Hong Kong – Falling Awake to Life – Through Story, Myth and Mindfulness

I was brought up, the daughter of a banker, in British run Hong Kong. In 2014, aged 52, a feminist socialist, I went back to recover memories and to make peace. This is a diary of that trip.

Today I’m going up ‘The Peak’ to visit a child… the one I used to live inside.

The morning before leaving, I look out from the 17th floor of our hotel. Below is a roof garden on a nearby aging block of flats. It’s a concrete tiled square framed with potted plants. A grey metal door stands open and a slim Chinese woman is hanging up a single sheet on the clothes line. In the cool silence of my hotel room I watch it flap in the strong wind. I’m intrigued because she has the sheet pegged up but she keeps moving and re-pegging it, grasping it in the high wind. Then I see the metal door slam and finally the woman leaves her sheet pegging. The door won’t open. She returns to the sheet, shifts a peg. She then repeats this door pulling/sheet pegging routine several times. Finally she bangs her fists on the door. I assume she’s shouting. Nobody comes. I can do nothing but watch through the glass.

Chris, my friend and fellow traveller, calls me and we leave.

[I take this photo a day later, relieved to see ‘my’ Chinese lady safe]

We travel up the Peak with the bemused taxi driver (see post “Going Home”) and get dropped off half way up by the park I used to play in. It’s still there. And the old bus stop where I used to catch the No 15 to primary school on The Peak.
As we walk along a residential road, on our right thick jungle foliage falls away steeply into mist. The cicadas crackle. Through fog and rain we pass the ghost of my 8 year old self lagging behind her mother and cowardly corgi, Jemima , her attention caught by an amah squatting across some drains to relieve herself. Today a Chinese man is walking 2 enormous Alsatian guard dogs. One calmly places his jaw around Chris’s leg until his owner intones a command and they leave. She only has a bruise but it feels shocking and anti-climactic.

We approach one of my childhood homes. The loop of the drive is warmly familiar but the house has been replaced by 3 flats and a guard house. This guard is friendly.

The previous one was not. Our taxi had parked by the huge metal gates and he appeared instantly, insisting we leave.

19 Middle Gap Road. I look over his shoulder to the grand exterior. That house had 5 bedrooms, an attic playroom and a raised garden with swimming pool. We never had a guard.

Which made it easy, 40 years ago when I was 15 years old, for a gang of Chinese men to burgle our house in the early hours of the morning. My father, my teenage self and my 9 year old brother were asleep. They drugged the dogs, tied us up and walked away with cash and easy valuables.

We never talked about it. I got blind drunk, my brother got mumps and my father had a solid grey metal door built half way up the stairs.

This morning I watched, soundless, behind glass as that Chinese lady banged on her grey metal door. This afternoon as I look over the guard’s shoulder, I wonder if that door is still half way up the stairs. The memories slip out. I watch them, soundless behind time’s glass.

We walk back and catch the no 15 bus.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I used to live up the Peak in Hong Kong. Only rich people live on the Peak. The richer you are the further up you live. We lived half way up.

“Middle Gap Road?” I ask the taxi cab driver. We used to live at no 19.
He looks at me blankly. Not because his English is bad as it turns out. My friend Chris is more resourceful and points out a landmark nearby.
“Ah!” Says the Taxi driver, “People who live on that road don’t use taxis. They have private cars and chauffeurs.”
I tell him that I used to live there 40 years ago.
“So why you not speak Chinese?”
“My bad” I reply.
He laughs and takes us to Middle Gap Road.

“My Bad. It’s been ‘My Bad’ for nearly 53 years. In 1962, when I was 6 months old my family came to live in Hong Kong, leased for a 100 years to the British from Mainland China (well, 99 years and more complicated…). Sounds like Sleeping Beauty but there’s no happy ending. For 100 years, the Great British Empire, did not see fit to give the Hong Kong Chinese the vote. When the time was up, the British passed the land and its people back to Mainland China. No fighting the dragon. No Handsome prince. No Democracy.

By the time I appeared in 1962, my father was on the rise. He was a banker. With the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC). Anyone wealthy had servants. ‘Everyone’ had amahs. These are women who ‘live in’, clean your house and look after your children.

When I was sent to boarding school in England at the age of 11 (my brothers were sent at age 7 – it wasn’t deemed so important for me, a girl), my mother impressed on me the necessity of not ‘bragging’ about all the servants I had so as not to incur the jealousy of my peers. 35 years later, as my teenage son teased me about my wealthy early days it occurred to me how ridiculous it was for a child to ‘brag’ about such things. As I pointed out to him, he didn’t need servants, he had me….

There was so much ‘not to brag about’. I was brought up in a country taken from the Chinese during the opium wars (Britain was the baddie – look it up) and now under British Colonial rule. A rule apparently based on the philosophy of: “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate.” Memory replays a Sunday morning as we leave the Cathedral to be met by a flock of begging Chinese widows in black. We walk past them to where the chauffeur waits with the Jag.

It’s now 2015. I’ve come back to Hong Kong on a sort of pilgrimage. To make peace. To recover memories. I lived here solidly for the first 13 years of my life. My father remained until I was in my 30s. I’m a white British, Colonial Ex-Pat, I never learned Cantonese and I have no right of abode here. In what way if any, can I call this land “Home”?

I’ve come to find out.

Tag: Hong Kong

Hong Kong – Part 3 – Doors to the Past

HONG KONG- Part 1 – ‘Going Home?’