No knowing what life on the other side of the glass is like

At the airport there is someone holding up a sign with my name on it. He takes my luggage and leads me to a big black car. I sit in the back on the way to the hotel. We pass through the gates and after security inspection I am inside a large marble lobby. Someone is playing the piano in the distance. It is cool and comfortable and spotlessly clean.

I check in and make my way to my room, kick off my shoes and lie down on the bed to watch an uninteresting business channel on television. In the evening I get back in the big black car and I am delivered to another carefully guarded and beautifully maintained hotel, to a dinner in an excellent Italian restaurant.

The next day I go from one meeting room to another in a series of glass-office towers. And by the end of the day I am back at the airport and on the evening flight back home. Throughout the trip, I spend most of my time sitting in the back of the car. The traffic is terrible here and between each hour-long meeting there is at least another hour of staring out the car window.

What I see are rows and rows of tattered stores, crumbling buildings, and a sea of ageing motor cycles and cars. And people everywhere. Groups of men standing around smoking, young women laughing, and children chasing each other along the sidewalks. Going past the window of my car is an endless display of daily life.

Nothing looks clean or organised to anything like the standard of the hotels and office buildings I am visiting. There are piles of garbage against the walls of the dilapidated buildings and when I can look through the doorway of a store or a bar I see dark, dusty rooms or glaring fluorescent lights.

If we stop for long enough, a small child or woman holding a baby will come and knock on the window of the car begging for change or selling plastic toys. I am practised at not making eye contact lest I attract a whole gang of beggars. If they are too persistent the driver will shoo them away while I sit in the back feeling guilty.

At each destination I walk into well-designed meeting rooms with speaker phones, flat-screen televisions and friendly waiters serving horrible coffee. I talk with groups of men in nice suits about economic growth and inflation and sovereign bond spreads. We exchange business cards and they ask me when I arrived and how the weather is in Hong Kong. We shake hands and say that we look forward to speaking soon and then I go back to the car for another hour to watch the folks go by whose lives actually depend on this economy.