Hong Kong, March 2018 - 20 surprising things

I've been reflecting on my recent visit to Hong Kong - and previous visits too - and I've come up with a list of twenty things that to me are both surprising and interesting.

1. Retail contrasts
How many shops selling Rolex watches, Guerlain perfumes, and Gucci clothes does one city need? Such retail establishments seem to be everywhere - and not just in the main business districts.  But one of the joys of Hong Kong is to turn the corner from the shopping streets with the international brands to find traditional everyday commerce just a few metres away.  Over the years I have spent some time in the street markets of Wan Chai within shouting distance of the branded retailers, and on this visit I have explored Causeway Bay and found the same juxtapositions there.  Where else can one find butchers and fishmongers within 50 metres of top-marque clothes shops?

2. Where are the foreigners?
Hong Kong is a global city with vast numbers of expats living and working there.  Yet they don't get everywhere, by any means.  Visit the bars of Hollywood Road in Central, or Lockhart Road in Wan Chai, and westerners outnumber local people many times over. But go a mile or two in either direction - towards Kennedy Town in the west or Shau Kei Wan in the east - and it's hard to find any westerners among the myriad local faces.  I was in the centre of Aberdeen last Saturday and was the only non-Chinese in the square.  The same has been true in parts of Kowloon away from the main shopping streets and the ferry and bus terminal at Tsim Sha Tsui.  Hong Kong has certain areas that are 'foreign' and other areas that are 'local' - and there's not much relation between the two.

3. Mainland Chinese visitors
Occasionally one comes across tourists from the Chinese mainland.  Sometimes they are independent, sometimes in groups. Those in groups follow their leader slavishly, just as western tourists do in a foreign country.  Yet Hong Kong IS China, albeit through its Special Administrative Region status.  Three places I have come across mainland Chinese visitors are at Stanley (which is effectively a tourist attraction for westerners on the south coast); on the trams; and around the Macau ferry.

4. Music at Tsim Sha Tsui
Along this promenade in Kowloon, with its iconic view of Hong Kong Central across the water, and around the nearby bus station, musicians of all types and abilities set up on Sunday afternoons (and sometimes during the evening too).  There is a little amphitheatre where organised performances take place, but others just set up their pitches.  The standard varies from execrable to highly professional, but it is all tolerated.  Singing is generally in Chinese, but if one listens careful to the sounds they are often western hits of a few years ago, translated for a local market.

5. The decline of English
It has been my perception that since my first visit to Hong Kong in 2005 there has been some decline in the prevalence of English.  Certainly with the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 education policies changed and 'Mother Tongue Instruction' is now the norm in primary schools.  But whether this should be in Cantonese or Putonghua (Standard Chinese) is a controversial issue.  There is an official goal of biliteracy (written English and Chinese) and trilingualism (spoken English, Cantonese and Putonghua), but university staff I have recently met all argue that the standard of both spoken and written English has declined in recent years.  On the other hand, someone pointed out to me that if I am finding fewer people speaking fluent English in hotels, restaurants and service occupations, perhaps it's because there are many more foreign workers from elsewhere in East and South Asia now in the country.

6. Invisible shops and restaurants
Hong Kong is so densely packed that commerce has moved upwards.  Look for a restaurant at ground level and one can be disappointed - they are often upstairs via a lift or escalator from an inconspicuous ground-floor lobby.  There are treasures on high floors - on this visit I was taken to a superb bookshop high up in a block in Causeway Bay (the 'Eslite' bookshop) and later found that there was another of the same chain on an upper floor of a building in Kowloon.  But the presence of restaurants at height can be disconcerting - getting out of the lift to be confronted by a waiter who shows you to a table before you have even had the chance to look at the menu.  Finding these high-floor commercial premises must often depend on being taken there the first time by someone who has been before.

7.  Bamboo scaffolding
How high is it safe to erect scaffolding made entirely out of bamboo?  Is there a health and safety guideline on the thickness of the bamboo and how high it can be trusted?

8. Street shrines
On my way to a restaurant in Causeway Bay one evening, and then a few days later during the day, I came across old women operating what can only be described as 'shrines' under a flyover at a major bus interchange.  'Clients' were sitting having incense sticks waved ceremoniously around them.  For what purpose?  In one case a smartly-dressed businessman sat on one side while his equally smart female partner sat on a stool with her eyes closed while this ritual went on around her head.  Was she about to do an exam?  Did she have a headache? Were the couple trying unsuccessfully for a child?  Hong Kong has an interesting mixture of Christianity, Buddhism and superstition.

9. The Octopus card
The Octopus is a pre-payment card that seems to be usable for almost anything.  Its primary purpose is as a means of payment for public transport, but it also has uses ranging from car parking to payment in convenience stores.  And the over 65s get a special green 'elder' Octopus card which ensures reduced costs on transport (and the Star Ferry is then free), although whenever the card is used the card reader makes a distinctive sound, alerting everyone to the presence of a 'senior'.  Is there a reason why such transport pre-payment cards in various cities start with an 'O'?  London has its Oyster cards, Sydney its Opals, and Hong Kong its Octopuses.

10. Going up to go down
Entering a subway in Hong Kong always seems to involve going up two or three steps before then going down the expected flight.  It seems counter-intuitive at first, but the steps up prevent subways becoming flooded when typhoon rains are at their heaviest.

11. Getting on a metro
All metro platforms have glass partitions and gates along the platform edge so that no one can fall (or jump) onto the track.  The gates open only when a train is positioned adjacent to them.  I've seen this on the Jubilee Line in London, but nowhere else in Europe. (I'd be happy to stand corrected on that).  Given the crowds on the metro at peak time, it's a very good idea.

12. Buses under the water
There are three road tunnels linking Kowloon with Hong Kong Island under Victoria Harbour.  A surprisingly large number of bus routes link the two through these tunnels. Often in a distant part of the mainland part of Hong Kong one sees a bus proclaiming its destination as 'Central' or 'Admiralty' (on Hong Kong Island).  One of my favourite routes - the 973 - starts at Stanley on the south coast, travels round the west of Hong Kong Island via Aberdeen and Pok Fu Lam village, takes the tunnel through to Kowloon and ends up at the metro station at Tsim Sha Tsui East.

13. Queuing for the bus
See a long line of people lining the pavement on a main road, and they will almost certainly be queuing in a very orderly fashion for a bus, doing so within yellow lines painted on the pavement to show where the queue should be for each bus that uses that stop (and hence often creating well-demarcated parallel queues).

14. Patience in crossing the road
Whilst there are pedestrian lights at almost every significant road junction, the wait for green for pedestrians is often very long indeed, requiring a great deal of patience.

15. Drive on the left, but walk on the right
Traffic goes on the left  in Hong Kong (like nearby Macau, but unlike China).  But I have observed that on the major pedestrian walkways around 75% of people walk on the right.  I've no idea why this should be so.

16. Walk through buildings
The pedestrian walkways in parts of the territory are very comprehensive (if sometimes a little confusing).  They are plentiful in parts of central Kowloon, and in Central and Wan Chai in Hong Kong.  One of the endearing features of these is the way such walkways pass through office blocks and other buildings so that one can experience the atrium (that should possibly be atria) of skyscrapers occupied by global companies.  One is only prevented from trying to visit other floors by ropes across escalators, security gates in lift lobbies.,or the presence of security personnel.  Some of the most impressive buildings to walk through are the IFC Tower and the Standard Chartered Bank in Hong Kong Central, or the Central Plaza in Wan Chai.

17.  Green Space
With its very high density living in many areas, it is pleasing to see how many little parks and outdoor recreational areas have been created.  Certainly there are bigger parks such as Kowloon Park, Victoria Park and Hong Kong Park.  But many of the newer housing developments have been designed to create small open spaces, even in the densest developments.

18. High rise housing and the landscape
I was on a bus recently and counted 45 storeys of flats in the blocks I passed.  Yet such heights don't seem extreme because the hills of Hong Kong normally stand above the housing blocks.  However, a friend with a background in landscape design pointed something interesting out to me.  At one time  the view of Hong Kong Island from Kowloon saw all Hong Kong  buildings lying below the skyline of the ridge that runs along the island.  That is no longer true - and the blocks that break that skyline do seem more dominant and in some ways threatening than those that stay below it.

19. Farming and nature
The image of Hong Kong is of a high density urban environment.  But I was once taken out into the New Territories close to the border with China and was surprised at the amount of farmland and agriculture in the north-western area; close to Shenzhen.  And the hills of the whole territory are extremely well-wooded.  Hong Kong is greener, as well as much hillier, than I envisaged before I first visited it.

20. The big birds
Staying in rooms on the upper floors of Hong Kong hotels, one sometimes sees massive dark birds wheeling in the sky overhead or at eye level.  They float without apparently twitching a muscle or beating their wings at all.  Look up from ground level - something one rarely does - and they appear from behind one tower and cross the open sky to disappear behind another.  For some time I have wondered what they are.  I have just found out: they are a species of kite.  And they are magnificent.

Hong Kong, March 2018 - Domestic service and crowded housing

I’ve worked out that this has been my sixth visit to Hong Kong.  My first was in 2005.  All but one of my visits has been primarily for work purposes, although each of them has had some free time on the side, enabling me to get out and about and not just sit in meetings and functions, or visit institutions.  Over the years I have been all over the Special Administrative Region (SAR), including parts of the New Territories, but in reality the areas I know best are certain districts in Kowloon along with almost the whole of Hong Kong Island itself and some of the outlying islands such as Lamma.

Yesterday was Sunday, and at 9 o’clock in the evening I walked back to the Airport Express station from the Macau Ferry port on Hong Kong Island.  An overhead walkway provides most of the route and continuously lined along this were little enclosures made of cardboard boxes half opened out so that each enclosure can accommodate between 4 and 8 women sitting on the ground.  In most the remains of picnics were being finished off.  Earlier I passed a bus station where two much larger groups had taken up root directly on the pavement between the bus stands, and in one of the group two or three men were making music and singing to a guitar, but the majority of those present were women.  Elsewhere a glance into darkened corners between the high rise buildings or under walkways provided a vision of three of four women lying on the floor surrounded by the detritus of a meal.  Earlier on in the day I was walking the promenade at Tsim Sha Tsui, along with thousands of others, looking across the waters of the Victoria Harbour at the towering office and apartment blocks of Hong Kong Island all the way from Kennedy Town in the west to North Point in the East, and notable among the crowds were large numbers of women wearing Islamic headscarves.  Last Sunday I was on a bus and passed Victoria Park at Causeway Bay, and all along the pavement next to the park sat groups of women.

I guess that, along with various of the Gulf States, Hong Kong is the territory with the greatest prevalence of domestic service anywhere in the world, and almost all of it is labour drawn in from abroad.  Data from the Census and Statistics Department of Hong Kong SAR shows that at the end of 2016 there were 352,513 registered domestic service workers in the SAR of whom 98.5 per cent were female: 53 per cent of these were from the Philippines and 44 per cent from Indonesia.  As there are around 2.5 million households in Hong Kong that means that roughly every seventh household employs a domestic servant. (It may, of course, be that some of the wealthiest households employ several, thereby reducing the percentage of households with a servant).   Put another way, foreign domestic servants make up around 4.8 per cent of the total population of Hong Kong.

Many years ago I did some research on the domestic servants of Paris, concentrating on Spanish and Portuguese women. In the 1982 census of Paris, Iberian females amounted to 6 per cent of the population of the wealthy district along the Champs-Elysées, and 5 per cent in some nearby districts.  But an observation I made then (White, 1989: in P.E. Ogden and P.E. White, Migrants in Modern France, p. 206) was that “one of the most interesting aspects of the presence of Iberians in these wealthy areas of Paris is their lack of visibility.” The same would be true of Filipina and Indonesian domestic servants in Hong Kong now.  Except on Sunday.  For Sunday is the normal day for domestic servants to be given the 24 hour period free of duties, as mandated in the employment regulations.  It is a requirement for all domestic servants to live in the households of their employers – a requirement that has recently been upheld in a legal judgement made shortly before my visit. 

So it is that on Sundays, ‘released’ from their other duties, the maids of Hong Kong meet up with others of similar backgrounds and occupations to spend their day together – picnicking on the street or under the cover of overhead walkways or bus stations.    These latter are obvious places to meet up since they can gather women from several districts (many Hong Kong buses cross between the mainland and Hong Kong Island via the three road tunnels). The domestic workers of Hong Kong suddenly become very visible for one day a week.

Hong Kong has some of the smallest average apartment sizes for a developed world city – on average around 470 square feet (44 square metres), going down to 130 square feet (12 square metres) in some of the most crowded areas – particularly on Hong Kong Island.  Given the regulatory requirement for domestic workers to be provided with accommodation allowing ‘reasonable privacy’, the most crowded areas of Hong Kong do not have large numbers of servants.   So the Filipinas and Indonesians have a Sunday ‘commuter journey’ to meet up in certain central spaces.

To say that there is overcrowding in Hong Kong is an understatement.  I have been privileged in the last few days to be working alongside a number of very informative local residents, and I also benefited from a long conversation with a senior flight attendant on my way back to the UK last night. Everyone recognises that the price of property is well-nigh unaffordable for any vestige of comfortable living by ordinary people, particularly on Hong Kong Island.  There are certainly many poorer people there, but they have lived in their flats for decades.  Newer or more spacious property is dominated by business people and above all expats.   All the people I was working with live in Kowloon, near Tsing Yi (on the way out to the airport) or in the New Territories.  None could afford to live in Central or Wan Chai (or perhaps would want to, given the crowded nature of these districts). 

But will the booming nature of the Hong Kong economy and housing market last?  The number of maids has risen by 40 per cent in the last eight years.  But, as a mainland Chinese colleague pointed out to me over the weekend, Hong Kong suffered more than the People’s Republic during the financial crisis of the late ‘noughties’.  And the relationship between Hong Kongers and China is fraught with anxiety.  The ‘Occupy Central’ protests of late 2014 (which I witnessed at first hand since I was in Hong Kong at the time) led to a toughening of Beijing’s stand on the future autonomy of the SAR.  University students in Hong Kong, most recently in the Baptist University, continue to object to compulsory courses in Putonghua (standard Chinese). One of my Hong Kong colleagues told me she’d not been to China since she was taken there on a school trip as a child, and she has no desire to go back.  Macau is being built up by the Chinese authorities as an education centre to vie with Hong Kong.  And the growth of Shanghai as a global city (recorded in my previous blog) could threaten Hong Kong.  

The flight attendant this morning on my flight back to Manchester was telling me that she’s looking to invest in property to rent out in Salford, or in Blackley in North Manchester – less risky than in Hong Kong, even in the New Territories where she currently lives.   But there will be little question of the employment of foreign domestic labour in such Manchester locations – particularly after Brexit.