'What I have written strains to be true but nevertheless is not true enough. Truth is anecdote, narrative, the snug opaque quotidian.' John Updike AND SO, at last, we've arrived at our tryst with history. The main event. The real deal. Hong Kong's chance to tread the klieg-lit boards of the world stage. For a journalist, this should be a defining career moment, an apotheosis. One of the decade's - perhaps the century's - big stories; the passing of the baton from a waning empire to one that is waxing, waking. Our shotgun adoption. Each day, the drone of that omnipresent mantra grows louder. The handover. The handover.
Strange, then, that after sleepless nights and crease-browed days trying to puzzle out my feelings about this momentous event, I feel a bit like the drama school dropout from A Chorus Line. I reached right down to the bottom of my soul and I feel ... nothing. Nothing, that is, apart from a sense of swimming ceaseless circles in a sea of ennui, and an overpowering urge for the whole circus to be over. To get on with life. To find out what comes next. To leave behind forever the half-baked concerts, the orotund orations, the plastic souvenir tack. Never again to clap eyes on mugs and t-shirts and pens and kites and keyrings splattered with a garish commingling of the Union Jack and the mainland's yellow stars.
For the truth of the handover is not to be found in the invasion of instant experts with their preconceived agendas, nor is it to be divined from slick CNN soundbites. It is not hidden within the mumbled speeches of bumbling royalty, the whine and pop of fireworks or even the po-faced edicts of our new masters. It is, rather, within the snug opaque quotidian. The day-to-day murk and muddle of learning to live as part of one country with two systems. Come July 1 there will be no instant revelation, no great secret laid bare. Long after the 8,000-strong corps of foreign journalists have become bored and decamped for the next attraction - leaving rainforests of spent paper, the ether still swollen with their weighty, wasted words - those of us who remain will be peeling the truth like an onion, layer by layer. And learning to live with it.
I have spoken to many friends lately, expatriate and Chinese, who feel as I do. Any event so long-anticipated, so potentially life-changing, can, under the pressure of full media immersion, see excitement and enthusiasm traded for let-down, even boredom. It is hard to believe the handover is here at last, after the suspense, the waiting, the interminable years of bile and bickering. Yet its very imminence conjures the languor of anticlimax; a sense of sleepwalking through these final weeks.
I have been looking back on a piece I penned for another publication when the 1000-day countdown began. It seems an age ago. It seems like yesterday. I wrote of feeling like an itinerant voyeur here for one of history's ringside seats; pondering with a guilty thrill the lot of those stuck here if things turn sour, happy to wolf down my own little slice of the economic miracle but secure in my escape plans and my schadenfreude. Of facing my main fear of 1997 and admitting it was merely that the good times might cease to roll. Of trying to reconcile journalistic principles with pragmatism; the choice between some degree of well-paid self-censorship, or a one-way ticket home to integrity and a whopping pay cut.
Those fears now seem ill-founded as, with days to go, the stockmarket continues on its meteoric trajectory, the bamboo whiskers still bristle on each soaring new accretion of glass and concrete, and property prices nudge ever more ludicrous levels. Our press has hardly become Singaporean. Fortune's chronicle of a death foretold now seems a faintly laughable memory. Of course, in a system so volatile, bubbles can quickly burst. Entropy lurks around the corner, never more than a couple of dodgy Beijing decisions away. Jonathan Alter, in Newsweek's recent handover commemorative edition, warned of the advent of the Year of the Termite: Hong Kong faced 'not sudden dismemberment by a mainland tiger; just a slow weakening of its foundations as corruption and connections eat away at its heart.' Or, as Marc 'Dr Doom' Faber lamented in his latest handover-inspired jeremiad, 'it's like someone taking over a company and having no idea of the business'. Our dimpled early warning system, Anson Chan, has already sounded an ominous note, with the unprompted declaration that any pressure applied to her principles would result in a swift departure from Tung Chee-hwa's side. As for Tung - pin-up boy for the to-get-rich-is-glorious crowd - it is instructive to watch the daily swelling of his eyebags, evidence of sleepless nights and weighty struggles to shrug off the strings of persistent puppeteers. Despite all this, though, optimism is in the ascendant.
Curiously, I no longer feel like a mere mercenary spectator. Sure, as a gweilo with a threadbare smattering of tone-deaf Cantonese who arrived here just five years ago, there is a sense of marginalisation. A timid hovering on the fringe as a new generation of rich and sussed trilinguals step up to claim their entitlement; watching antediluvian expatriates get knocked aside by the localisation juggernaut like tenpins in the Hong Kong Club's bowling alley bar.