Not long ago, the city’s time was said to be over. Not anymore. Like an indestructible kung fu champ, it’s kicking back—big time. Karl Taro Greenfeld gets right into the action
We’re downstairs at King of the King, a Cantonese seafood restaurant in Hong Kong’s Central district. Behind lacquered–wood partitions, mah–jongg players shuffle tiles, making that noisy rattle—like a thousand impatient women tapping their fingernails. But the eight of us seated around a white cloth–covered table are playing poker, not mah–jongg. While the cards are dealt, the talk is of deals and business and opportunities and new properties. A hotelier, Jason (who brought me here), is wondering about selling out to a Russian businessman, and Ben, the scion of a wealthy family, is discussing investing in some property in Beijing, and Chris, a trader for a hedge fund, says that the thing to do is borrow in Hong Kong dollars at two and three–quarters percent and deposit in Australia at five and three–quarters and use the spread to buy a new Ferrari. Then the guys are talking about Full House, one of the Korean soap operas sweeping greater China and starring the actress Song Hye Kyo, who is so fine—a little chubby, comments someone, but she’s still so leng lui, dude. But the conversation, between hands, keeps going back to deals and opportunities and property: the development in Kowloon West, Korean equities, new hotels, better cars. As I wait for my cards, I look around and notice that everyone at the table is wearing a better wristwatch than I am. When I ask Chris, who is next to me, what time he has to go to work in the morning, he shrugs. “Whenever.”
In Hong Kong today, it seems that no one is bothering to earn a living because everyone is too busy making a killing.
In between noodles with pork, bowls of fried rice, and crab and corn soup, I find that I am losing track of the half–Cantonese, half–English conversation and become slightly impatient, so I go all in with two pair, kings over sevens, and this guy Scotty across from me in a hoodie sweatshirt, a Nike visor, and his cell phone dangling from a lanyard around his neck calls me and has kings and jacks. I’m about to buy in for another sixty dollars when I look around the table and wonder who the easy money is and realize that it’s me.
I fold my cards and explain to Jason that I have to meet someone, which is true, and I take my leave—past the clattering mah–jongg tables, the fish tanks stocked with garoupa whose bulging eyes make them look as if they are taking pity on my losing ways—and head up the stairs and out the door and onto Queen’s Road, where the air is hot and damp and smells of wet concrete and Victoria Harbour.
There are the usual crowds of well–dressed Hong Kongers out for the evening: businessmen in summer–weight suits and wire frame glasses; pretty girls with hennaed hair, artisanal T–shirts, and treated denim jeans; gweilo—Western women in shiny tops, jeans, and strappy heels. The sidewalk is hard going: The pavement is being torn up. Steel pedestrian bridges laid down over scars in the concrete reveal tangled layers of fresh plumbing and fiber–optic cable. The city, apparently, is rewiring.
I ride up an escalator at the Entertainment Building, cross over an air–conditioned pedestrian bridge to Central Tower, then another to the Central Building, then to The Landmark complex, Alexandra House, and the Princes Building and I’m back in the Mandarin Hotel—all the way across Central Hong Kong without setting foot outdoors. I’ve always enjoyed this particular route, not only for its convenience but also for the feeling of being above it all and for the perspective it provides into Hong Kong’s psyche. In the past, I observed that it took me by two Prada stores (just in case I’d forgotten to pick something up at my first Prada opportunity, or, even more worrying, something I’d bought at the first shop had gone out of fashion before I reached the second). Then, in the bleak early years of this century, the route took me past shuttered boutiques, the occasional bum, and, for a time, anxious pedestrians wearing surgical masks. I recall making the walk in the opposite direction, from the Mandarin to the nightlife district of Lan Kwai Fong, and not seeing another soul for most of the trip. That was in early 2003, at the height of the SARS scare.
My family and I moved away from Hong Kong in 2004, after living in the city for more than three years. When we left, the territory was still reeling from SARS, the lackluster leadership of Chief Executive Tung Chee–Hwa, and paralyzing pro–democracy marches. Unemployment was stuck at ten percent. The property market, still the main economic driver in Hong Kong, had plunged fifty percent from its late–1990s highs, leaving 200,000 homeowners in this city of seven million people in a negative equity position in which they owed more on their flats than they were worth. Luxury hotels were closing. Restaurants were nearly empty. I would occasionally find myself the only shopper in swanky boutiques.
