Visiting Hong Kong is like playing pass-the-parcel: each time the music stops, you unwrap another layer only to discover yet more layers waiting to be peeled away. This is my fourth or fifth trip to the city, so the music has stopped for me a good many times, yet I am still there, a child surrounded by layers of wrapping paper, but denied the final prize.
The layering is partly geographical. The city follows the contours of the land, which consists of steep hills that plunge into deep bays. The buildings on Hong Kong Island start at the water's edge, but the flat sweep of the harbor quickly yields to the Peak, and the buildings follow this ascent. Standing at the bottom you have a double sense of being towered over - tall buildings that start meters above your head, so that you have to crane your neck just to see their base.
The hilliness combined with the large population makes every inch of space precious, and this pressure on land leads to some ingenious local solutions. Hong Kong is the only place I know that has a double-decker tramline. The trams are as tall as buses, but much narrower, which means they can nimbly weave in and out of traffic, without using up too much space of their own. Then there are the walkways that loop and arch over main roads, forming aerial pathways between buildings that mean your feet never have to touch the ground. And then, of course, there are the fabled escalators too, the longest in the world…
This physical layering is not what most interests me though. There is another kind of layering, which is harder to perceive, and harder to describe. The way you can suddenly turn a corner in a large shopping mall, and come across a grimy corridor with shops spilling over with Filipino goods, and as you walk down, you realize that all the people there are Filipino too, but before you have time to take this in the corridor is over, and you are back in the air-conditioned space of the mall again. Or walking along Nathan Road, and passing the Indians who want to sell you watches, or cut you a pair of trousers, and wondering where it is they live, as you so rarely see Indians in other parts of the city.
Most insistently of all, there are the visions that strike me as "Chinese", but of a faded, ramshackle China that is at odds with "modern" Hong Kong, or "modern" China for that matter. The small, pokey stalls in Sheung Wan that consist of little more than a counter and a few shelves - no door even - and the shelves crammed with bits of porcelain, and to complete the picture, a litter of kittens curled up in a small nook on the floor; the small storehouses packed with obscure, dried seafood, and men lolling around playing mah-jiang; the stretch of open-air food stalls in Stanley Road that are still open in the middle of the night for noodles and iced bean desserts.
There is so much here that doesn't fit together, that exists separately and self-contained, and yet endures and remains on good terms with its neighbors.
And one other surprise…another layer that I unwrapped during this trip…despite its hectic reputation, Hong Kong is full of places to relax, and what's more, no one knows how to relax better than Hong Kong people. Whether it's the weekend family trip to have dim sum in a noisy neighborhood restaurant, or the outlying islands with their butterflies and their beaches, there are people everywhere, all the time, giving every indication of not thinking about work or money.
Many thanks to Reejay for letting me stay with him over the past few days, for being such a kind host, as well as a good cook, and above all, for sharing his time.
