I harbor memories of the colonial past.
It doesn’t make me look good in retrospect.
The Hong Kong of my mind’s eye was charming. It had vestiges of colonial Great Britain in its landmarks. The Chinnery Bar. The Captains Bar. Cigars at the Mandarin Oriental. Tea with the family at the Peninsula. Weekend junk trips with friends. David Tang’s China Club.
Even the finance industry had its British airs. There was something gentlemanly about the work that, like Hong Kong, was evocative of a day gone by -- though plenty of women cut their course personally and professionally no less meaningfully.
Today, middle aged foreigners like me have become dinosaurs in Hong Kong, roaming the earth after the asteroid came screaming out of the sky. A few dodos still coursed the streets, the living examples of every investment banker’s secret aspiration: to be promoted beyond their level of competence, to be endowed with the unique opportunity of personally navigating a company into the bulge-bracket tar pits while sowing large discretionary bonuses for obscene gain.
For us last-of-breed, it was a moment in history when inflation meant everyone got a raise, when the customers didn’t matter, when informed decisions came not only by our personal fiat, but from plush offices on the 39th floor of some harbor-front tower with one of the better views of China.
Maybe you would have felt at home here in a by-gone age. Ensconced like a Buddha before a Bloomberg terminal, sipping the first of how many endless cups of coffee or cans of Diet Coke, the racing form from Happy Valley always turned to the third race.
But that Hong Kong was put paid -- dying at the very least, and for many, gone.
It was like some storm had settled over the obsidian glass high rises in dying-to-be-anything-and-everything Hong Kong. Life wasn’t exactly gray torpor. But it was close. The grandeur of the place -- where skyscrapers domino-ed dime-sized parks and rendered mediocrities like me Masters of the Universe -- had given way to actuarial tables and the coming of the Chinese ascendancy.
The dreams now belonged to someone else. There wasn’t a fourth race in Hong Kong unless you were Chinese.
It didn’t mean someone like me couldn’t work a dream, however. I still had that in me. I have always been an overseller in business -- if not in life. Jump on my dream train and I will spin a yarn that will pull you forward, even if I was lugging too much weight behind a tiring old steam engine -- which I had become.
I could be a liar, a fabulist, a purveyor of mis-matched shoes.
I was impressively credentialed.
I was an asshole whisperer, adept at dealing with jerks.
I was skilled at taking information and fashioning it to a moment, to a circumstance, so some rich bastard would invest in whatever it was that I was pitching. All I needed was a subject which confounded yet interested an audience -- and in China, I found the near-perfect topic in which to become an “expert”.
I wasn’t an expert, though. Far from it.
I spoke Mandarin. But basically, it was good bar Mandarin full of co-opted phrases aimed towards predictable moments to impress listeners.
I had lived and worked in Greater China for decades, cutting my teeth in China policy and Sino-American relations and finance as a student and professional. I had briefed presidents and policy makers and billionaires.
But truth be told I had spent most of my career unlearning what I had learned about China.
The place simply confounded at every turn.
Few knew it.
Fewer understood it.
It was, proverbially, the other pole of human existence.
All there was, it often appeared, was the romance of it all. It did not matter if you were in Kentucky or Russia, you were told the same thing in the sand box as a kid: Dig a hole deep enough and you might get to China.
But few people ever “get” China well. Even so-called experts were masters of a moment at best -- and, if my experience was any indication, they were usually held hostage by the romance of the place, a sentiment the Chinese leveraged to the hilt.
I spent my formative professional years working in a Washington, D.C think tank as an analyst. I worked with the best of the China experts, many of whom still travel the same halls populated by the same government policy makers today as three or four decades ago.
Most seemed to have been trapped in a time warp -- re-writing their PhDs for one another. Like so many in Washington or any other capital, they had become beneficiaries of the institutional inertia these cities cultivated -- forever on the lookout for threats to their standing; always keen to protect their status.
Indeed, if these China experts gravitated toward anything it was the statism that the Chinese romance bred in the bone -- and, crucially, which Beijing actively cultivated to its maximum benefit.
These experts weren’t dupes. To a person, they were bright and articulate and compelling when it came to China -- or their particular areas of expertise involving China. But more often than not, they were broken clock experts -- right some of the time, but wrong just as much and Beijing managed them like clockwork, ever so purposefully.
A trinket here; a junket there; a sponsored sabbatical anywhere.
As the years passed, the experts fell into their frequently China-sponsored sinecures and sheltered in the institutional amnesia that benchmarked policy making circles on just about any subject. Or they allowed their views to evolve, in line with the dulling effects of consensus.
If confronted with accountability, the most honest of the ilk were able to convincingly explain why they were wrong.
But then again, they hadn’t been challenged so much, if at all. Policy toward China just migrated -- from insularity after the communist take-over in 1949, to Nixon’s opening, to commercial interaction, to Tiananmen Square, to constructive engagement and US Most Favored Nation status, to WTO ascension and the eventual emergence of a steroid-like US dollar vendor-financed development that returned China to great power status in no time at all.
No country in human history arguably had ever become so muscular so quickly, averaging annual levels of growth that allowed economic output to double just about every ten years over fully three decades.
