Seven Random Things

Some weeks ago I was tagged or challenged by Nappy Valley a fellow blogger and cyberspace acquaintance to write seven random things about myself. Nappy Valley is, as I learned from her own seven things, a fellow Essex Girl who grew up in Hong Kong during the 1980s and now occupies my old life pushing a pram round a common in SW London.

So we have quite a lot in common, if you’ll pardon the pun. Except that she executed her piece remarkably swiftly, rejoicing in the fact that the challenge gave her something to blog about in an otherwise uninspired week. By contrast I find myself with an essay crisis of extraordinary proportions which has caused me to stick my head in the sand, discover writer’s block and lose almost all interest in blogging.

As I struggle to write something, anything, I’m going to assume that the family and friends for whom I started this blog already know enough about me and focus instead on Hong Kong. So, with the full weight of four months of first hand experience behind me, here goes!

1. I first came through Hong Kong in 1995 with my German boss, a dynamic, young entrepreneur who was looking to invest in China and build a factory for the wooden toys he was producing too expensively in eastern Germany. I didn’t warm to China and subsequently declined the opportunity to move to Ningpo with a sales and marketing role in his fast-growing business, leaving the firm soon afterwards. That ex-boss now employs 900 people to make his wooden toys. He has pioneered the use of bamboo in toy making as a greener alternative to wood and has won design prizes for his products. Just occasionally I wonder where I’d be now, had I stayed on. Instead I’ve done my bit by adding four toy consumers to the market place.

2. Before heading to China on that occasion, I stayed the night in Braemar Hill with a family friend who had first met my parents at a remote hospital in the Northern Transvaal, where my father was a missionary surgeon in the early 1960s. Her parents had been medics there too, working with TB patients in what was then Sekhukhuneland. As a girl she was taught to bake by my newly-married, young mother while the doctors held their clinics under trees far out in the bush. From South Africa her parents moved to Hong Kong where TB was rife due to poor sanitation and overcrowding partly due to the influx of immigrants fleeing Communist China.

3. I've recently read ‘The World of Suzie Wong’ by Richard Mason. A penniless young English artist takes lodgings in an inexpensive hotel on the Wanchai waterfront without realising that rooms there are more usually rented by the hour by British and American sailors. During his stay he gets to know the hotel’s bargirls and falls in love with the enigmatic Suzie Wong, herself a TB victim, whom he finally marries. Apparently it was this book which created the myth on which Wanchai's reputation was built but the book is also credited with challenging the hypocrisy of the prevailing western attitudes towards racial superiority, morality and mixed marriage in Asia. Fifty years on miscegenation wouldn't raise an eyebrow but I can't help feeling there might still be awkward silences at the in-laws' dinner table when news broke of the wife's former profession. Or am I out of date?

4. Whilst Wanchai is still the scene of Hong Kong’s thriving red light area, the girls who work the district are no longer Chinese but originate instead from Thailand and the Philippines. Suzie Wong's hotel would no longer be on the waterfront but several roads removed from the harbour where junks and sampans moored and unloaded their wares in the 1950s. Land reclamation on the island’s northern waterfront began in Hong Kong in the late 1860s and continues today. Most of the urban area of Hong Kong is in fact built on reclaimed land and one has to wonder if Hong Kong will be an island for ever as similar projects on the Kowloon peninsular squeeze the busy waterway of Victoria Harbour from both sides. I’ve heard said that a trip across the harbour on the Star Ferry is no longer as exciting as it used to be as it is now over in so very few minutes.

5. On the roads, in the car parks and private garages of Hong Kong Island Bentleys, Aston Martins, Rolls Royces, Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Maseratis are all in evidence. It is extraordinary when, considering Hong Kong’s narrow, steep and winding roads and the frequency with which one gets stuck behind a lumbering double-decker bus, it is unusual to reach speeds of anything over 40 km per hour. I have slightly more sympathy with the open top varieties for, if ever there was a climate for cabriolet-cruising then surely it is here and you don’t need to go particularly fast to feel the wind in your hair. Sunday morning is promenading time. Just as Victorian gents might once have strolled along the waterfront or Praya in years gone by to show off a new suit or a new wife the modern day gent takes his sports car out early along the island’s south side or up to the northern New Territories for the rare experience of anything over third gear.

6. I predict that a number of those cars will be up for sale over the coming months. To ignore the effects of the economic downturn and the global financial crisis on Hong Kong would be to give the false impression that we are living in a bubble. Far from it. China has revealed that its economy is expected to grow by 7.5% in 2009, down on the expected 9% and that the effects of global recession are likely to be far worse than was initially thought. Fewer Chinese imports are being bought around the world leading to factory closures and widespread job losses. I hope my toy-manufacturing ex-boss will be OK. The ex-pat community of Hong Kong is undoubtedly affected and the one conversation to be heard repeated over and over again is, ‘Will you be all right?’ or ‘Is your job safe?’ The fact of the matter is that nobody knows.

7. Christmas is coming, though it’s hard to believe. Any preparation I have done is way behind my usual efforts as it still feels like the summer holidays. It is hard to get into the mood when its 29 degrees outside and you are building sandcastles on the beach. I did have an exploratory foray last week in search of some toy shops, feeling as I did, that the children might not accept my explanation that Christmas wasn’t going to happen this year as Mummy hadn’t got her head round the fact it was already December. The decorations are up in the shopping malls and on sale in the shops where I have spotted baubles, tinsel, reindeer, Father Christmas, polar bears, Christmas trees and even the occasional angel. Noticeably absent was any sign of the Christ child. China is not a Christian country and most of Hong Kong’s citizens are followers of Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian faiths which would explain the absence of Christian symbolism. And yet Hong Kong is busy preparing for a festive holiday; a party to which the baby Jesus seemingly hasn’t been invited.