Hong Kong has always had foreign residents who found the city incredibly boring
- From Hong Kong’s urban beginnings, chronic boredom among long-term residents who felt trapped here was well-documented in diaries, letters and published memoirs
- Being ‘out East’ was framed as a joke or a source of petty irritation, tolerated for the money’s sake, enjoyed where possible between home leaves
Dynamic, international, cosmopolitan – these adjectives were once breathlessly applied to Hong Kong in all its many-faceted dimensions.
But how many openly admit to the commonly felt opposite end of the spectrum – dull, repetitive and, at times, excruciatingly boring? And how much more pronounced and widespread this jaded latter sentiment becomes when pandemic-mitigation measures have eliminated the temporary solace once found in short-range regional travel?
Those who might otherwise have decamped elsewhere for a few days’ respite from the same old places and overfamiliar faces have been remorselessly thrown back upon whatever inner resources they might happen to have. In tandem, dawning awareness of contemporary Hong Kong’s – shall we say, less appealing – everyday realities have also come as a rude awakening.
Forced to take a long hard look at their lives in Hong Kong, many long-term residents gradually concluded that things are no longer all they had previously told themselves they were, and poured the Kool-Aid down the sink – once and for all. Permanent departure numbers over the past two years tell their own story.
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Chronic boredom, combined with cabin fever, have always been commonly expressed sentiments among those who feel trapped for extended periods in physically and socially small places.
From Hong Kong’s mid-19th century urban beginnings, this aspect was well-documented in diaries, letters and – less frequently – in published memoirs; almost as soon as people returned to the colony, it seemed, a desire to leave again began to build. Hiking expeditions and boat trips could only provide so much open space – and the company always remained the same.
Into the late 1950s, for most foreign residents, extended absences only came around every three years; six weeks each way by ship from Hong Kong to Britain was the norm.
From those times to the present, mercantile societies across Asia that mostly attracted long-term foreign transients for the significantly greater amounts of money they could earn, low or virtually non-existent taxes, “lifestyle” advantages and – for many – the various conferred privileges that came with being European in colonial societies, always had long-term boredom entered firmly on the debit side of life’s ledger.
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After all, the curious logic runs, what is the ultimate point of working ridiculously long hours in some foreign place, if not to “enjoy” the proceeds of all that endlessly repetitive labour, in a constant, self-perpetuating cycle of earn-and-burn? Affordable conspicuous consumption offered in return for looking the other way when it came to autocratic governments, gross socio-economic inequalities and environmental degradation only goes so far.
Examining too closely who does the lesser-paid, more-menial, but nevertheless essential work, such as domestic labour, under what conditions, and for how much, squarely remains – in the parlance of an earlier era – “simply not done”.
In The Lady and The Unicorn (1937), English writer Rumer Godden summed up the boredom-prone type – closely modelled on her stockbroker husband and his circle – that was commonplace from Calcutta (where the novel was set) to Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. A complete lack of interest in the places that they come to spend large tracts of their lives, along with an insulated lack of empathy for those who lived outside their particular “bubble”, created and reinforced that profound sense of boredom.
Out East was framed as a joke, a jape or a source of petty irritation, tolerated for the money’s sake, enjoyed where possible between home leaves, and eventually left far behind, when enough wealth had been accumulated. No matter how long they lived in Asia, Godden wrote, “Omar Khayyam was a kind of curry”, and the only monuments they knew were “the Cenotaph because of Remembrance Sunday, and the Victoria Memorial because it was too big to miss”.
Hong Kong was much the same for some – and remains so for others.