It was as if everyone’s worst fears about Hong Kong’s return to China had come true. With reunification, it seemed that Hong Kong’s advantages—rule of law, convertible currency, world–class service, a large and sophisticated business and financial community—would gradually be arbitraged into irrelevance as Western businesses bypassed the Fragrant Harbor (the literal translation of Hong Kong) and headed straight for Guangdong and Shanghai. Who needed Hong Kong anymore, the reasoning went, if you could deal directly and more cheaply with the Chinese? There was a creeping sense that this city, which had once seemed a world metropolis on a par with New York, London, and Tokyo, was no longer even the most important city in southern China.
Then came SARS. Magazines ran stories with headlines like “Urban Decay: Cities Are Living Organisms—and Hong Kong May Be One That’s Dying,” explaining how disease outbreaks have been the death knell for many a great burg. I remember that headline well because I wrote it when I was living here and running Time magazine’s Asian edition.
Yet the city I flew into just sixteen months after moving out had not only recovered, it had been transformed. Hong Kong’s scientists, doctors, and public health officials had done a remarkable job of beating back SARS and warding off avian influenza outbreaks. The perpetually disappointing chief executive Tung Chee–Hwa had finally resigned, citing “health reasons,” and had been replaced by efficient former finance secretary Donald Tsang. And the property market that had been like an ankle weight on Hong Kongers at the upper and lower ends of society was now booming in a manner very familiar to New Yorkers, Floridians, and Californians.
My stroll back to the Mandarin reveals how much has changed. Central Hong Kong used to be office buildings with ground–floor boutiques tucked discreetly under awnings. Now the branded boutiques have bulged out past the old shells of buildings like bodybuilders grown too huge for their clothes. Even the famous Chater House office building blares Armani from its street–level storefronts, and a corner of The Landmark complex is a Louis Vuitton store. The march of progress, for Hong Kong, has been the march of brands as they’ve taken over entire urban vistas. Gazing along Des Voeux Road means staring down a canyon of Armani, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana, and Yves Saint Laurent. Suddenly, everything seems newer and bigger than before, with higher prices and better service. By this fall, there will be a new Mandarin Oriental, a new Four Seasons, a new Ritz–Carlton. A new Disneyland. A new Ocean Park. New clubs in Lan Kwai Fong serving new drinks—the Flirtini (this year’s lychee martini). A new bridge to new casinos in Macau. A new cable car up to the Big Buddha statue on Lantau Island. A new mall at the International Finance Centre. New flats throughout Hong Kong oversubscribed overnight. A new chief executive. New enthusiasm.
As China goes from economic strength to strength, with no end of ten percent annual growth in sight, Hong Kong’s geography has become its greatest asset. Millions of tourists from China flood in with billions of kwai as well as hundreds of thousands of businessmen looking to spend or launder their money on flats and Fendis. These are a new breed of Chinese tourists who have big money and speak English and shop at Harvey Nichols (new Asian flagship boutique) and Louis Vuitton. In terms of tourism, the Chinese are the new Japanese. Suddenly, all the vast promise of that 1997 passing of stewardship seems to be, incredibly, coming true. China is the hottest story/market/country on the planet, and Hong Kong has more than a ringside seat; because of its financial services, rule of law, and currency transparency, it’s become the middle of the Middle Kingdom.
All of my old friends who were envious of my departure are now scheming how to extend their postings or thinking of leaving their companies to start hedge funds, property ventures, or members–only nightspots. Fellow journalists who lamented being stuck in this backwater of a story are renewing their leases, at twenty to fifty percent higher rents. Everyone is planning, dreaming. Conversations revolve around new development, bigger properties, and insider transactions; at times I feel like I have walked into a gigantic, swankier version of the Glengarry Glen Ross offices. “Hong Kong is run by the property market and the stock market,” says developer and entrepreneur Allan Zeman. “The people here are born gamblers, and when they are feeling this good, it builds on itself.”
