A shopping mall

There’s the Mall of America (currently in the Polar Vortex) in Minneapolis, and the Mall of Asia by the Bay in Manila, but Hong Kong is one big tropical mall of a city that entices everyone to open their wallets. The city lives 24/7 to make and access the social and physical value represented by the Hong Kong dollar.

Put simply, the coolie and the nanny, the necktied banker and the harried taxi driver, the numerous salesgirls and the proud street sweepers, and all others within the urban triangle at the mouth of the Pearl River, from Xianggang (HK) to the outskirts of Guangzhou (Canton) to Aomen (Macau), get going in the 24-hour cycle of a metropolis that does not ever sleep, hustle in earnest in search of the currencies issued by the Hong Kong-Shanghai Banking Corp., the Bank of China, and the Standard Charter Bank.

Our latest visit to Hong Kong a week ago showed a terrain more bustling than it was in the ’70s when we frequented a tenement home on Kowloon’s Ship Kip Mei and a Hakka village in the New Territories’ Sai Kung.

I was in the staff of NT’s Nam Wai all-community approach Human Development Project. A resort developer came calling and the smart villagers sold their real estate for a hefty price. The grateful community presented a Rolex watch to one of our resident volunteers; a daughter let me steer her dad’s Mercedes when I visited them in the SF Bay Area where they migrated.

A Canadian colleague and I this past week took a commercial half-day tour of former familiar places on Victoria Island. Aberdeen with its famed floating restaurants was our first stop.

I visited Aberdeen in the ’70s. It only had a one-street promenade that had a few tall buildings, one owned by a family who manufactured some of Hallmark’s votive candles. When I visited the factory, I expected no more than 10 workers in a storefront melting paraffin wax to a mold. The business was in fact a multi-faceted concern that occupied the multi-story building, even providing munitions material for Vietnam. The owner’s family name is Lam, residents of exclusive Pok Fu Lam Rd, our clue then that the business was more than just a dismissible one-line entry on a bank ledger.

Aberdeen was a floating fishing village populated by Tanka boat people who cleaned the daily catch in the channel. Now, the ladies steer their sampans for tourists (at extra cost from basic tour fee) while navigating their boats around sleek yachts of the rich and the infamous. The fishing had since moved elsewhere.

A jewelry shop in the Aberdeen industrial zone was next stop. No doubt the gold and jade, pearl and silver necklaces and pendants engaged skilled workers and were guaranteed quality but the operation was marketed hard to captive audiences and was personnel heavy, adding cost to what was already too rich for my pocketbook. Chinese tourists, consumers of things glitzy, were loose with their credit cards.

Deep Water and Repulse Bays were next sights but the tour did not make a stop since the draw card of the area was gawking at expensive dwellings and drooling over Ferraris. A tall condo built between the shore and a steep hill has an architectural gap reportedly big enough for a helicopter to fly through in films. But it is the astronomic cost per sq. m. that made us recall how the whole of NYC’s Manhattan and the golden mile off Chicago’s lakefront are now only affordable to the U.S. 1 percent! Residents include many expats on company-paid dwellings.

Stanley Market, a day market, was next stop. I zipped my back pocket tight to keep my wallet in place. The shops did not differ from all the tourist traps I’ve been through, colorful and aerosol fresh so I window-shopped, letting all the cute and affordable t-shirts remain hanging, the knick-knacks and trinkets resplendent on display, but left the limited HK$ secured.

The apex of the tour was Victoria Peak, long the end destination of the HK tram if one came directly from HK’s Central District. The view of the city’s skyline is still fantastic, as it was more than a decade ago when we last viewed the sight, but they had added more buildings since, and for HK$40 more, one offers a roundabout view in one place. I walked round the old public vantage points.

Tsim Sha Tsui’s waterfront back in Kowloon, our tour’s pickup and drop-off point, offered a view of the legal fireworks set to go up an hour before and after New Year’s midnight. Not unlike taking a photo near Bruce Lee’s statue in front of a clear photo billboard of Victoria’s skyline to avoid the real but hazy one, a lot of Hong Kong was costly artifice, a really spruced-up mall.

The crowd that watched New Year’s fireworks poured out of public transport, gathering as early as 6pm since many thoroughfares closed early. The MRT ran ’til 3am for the revelers.

I stayed in Tai Kok Tsui in West Kowloon’s Mong Kok area where the low-income folks come out to eat and shop before midnight, occasionally lighting up banned firecracker in alleys, but are foundational to fanciful and fashionable Hong Kong. I felt at home with my hoi polloi; kept company with them into 2014!

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