Nury Vittachi - Hong Kong: The City of Dreams

A C ITY AT W ORK AND AT P LAY

Eating and sex: thats human nature.

Mencius, 372 BC to 289 BC

F or many ordinary Hong Kong people, buying and selling real estate at high speed is a sort of extra job. And flats sometimes change hands numerous times while they are just a twinkle in a property developers eye. A friend of mine bought an apartment in a new Hong Kong housing development. I congratulated him and asked, Whats it like?

I dont know, he replied. They wont finish building it for at least a year.

Well at least itll be nice to be the first owner of a brand new property, I offered.

Im not the first owner, he replied. Im the fifth.

This is a work-obsessed society, and making money from propertybuilding it, investing in it, buying it, selling it and renovating itis the single most popular field of endeavour.

Floating taxis and fishing vessels can still be found in Aberdeen Harbour, which is most famous for its floating restaurants and the boat people who live in its waters.

And it happens at speed. Even for apartments which actually exist, the market moves fast. Ill never forget the day I decided to sell my apartment. At 4.30 p.m., I visited the property agent and told him I wanted to put it on the market. By 5 p.m., he had phoned a list of buyers who turned up at my front door and started bidding for it. By 6.30, I had the deposit in cash. True story.

But does a strong economy make a paradise? No. Lets put things in perspective. Even the most blindly over-enthusiastic Hong Kong booster (and Im talking about myself again here) has to admit that the place has certain shortcomings. The one that amazes me is our stunning lack of creativity. Lets examine this in conjunction with the property theme which we started this chapter with. We in this city are absolutely brilliant at producing buildingsbut we are terrible at naming them, since that takes creativity. We can throw buildings up seemingly overnight. We can do skyscrapers, we can do groundscrapers, we can do round buildings, square ones, triangular-shaped ones and ones with lots of eye-catching geometric anglesas the incredible pictures on the following pages show. I know of cases where we have erected tall towers, decided we didnt like them, and then tore them down to start againall before a single human being had spent a single night in them. We produce buildings so fast that when a block reaches the age of 30, banks stop offering home-loans on it, since everyone assumes that it is time to knock it down and replace it with a fresh one.

But when it comes to naming themah, well, thats different. Naming a building takes creativity. You cant do it out of an engineering manual. It takes poetry. It takes an artistic soul. We are not at all good at that kind of stuff, sorry. Failing to understand the creative principles involved in naming things, we instead use labels. The central business district used to be called Victoria; now it is called Central. At the middle of Central is a building called Central Building. Nearby is a tower called Central Tower. Down the road is a commercial building called Commercial Building. In the suburbs, we find a building called Skyscraper, and on the other side of the harbour is a Multi-Storey Car Park Building called just that. Near where I live, theres a hospital. The main block is called Main Block. Recently they built a new clinical wing, named New Clinical Wing. You get the point.

Occasionally, we work up a bit of courage and add an adjective to our building names. For example, theres a Newish Building and an Adjoining Building in Hong Kong. Near my old office there is a restaurant called Quite Good Chinese Restaurant (its signature dish is Quite Good Noodles). But my favourite restaurant is gone now. It used to be in Wellington Street, in Central: a wonderful vegetarian restaurant, called, you guessed it, Vegetarian Restaurant. The waitresses inside all wore name badges; and every badge said: Waitress, thus serving to differentiate the young women from the plants and the fish.

No; poetry is not our thing. We are practical, working men and women. We work on the land, we work on the hills, we work on the waters of the harbour, we work from barrows and cardboard boxes on the pavements.

Water is never far away for Hong Kongers, who love messing about in boats.

To a photographer with a sharp eye, and advanced mountaineering skills, the striking geometric shapes of the best of Hong Kong architecture become evident.

Architect I.M. Pei dared to build the Bank of China out of triangles, which are beautiful but violently upset feng shui fans

Sometimes the old ways still work the best, this woman keeping cool with a fan seems to be saying.

But we dont spend all our time making money. We also spend a great deal of time spending it. Shopping is Hong Kongs Olympic specialty. People in our community have developed our own form of aerobic exercise to get a workout: speed shopping.

The range of options for the shopping addict is immense, with whole areas devoted to single productseither popular items, or even quite esoteric, niche items. Happy Valley has a whole street of shops selling high-heeled shoes and designer boots, and Wan Chai has a road lined with chandelier stores (why not pick up a few on your way back to the hotel?). For something more exotic, check out Sheung Wan, located a short walk east of Central. It is filled with shop after shop where ancient, sun-dried, strange-smelling fish are sold by ancient, sun-dried, strange-smelling fishmongers. How they all compete with each other, I have no idea. It is like stepping back in time to old Chinaand it becomes even more curious when you realise that this area is listed on old maps as Chinatown. Yes, even a city in China can have a Chinatown.

We also have shops for dead people. You find them also in Sheung Wan, after the dried fish stores. These dead shops sell items fashioned in paper and card, designed to be burned and thus sent to heaven, for the use of the recently departed. (Once burned, they are assumed to re-appear in heaven as solid, useable items.) The range of paper-made goods destined to rematerialise in paradise is amazing. There are designer shirts, sports cars, televisions and houses. There are paper servants. There are airline tickets, although Im not sure what they are for (are dead people allowed to fly back to earth for their holidays?). There are computers, so watch out for emails from dearly departed Third Uncle Pang. And the really bad news: there are recent model mobile phones, and karaoke machines with extra large speakers. The noise pollution in the Hong Kong equivalent of heaven is going to be pretty bad.