats and tourists anxious to get home. Of the eighty-something gates at the Hong Kong International Airport, he seemed to always get stuck with the unlucky ones. But that the flight number was 718 and he was seated in row 28 gave him some comfort. This endless game of spotting the eights and dodging the fours drove him crazy, and the architect found himself playing it even more whenever something big came up at work, like the Carlyle meeting tomorrow. As William struggled to take his mind off that subject, he spotted his co-worker Russell slumping in one of the chairs with a thick paperback in his hands. The stocky gweilo put down his novel and looked straight at William, smiling and expecting a response. Some bad luck was just impossible to dodge.
‘Wah, I didn’t know you were on this flight!’ William greeted him in fluent though accented English.
It wasn’t so much that he disliked his colleague – Russell was an all-around nice guy and was really quite harmless – or that he disliked Caucasians – even though they always insisted on calling him ‘Bill’, which was clearly not the intelligent-sounding Christian name he had chosen for himself back in primary school. But it was Sunday night and the last thing Ah Yick needed was a thirty-minute polite conversation about work. He left his game face at the office last Friday and he wasn’t about to put it on now, not least for some frumpy Aussie who sleepwalked his way through Shanghai not speaking a word of Chinese or knowing the first thing about China. And Russell wasn’t a particularly talented architect either, though what he lacked in ability he made up for with wise quips and lame jokes. Typical gweilo.
‘Big day tomorrow, huh?’ Russell brought up a topic that William had spent the past forty-eight hours trying to forget.
It was the Carlyle Project, the high-profile 1,500-room Belmont Hotel to be built in southern Pudong. There was a 9:00 a.m. client meeting tomorrow for the firm to present the design for the first time. It was William’s second solo design act – after the disastrous Black- stone Project – and he threw himself at it, spending weeks going through stacks of design books and tweaking every detail of the façade. He even showed his work-in-progress to Gloria to get her layman’s opinion, something he hadn’t done since Blackstone. She told him it looked ‘pretty’.
As much as the project was stressing William out, it also gave him plenty of bragging rights. Last month during a high school reunion in Tsim Sha Tsui, the topic of luxury hotels came up when one of his old classmates mentioned the Peninsula in Shanghai. That was cue for Ah Yick to share his new found philosophy on the subject.
‘Designing hotels in China is a tricky business,’ he declared, before his speech took a metaphysical turn. ‘These Mainland Chinese have no clue what they want. You must tell them without telling them, if you know what I mean.’
Ah Yick was satisfied with the way he had impressed his friends so much and revealed so little. He could have told his friends more, but he was afraid he might jinx it. The Cantonese were a superstitious people after all. That’s why he packed his Armani suit and Hermès neck tie, a combination to be worn only at important occasions that required maximum luck, like the nine o’clock tomorrow. If it all worked out well, the architect figured, he should be able to make an official announcement to his friends by the next alumni event: The Belmont Shanghai, designed by William C.Y. Yeung.
‘Oh yes, we have an important meeting tomorrow,’ William finally responded to Russell. Just the thought of it made his heart race. ‘The clients are hard to read. So who knows?’ He hoped that a rhetorical question would signal the end of that conversation.
It was true, Mainland Chinese clients were hard to read and impossible to please. William remembered that dreadful day a year ago like it was yesterday. He and Peter, the senior partner from New York and a rainmaker for the firm, arrived at the meeting at 8:00 a.m. sharp. The Chinese-Westerner tag team was a time-honoured tradition and a winning formula. The Chinese guy would do all the talking, while the white man, preferably someone with a head of grey hair, would nod credibly and flash his Cheshire Cat smile. All was going according to plan; after they exchanged pleasantries and traded opinions on the weather, it was William’s turn to present the Grade A office tower in the heart of Hangzhou just off the famous West Lake. It was a clever design that recalled Mies van der Rohe’s clean lines and Rem Koolhaas’ audacity. But the clients didn’t like it one bit. They had wanted something more akin to the Central Plaza in Wan Chai, a classic gold-and-silver skyscraper that oozed luxury and wealth. In all, it took them five minutes to shoot down what had taken William four months to put together. To make things worse, Peter chimed in with a couple of trite gweilo jokes in an attempt to defuse the tension. He said something about William not understanding the Chinese even though he was one of them. That last bit didn’t get translated.
‘It was nothing personal,’ Peter explained to William after the meeting. ‘I had to say something to save them face. Northern Chinese are not accustomed to saying no to people.’
