Hong Kong: First Impressions, Wrong Hostels, and the View from the Peak

The hostel situation was a more significant problem. I had booked a place called the YesInn, which exists in three different locations across Hong Kong, a detail I had not registered when booking, meaning I arrived at the wrong one entirely. The woman at the door told me this with the patient sympathy of someone who has explained it to many people before me. I got a taxi to Fortress Hill on the southern island, found the right building, took the lift up to the correct floor, and was greeted by a New Zealander called Jay with the cheerfulness of someone who had been there for two days already and regarded new arrivals as entertainment.

Jay was followed by 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. This group would constitute my Hong Kong social life for the duration. We found a noodle place for dinner, came back for beers from the 7-Eleven, and then, by the logic that governs most hostel evenings, ended up in a bar on a corner somewhere in the city, doing the Macarena to music that wasn’t the Macarena until the DJ, presumably interpreting the crowd, put on the actual Macarena, at which point the corner of the bar became briefly but genuinely unanimous. I woke up the following morning with twelve hours of recovery ahead of me and only a partial account of the evening in my possession. There is a photograph of me on a street sign that I have no memory of climbing.

The next day’s main objective was a MacBook Air. Hong Kong has no Apple store, only premium resellers and what I would charitably describe as the free market in full operation. I spent five hours covering a significant portion of the electronics district before finding a premium reseller who would not negotiate on the price but who was selling at a figure still several hundred pounds below what the same machine would cost in the UK, because Hong Kong has no sales tax. I carried it back to the hostel with the care normally reserved for things that cost several hundred pounds.

Discovery Bay deserves its own paragraph. Jay had recommended it as a contrast to the main islands, and contrast it certainly was. A short ferry ride from the central MTR, it is a planned residential enclave built on the northern shore of Lantau, and it operates on a different set of social and economic assumptions to the rest of the territory. There are no private cars. Residents travel around the island in golf carts, each one costing its owner something in the region of two hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars. The residents are overwhelmingly expatriate, sunburned, and prosperous. The streets are quiet and lined with flowering trees. It resembles, more than anything else, an extremely comfortable simulation of a place, and it exists about three kilometres from some of the most densely populated housing in the world.

Hong Kong’s territory contains around 7.5 million people in just over a thousand square kilometres, a density that makes London feel spacious, and the history embedded in that density is not simple. Britain administered the territory for a hundred and fifty years under a lease arrangement that was partly historical accident and partly imperial calculation, building the financial infrastructure that made the city what it is while maintaining a political system that gave its residents rather fewer democratic rights than the British at home. The handover to China in 1997, conducted by Prince Charles in the rain, ended the colonial period without entirely resolving the questions it had generated about what Hong Kong is and who it belongs to. In 2011 those questions were already forming on the horizon, though the full force of them was still a decade away.

On my last afternoon I took the Peak Tram up to Victoria Peak for the view. The tram is crowded, steep, and worth it. The skyline from the peak is the photograph from Daniel’s wall, or close enough that the difference is a matter of standing position. I spent half an hour up there looking at it, which felt appropriate. You set out to see certain things and when you arrive at them it is worth giving them the time they deserve rather than photographing them and moving on.

The Sunday before I left, the Filipino women of Hong Kong had gathered in their thousands on the streets and underpasses of the central district, as they do every Sunday, their one day off. They come from all over the territory, domestic workers mostly, living in their employers’ homes for six days a week, and on Sundays they lay out cardboard and bring food and meet friends and exchange news and clothes and gossip in a city that is not their city, among a community that has constructed its own version of home on the pavements. At first glance it looks like a humanitarian crisis. It is in fact a community operating exactly as communities do when the conditions force them to find unconventional spaces. It is also, if you look at it for long enough, a reminder that the prosperity of a city like Hong Kong is built on labour that tends to be invisible until it pools on a Sunday in a public space and becomes impossible to ignore.

I left the following morning for Manila. Jay and Murray came down to the street to wave me off, which was the kind of thing that happens when you spend a week in a hostel with good people and which I am not sure happens any other way.