A Pilgrim in Hong Kong
Story and photos by M. T. Eley
I once spent a summer — at least, it was my summer — in Australia, that second cousin of America. Among other things, this led to the disorienting sensation of shivering away some pints in a damp snow squall one August evening, walking back to the apartment from the pub in a pint-fueled pilgrimage. I think it was then that I decided to schedule a layover in Hong Kong on my flight home the following week, to see if that former British colony was also as strangely similar to America as Australia was. Not all pilgrimages have an end in mind: some of the best start out as mere wandering.
If Australia is a blood relative of America, Hong Kong is related only by marriage, one recently annulled. This is clear the moment you burst from the mountains on the airport train. You are surrounded suddenly by dense neighborhoods built atop each other, with the valley opening up towards Victoria Harbour and Hong Kong proper beyond against a mass of green mountain. Australia enjoys that same spaciousness and love of spaciousness that defines the American consciousness and causes us to dumbly eschew our city centers for suburbs; Hong Kong has none of this. It cannot afford to, being rich in humanity but poor in land. But there is also a quiet contentment in being snugly packed among fellow humans that I cannot find elsewhere in the British diaspora; it is a distinctly Asiatique trait, even when they do have land to spare.
I knew this particular hive of towers around the train to be Kowloon, the portion of the city on the Chinese mainland, where the bulk of importing and exporting is done in jungles of cargo containers beneath towers pockmarked with AC units. More haunting are the neighborhoods of vertical cemeteries, with rows atop rows of mausoleums and marble looking out over the ever-growing port. As the train began to descend into the ground to duck under Victoria Harbour and into the city, I looked up to see a massive glass skyscraper overhead, with a digital clock two stories tall near its summit. Then, the silence and black of a train tunnel.
Minutes later, I emerged from the Hong Kong station, which like all elements of public infrastructure in Hong Kong is uncannily clean. An equivalent volume of Boston or New York traffic would leave the place demolished — again, I think it is the American resentment of having to share a space with so many — yet somehow, the Hong Kongese leave their public places like Americans wish they left their national parks. There is a pervasive sense of public decorum, which I suppose comes of necessity when you must accommodate 17,311 people per square mile.
Hong Kong accomplishes that miracle required of great cities: it is both endless and walkable. Within the narrow band of buildable land is a world of pleasant parks and cramped residential buildings, sickly mauve concrete towers and gleaming glass skyscrapers, luxury shops and Cantonese-only eateries with glistening ducks hanging in their windows like glazed, deflated kickballs. Down one street, you find haute cuisine with fresh French produce; go up it instead and there are cafés for students, where a few Hong Kong dollars can get you fried Spam and a runny egg atop steamed rice with cold coffee so full of saccharine that your head swims.
Turning up one of these streets where students drank themselves hyper with coffee, I saw the blue-and-white Bank of China tower working its way angularly up to the sky and figured this was as good a compass point as any. From its base, one could see a dozen other monuments to banking, but my eye was drawn to a pleasant church bell tower shyly peeping up from the trees that seemed as out of place as I was.
This was, of course, St. John’s Cathedral, once unimaginably the tallest structure in town. Now it is a quiet and calm presence, unimpressed by the towers around it. Feeling something of a lost soul, I wandered in.
Even as an idle Methodist and not an Anglican, the building felt welcoming. The interior was full of that sweet sound of summer, ceiling fans, and its pews and hymnals smelled as good and musty as any clapboard church to ever sit between American farm fields on a green summer’s day. Something called me back to Camp Sychar, a humble non-denominational (but secretly Baptist) “meeting camp” back in Ohio, miles from the family farm, and a wonderful place to fall asleep during the weeks bridging July and August. Closing my eyes in one of the pews, I could almost imagine the sonorous tones of a revival preacher in the immense old meeting hall, its timbers creaking in the summer heat, the smell of century-old pine sap mixing with the sweet odors of summer leaves at nighttime. Had my eyes remained closed, I could have risen from the pew, walked out of there and right back home… but I made the mistake of opening them and I was once again in Hong Kong, again in a queer state of homesickness. The layover stretched like an eternity before me.
