A technophobe’s personal journey through post-handover Hong Kong

True story. In 1994, after a year of Hong Kong flat sharing, I went to an electrical emporium called Johnny’s, in the Furama Hotel, in Central, now long pulverised, and bought my own telephone. This, you understand, was a landline phone. It was also a fax and answering machine, and was about the size of three toasters.

After I’d carried it back to my new flat in Sai Wan Ho and plugged it in, a strange thing happened. Friends reported that when they rang at certain times, a man would pick up, announce in BBC English that no one was around and suggest leaving a message. My calls were obviously being misrouted to another number but as I was the only Westerner in the building, and maybe the entire street, I couldn’t think where he lived.

Older readers will remember the sky-high cost of ringing overseas back then. My intercontinental communi­cations were mostly conducted via aerogrammes; I’d buy them in the General Post Office, in Connaught Place, under a portrait of the queen, who was already disappearing from Hong Kong’s coins yet still reigned within government buildings. Local calls were free but I was worried the perfectly spoken mystery man might be hijacking my phone line to ring the UK.

Eventually, Hong Kong Telecom, which then had the franchise for all domestic phones in the colony, sent round an engineer. Naturally, I couldn’t speak Cantonese so someone in an office was lined up to translate what was bound to be a complicated diagnosis, and it was she who told me I hadn’t changed the pre-recorded tape with which the answering machine was thoughtfully supplied. To this day, I can remember the HKT guy’s face: his disbelieving expression exactly mirrored that of a flatmate when I’d burned my neck ironing a shirt collar while wearing it.

I could say, in my own defence, that it was a weird time. In the run-up to the handover, the city’s psychology – its whole internal wiring – was being replaced. RTHK had a Sunday morning phone-in programme that revolved around two topics: passports and expat sales. Everything was in flux. There was talk about MI6 removing “listening devices” so China couldn’t get its hands on them. Who knew what was going on in the atmosphere around us?

But, really, I was a technical moron. I’d never learned to drive, or to operate a washing machine, or an oven or a video recorder. Hong Kong, with its efficient public transport, its laundries, its takeaway noodles, its social life, suited people like me perfectly. It was a place that had sprouted because of transients, both Western and Chinese, who hadn’t intended to linger. As I didn’t intend to stay long either, there was no point in acquiring any of the white goods (sic) being sold over the airwaves on Sunday mornings. In the 20 months I spent in that Sai Wan Ho flat, I never had a fridge.