I catch that buzz later that night while I’m having drinks in Hei Hei Wa, a new club, with my friend Davena Mok. She promotes DJs, musicians, clothing brands. At least I think that’s what she does. The truth is I’ve never really figured out Davena’s line of business, but I know it requires that she spend vast amounts of time in trendy nightclubs and that she be on hugs–and–kisses terms with every impresario, party promoter, and door person in Asia. We’re on the back patio, near the Jacuzzis, beneath a canopy of lush palms that rustle in the breeze. I can forget, for a moment, that I am in the middle of Hong Kong. But then a guy wearing sunglasses and a three–button black suit joins us on the patio, trailed by a much younger woman in a shoulder–strap black dress and several fellows in jeans and trainers, and I remember hearing a rumor that this club was popular with a certain element of Hong Kong society that occasionally closes deals with chopper knives instead of contracts and cash. Rumors of a joint being a little mobbed up, Davena points out, have never killed business at a Hong Kong nightspot. “There’s so much happening now,” she says between sips of a vodka and orange juice. “Everyone’s opening up new clubs, new bars. The guys from Fly have Volar. The guys from Drop have Finds. The guy who does Jewel is expanding Dojo. It’s all a bit ridiculous, but it’s good fun.”
Davena’s story is typical of where Hong Kong is right now. A few years ago, when the city was mired in a seemingly interminable slump and Fortune magazine was predicting it might become “the Cleveland of China,” Davena was broke enough to work as my assistant. Now, less than two years later, she is a one–woman…whatever she is. But she is turning away business and has become choosy about her clients and partners. The dreaded brain drain that had young, talented Hong Kongers fleeing for the United States, Australia, Canada, and, mainly, China has reversed itself as the best and the brightest return. My friend Tom Hilditch, editor of HK Magazine, has a simple explanation for the about–face. “There’s all this talk about China, China, China,” he says, “but when you actually go there and stay for a while, you realize how lacking it still is in terms of basic comforts. After you’ve spent a week or two in China, arriving in Hong Kong is an incredible relief.”
Those waves of returning Chinese have launched more nightclubs in the past twelve months than were started in the entire forty months I lived in the territory. And Hong Kong remains one of the best cities in the world for clubbing because all the venues are within walking distance of one another and you can easily make the rounds of five or six joints in one night. Be forewarned, though, that you might find yourself stalled at the velvet rope: Almost every club has a members–only policy that is waived only for the seriously rich, trendy, and foxy.
The newest hot spot is Volar, and as we’re leaving Hei Hei and walking past the California Fitness Gym on Wellington Street, we run into Jackie, the door person at Volar, who explains that she’s on her way to Hei Hei. “I’ll be at the I [as in Dragon–I] later, and Volar will be happening later later, when the models get free drinks,” she says. (Question: When did they sign the UN accord that guarantees models free drinks everywhere in the world?)
We end up reversing the order and hitting Volar first, sitting down with its owner, Benedict Ku, and the former emcee of the rap act LMF, Sam Lee. Benedict’s family manufactures artificial flowers and Christmas trees, businesses that have left Benedict yearning for a more fulfilling outlet. “Guys like me, from good families, we want to create, we want to make a difference—not just spend our parents’ money but get the juices flowing. There are so many creative people in Hong Kong right now, and that’s why the vibe is so full on.” He’s designed his club as a series of circular rooms off a main rectangular room that has an ovoid DJ booth in the middle and an elliptical bar off to one side. As the night goes on, I notice a similarity in the design and style of these nightclubs: The recessed lighting, overstuffed banquettes, and padded and cushioned walls and ceilings make me feel like we’re on the set of Miami Vice: Far East, only instead of pastels and linen the guys are wearing Deth Killers T–shirts and Chrome Hearts shades.
At Dragon–I, we run into a Frenchman I know who worked for a watch company that occasionally advertised in our magazine. “Thank God we didn’t leave Hong Kong,” he says, momentarily distracted from a beautiful, indifferent Anglo–Indian girl for whom he has bought a glass of white wine.
