Brief Appreciation for Hong Kong

When you pull way back on Google Maps and look at the entire east coast of China, Hong Kong doesn’t loom very large.

But if areas could be shown by historical importance, the southeastern corner with the Zhujiang (Pearl River) flowing into Guangzhou would stand out.

When China first opened up to what we now call the West in the early 1800s, Guangzhou was the opening. The only opening. All commerce was conducted through that portal. All the silk, the porcelain, the spices, the opium.

Hong Kong sits at the opening of the opening, where commerce went in and out of the river system, in and out of China. The ships that made it from Europe and, later, the U.S., usually weren’t the ships that could sail up the Pearl River.

The ships that took cargos in those final miles had to be quick because most of what they carried was illegal. Opium Clippers picked up hundreds of chests in India, where the British had learned to cultivate and process the drug; carried it Hong Kong; put it on Fast Boats and usually evaded Chinese authorities on the way to what they called Canton.

They say behind all great fortunes lie great crimes. I don’t know if it is true for cities in general, but it is for Hong Kong.

I don’t know if that’s why I loved Hong Kong so much. Do it’s outlaw origins still persist in Wanchai and plenty of other parts of the once-Special Territory?

It is horrible that western companies, most British, addicted millions of Chinese to opium to pay for what western consumers wanted from China. It is understandable that Hong Kong is in many ways the most powerful symbol of the Century of Humiliation that, in my opinion, is the primary driver of the Communist Party of China today.

I can know all this but still the only Hong Kong I know through my direct experience is the Hong Kong I traveled to for work and stayed sometimes for months at a time, between 2000–2004. I was in the Transnational Education Business, which took me into High Schools and into college classrooms run by local Hong Kong people for overseas universities.

It was a beautiful period for global learning-together advocates like me, with early educational software emerging on a still largely non-commercial World Wide Web. The Great Firewall of China was not fully in place. Political leaders and the general public in China and the U.S. felt generally good about each other.

Hong Kong was where the worlds met and got along for the most part. Most people there work very hard because they don’t take anything for granted. They have seen too many typhoons.

Not-knowing what would happen daily, monthly and over the years for people living in the Special Administrative Region created a sense of urgency that felt like life on a moving sidewalk there during the early 2000s. It was fun but exhausting.

Gradually, the Firewall grew, barriers appeared on sidewalks. Gradually, it stopped being fun.

I know mainland Chinese people who see Hong Kong people as corrupted by western influence. This is no big revelation to anyone who has been in China at all, but if you haven’t, it is important to be aware of this belief. Many people who live in China and many people who live in the U.S. feel this way — that the influence we have on each other may not be entirely good.

What cross-cultural influence actually happened in Hong Kong? Did two cultures just mix and become one? What actually happened was that western culture was written into the legal, business, and educational systems of Hong Kong by an Imperialist power launched by drug dealing at scale.

Hong Kong contributed people, people who poured in by the thousands every day especially during hard times on the mainland. Given a choice, some people preferred to live under the Imperialist power and the remnants of that system still in place after 1997.

I would have.

I was a finalist for a nice faculty position at a good university in Hong Kong in 2004. I dropped out because it wasn’t the best decision for my family.

I have no regrets about it but as I Say Goodbye to the Hong Kong of my imagination, I am also saying goodbye to the instance of the Multiverse in which I did take that position, because now I’d be leaving.