Way back I made two other trips. The first was as a tourist in the early 1970s, when the old Kai Tak Airport provided a
sensational arrival experience, rickshaws plied their trade and the Star Ferry was
how one crossed Victoria Harbour. The Star Ferry continues, and I took this photo from its decks, but Kai Tak Airport is a distant memory. The construction of the new Hong Kong International Airport, its approach by road, the Airport Express train line and the bridges required is a massive credit to the planners, engineers and workforce of Hong Kong.
My second experience of Hong Kong was a business trip in the mid 1980s, when my purpose was to raise mega-millions in the interbank capital market. The Harbour Tunnel already was heavily
congested and the night-time view from Victoria Peak across to Kowloon and its
millions of lights cemented my understanding of Hong Kong’s insane population
density. Since then, the population has doubled and Hong Kong is a vastly
different place. The view is frequently obscured by today's heavy pollution (mostly blown across from
China). There are now three cross-Harbour tunnels and so much land
reclamation has taken place that locals joke you will soon be able to walk
across Victoria Harbour.
Having collected memories galore, it seems like the right
time to record a few brief impressions of the Hong Kong Island I’ve known since
2007.
Hong Kong is a startlingly beautiful place, scenery-wise, but is most famous as a uniquely high-rise city. My granddaughter tells me that her new home town of Sydney has 20 high-rise buildings, New York has 600 and Hong Kong has 1200. True,
the city is very crowded along the water-lines but it’s surprisingly roomy along the green-clad
hilltops where one must beware of snakes. This bus negotiating the narrow road towards Stanley travels through lots of snake territory.
Hong Kong has fantastic public transport and fantastic infrastructure. The taxi service in Hong Kong is also amazing, and cheap, but I don’t know how the drivers survive after paying for their fuel and running costs. Beware – some of the drivers are pretty dodgy (unsafe) and many of the ‘not for service’ taxis pulling up outside bars and restaurants are actually delivering drugs such as cocaine, ordered from suppliers by customers on their smart phones. For most trips, I much preferred the double-decker buses, whose drivers are excellent.
In such a high-rise environment, the mind boggles that owning a dog (or two or three or more, often quite large breeds) is a status symbol. My grandchildren have commented on the lack of dogs being 'walked' along the pavements of their new home patch in Sydney.
Hong Kong is exciting, energetic and vibrant, yet one feels physically ‘safe’. It’s a very busy, industrious place, operating as a full-service economy. My grandchildren have been startled to discover that in Australia, you put your own petrol in the car and pump up your own tyres.
Hong Kong also has a vibrant intellectual and cultural
life. With four babies in the house it was a big ‘ask’ to sample it, but I did accompany my daughter to a few very well-attended meetings of the Royal Geographic Society.
Hong Kong has distinct seasons, with surprisingly cold winter
weather at times, but summers are unpleasant, with temperatures around 35 degrees
Celsius and humidity above 90%. The city frequently experiences heavy rainfall (categorised
as Yellow, Red and torrential Black Rain events) and Typhoons, the most severe
being categorised as T10. My daughter has experienced the latter, in which this tree just missed her bedroom window, but I never
got past T8.
Hong Kong generally, but especially Hong Kong Island, is
being inundated by rich Mainlanders who are crowding the expats out of all the
good areas and good schools. Extremes of wealth and poverty are
obvious as soon as you step off the typical tourist trail of night life and
shopping.
The life of an expat family in Hong Kong appears seductively
irresistible, until you realise that what appears to be an excessively generous
expat salary will be quickly soaked up by exorbitant ‘expat prices’ for
accommodation, education and health care, plus the lifestyle costs of frequent
and luxurious patronage of bars and restaurants, long summer holidays and air
travel. Electricity is expensive too.
Expat families on the Island generally live in air-conditioned
high-rise apartments, as my daughter did for 5 years, but for her last few years
she was lucky to live in a ground floor apartment fronting on to a private garden.
There are a number of public play areas for children, such as this equipment on the beachfront at Repulse Bay, and the ‘Pirate Ship’ at Stanley Plaza, but many activities outside home are conducted in
high-rise venues. I remember small children kicking balls at Soccer Tots around
an empty floor in a multi-storey building.
Expat family life revolves around
schools, kids’ birthday parties, playdates, pricey clubs like the Royal Hong
Kong Yacht Club, Aberdeen Marina Club, the Cricket Club and the American Club, and
theme parks such as Ocean Park (on the Island) and Disneyland (miles away, near
the airport).
There are some free public outdoor activities for children, such
as at ‘Inspiration Lake’ near Disneyland (pictured) where the kids can go crazy on their
bikes and scooters, and many walks, such as
the circuit at ‘The Peak’ and the numerous, more adventurous, hiking trails.