Before I can correct him, he continues: “The girls here are the best anywhere in the world. And they are easy—”
The girl glares at him. “Except for you, of course,” he says quickly. “Not you.”
The next night, I’m having dinner at Isola, an Italian restaurant in the new International Finance Centre mall, the future home of the Four Seasons. There is a patio all the way around the restaurant and an outdoor lounge on the top floor with cushioned benches laid out between planters. At dinner are a few of my old colleagues: Jim Erickson, the senior business editor at Time, writer Aryn Baker, and Neil Gough, a senior writer at the South China Morning Post. The conversation turns to what Hong Kong was and what it has become, and how we got from there to here so quickly.
“None of it is real,” explains Erickson. “It wasn’t that bad when everybody said it was bad, and it isn’t that good now.”
But if you look around this packed restaurant, where the excellent rigatoni with lobster goes for forty dollars a plate and the cheapest bottle of Barolo on the menu is ninety dollars, you get the feeling that it’s pretty damn good right now. The mainlanders here are sophisticated and are familiar with fine Continental dining. There is a rich mix of expats and locals. For example, in the corner of the restaurant, against one of the plate glass windows, I see a fellow I recall who cashed out of his investment bank to start a hedge fund. That was when I was moving away. Now, as we get reacquainted, I find out that—surprise, surprise—he’s doing very well.
“We’re not going anywhere,” he says. “How’s New York?”
“Not like this,” I tell him.
It’s not the transition from bust to boom that is startling but rather just how different Hong Kong is from the place I called home. In my mind’s eye, Hong Kong should never change, the duplicate Prada boutiques should be reliably where they have always been, the Mandarin must remain resolutely and impeccably the Mandarin, and the slippery steel spiral staircase at the top of D’Aguilar Street must always be the shortcut to Dragon–I. Instead, it’s all changed, or is changing, and those Prada boutiques have consolidated into a bulked–up Prada superstore, the Mandarin I know and love has become the second–best Mandarin in Hong Kong, and at the top of D’Aguilar Street are a series of bars punched into the stone retaining wall and a fancy, well–lit stairwell that climbs up, up, up to newer, better nightclubs and bars.
Though renewal is perhaps the essence of a city, when I am confronted with it in a place I know so well, it is jarring and evokes waves of nostalgia that I didn’t even know I felt for a place and time. My younger daughter, Lola, was born at Matilda Hospital up on the Peak. And for my older daughter, Esmee, who was fifteen months old when we moved here, her first memories are of Hong Kong and our apartment on Barker Road with its dazzling view of Central, Victoria Harbour, and Kowloon. (For years, Esmee referred to every skyscraper she saw as “a Hong Kong.”)
I’ve come to Knightsbridge Court to see a few old friends and to walk down the tropical Chatham Path from the Peak to May Road. I’m strolling with my friend Adrianna Trinker and her boxer, Bingo. The path is steep and zigzags through lush forest and over vertiginous streams. It is about ten degrees cooler in the shade than in the patches of sunlight. Bingo charges ahead, skidding to abrupt stops to sniff at the spiny black caterpillars lining the trail. I used to walk with my daughter on this path, holding her hand so she wouldn’t slip on the slick, mossy pavement. On a paved spur about halfway down the hill is a little shrine with a red lintel and smoking incense burning in ceremonial urns surrounded by offerings of wrapped fruit. In the dark, recessed interior of the altar are figurines of the Chinese goddess Kwan Yin, whose virtues are mercy, courtesy, justice, and of course wealth. To the west side of the shrine is a rivulet of trickling water in a shallow groove in the rock. Here, along the banks of this tear duct of a stream, someone hoping for good luck has built a miniature village of two–inch stone houses and intricately carved matchstick–sized farmers, merchants, and scholars seeking their own modest nirvanas. My daughter always marveled at this diorama. “Can I touch it?” Esmee would ask. And I would shake my head.
At the bottom of the path, Adriana calls Bingo and sends him charging back up the hill toward home. We say our good–byes. My daughter and I used to ride the Peak Tram one stop from here back up to Barker Road. I always enjoyed the feeling of being the only local amid the tourists riding to the Peak, using this most exotic of funiculars for that most ordinary of journeys: going home. The conductor let us ride for free. Now a tourist myself, I take the Peak Tram down to Admiralty and pay the full fare.
I want to tell you about my best day in Hong Kong. It was October, a few months before we departed. I had driven my family to a country park in Sai Kung, a few miles north of Hong Kong in the New Territories. We parked and hiked two miles over jagged hills, between dry brush and bamboo that smelled like licorice. The trail was paved most of the way, making for easy going until we came to a forty–five–degree rise on a limestone karst and I had to carry my younger daughter’s stroller up the long, sheer climb. What breath I had left from the hard ascent was taken away when I saw the vast bay arcing toward the distant forested headlands. It is a curve of beach as pleasing and gentle as the tip of a manicured fingernail, with white sand in perfect proportion to turquoise water. This sort of tropical vision within a few miles of one of the most densely populated cities on earth was a wonderful surprise. You would expect this in Bali, Goa, Phuket, but not Hong Kong. Tai Long Wan is, I believe, the loveliest beach in all of southern China.
On that fall afternoon, there was not another soul in sight. The descent to the ocean took us past freshwater ponds teeming with ducks, fish, and turtles, and a quiet village with two noodle restaurants where the proprietors were sleeping on plastic chairs with their feet propped on wooden railings. The sand was fine–grained, the type that adheres to your legs even when it’s dry; the water was cool and softer than most ocean water, a mixture of saltwater and fresh runoff from the headlands.
My wife and I left our daughters playing in the sand with our amah, Marina. We hiked along the beach and turned inland, following one of the streams up a grade that grew steadily steeper as we leaped from one mossy stone to another, clambered up sheer faces by holding on to tree roots, and swung ourselves over slabs of limestone. The water was a torrent now, the stream narrowing into spindly falls that splashed into deep, cool, shadowy terraced pools. All around us was the sound of rushing water; a faint breeze from the ocean rustled the bamboo. Down below, on the sand, we could see Marina and our daughters, Esmee and Lola, the only pocket of humanity on the beach—spots of tan skin on the white sand as they raced the tiny waves in. On the horizon were specks of green and brown—tiny, uninhabited islands—with the occasional junk passing slowly in their lees.
At that moment, standing beside my wife atop this succession of waterfalls, gazing at my family below on the beach, with the whole of southern China—no, the whole of Asia—spread out before me, I felt like I was on top of the world.
So one afternoon on this trip, I catch a ride out to Sai Kung and climb the hill again. It’s hot and damp, and it starts to rain at the summit. I see the ocean, the little village, a few wooden boats pulled up onto the sand. I’m taking stock. I’m relieved: At least this patch of sand and sea hasn’t changed.
I’m sitting in my old office in Taikoo Place, a glass–window corner thirty–seven floors above Victoria Harbour. Michael Elliott took my job as editor of Time Asia and then, like one of those boutiques in Central that can’t stop growing, bulked up his role to an even bigger job as international editor in charge of Time’s European and Asian editions. He’s in my old chair, behind my old circular desk, his sodas chilling in my old refrigerator. I miss this office and especially its stunning views of the harbor and Kowloon beyond. Directly across the water is the spit of land that used to be Kai Tak Airport and East Kowloon.
Mike is talking about the new chief executive, Donald Tsang, and about who is supporting him and who is opposing him and whom he had better watch out for. It’s the kind of information and gossip that Mike excels at collecting and is always pleased to pass along. I used to care about stuff like this, I think. I really did. Hong Kong—where just two years ago, 500,000 people marched in the streets to protest impending legislation that they feared would curtail their civil rights—used to care as well. It doesn’t anymore. In June, for a similarly themed march, the turnout was 1,100.
There are probably as many at the Kee Club that night. The famous members–only club above the legendary Lung Kee Restaurant, renowned for its smoked duck, has been a Hong Kong stalwart since it opened in 2001. It was one of the first Hong Kong nightspots to take the tradition of the dining and recreation club—long a regular feature of upper–class and expat life—and adapt it to the shots–of–tequila/up–all–night crowd. The atmosphere is the nocturnal opposite of the stuffy Cricket or American or Country clubs, where we swam and dined on slow weekend afternoons. The Kee Club takes that colonial sense of elitism and turns it on its head. Half the people in the joint on any given night aren’t members and didn’t come with anyone who is. There’s a cash bar—unlike at the recreational or dining clubs, where a nonmember’s money is literally no good.
