I HAVE spent most of my life living in two cities. Both have been described as unbearable, with residents of both declaring the need to escape regularly to avoid insanity. Both cities are crowded, fast and impossible to be indifferent to. New York is one: either you love it or you hate it. The other is Hong Kong: ditto.
I love them both. And while I've always found similarities between the two places, I had no idea how close they were until I read a fine history of my first home city, New York, New York, by Oliver E. Allen. Here is evidence that Hong Kong bears a striking resemblance to New York. The problem is, it resembles 17th, 18th and 19th century New York.
New York was founded upon trading and was set up under shady circumstances, just as Hong Kong was. Of course, the British had to use guns to claim their real estate: no Chinese would sell Hong Kong Island for $24.
Through much of its history, New Yorkers were obsessed with money and trading; visiting Europeans marvelled at the money-mindedness of the city's inhabitants and their apparent willingness to pursue trade and eschew refinements.
For example, as the city expanded, very little space was set aside for parks. The business community, Allen points out, 'would doubtless have argued that any property not commercially useful was a waste'. In 1844 William Cullen Bryant wrote in the New York Evening Post: 'Commerce is devouring inch by inch the coast of the island ...' However, the most interesting reading concerns the influence of money on the city's political attitude. During the American Revolution, when feisty colonists were passionately espousing a new concept of democracy and individual rights, New York was a bastion of Tory sentiment. It was fashionable there to wear a red ribbon on one's hat as a sign of loyalty to George III and to avoid being mistaken for one of those nasty revolutionaries. The loyalists of the Big Apple even issued a 'counterdeclaration of independence'. Up to now, I had wrongly credited a certain group of Hong Kong business people, who had petitioned Governor Chris Patten to slow down the pace of democratic reforms, with originality. In fact, New York did it first and with more panache.
Nor was this an isolated incident of profit over principle. In the months before the American Civil War, New York's business community was reluctant to oppose the South. Not because it supported the rebel cause but because it seemed a shame to rock the boat when trading relations were so good. As a divided nation prepared to take up arms, the South screaming for independence and freedom and the North shouting about unity and equality, one city mumbled something about the bottom line and tried to keep its head down.
