Wanderlust

In April I went to a bar with the terrible name Ozone on the 188th floor of the Ritz-Carlton in Hong Kong. We were so high up that the broad deck was enveloped in mist, but when it cleared you could see the city far below like a map made of lights, twinkling with promises and secrets. We talked about the recent Hong Kong election, which had been, as Nelvin put it, a choice between a candidate who was only semi-close to Beijing and one who was more explicitly Politburo-friendly.

Sunday will mark 15 years since Britain handed Hong Kong back to China. Back then, everyone wondered what the city would become like. Residents left in droves. Some of them, like young Nelvin, came back. But everyone still wonders what China will do to this town. Will Hong Kong retain its frenetic polyglot charm, its unusual mix of chaos and disorder? Will it remain as magically itself as, say, New Orleans? Will it become more like China, or the other way around?

I broke away from the boys, who went out for late-night duck, and went back to our room at the Y, handing the cab driver a piece of paper with the address written on it in Chinese. Our room was only on the 19th floor, but I still felt high-up, staring at Kowloon verticality across the way. I took this picture out the window.

I have two 10-hour layovers in Hong Kong coming up. The last time I visited was in the summer of 1998. I flew into the old international airport, roaring past skyscrapers to land on Victoria Harbour. When I left five days later the old one had closed, and the new, less harrowing Chep Lap Kok airport had opened for business. It’s safer and less dramatic, like everything seems to be these days.

A few days ago an interviewer from a Hong Kong magazine asked what I brought with me when I traveled. You mean psychologically, I asked, or like actual objects? It’s an open-ended question, she said, offering me no shelter. So I said the usual stuff about bringing an open mind, a sense of adventure, blah blah blah. But then she asked me to send her a picture of stuff I brought when I traveled, and you can’t photograph an open mind. 

I seized up. But then I took a very contrived-looking photo of my Lumix, a Clairefontaine notebook, and a couple of really kick-ass pens, one a fountain pen I got for my birthday, and have never taken anywhere, and one a Conklin ballpoint that is way too nice to take anywhere. Also, a very dog-eared copy of “The Heart of the Matter” by Graham Greene.

Except with regard to pen-quality, this wasn’t too far off—I’ve always traveled with a camera and a notebook and often with Mr. Greene. It sins by omission, though. For instance, a complete list of things I wouldn’t get on an airplane without includes: Neck pillow, socks, sweater, nuts, water, and reading material (now contained on an iPad, but I decided the iPad wasn’t photogenic enough.) I wish I could say I had some more interesting essentials, like hot sauce or a lime green angora throw, but that about covers it.

My brother Gregory, himself a world traveler (it runs in the family), pointed me to the new book The Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions by anthropology professor Gordon Matthews. Matthews embedded for four years in this high-rise warren of low-end globalization. My brother, as it so happens, also stayed there briefly in 1999, and writes:

“I stayed in some flophouse buried in the filthy upper echelons of the Chungking Mansions. Quite cheap. Quite convenient. The best curry you can get in HK. Teams of West Africans with their Filipina girlfriends would sit on the steps and drink warm Guinness all day. Bengali hawkers would try to sell you low-end mobile phones.”

Our mom, who visited Gregory there, writes:

“I was afraid to take the slow elevator to the upper floors.”

Jason Beerman on CNNGo.com writes more about the place here.

When she got on a boat to Hong Kong for what would become a two-year-trip, Leila Hadley was 25—an age at which a young lady might do such a thing today, but it was 1951 and she was the single mother of a six-year-old, with five years in PR under her belt. She writes:

“I had wanted to leave New York — not the city, which I loved — but the life I lived there, which seemed to claim from me barely more than an acceptance. I wanted to be a stranger in a world where everything I saw, heard, touched and tasted would be fresh and new, because wonder and awareness seemed to have disappeared from my life, leaving an excessive familiarity with an existence of routine.”

She especially dislikes her thousand-card Wheeldex, progenitor of the Rolodex.

For the rest of the trip, during which she and her son wind from the Far East to the Middle East via Colombo and the Nicobar Islands, read Hadley’s memoir “Give me the World,” first published in 1958 and reissued in 2003.