Hong Kong: Between Two Systems, On One Very Long Night Out

The airport, designed by Norman Foster and opened in 1998 on land reclaimed from Lantau island, is one of those buildings that functions as a mission statement. It is vast, logical, and entirely self-confident. Walking the considerable distance from the aircraft to the baggage claim, you understand that you are in a city that regards infrastructure as a competitive advantage rather than a necessary inconvenience, and that has been right about this for long enough to have developed some conviction about it.

I arrived at the wrong hostel. There are three branches of the YesInn in Hong Kong, a detail absent from my booking confirmation, and I arrived at the one in Fortress Hill on the wrong island in the dark with a backpack that felt heavier than it had been in Tokyo. A taxi to the correct hostel. A lift to the correct floor. A New Zealander called Jay who greeted me with the warm efficiency of someone who has been there two days and considers himself a veteran. His roommates were David from Hungary, Murray from Australia, and Hyewon from South Korea, who described herself as being from the good Korea, which I thought was fair and accurate.

The evening that followed is documented more thoroughly in photographs than in memory. At some point I began performing the Macarena to music that was not the Macarena, which is a decision that seemed reasonable in context and which produced, by the third song, enough participation from the surrounding bar that the DJ played the actual Macarena, at which point the dance became unanimous and involuntary. I woke the following morning with twelve hours of recovery ahead of me and a partial account of the evening that has not substantially improved with time.

Discovery Bay, a ferry ride from Central, is where Hong Kong puts its expatriate professional class to live in comfort that the main islands cannot provide at equivalent cost. The residents travel around the island on golf carts that cost two hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars each, because private cars are not permitted on the island, an arrangement that is either ecologically considered or an accurate representation of how wealthy enclaves operate when they have enough money to design their own traffic policy. The houses are beautiful. The gardens are tended. The beach is clean. Three kilometres away, in the high-rise blocks of Tuen Mun and the densely packed tenements of Sham Shui Po, the city has a different set of facts about space and money.

On Sundays, the Filipino domestic workers of Hong Kong gather in their tens of thousands on the streets and covered walkways of the Central and Admiralty districts, their one day off in a working week structured by contracts that require them to live in their employers’ homes and work six days of seven. The Philippines is the world’s largest exporter of labour relative to its population, a situation produced by a domestic economy that cannot absorb the workforce it generates and by a remittance infrastructure that makes exporting that workforce financially sensible for the country as a whole even as it separates families for years at a time. Filipino overseas workers send home approximately thirty billion US dollars a year, a sum that represents roughly ten percent of the country’s GDP and that funds everything from school fees to house construction in provinces where local employment pays a fraction of what Hong Kong or Singapore or the Middle East will pay for the same labour. The women who gather on the pavements of Central every Sunday are in Hong Kong because the Philippines needs the money they send home, and they construct their community on the pavements because there is nowhere else for it to go.

I took the Peak Tram on my last afternoon and found the view. Took the photograph. It was not quite Daniel’s photograph. It was close enough.