But St. John’s is adjacent to another means of accessing the heavens, the famed Victoria’s Peak tram. This funicular ascends the mountainside in a lumbering glide, but the capacity is decidedly pre-tourism. Even in the muggy summer heat, a crowd thronged around the station, coiling like a snake before spilling down the street. As I watched another tram scoot off and up, I noticed there was a five-foot velvet cable extending, like an afterthought, from the main queue. A sign read “Buy Online” and indicated a web page.
On a whim, I tethered into a nearby cafés WiFi, found the site and bought a ticket. I then sidled up by the teeming masses, presented my digital ticket — and was admitted onto a freshly-arrived tram.
No greater sense of superiority can be acquired more cheaply than the digital pass to the Victoria Peak Tram. Perhaps it was a few yen more than the basic roundtrip; perhaps it was a fluke; perhaps it was a Hong Kong-based merchant that Chinese citizens could not legally patronize. No matter the cause of my unexplained prestige, it was indisputable as I boarded, basking in the hatred of ten thousand line members. The rusty-red funicular soon kicked off.
But the heights of my fortune were short-lived. After the ascent, I found that my speedy climb did not include an equally rapid descent. What was more, a single trip back down cost three times the rapid ascent and required a wait of over three hours. I felt red-faced. The only saving grace of the added expense was that one’s descent time was scheduled, during which you were free to pass the hours outside the misery of a queue.
So, I set out on a walk, passing the colonial-style Gate House, all that remains of an old governor’s residence atop the peak, before delving into a park with barely-maintained public pathways which seemed to climb further upwards into the dense jungle. A brief word about the colonial architecture which hung around Hong Kong, an allusion to the vast century and a half of British presence stretching from the youth of Queen Victoria to the heady days of Windows 98: “colonialism” is not a bad word, there. Its remnants, like the Gate House, seemed like nostalgic ruins even if they are perfectly maintained. Perhaps someday, after China has had awhile, Hong Kongese will join Western intellectuals in universal denunciation of the former British empire, but in 2017, newspapers decried the Chinese government and alluded to civil, British liberties. I understand that these obsessions are now passing.
But one does not think of British colonialism or Chinese imperialism in the muggy thickets of Victoria’s Peak, simply the oppression of humidity. Every now and then, a clearing would admit a view out towards the gleaming Indian Ocean, but then you would dive back into a clay path surrounded by a cloud of green leaves, anticipating Dr. Livingstone at any moment. The trails wound ever-upwards and the jungle seemed to grow to a fever pitch of heat and mugginess. Having dressed for the frigid temperatures of airports, I was attempting the hike in jeans and long socks and agony.
And then, as the salty Spam, runny egg, rice and the sugary coffee began to conspire with the heat and dehydration, the path burst onto a clearing — the clearing at the top of the Peak, which is a little higher than the tallest trees surrounding it and offered kingly views of the great city in its entirety. A simple pavilion offered shade. And off to the side, there was a humble concession cart which sold perspiring cans of Tsingtao beer alongside sweet, succulent frozen slices of pineapple, dripping in juice.
I laid down a handful of Hong Kong dollars, enough for two beers plus perhaps a whole frozen pineapple, and reclined in the shade of the pavilion, my bag for a cushion, the luscious breeze of the Indian Ocean rolling up the hill and across the pagoda before falling down into the harbor in complete, breezy silence. There is no earthly luxury which approaches simple pleasure after great exertion. I never drank champagne so fine as that Tsingtao malt beer — nor ate a fruit so fresh as that icy, canned pineapple.
Restored, I walked about the clearing and took in the views of Hong Kong, retreating back to the shade at my leisure when the late afternoon sun grew too hot. The peak seemed almost on the level of the tower with the digital clock, and looking at it I resolved to make my way down the mountain, across the Bay and to climb its heights. This was not so brash as it seems: I knew from an advertisement in the tram that the Ritz Carlton, which sat atop this tower, had a sky-bar that was open to the public if one could not afford to visit as a guest. And having visited the city’s highest perches, I could go back to the airport via the last train of the evening, having seen something of Hong Kong.
The clearing had a service pathway which led back far more easily than the clay path to the funicular station, and I found that three hours had passed by quickly. If I had any residual shame from having to pay quadruple the price of basic admission, it was eliminated by recognizing some of the faces in the crowd which got on after my group arrived at the base of the mountain. From here I headed quickly to the ferry building in the sudden dusk caused by the skyscrapers and mountains.
