Then & now: get me out of here

Hong Kong’s European society tends to lionise visiting literary figures; the absence of much serious home-grown talent means that when internationally known writers pass through Hong Kong they are pounced upon. Literary dinners and readings are held for them, mostly attended by lawyer/ banker types who combine artistic or literary pretensions with the financial resources to pay high prices in return for namedropping privileges afterwards (“… as I said to XX, when we had dinner together last week …”).

W. Somerset Maugham shrewdly noted, “to claim acquaintance with the celebrated merely shows one is, personally, of little account”, and in this respect Hong Kong has changed little over the decades.

One visiting author who generated a substantial local stir was renowned Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw, who visited the Far East in 1933 as part of a round-the-world cruise. By then elderly and world-famous, “G.B.S.” stopped off in Hong Kong before heading north to Shanghai. While here, he was photographed with leading Eurasian compradore Sir Robert Hotung. Both men were in Chinese dress and, as they were only a few months apart in age, they could have passed as brothers – or, perhaps, cousins.

On arrival, Shaw declined an invitation to speak to the local Rotary Club on the grounds that their mindless social conformity left him quite speechless. To compound the insult, Shaw tartly observed that local European “attitudes to the Chinese [in general] were close to middle-class attitudes to servants in Britain”.

Few things enrage Hong Kong Europeans more than being accurately depicted; the suggestion that they might really be petitbourgeois folk with middling minds and manners to match, instead of the merchant princes of their own imaginations, sent many self-important society figures into near-apoplexy.

In this – as ever – they were deeply conflicted; Shaw was famous, and the obvious desire to snub him tussled painfully with the equally pressing, snobbish need to claim some brief association with a man of his stature.