Get Lost in Hong Kong's Modernized Chaos

Hong Kong is a city of twittering helicopters and well-kept women. “Hysteric Glamour,” chirps one storefront, smothered in hot pink, mustard and orange decals. “Love it!”

Hysteric Glamour, a shop in Central, sums up Hong Kong’s ethos.

And they do. O how they love that hysteric glamour. From the vendors of sweatshopped cell-phones to the “tai tais”, those ladies who lunch, the Pearl of the Orient is all about face: how deluxe the car, how designer the couture, how deep the ceremonial bow.

The consumer culture is contagious. I find myself in a night market, lit by lurid neon. Rain tattoos the tarps, strung over tee shirts of Mao and Hello Kitty. Electronics snarl together on the folding tables. Everything seems shoddy, including the scarlet synthetic wig and pink aviators I buy on a whim.

I hit the dance floor in my “Alias” disguise. At 5’7’’, I’m an Amazon here: not quite Jennifer Garner, but certainly noticeable. We slink the alleys of Lan Kwai Fong, Central’s nightclub district. Jackie Chan and Zhang Zi Yi aren’t at the Dragon-i tonight, so patrons are left speculating about my bright red bob and silly sunglasses. Eventually, we close down the trendy lounge, sodden after sake cocktails and cheesy salsa moves.

I’m not the first foreigner to succumb to products and posturing here. Jan Morris described the colonizers in her travel classic “Hong Kong”: “often [they] seem to be pursuing their careers in a pleasant state of half-speed-ahead, eating well, enjoying their friends, gossiping in the club bar, taking the junk out on Sundays.”

Christopher New was far more damning in his novel “The Chinese Box”, twisted into a 1997 film by Wayne Wang. The bestselling author – and HK resident for nearly three decades – described the city as a drainage system for the country’s capitalists. “Every one of them worshipped the golden calf with brutal enthusiasm,” he wrote, “hoping only for enough time to fill a foreign bank account before the communists at last swept over the Kowloon hills and in their own no less brutal style stamped out the cult and replaced it with their own.”

Author in her Alias disguise at a Kowloon night market.

Locals now fill the racetrack terraces and Rolls Royces in this 98-percent Chinese city, dominated by the Cantonese. Western wallets are still welcome, however. The tourism board has been “heavily advocating the proper treatment of tourists, asking citizens not to rip them off when they are purchasing electronic goods,” reports the “South China Morning Post”.

Old habits die hard, it seems. This cosmopolitan consumeropolis was once a pirate outpost, then a port trading in tea, silk and opium. From a barren rock, Hong Kong grew into one of the world’s densest cities with seven million residents in 1,100 square km. Whenever space grows too tight, dirt trucks arrive from the New Territories. Such “reclamation” has already reduced the bay to nearly half its original size.

Victoria, the vanishing harbor, is a frantic mosaic of sampans, ferries, pleasure crafts, fishing boats and ocean-going freighters. Nature wreathes the mouth of the Pearl River Delta, the portal between China and the Pacific. As Morris wrote, “it is more than a city actually, being an archipelago of some 235 rocks and islands attendant upon a squat mountainous peninsula.” Indeed, Hong Kong is highly concentrated: 70 percent of the region remains blanketed in forests, farmland and country parks.

Skyscrapers girdle the circuit-board center, humming with deals and deadlines amid the hot smog. The globe’s fifth tallest building, Two International Finance Centre, soars 88 stories here. Nearby looms IM Pei’s legendary Bank of China tower (featured on the HK$20 bill, but nonetheless considered to have feng shui so wicked that a leader reduced the nearby Government House to a society-party shell).

Mirrored glass – not just blue, but pink and gold and green – reflects the sultry light of the South China Sea. Big thunderclouds boil across this neon-swathed cityscape. Brooding and quicksilver, Hong Kong sometimes resembles Gotham in a Batman noir … with Bladerunner highlights offset by the beatific smile of a 110-foot bronze Buddha at Po Lin Monastery.

Glitz and grit collide in Hong Kong. Television aerials blacken the sky like sharp Chinese pictographs. Topless dancers, tailors and pirated-DVD touts jostle in Kowloon. Laundry festoons water-stained concrete tower blocks, where entire families squash into 10x10 apartments. Corrugated iron shanties cluster on the outskirts, near the duck farms and oyster beds. The poor and posh jumble together like stir-fry in this steaming, subtropical bowl.

At the end of the day, Hong Kong is dedicated to malls and money, not museums and manners. But the city’s air contains a charge far beyond credit cards and cash registers. Behind the right pair of sunglasses, it takes on a rosy glow. Hysteric Glamour. Love it!