Hong Kong’s ferries are the real thing, all deck and easily fallen off of. I hope they never change, because they allow you to lean out over the churning waters and survey the city like a sailor on an old junk, the fresh salt air mixing with the stale pollution. When the sun has begun to set to your right and the skyscrapers of South Island begin their nightly light shows in beautiful, vivid Technicolor against the rosy sky and dark blue of Victoria peak, it is one of the true wonders of the modern era. Something like fifty cents gets you aboard one of these green-and-white antiques as they chug from one side of the bay to the other, and truthfully you could make a day of going back and forth on them, stopping only for Tsingtao and frozen pineapple.
The International Commerce Center, as it’s called, loomed larger and large towards the sky, its clock counting down the minutes until the last airport train left for the night. The tower is built in the modern style, and is thus unremarkable save for its size. A quick ride in a rocketing elevator upwards found me in manmade heaven.
The lobby of the Ritz is a heady mixture of chambers and ebony and gold and lambent marble and other sleek shades of opulence, two-story dining rooms with vast windows overlooking the harbor and escalators and elevators going whichaway, all on the 102nd floor as though this building was built on top of another. Twenty stories even further up was the rooftop bar, and this required another trip in an elevator which gradually grew dimmer and dimmer during the ascent, to prepare you for the bar’s nocturnal lighting.
From this moody vantage point, one can spy the vast fields of cargo containers and some of the poorer neighborhoods whose own towers are a bit more cramped than this one. There is also a smashing view of downtown, serried and lit up like a treasure chest across the way. If you are lucky, you may grab a seat right up against the window, the open sky above you, the occasional roar of a jet reminding you that you are not far from a major freeway of sorts. I snagged such a seat just as night fell on the city and the downtown burst with artificial light.
For those who feel the twinge of wanderlust that these sorts of essays engender, hear this: the most chance moments of your childhood will assail you when you are abroad on a pilgrimage. When sipping a cocktail overlooking all of Hong Kong, you will think of passing by the Mount Vernon, Ohio, sewage treatment plant while your parents, up front in the family car, drive on into the night; past the high school where teenagers still congregate outside the lit-up football field after a home game with cigarettes glowing in the night. Those memories will seem so achingly familiar that you would give anything to be lost on the known roads of Knox County, USA, rather than be found here at the place you traveled very far indeed, across ocean and harbor, to go.
But the moment passed. I swallowed my dram, ordered another glass and looked at the Indian man beside me who had never heard of my childhood places just as I had not heard of his. He must have been having similar thoughts, for he asked me where I was from as the waiter set down a devilish, smoking drink in front of him, a trick of dry ice and champagne.
Typically, when asked about my home outside the United States, I triangulate away from Knox County to better-known places: Cleveland? No. Pittsburgh? Eh… Chicago? Ah yes, Michael Jordan, The Blues Brothers. But I looked out to the bay, coruscating in the digital rainbow of capitalism, and thought of the quiet farm fields near Camp Sychar.
“Knox County,” I said. “Ohio.”
“Ohhhh, yes! I’ve heard of it!” the Indian replied. I jumped and nearly bought us a round. “Where they keep the gold locked up!” he continued, thinking of Fort Knox.
I smiled and turned back to the window, thinking of how no one would ever hear of Knox County, and how in a sense, that made it pretty safe, indeed.
“Yes, that’s true. Where they keep the gold locked up.”
He told me he was from Punjab and was here on business, working for one of the vast, nameless corporations that service frustrated Americans from vast call centers. He cared as little for his work as I did and showed me his family in photos from back home; scenes which were as anonymous to me as Knox County was to him, and yet you could sense he stored his gold there, too. He mentioned a distant uncle was a Brahman and this was what was most Americans he encountered usually delighted in; I stupidly inferred he had family in Boston, only realizing weeks later he meant the religious sect and not elder statesmen in Massachusetts. Having both properly misunderstood each other, we parted ways something of friends, better for the experience, having exchanged drinks and LinkedIn profiles. I am connected with him still, not that it means anything.
But perhaps that meeting was enough. I made it back to the airport on the last train, eventually falling asleep in the airport that night, pre-security, with little but the sound of vacuums and a distant baby to keep me company. Something about the homelessness of sleeping on airport tile makes you feel aware of your sins, and I thought perhaps I might attend Camp Sychar next summer, just to top up my piety and experience the gold we have tucked away in Knox County. But this pilgrimage was complete. I had been heading home all along.
