Then & NowHong Kong’s social climbers befriend Instagram influencers today, before they employed different tactics – they make tempting targets for humour
- From shameless spongers and name-droppers to snobby artists and writers, social climbers have been a feature of Hong Kong since its earliest colonial days
- Proximity to wealth – actual or assumed – set their hearts aflame. Society magazines encourage this sense of an upper crust
From its mid-19th century urban beginnings, Hong Kong has been visited by successive tides of social climbers.
Despite intermittent economic downturns, the generally prosperous possibilities the British colony offered ensured almost every arriving passenger vessel had on board at least one ambitious chancer ready to try his or her luck in a new port.
Newly beached arrivals quickly found opportunities among total strangers, who had little option but to uncritically accept the newcomers’ stated valuations of themselves – at least until credible evidence of unsavoury character traits, or verifiable misadventures elsewhere, had time to catch up with them.
All too often, by the time such information had percolated onwards, the social alpinists were well established on whatever greasy pole they had targeted – or had already failed miserably and silently slunk away.
How were these types – especially freshly landed specimens – most readily identifiable? A near-compulsive tendency to drop certain names in rapid succession, to quickly establish membership of an imagined “in crowd”, was a classic hallmark.
In small, closely interlocked places such as Hong Kong, someone else present would be aware that these insinuated connections were tangential at best. Any clear-eyed onlooker who had lived in Asia long enough to observe the species – yet not had their own sensitivities warped and numbed into acquiescence or imitation – could spot them a mile off.