An Expat's Life

Hong Kong was expensive, but we found a two-bedroom flat we could afford in an old three-story apartment building just off the main road of a finger of land at the southern tip of the territory.

Stanley (pictured above) was the home of to-die-for luxury high-rise towers on the ocean-view side. On the other side, a shanty town of tin shacks for working class Chinese sprawled over a deep crevasse between two hills. Like a city from another time, folks jerry-rigged their own water and electric systems and set up their own shops. The curious could walk through if they didn’t mind an elderly woman who might make a rude face or comment loudly in Cantonese on their presence.

A labyrinthine market separated the two communities, catering mainly to streams of tourists hunting for cultural antiques, T-shirts and other tchotchkes. In between the tourist traps, Stanley market hosted fruit and vegetable stands and several small restaurants, mainly geared to the expats, all covered by a patchwork quilt of colored canvas roofs, connected by uneven cement stairways and jerry-rigged homemade plumbing that could trip you up if you didn’t watch your step.

Stanley Market circa 1990's

Our apartment building sat along a water catchment about four blocks up from the market. If you stood on your tiptoes, you had a decent view of the South China Sea from the rooftop where we occasionally had barbeques and birthday parties. An elderly and somewhat sour man, Kwong Ng, managed the building from a tiny office in Central filled with paper records, not a computer or even an electric typewriter in sight. I imagined he used an abacus.

We curtained off a small slice of our second bedroom and put in a twin bed for an amah, a Filipino maid who would watch our kids, cook for us and clean the place for a modest salary. Our amah was recommended by a friend of our in-laws. You couldn’t find a more consistently good-natured, trustworthy and hard-working woman. On her modest pay, she maintained a home back in the Philippines and supported a son in school there.

Sunday was universally the day off for amahs. Many gathered in parks or empty city squares for community picnics, sometimes spreading out on makeshift cardboard carpets, often singing and playing guitars. As I recall they also took off a couple weeks at Chinese New Year when they got a bonus, hopefully large enough to pay for a flight back home.

By contrast, we often savored our Sundays over brunch at the colonial-style Repulse Bay Hotel (below) down the road or the restaurant at the new exhibition center overlooking the harbor in Wan Chai. To get around, my in-laws gave us a great deal on their used Honda sedan. We learned to drive on the left, though we mainly commuted by double-decker bus or occasionally a taxi into Central.

The American school, where my wife worked for a time, was our main social hub. Weekends sometimes included a small group hike on one of Hong Kong’s many well-kept trails. It wasn’t hard to get away from the dense urban jungles. A bus or ferry could take you to trail heads that climbed through subtropical jungles to views of rolling hills and bays. On a weekday, you might not see another human for an hour or two. My father-in-law inspired me to get a decent camera back in those days of analog film to capture the vistas.

Occasionally, I played squash, the British version of racquetball, at the school’s courts. From time to time, a group of teachers would rent a junk -- a traditional Chinese wooden boat -- to go for a swim, followed by a trip to some obscure outdoor island restaurant.

Two local English television stations provided an interesting reflection of the community. News programs often focused on the twists and turns of the 1997 handover and an influx of Vietnamese boat people who were shunted into spartan Hong Kong government detention centers.

Like British gentry, we’d laugh at how TV anchors like Mabel Chan (we called her Marbles) mangled their scripts. Our Cantonese was worse. We memorized a few phrases so we could ask a bus driver to stop or a waiter for a check.

Over-the-top TV commercials on the English channels hawked luxury brands of jewelry or other fashion items we never heard of in the U.S., sometimes to the tune of opera arias. Cigarette, whiskey and beer ads often showed white-sand Philippine beaches I longed to visit.

We took a few vacations from this paradise. Thailand and Malaysia had second-tier hotels at popular beaches that catered to our budget. I learned to snorkel and parasail.

In Penang, I prepare to parasail for the first time

At the office, the mainly Chinese staff worked in a large pool of cubicles. The few offices with doors were reserved for expats, with the exception of Letitia Chow, the energetic editor of Jewelry News Asia whose upbeat personality often seemed to dominate the office.

When Peter hired a computer-savvy editor-in-chief for ACM, Sheldon Reback, I had to give up my office. Scrambling for a spot, I asked Peter if I could take over the windowless nook where the tea lady worked. She made and delivered hot water, cookies, tea bags and instant coffee, whatever you wanted. Peter agreed, and the tea lady adjusted to a new location among the cubicles.

I recall feeling awkward, my ego bruised, as I sat in my new perch. I had a dim awareness of the tea lady’s discomfort, too, and whatever reactions to her getting the boot that might have rippled through the office. In those years before folks talked about white privilege, the deferential attitude the Chinese office staff typically showed me as an expat stroked my ego, but didn’t weigh on my conscience.

I briefly had (and later shared with Sheldon) a tall and lovely assistant with a somewhat unusual name, Revinder. One day she asked me what Chinese name I wanted on my business cards that sported English and Chinese on opposite sides. In a rush, I said to just make it sound like my English name.

Calling cards were still a thing in business circles in those days, and seemed to have a special aura of importance in the British colony. It was considered an awkward loss of face if someone dropped your card during an exchange, so locals typically transferred them using both hands, the rough equivalent of a deep bow in Japan. So, it was with some dismay, I sometimes noticed Chinese-speaking executives smile when turning over my card to its Chinese language side.

At one cocktail reception, someone took me aside to explain that while my Chinese name sounded very close to my English name, the meaning was inappropriate. It translated to something like “beautiful pineapple dress.” I discovered one needs to hire an expert with strong language skills to create a proper Chinese name. I did, and relished in telling the story when I handed out my new business cards to praise from native Chinese speakers who said it echoed the name of a revered warrior from old martial arts novels. 

My tale was often a useful ice breaker when interviewing a visiting tech dignitary. One of the first I recall was An Wang, founder and CEO of Wang Computer who came to Hong Kong to pitch Freestyle, an early tablet computer. The device was fascinating, but expensive and required lots of proprietary Wang software and systems. It failed, but Wang (below) was a pleasure to meet as he held court in a guest suite on a high floor of a top hotel.

Jim Manzi, the CEO of spreadsheet maker Lotus, also paid a call to Hong Kong. I recall a joint interview with the tech editor of the SCMP, James Riley, a handsome, easygoing and hard-drinking young Australian. James was especially fond of Manzi whose easy sophistication, dry humor and good looks reminds me now of the impeccably tailored Michael Corleone from Godfather II.

Manzi’s product eventually got clobbered when Microsoft sold its similar Excel spreadsheet as a bundle of programs called Office that included its word processor and other software. Lotus rebounded with a novel application called Notes, that became a darling of the trade press. It failed to carve out a new market niche the way the spreadsheet had, but Manzi seemed to enjoy his relatively short celebrity until IBM bought the company.

A 1993 interview with Sun Microsystems’ CEO Scott McNealy (below) was among my favorite executive encounters. McNealy was known as a sort of standup tech comedian. Boyish and brash, he had the self-deprecating humor that Silicon Valley became known for, joking about how he majored in golf at Stanford. But he could turn the laughs into a blistering fire against his rival Microsoft and its “hairball” of an operating system, Windows. It made for great quotes, and McNealy and his PR crew knew it.

Next: Americans in Shanghai