Hong Kong has an amusing way of living up to its
high-imperial past. The southern end of the island – that which sets its gaze
upon the cargoship-studded expanses of the South China Sea – is still littered
with country clubs and golf courses that cater exclusively to Elderly White
Gentlemen. A closer look from the bus and you can make out a scattered,
sunbaked gaggle of half-pint, rice-hat-donning dwarves laboring to the
unrelenting rhythm of Privilege – or lack thereof. The grounds, it shall be
said, are immaculate.
A little further down the beautifully verdant and winding
mountain road, one descends upon an expanse of spotless beaches. On most days,
one cannot eat, drink, smoke, play football or toss Frisbee anywhere in the
sand – but today is the annual rugby brouhaha. Goons the expat-side-of-town-over
descend upon the seaboard to celebrate their fortune in true, perspiring form.
Sweat and sand and blood and beer – the plaster of imperial supremacy – mingle with
a vengeance. Altogether, it’s rather good people watching.
Hong Kong functions incredibly well because it fosters a
ruthlessly polite, upbeat and conformist temperament amongst the ‘educated’
sectors of its native population whilst encouraging (Westernized) foreigners to
indulge their every whim. Gomorra? Not exactly – for halfies and whole alike
are encouraged to take part. So long as you’ve an Anglophone accent or a vague
desire to obtain one, you’re eligible. If Singapore’s the Silicon Valley of Medium
Security Prisons, Hong Kong’s the American Dream on Parole. Gone are the native
Days of Being Wild.
Which brings us back to our first question, namely, the
role of imperial culture in contemporary Hong Kong. If the Americans now give
us (cultural) order, the Brits first gave us (social) law. To understand our
maiden, we must first engage her legacy. Our subject? The horse races.
A ten-minute walk from work, the races are the incarnation
of every lowbrow colonial administrator’s mid-week wet dream: a mélange of
bright lights, cheap beer, low-cut skirts and fat-bodied ties. Bankers, their
ostensible replacements, also abide. Never have I seen as many tactically
dressed and tastelessly attractive Caucasians in all my life. There to out-bet
the alcoholic, newspaper-clutching coolies, crackers at the tracks are deep. Doesn’t matter if you’re Swede,
Frankish or fraudster – so long as you’re there to drink beer, clutch little
pieces of paper and hip-hurrah into the air, feigning ebullience as the midget-led
stallions clamber by.
Not that people don’t win on the races – more often than
not they seem to. With names like ‘Jubilee’s Golden Shower’, ‘Merchant of
Penance’ and ‘Taming Amy’, choosing a winning horse has never been easier. That
is, of course, if you’re jockey hasn’t already tipped you off – a not uncommon
occurrence amongst ‘local’ – if not native – attendees with various ways and
means. As an old friend once responded when I asked how he’d spent the
Christmas holiday at the campus bar: we just sit around, trading money.
I can no longer recall my first visit to the races, though
a pleasant memory it must have been. Five minutes past the shopping district,
where I work, you reach the southeastern edge of the Hong Kong Jockey Club –
the subject of a future post, should I become a more responsible correspondent
in 2013. Veering left, you hug the outside wall of the tracks, a cobbled-stoned
embankment mounted by ivy and swept with (Chinese?) weeping willows. As you
gradually round the track from the exterior, you can hear the distant buzz of
the crowd. It’s been dark for several hours, but the stadium lights lend the
sidewalk an evanescent glow. To the left, high-rise apartments jut from verdant
hills. Amongst them, a crumbling neo-classical Catholic girls’ school emerges
from a sea of mangroves. As you pause to light your cigarette, a double-decker
tram breezes by. Packed with mid-week revelers, you look up, grin and pretend
to avoid their gaze.
You’ve rounded the tracks and finally face the plebian
entrance (of the other we’ve no information). Next to the tram depot across the
street, a string of quasi-trendy bars called Rive Gauche or Guten Loving
spill forth with professional 30-somethings. It’s already 9:30pm, so the less
ardent of spectators (family men, teetotalers) are already trickling out. That
said, it’s also free to enter at this hour – so if you’ve brought your own liquid
pacifier, the evening costs you naught.
Upon entry, you’re thrust into a honkey potpourri of epic
proportions. For those of you living in the Occident, this mightn’t appear
strange. I ask you, however, to consider me this. Imagine central or northern
Harlem on a hot summer’s day. It’s Sunday and you’ve a French family wandering in
search of the Singing Gospel. Around the corner, a young Scandinavian smokes outside
his over-priced, roach-infested hostel, while a gaunt, washed-up Hackney writer
sips a coffee outside the barbershop-turned-café. Apart from that, not a
cracker in sight; after all, why should there be? Only teachers, gays and grad
students would be silly enough to do so.
Then you round the corner. Rucker Park has been converted
into a suburban block party, a meeting of the Milwaukee Rotary Association, the
Portland Boy Scouts Alumni Reunion, the Goebbels-und-Greta Garbo Appreciation
Club. There are picnic tables and red and white-checkered table mats in
plastic; a strange Volvo-cum-Dodge-minivan hybrid is blasting Creed from the
parking lot; a man in a salmon-colored blazer is handing out Grover Norquist
stickers. Such is (almost) the shock of entering the Happy Valley racecourse on
a Wednesday evening, wherein you’re face to face with Christmastime at the Minneapolis
Shopping Center, a Cubs game in early July. Self-indulgent, mid-to-late-20s
white professionals burp, bop, giggle and boop as far as the eye can see. Never
have I seen so many salmon colored blazers in all my life.