I’m talking to a beautiful English girl named Kelly, who is sipping from a bottle of Perrier–Jouët that has a sack around it like a tea cozy. She’s wearing a dress that I believe is made of rubber.
“Do you have a girlfriend, la?”
“I’m married,” I reluctantly admit.
She nods her head.
Rejane Magloire—who had a few hits, including “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”—is supposed to perform, but instead a fashion show of some sort is being forced upon us: a procession of stoic, unsmiling girls and boys marching in the glare of photographers. Their outfits all look identical.
“It’s a jewelry show, la,” Kelly explains to me, rolling her hazel eyes.
Then I see them—bracelets, necklaces, rings, all glittering in the hot light.
“Buy me that bracelet,” Kelly suddenly says, pushing up against me, her breath slightly sour from the champagne. “Be my boyfriend, la.”
I shake my head.
She laughs and turns back to the jewelry. I go look for my friends.
I’m standing by the wide stairway that leads to the second floor, looking for a few folks I was supposed to meet for drinks. A pair of beautiful Chinese girls pass by and then an Indian woman in a gorgeous dress, trailed by a pair of eager bankers.
My phone rings. It’s my friend Jason, and he’s telling me there’s another poker game tonight. “You wanna play?”
I’d love to buy back in.
HOSPITALITY, HONG KONG STYLE
The Mandarin Makeover: Super Zen
Even for those who have previously visited Hong Kong, the city will seem a new destination. Besides the nightclubs, restaurants, and boutiques and the Disneyfication of Lantau Island, the range of hotel options has opened up to the point where the Mandarin, the Peninsula, the Regent, the Conrad, and the Shangri–La—the quintet standing guard like plate glass terra–cotta warriors around Victoria Harbour—are being made obsolete. A Four Seasons is coming to the International Finance Centre. A Ritz–Carlton will open next year, and across the water will be the new W.
It’s a whole new hospitality scene, explains my poker–playing friend, the half–Chinese, half–Jewish friend Jason Cohen, who came from the Grand Hyatt to be marketing director at the Jia, a boutique hotel that opened last year in the Causeway Bay area of Hong Kong. We’re sitting in Opia, the restaurant off of Jia’s lobby, and we’re downing oyster wasabi shooters and then tucking into plates of tortellini with scallops. I promised myself a few years ago that I would never again write the words a blend of East and West or fusion to describe a restaurant, which leaves me terribly underequipped to recount this meal.
The food is fine and is Eurasian.
During all my years in Hong Kong, the lack of a first–class–boutique hotel was a common lament. The Jia is an attempt to appeal to those who don’t mind smaller funkier rooms and who consider DJs to be as integral a part of the hotel experience as the concierges. (In the evening, the lounge area at Opia becomes a nightclub.)
If the Jia is the quirky hotel that could, and did, then its newest competitor is the superluxe hotel that can, and will. The Landmark Mandarin, sometimes called the boutique Mandarin, charges far more for a room than its predecessor Mandarin: about $600 a night. For that, guests have access to Pilates and yoga studios, holistic wet spa areas, and 15 private treatment rooms where the facilities include authentic Turkish hammam baths, a dry–heat laconicum, and a Zen relaxation room. There is an amethyst crystal steam room, a vitality pool, and rain forest showers, all preceded by a “welcome foot ritual” and followed by Chinese, Ayurvedic, European, Balinese, and Thai massages and treatments. The old Mandarin, which has been at the center of Hong Kong life almost since its opening in 1963, will be closed at the end of the year for an extensive refurbishing. But no matter how the ownership spins it, the fact remains that the old Mandarin will become just that, the old Mandarin. The tony mainland guests who need a personal shopper and a dry–heat laconicum will be shacking up at the “new” Mandarin. I can think of no better symbol of Hong Kong’s rejuvenation than that transition.