I think you should let me vet your article on Hong Kong," an old friend from the city announced to me over dinner. "You got it all wrong in your book, you know." I suppose I deserved it.
I hadn't exactly been kind to Hong Kong in my second novel, White Ghosts. Set during the handover to Chinese rule ten years ago, I portrayed the former colony as a shallow, empty place - racially divided, materialistic and doomed to sink into the ocean. To make matters worse, she said, I had turned my back on the people I shared my times in Hong Kong with. "No one agreed with what you wrote," she scolded. "It's little wonder you didn't sell many copies." Ouch.
The funny thing was, I was thrilled at the prospect of revisiting the city since I had worked there - one year under British rule, another under Chinese. Why, if I had taken such an aversion to the place, did I want to return? Was my friend right - had I just got things wrong? Or had things actually changed since the negative times I remembered?
As the plane circled, the island itself didn't look too different. It was still the sleeping dragon I remembered, with the clouds nestled between serpent-coiled mountains like steam from fire-breathing nostrils as they cooled in a vast surrounding sea. But, as we came closer, instead of dipping steeply through a constellation of skyscrapers in the approach to the old airport at Kai Tak (me white-knuckled as I watched the tips of enormous 747 wings seem to brush apartment windows), we made an altogether more sane landing at Chep Lap Kok on Lantau Island. It was nice, for once, to arrive in Hong Kong and not be utterly terrified.
On the way into the city, I realised I didn't recognise a thing. For the first time I travelled on the 1,377m Tsing Ma bridge (the sixth largest suspension bridge in the world). And when I finally caught sight of the city skyline, I gasped. The towering skyscrapers I had known were now dwarfed by new giants, most spectacularly by the 88-storey Two International Finance Centre building. I was a little intimidated by the prospect of living right next door, in the smaller IFC 1, but I quickly got used to it - after all, it did house the Four Seasons hotel.
I invited Dominic, a local friend, to join me for cocktails on the 45th floor of the hotel. "There's more democracy now under Chinese rule than there ever was under the British," he explained, as we looked out over the misty harbour. "But the pollution is bad and some of the new development work is depressing. Did you know they destroyed the Star Ferry pier for a new waterfront development?" I felt a heartstring being tugged. The Star Ferry is special. I remembered travelling on it to take a girl called Maria on a first date - for a curry in Kowloon. She's now my wife and the mother of my two children.
Dominic took me out to dinner at the Foreign Correspondents Club, or the FCC as its more commonly called. Here, on one particular morning in October 1997, I had leapt around the lobby triumphantly in front of the Bloomberg monitors as the stock market crashed. I was one of the lucky ones to have short sold. (Before you get jealous, I lost all the money I made just two months later.) It was a thrill to see that the same Bloomberg monitors were there, trusty as ever. Clearly, I had some fond memories of Hong Kong, after all.