So all of a sudden you are an expert on Chinese ethnography? And what about MY face? William thought, as disappointment turned into anger. No matter which way he sliced it, Blackstone was a disaster. It was a miracle that William even got a second chance with Carlyle. The code name might have been unpronounceable for most Chinese, but at least it didn’t have the word ‘black’ in it. And if he could pull this one off, he would not only redeem himself in front of his team, but also revive an otherwise pitiful portfolio. Ten years into his career, William had little to show for other than a dozen residential complexes in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, those same old pencil buildings rising above a nondescript shopping arcade. His career and self-worth now rode on a single design.
‘They like what they see in Hong Kong, Bill. That’s why they hire guys like us to build them a little Hong Kong in Shanghai.’ Russell had a tendency to answer every question, rhetorical or not. ‘You can’t fight that, mate.’
The gweilo did know something about China after all. William squeezed a smile and said nothing – the subtle difference between acknowledgment and encouragement.
Having lived in Shanghai for two years, William knew everything there was to know about the city. The one thing that baffled him, and that he couldn’t wrap his head around, was the way Shanghai was slowly turning into another Hong Kong. The city had all the financial and political capital it needed to leapfrog its rival into something far greater. But for one reason or another, whether it was a lack of imagination or a serious case of risk aversion, all the new constructions ended up looking like those cookie-cutter developments in Hong Kong. The last couple of weekend walks he took had made for deeply disappointing architectural tours – there wasn’t a single surprise in the entire journey. Even the fast-changing Pudong skyline was starting to look like Victoria Harbour.
The Dragonair staff announced general boarding for flight KA718, and the two architects picked up their bags and got in line. Out of nowhere, a woman swooped in and wedged herself right in front of William, standing so close that her pony tail was stroking his chin like a shaving brush. It was the same Shanghainese woman who had set off the alarm at the security check-point.
‘Xiao jie, you can’t cut in like that,’ William said in brusque Mandarin. His tones might have been off in some of the words but the message was crystal clear.
The woman was about to snap back but William pre-empted it, ‘Save it, lady. You are still in Hong Kong and we have queues here!’
The woman mumbled something in Shanghainese and caved in. William had lived in China long enough to know that there were two things fundamentally missing in Chinese society: an indoor voice and personal space. When he first moved to Shanghai he would get cut off and pushed aside all the time. But he had learned and he had adapted. The Mainland roughness rubbed off on him like an infectious disease and he found it hard to switch it off when he was back in Hong Kong. Gloria had joked about his deteriorating manners, like the way he squeezed into a crowded elevator or yelled at the taxi driver. One time he got into a screaming match with another patron at a dim sum restaurant in Mong Kok and caught himself yelling in Mandarin. All that had made him realise that the two cities were converging in more ways than one.
On the plane, William was relieved to learn that Russell was seated all the way at the back. That’s the best news he had gotten all day. Ensconced in his seat, William put on his earphones and celebrated his hard-earned solitude with his favourite Faye Wong playlist. The Beijing-born Canto-pop diva was a slice of Hong Kong he carried with him wherever he went. Then he turned on his laptop for one last look at his baby, The Belmont Shanghai, and mentally went over the opening lines of a speech he was to deliver in less than twelve hours. One picture after another, the computer-generated mock-ups showed a glamorous hotel tower from every possible angle. The gold-and-silver building, glittering in the sun and bearing witness to China’s new wealth, bore a close resemblance to the Shangri-La Hotel in Admiralty. William had learned and he had adapted once more. Before he switched off his laptop for takeoff, he checked the time on the bottom right hand corner of his screen. It read ‘8:38 PM’.
Going North
Going South
Chongjun nearly knocked over a woman when he got off the Southern Airlines plane. This sort of thing happened to him all the time, for even when he walked he had his nose buried in a book or a magazine. ‘Dui ng tsu ah,’ he apologised to her in halting Cantonese, quickly slipping the book he was reading – The Complete Guide to Low Light Photography – back into his tattered leather attaché. Hong Kong people were squeamish about any form of physical contact, the thirty-two-year-old Shanghai native had to remind him- self from time to time.
Chongjun, or CJ as he was known here, had been living in Hong Kong for roughly eighteen months. After graduating from Fudan University with a degree in journalism, he worked briefly as an editor and photojournalist for a local newspaper in Shanghai. His claim to fame came two years ago when he posted a scathing article on his blog criticising city officials for a spate of failed infrastructure projects. The piece went viral on the internet and a few months later he was recruited by a news magazine in Hong Kong as a staff editor. It was a dream come true, for only the best and the brightest among graduates in the Mainland could nan xia, or go south, to Hong Kong. To the Chinese educated elite, the Pearl of the Orient was really the Land of the Free, a sanctuary where Facebook and YouTube were not blocked and public political discussions were unfettered.
An hour later Chongjun arrived in the office with his luggage, just when his colleagues started to disappear for lunch. It was a hot summer morning outside but it wasn’t much cooler inside either. The low ceilings and the narrow hallways cluttered with file cabinets impeded air flows. The magazine was located on the nineteenth floor of an old industrial building in Chai Wan, the easternmost part of the island. The weekly publication went to press every Wednesday afternoon, making a mad rush at the start of each week inevitable. The endless cycle of reporting, writing and editing, repeated week after week like clockwork, bore down on the staff like the scorching sun. Taking time off, like CJ’s three-day trip to Shanghai this past weekend, needed to be approved at least six months in advance. But he didn’t mind it one bit. The long hours and the stress went with the territory. That’s the Hong Kong he had heard and read so much about back in Shanghai. Anything less would have been hugely disappointing.
Today, however, was shaping up to be more than CJ had bargained for. Earlier that morning while he was still airborne, Xinhua News Agency issued a press release about the vice premier’s last-minute trip to Hong Kong and Macau. The surprise state visit, announced just three days before the bigwig’s scheduled arrival, sent the local press into a tizzy. For the news magazine, that meant the cover story of this week’s issue had to be changed and a new editorial written by day’s end. The sausage machine of print media would once again go into overdrive tonight.
‘Ah See-jay, can I talk to you in my office for a second?’ Michael, editor-in-chief and arbiter of all things that mattered in the universe, summoned the staff editor in his native Cantonese. The temperature had just gone up by a few degrees.
Chongjun knew exactly what was going to happen in that corner office. The chief had become rather predictable these days.
‘So how are your parents in Shanghai?’ Michael asked while smoothing his greasy comb-over, pretending to care.
Chongjun’s mother lived in Shanghai, but his father left them when he was five and now lived with his new family in Nanjing. He wouldn’t expect the chief to remember such minutia. Just the same, the question doubled as an ice-breaker and a back-handed reminder to CJ that the rest of the editorial staff had to cover for him while he was sipping tea with his folks. They said Shanghainese people were tricky, but they were no match against these sly xiang-gang ren.
‘They are fine. Thanks for asking,’ CJ responded in Mandarin. That had been the way the two communicated with each other ever since they met.
‘Great, then you should be well rested for the late night ahead! Ha ha ha!’
The thundering laugh echoed through the room, drawing curious looks from outside the office. ‘Late night’ was code word for an all-nighter. But all that was just a prelude to the bombshell that the chief was about to drop on CJ.
‘With this thing about the vice premier, it looks like that piece you wrote on the Dalai Lama’s successor will have to wait at least another week.’
In the past when there wasn’t such an obvious excuse – like the time he wrote an article commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Zhou Enlai’s death – the chief would dish out the usual rhetoric that a magazine was a business and that, like any business, compromises were necessary to preserve its viability. ‘Compromises’ was code word for self-censorship, ‘viability’ for advertising dollars.
Indeed, advertisers had been getting a bit jittery these days. Not everything critical of Beijing made them nervous; just a short list of hot button topics like Tibet and Falun Gong. Chongjun compared the situation to the Garden of Eden. Like Adam and Eve, journalists in Hong Kong could help themselves to anything their hearts desired, except for the apples on that one tree. But the more they couldn’t have it, the more they all wanted it. Two months ago, he managed to pluck a forbidden fruit when he landed himself a telephone interview with the heir apparent to the Dalai Lama. Two months later, he still hadn’t taken a bite of the apple, for Michael kept pushing it back with one excuse after another. The idea was to let time, a reporter’s worst enemy, kill the article before the chief had to do it himself. An elegant solution to an ugly problem.
Back at his desk, Chongjun felt he had just been run over by a ten-ton truck. He also started to feel a little hungry. Other than those vile scrambled eggs they served on the plane, he hadn’t eaten anything all day. He decided to sneak out for a couple of hours and go home to drop off his bags. After what happened in the chief ’s office earlier, nothing would seem out of line. In a defiant move, he grabbed his carry-on luggage and made a beeline to the exit. Hai gum sin, he whispered one of local expressions his Hong Kong colleagues had taught him. He thought that this particular phrase, the Cantonese version of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ‘Hasta la vista baby,’ was perfect for the occasion.
