A RAVE REVIEW
THE other day I discovered something that astonished me. I discovered I love Hong Kong. In fact, I love it so much I am going to pay my tax bill.
I realised that, as parties go, dancing on the Titanic has nothing on this. For one thing the expatriate rave currently building up on the dance floor of HMS Hong Kong is probably wilder - certainly it is uninhibited by parents, priests or thoughts of cleaning up afterwards. For another we know exactly when the iceberg will strike, exactly when all the glasses will go sliding off the table.
But first the matter of parents. Few of our parents fulfil the promise of their early years. They begin life as giants. They know everything and can do everything. They are the fountain of all reason, affection, food, clothes, clean bedrooms, pocket money and fresh laundry. But over the years that fountain often dries to a sour trickle. The giants shrink, wrinkle, turn racist, dress badly, start to smell, have affairs, divorce, shrink more, argue and become embarrassing, way out of touch and generally rather stupid. In short they are a terrible disappointment to their wonderful children and one of the main reasons so many foreigners flee to Hong Kong.
Scratch the surface at any expat dinner party and it becomes clear Hong Kong doubles as a sanitarium for wounded children. The general consensus is parents should be heard but not seen. By all means keep them drugged on upbeat weekly phone calls, rosy letters, selected snapshots and optimistic faxes. But on no account should a visit of more than one week per annum be encouraged. 'It's not that I don't love my parents,' said Isabella, serving up her mother's recipe for apple pie, 'I just don't really like them.' As a result, Hong Kong's little expat world is really a university campus where, unrestrained by any responsibility to their families, everyone is majoring in The Good Time and doing subsidiaries in Delusion. However, unlike normal university campuses, here the women do shave their armpits. The grant cheques are monthly and huge. No one sells The Socialist Worker and any discussion of politics tends to boil down to the only really important question about 1997: 'Have you booked a hotel room yet?' The greatest parties are, of course, built on the grandest delusions. And on HMS Hong Kong, although the spectre of AIDS rages close by, no one is looking out of the porthole. A friend from Los Angeles visiting Joe Bananas last Wednesday was thrown through a time warp. 'It's, like, kinda pre-AIDS fear or something,' he said astonished. 'I can't believe it. Promiscuity in America is, like, passe. This is really cool.' So I took him on a tour of Hong Kong on Friday night. We started off in Wan Chai. Nothing promiscuous about girls covered from the neck to their out-sized leather boots in shining Lycra, he agreed. ('Oh, that's cool. They have one kinda all over body condom.') But Neptune, the Big Apple and Pussycat ('Man, I can't believe you have a club called Pussycat. Cool. Cool.') made a deep impression. 'Gee,' he said, 'this is fat lawyer heaven.' Two o'clock found us in the Ying Yang Club. Inexplicably, I was wearing only my girlfriend's black body-stocking and a pair of blue thongs I had never seen before or since. The place was packed and the dance floor heaving to the sound of The Village People. There were lesbians and gays and straight people and bisexual people. The atmosphere, however, is strictly trisexual. (As in, 'I'll try anything once'.) And to prove it, another friend, Mary, and her dance partner, stumble out of the dry ice and announce a late-night swimming excursion to the Hopewell Centre.
Since it featured in the British Airways ad, this pool has become the premier home to the Hong Kong skinny-dip quickie. Open air and just over a metre deep, it was never designed to be used. Indeed, there is no one at the Hopewell Centre to use it. Its sole purpose is for fung shui: the building apparently resembles a candle and so the pool was built purely to keep the wick dipped. Naturally, all this wick dipping stuff has only added to its reputation.
It's much later, about 5 am. The Los Angeleno has long since vanished and my girlfriend and I are in Causeway Bay drinking a dai pai dong's chemical approximation of coffee. Suddenly a gang of Chinese youths crowd around us. They are in their early 20s and have the unfocused eyes and wild gesticulations of the very drunk. One grabs my shoulders, another shoves something in my face. I am thinking I am about to become the first white person I know to be mugged in Hong Kong, when I see what is in front of my face is a huge, crystal bottle of XO. 'Drink, drink,' the gang's leader is saying. It finally dawns on me: 'Oh my God, we are being forced hospitality by a brutal gang of chuppies.' Incidentally, did you notice how easily the Los Angeleno slipped away and how effortlessly Mary and her beau walked on and swam off? This is another of Hong Kong's great bonuses. If you get bored of hearing someone say 'cool' all the time, you can just let them go. For all its towering architecture, Hong Kong is really a soft city, a ball of putty which you can stamp with the pattern of your own social map. On a small scale, you can drop people who bore you even if they live next door; just never call them and screen their calls. On a larger scale, you can drop whole social worlds by changing the bar you drink in or restaurants you visit.
Or, if you get bored of everything expat, you can change your entire social universe: take a course in Cantonese, take a Chinese lover, take in a John Woo movie. In extreme cases you can take the MTR to Kowloon.
Oh and there is one other thing that makes staying in Hong Kong and paying your tax bill worthwhile: it's only 15 per cent.
