I Arrive in Oz
In those days, arriving in Hong Kong was like being born again: you had to pass through a frighteningly narrow portal called Kai Tak airport. Its approach skirted the tops of grey Kowloon apartment buildings, then dropped sharply to a short runway that ended in the milky green harbor. Once, during what turned out to be our five-year stay, a plane failed to stop in time. All passengers survived, but a few took an ugly bath.
We arrived along with a summer monsoon. It was the rainiest June anyone could recall. We saw everything we could from inside my in-laws’ Honda sedan. They were disappointed they couldn’t take us on any of their favorite hikes, but the bad weather didn’t bother me. I was drinking in awesome views.
The ride from the airport alone was intoxicating. The highway rose up and barreled through an urban jungle of apartment blocks in Kowloon, then dove into the tunnel under the harbor, emerging on the other side to rise again up and through the tenements of Wan Chai, so close you could sometimes see a face in one of the thousand narrow rooms and practically grab the laundry hanging out like flags of the working class.
Between the giant grey high rises, red and yellow neon lights flashed. Glowing Chinese characters spoke of tea rooms, apothecaries, Buddhist vegetarian restaurants. To the left, the lights of Causeway Way told a very different story of an exotic shopping oasis. Names of Japanese retail giants like Sogo and Mitsukoshi shimmered in the night sky. Beyond them the hills of Happy Valley, spiked with upscale apartments and ringed by a green mountain ridge, looked down on the illuminated brown oval of a giant race track. The horses were out of the gate, and I heard the crowd roaring at the Hong Kong Jockey Club before the car plunged again into another black tunnel.
Out the other side, and into yet another world: South Island. The road, now narrow, barely two lanes, wound around cliff edges, left then right then left again, a half mile above sandy beaches. Each turn showed a new vista of the South China Sea. Luxury apartment towers and a few aging colonial mansions clung to the hillsides. Rain-fed waterfalls streamed down the craggy hilltops and into catchments that dove below the road to the ocean.
It felt like a ride through a giant Disneyland China. Skyscrapers, fancy hotels, wet markets in alleyways, sailboats, ferries and hovercraft headed to distant islands. It all called to me. I had arrived in Oz, and I wanted to stay forever.
So, on a rainy Saturday I poured over the jobs section of the South China Morning Post, a pull-out fatter than the entire Sunday newspaper in Grand Rapids. Many of the ads flashed a promising word—editor. In those pre-Internet days, Hong Kong was a hub for printing presses, churning out magazines about fashion, travel, business and finance, and they were all hungry for native English editors.
There was a lot to write about.
Hong Kong was bubbling with life. It had a world-class port running at full tilt and a young stock market hungry for growth. The real estate market was red hot, too. Commercial and residential high rises were built then torn down again to build larger more lavish ones. The government kept reclaiming land from the sea to make room for the city’s ambitions. We joked they’d put the Star Ferry out of business because you’d soon be able to walk across Hong Kong’s harbor from Central’s business towers to the Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district. The native bird, locals said, was the construction crane.
In the New Territories and across the China border to the north, factories were churning out clothes, transistor radios, toys. In between their legitimate jobs, they cranked out knock offs of luxury watches, handbags and the latest Hollywood movies on videotape, filling stands at night markets where you could push through sweaty crowds to hear the clatter of a Cantonese opera or buy a teacup of fresh snake blood, a traditional health potion.
People were making fortunes and spending them. In the 1980’s, Hong Kong was the undisputed gateway to China, a billion-person emerging economy told by its leader, Deng Xiao-Ping, that “to get rich is glorious.” Every major global corporation was rushing to set up an outpost in Hong Kong’s glass skyscrapers. They all needed managing directors, marketing managers, sales people and executive assistants. Top execs were rewarded with housing allowances big enough for an apartment in the gleaming towers on the island’s residential south shore.
Only one cloud hung over the British colony—1997, the year the British agreed it would give Hong Kong back to the communist mainland. It was the subject of front-page articles in every Hong Kong newspaper. It came up in every conversation. People feared a brain drain as the smartest, most able locals sought out US or UK passports. We assuaged our fears repeating, as if to make it more likely, that China would never kill the goose that laid such golden eggs.
As it turned out, China didn’t strangle the goose, it just gagged it. Cut off from the oxygen of democracy, it’s grown somewhat pale while cities like Shanghai shine, burnished with government investments. But in 1988, even the political drama of the pending handover played into Hong Kong’s climate of excitement like the wartime intrigues of Casablanca.
Sitting on the balcony of my in-law’s low rise at the American school, where you could see, between the luxury apartment buildings, a sliver of the Repulse Bay beach, I dreamed of planting roots in this magic kingdom. I cut out an ad that called for an assistant editor of a computer trade magazine. It seemed like an appropriate stretch in a city growing in every direction.
The following Monday in another tropical downpour my father-in-law drove me to Wilson House, a grey glass office building, where sitting amid a sea of papers marked in red ink, I met Peter Brindisi.
Peter was desperate to get out the next issue of Asian Computer Monthly (ACM), an understaffed publication hanging by a thread and largely kept alive by his other title, Jewelry News Asia that sported special issues on rubies, jade and diamonds. Both magazines, I suspect, were just vehicles to fund the Australian’s true passions, time at the Hong Kong Jockey Club across town and the bar at the Foreign Correspondents Club across the street from the office.
I told Peter my story about scooping the local daily with the helicopter ambulance feature and played up my modest experience with computers. After a couple cursory questions, he looked up from his paper pile and asked with a sly smile through his unshaven jowls, “When can you start?”
It was all I could do to hold my composure, pretend to seriously consider the question and cooly reply that next week Monday would be fine.
Next: A Tech Reporter in Hong Kong
Rick, great writing as you've captured the essence of flying into Kai Tak airport dodging towwering apartment towers while watching people in middle floors living their life, eating, watching TV etc. Magic times, fountains everywhere with the sound of money and optimism beyond any ever seen in Silicon Valley.
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