To go home, the staff editor normally took the No. 8 bus. The double-decker picked him fifty feet from the office building and dropped him off in front of his apartment in North Point. But carrying all that luggage and still licking his wounds, Chongjun decided to flag down a taxi instead. He never liked taking taxis in Hong Kong, for his accent would make him prey to the crafty Cantonese. Just two weeks ago, a taxi-driver took him on the Eastern Corridor all the way to Tin Hau before he detoured back to North Point on the local streets. He protested as soon as they missed the highway exit but the driver played dumb and deaf. Minutes later came the implausible explanation that traffic on King’s Road was completely backed up due to a burst water main. It wasn’t until he started taking pictures of the driver’s ID on the dashboard when the latter finally agreed to cut the fare by half. Experiences like that reminded Chongjun of how foreign he essentially was.
There was of course other nonsense too, like putting up with bad service at restaurants and stores, and getting overcharged for anything from a bowl of wonton noodles to an expensive camera lens. When he asked for directions, sometimes people deliberately pointed him the wrong way. That explained his habit of carrying a city map book with him wherever he went. What really got under his skin, however, was the way Cantonese people addressed him using the collective term ‘You Mainlanders.’ You Mainlanders come to Hong Kong and bid up our property prices. You Mainlanders leech off our schools and our hospitals. Some of these accusations might have an ounce of truth; but others, like the notion that all of them were lazy and expected hand-outs from their Hong Kong cousins, were pure fabrication. He, for one, got up at 5:30 every morning and was almost always the first in the office and the last to leave.
Chongjun was not used to being home so early in the afternoon on a work day. There was a tranquillity to his apartment that he had never noticed before. Inside the 300-square foot shoebox of a place, there were books, magazines and printed materials strewn all over the floor. And that’s just the way he liked it – all that paper gave his home a Bohemian charm and added a touch of Kafkaesque existentialism to his Hong Kong experience. In the living room, every inch of wall was covered with photographs he had taken over the years with his Canon Mark III, an investment he made shortly after he moved to the city. He had long been an avid photographer. A semi-professional. He always thought that he needed something to fall back on in case his editorial career didn’t work out. Near his desk lamp and on top of his computer monitor was a picture of him standing in front of the Tsim Sha Tsui clock tower with the dramatic city skyline as his backdrop. The picture was taken five years ago when he visited Hong Kong for the first time during a summer break from Fudan. He remembered telling his friends back home that just by looking at the picture he could smell the salt in the breeze and hear the pulse of the city. Seeing the picture today saddened him. It broke his heart.
Next to his computer and lying flat on his desk was a printout of his Tibet article. It was staring at him, mocking him. All those late nights he put in writing it and polishing it had gone to waste. If this were the first time it had happened, he might have let it slide – Chongjun did not have a flare for theatrics after all – but it wasn’t. These editorial concessions would only get worse. At times it seemed like the problem went far beyond his boss and the magazine. It was all of Hong Kong. The government and the businesses. These Cantonese simpletons thought they were so clever, saying what they thought Beijing wanted to hear and doing what they thought Beijing wanted to see. That’s why they self-censored, self-edited and self- destroyed. But they had gotten it all wrong! China didn’t need another Shanghai or Shenzhen. What she needed was a Petri dish where freedom of expression could grow so she could study it and learn to manage it. Hong Kong was perfect just the way it was.
The more he thought about it the angrier he got. The unrelenting heat suffocated him. It crossed his mind to rip the article to shreds and delete it from his hard drive altogether. But he thought better of it. The article shouldn’t suffer for someone else’s mistakes. I could use it for my blog, he thought. Just two weeks ago Chongjun’s blog site was hacked and some of his old postings got edited, others deleted. There were two possible explanations: either some rookie hacker had chosen his site for practice, or that his blog was popular enough to be worthy of an attack. Finally a positive thought after a day of bad news.
Chongjun returned to the office an hour later. He went to work the following day and the day after that. On Wednesday, after the week’s issue had gone to print, he waited until everyone else had left the office, dropped a letter on Michael’s in-tray and packed a few personal effects before he left. Hai gum sin, he whispered as the building disappeared behind him.