One week they’ve erected a stage for Canto pop stars, a
rare opportunity in which the doyens of local mass culture croon in English to
the foreign element, their drowning ditties overcome only by the incessant
banter of Being Young and Living in the Orient. In October, the German-themed
lagers (but brewed in the Philippines) hire a gaggle of cutesy thin-legged
locals to prance about in lederhosen, pointing potential patrons with a wink toward
their respective tents. A faux Bavarian band plays Springsteen in the
background.
Not that I’m complaining: I do no such thing. On one
Wednesday in November I stumbled into an old friend from college, a native of
Hong Kong, who invited me to join his crew of dapper Yanky, Swiss and South
Asian dons. After several pitchers amongst a slew of 19-year old anorexic, 6’2,
aspiring Russian models, we made for grassy knoll before the finish line, where
the descendants of horse-owning, latter-day Mafiosi admire their winning mare across
the line. Afterwards, we make for the underground lair where the city’s first
and finest store their means of transportation. Our host’s friend has kindly
offered us a ride back into town.
We pile into his two-door, supped up Mercedes ricer-coupe, a
beautifully tacky but powerful piece of work. He’s slightly tipsy, but it’s
only ten minutes into town. Twenty years younger than the rest of the parking
lots patrons, we garner more than a few looks as he roars his engine à la
unemployed Vin Diesel, blasting the Black Eyed Peas (or something of that
nature) as we creep up the ramp at 5mph. A moment later we’re on the highway,
darting through cabbies at 100mph. His female companion in the front – a tawdry
but well-meaning American girl – takes pains to reassure him: “I mean, it’s
like, everyone says don’t drink and drive but, like, you’re still alive! Oh my God
this is so much fun!” I could have died a happy man. Well, bittersweetly bemused
at the least.
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If Wednesdays in Happy Valley offer a most fascinating
insight into Westerners in Hong Kong Gone Imperially Wild, then Sunday
afternoons in Sha Tin are a most telling alternative. Far north in the New
Territories, some 5 miles south of the Chinese border and home to the
sprawling, jungle-laced high-rise towers that house the city’s
services-and-manufacturing proletariat, the Sha Tin races cater to the Common
Man and his kin. Hosting 60,000+ people, Sha Tin is where you can still buy
hard-boiled eggs and Horses-R-us hats at the entrance, the later of which was
worn by fully 40% of the afternoon’s attendees, usually creased and tilted to
the side.
An afternoon of Tsingtaos was happily interrupted by the sponsored
appearance of Kate Winslet and Hong Kong’s ‘Chief Executive’, CY Leung, the
city-state’s most powerful politician and a devout adherent to whatever pill
Beijing is currently pushing. Following the celebrity appearances was a most
spectacular fireworks show – but the best of the evening was yet to come.
We sauntered out of the darkened stands with a stream of
gaming-weary drunkards, ourselves hardly an exception. The lines for the bus
and train entirely too long, we resolved to hail a cab from the other,
purportedly quiet, end of the stadium – so around the bend we’d go to seek our
transportational fortune. Little did we know what lied ahead.
Around a corner or two emerged the course’s most
illustrious exit, out of which flowed a most distinguished retinue of spring-colored,
ten-gallon hat donning English matriarchs by the hundred. Ostensibly nestled
atop the stadium’s box seats, they still had to momentarily emerge at street
level to catch a ride back to the city. A site as aesthetically absurd as the
Royal Wedding – but much more so given the nature of the venue, an outdoor
gambling den with tens of thousands of delightfully plebian Chinese men
sporting sideways baseball caps, the contrast was more than I could bear. Five
hundred of the most pompously tacky creatures this town has ever known were
boisterously spilling into the street, in diamond-studded heels, five-inch flowers
and plastic terrier-bows atop their head. The most perplexing sight I’ve ever
seen. All the same, we still needed a ride. And after all, we were still white.
Each 5-star hotel had hired a bus to take its respective
patrons back to town – so nudge into the most inconspicuous line we did. Within
moments, we were seated and surrounded by chattering, post-aristo Susies the
entirety of the swashbuckling trip back to town. Through twisting, towering
highways we blazed through endless neon lights, Mandarin billboards and daunting,
darkened high-rises, the exploding skyline a reminder we were still on Mars. I
pinched myself and hazily tried to read the LRB.
We arrived at the Park Hyatt a giggling troupe. Biting our
respective tongues (we’d boarded the bus in shorts and flip-flops), we thanked
the gracious driver and descended into the hotel lobby. In a different light,
the younger matriarchs weren’t as charming as I’d originally thought; nay, the artificial
luster now revealed the crease of time, the facial sorrows of social anxiety. Could
it be? Were they not of royal stock? Were we not the only imposters that surreal
Sunday evening in December?
What we witnessed that day were the remnants of bygone era,
an age in which attitude, style and racial prerogative reigned supreme: the
visceral gut of imperial order. Granted, we all love beer and horses, but some
of us love them more. And in a completely different manner. Perhaps.
But what if the opposite were true? What if our friends on the bus were not the
August Inheritors of an Ancient Imperial Order, the incarnation of Her
Majesty’s human scepter? Suppose they were the same hen-bound women smoking
ciggs on that Easyjet flight to Lisbon? The more I pondered the matter, the
less I could tell.
In the end, we went for Thai and a tallboy down the road in Wan Chai,
the city’s charmingly grotesque red-light district (partially) awash in balding,
blustering, bulging, horny middle-aged men from Aus and the British Isles. A
hundred years ago they’d be sailing into port to burn down the Summer Palace
and scheme on listless Chinese girls. Today, they pry on off-duty Filipino
domestic workers and throw popcorn at the television screen. Outside of 711
strut the corpulent West African sidewalksters, perennial fixtures of the
night. A gutted Belgian strolled by; he seemed to know them all by name.