Some of the so-called experts got parts of the China ascendance right.
A few even warned before Donald Trump and Covid-19 that China and its communist leadership presented a threat to the globe.
But most just chased the China dream, helping dig the proverbial hole deeper and deeper -- all the while going ever more native to align with a consensus selling the idea of a Greater China.
I was in that crowd. Until I was mugged by reality.
And so were many in Hong Kong.
Perhaps we can be forgiven if we were too drunk living the good life that outsized Chinese growth provided to realize we were just birds in a large cage, free to fly around and sell the China dream.
That certainly was my thought one afternoon, when I found myself lying flat on my back in the front doorway of a hotel just off Queens Road East.
It was a moment when the gods come for your heart. There I was, lying on the Wanchai sidewalk at the busiest part of the day, stricken suddenly by a cardiac event.
No one came to my assistance for a good five minutes -- or so it seemed, I really can’t say for sure.
I wasn’t sure of anything.
It was like I was dreaming without sleeping.
To the right I saw ropes and a plank hang down from the side of a building, partially obscuring an advertisement that featured the flag of the People’s Republic. It was a window-washer’s port of call, and the view was charged in red save for the gold of five stars that hugged the side of the building closest to the road.
To the left I saw a neon sign blinking yellow, selling Huawei Nova handsets.
Spread out above, I saw a blue sky so blue in the late day sun that, for a split second, I felt certain I was about to witness the birth of angels.
Eventually the hotel staff came to my assistance. I remember watching an Air China flight with its artistic red phoenix logo on the airplane’s tail rise overhead as staff tried to get me to sit up.
And I thought: that plane is a message from God, soaring above me like it was, rising ever higher and higher.
That plane could be a sign from God that He is getting ready to escape this world with my heartbeat in the palm of His hand.
It was at that moment I heard someone say in the background, “We have called the police”.
And I snapped to.
The fear of God which my cardiac event fueled instantly gave way to the thought of having to deal with the Hong Kong police. They scared me -- or, more exactly, they scared me more than a heart attack.
They traveled in packs in the wake of the protests and, I felt, their behavior had become altogether mercurial. Perhaps it was the violence in the streets that kept them in a perpetually defensive crouch, but they struck me as easily provoked and best avoided. As a non-Chinese resident on a Hong Kong work visa, I did not want to manage the unpredictability of it all, even if I was in fucking cardiac arrest.
I struggled to my feet, contritely thanked those trying to assist me, and declared I was fine. I heard myself say I needed to go and I realized my jaw hurt terribly as I said it. I was sweating. I had a jabbing sensation in my left side.
I made it halfway up a block when a motorcycle paramedic pulled up alongside. I thought he was a cop and I turned down a side street as soon as I could to walk away from him.
He dismounted and followed me down the street and, once he’d caught up, took my left elbow in his hand and asked after me.
I said I was fine. I don’t need the police, I told him. I remember repeating it several times.
I must have been as white as a sheet. I was perspiring profusely. I felt the wet chill of my soaked T-shirt on my back. He asked me to sit down.
He kept insisting: “I am not the police. I am not the police. I am a medic.”
Eventually he got me to sit down in a stairwell that stunk of piss. He asked me a few questions and before long an ambulance arrived and two men approached pushing a gurney.
I remember looking at the mattress and a white-sheeted pillow and saw two heavy black belts neatly laid over a red blanket and thinking to myself they were going to restrain me and take me away.
I was not in a panic. I was fully conscious of what was happening. But I was fearful for my safety.
I was scared of being arrested.
The paramedic asked for my ID. He asked for my name. I refused to give anything to him. I told him I was leaving Hong Kong and wanted no trouble. Just let me be, I implored. Let me leave. I will be no trouble to anyone. I apologized for the inconvenience I caused.
I got back to my feet and thanked him for his concern and said I had to go.
The last thing he said to me as I walked away was “I am not the police. I am here to help.”
Ten terrible words and one of the many contradictions defining what Hong Kong had become.
My cardiologist agreed when I recounted the story a few days later.
“The social compact here is broken. I would not say shattered, just broken. It need not be shattered. China can work well in Hong Kong’s architecture. It always has. But now, with the protests and the National Security Act, they are re-setting priorities and, believe me, they are wasting no time doing it.”
He was an emotive fellow and surprisingly expansive, but then again he was leaving.
“My kind of expertise can be mobile,” he said as he ran a wire from my groin to the arteries in my heart.
“I have a Canadian passport and can take the show on the road any time I wish. And my wish at my age is not to be on call at all hours of the day at the beck and call of some mainland official or their family member in need of care.”
He added: “I prefer to be a master to a tool any day of the week. And we are tools for the mainland right now.”
He recounted how he had been at work since three in the morning tending to a bigwig Guangdong party official who’d been helicoptered into Hong Kong for emergency surgery.
The cardiologist lamented, “we work at all hours of the day right now, taking care of communists.”
He told me I needed an angioplasty. He told me my heart was in fairly good condition, though one artery had some plaque that needed clearing.
“Nothing too serious,” he said. “Nothing that can’t be fixed.”
He then offered, “Better that than being heartbroken -- like so many of us who remember the old Hong Kong. The way it used to be.”