All activities for expats in Hong Kong are facilitated by the
presence of live-in domestic workers known as ‘helpers’ or ‘aunties’, usually long-suffering Philippinos,
who do most of the hard household yakka, watch over the kids and take them
places in taxis. In the picture, the lovely ladies in blue and green tops are mother and daughter, Mina and Janice, and both worked for my daughter for some years.
It’s almost impossible to operate as a family in Hong Kong
without a helper or two - or three. Many
activities for young children require that each participating child be
accompanied by an adult. When my daughter lived in one building subject to
frequent fire alarms, attended by the fire brigade, and she had four babies not
yet walking properly, for a time she needed three helpers plus herself to help carry
the children down the fire escape. I carried a baby down twenty floors on one occasion.
Helpers deal with the washing and drying of clothes, a daily grind in small apartments
in humid Hong Kong.
Supermarket shopping for expat supplies is another
burden. Most expats avoid like the plague any foodstuffs
grown in Mainland China, and pay premium prices for imported packaged
and canned food, plus fresh fruit and vegetables air-freighted daily from Europe,
America, Australia and New Zealand. My daughter has four children and each 2 litre carton of Australian milk cost her approximately $A10. Each supermarket stocks different items, and one has to go here, there and
everywhere by car to different ‘suburbs’ to find what we would normally load
into one trolley on a quick whip around our local supermarket in Australia.
It’s an unhealthy place, pollution-wise, humidity-wise and germ-wise, but pharmacies with dispensing chemists as we know them in Australia don’t seem to exist
either. My daughter obtained medicinal supplies for herself and her four children either
on regular visits to the doctor or, out of hours, at hospital pharmacies.
Education is taken very seriously in Hong Kong. Australia
should sit up and take note. We are being left behind in Asia’s belief in,
hunger for, and race towards, high-grade education. I’m not sure what happens in
the public system for Cantonese families, but the private education system sees
children in Hong Kong generally starting pre-school around 18 months of age.
They attend for a few hours a day on a few days per week, accompanied by an
adult. As children get older, hours are built up progressively and escorts are
relinquished. My four grandchildren (they're all in this school group of five and six year olds) have always attended schools with bilingual
classes in English and Mandarin and now the older twins, aged just eight, can
follow much of the coverage on the Mandarin-speaking TV channels.
The school bus service, complete with ‘bus mother’ to manage behaviour, such as the lady shown, is
astonishing. Early on, I wondered why some buses appeared to be empty, until I realised the children on board were so young that their heads were below the bus window sills.
My four grandchildren, then aged only 7 and 6, were on the school bus at
6.45am. It took a logistical master plan to get them all dressed and breakfasted in time. In the first picture, the clock above the driver reads 6.54 and the journey was already well underway. The children were delivered home again around 4pm, making it a very long day for them.
The expat lifestyle everywhere is very ‘high-risk’ for
marriages and family life, especially in Hong Kong, as my daughter
unfortunately discovered. There’s no
pressure to visit ‘the rels’ on the weekends and uphold family values. There’s
no pressure to fix taps and mow lawns on the weekend – in rented high-rise
apartments, someone else is the handyman and gardens are virtually non-existent. If present, gardens come equipped with a gardener.
With a ‘helper’ in the house, there’s no pressure for men to rush home from
work to lend their wives a hand with ‘dinner, bath and bed’ for the children. Hong Kong husbands (and some of their wives) have lots of ‘spare time’
and feel free to stray – as they do, in large numbers.
All in all, Hong Kong is a competitive place to be, a place of excesses, and a survival-of-the-emotionally-fittest kind of place. I’m glad I've had the opportunity to get to know this 'world city' so well, but I’m glad I don’t have to live there.
The lack of apostrophes on the title page was quickly ignored when page 2 proved they had no intention of getting lost. Radar helpfully provided her home address and phone number.
Thea wasn't quite sure of hers:
It was pleasing to see that the primary safety lesson instilled in both girls had been absorbed - 'stay together'. And it seems they were a bit scared of the dark.
They planned to keep warm:
And they did not intend to starve:
Hmm, we must have done something right as the parents of young children, as their food preferences were encouraging:
No squatting on the ground for this pair - chairs would be much more comfortable. I heaved a sigh of relief at this point as the 'pads and pencils' item proved they intended to stay in touch, even if they were running away.
They'd keep boredom at bay with a spot of reading, planned to keep themselves clean and, being good little Aussie kids, they knew they had to be Sun Smart.
No finger food for this pair - tableware was needed. By now it had almost reached the stage where a removalist would be needed to transport the load:
They paid impressive attention to personal grooming issues and first aid supplies:
They'd learned to count without making a mistake, even if their spelling was a little haphazard:
Craft activities were in order, with sticky tape, a pencil sharpener, a rubber and glue on the list. And last but not least was the most important thing, made evident during this COVID-19 pandemic:
