Dispatch from Hong Kong - Hong vs. Kong

Hong Kong is a city of contradictions: futuristic skyscrapers next to shabby buildings; high speed yachts sharing Victoria Harbor with traditional Chinese fishing boats; five-star gourmet cuisine alongside street food vendors; haute couture fashion houses on the same block as dollar stores selling cheap wares.


Next to my hotel, a skyscraper is under construction. The modern building reaches for the sky but the scaffolding cladding it is crudely made entirely from bamboo lashed together and covered in green plastic netting.

And yet all these contradictions create an eclectic mix that makes Hong Kong entirely unique.


The pace of Hong Kong is fast. There are more than 7 million people here and they tend to get around with haste, just like the big bucks being spent on luxury goods and the billions of dollars flying around the financial market.

And then there is that skyline, so beautifully highlighted by the city's harbor. On the hotel- and tourist-heavy Kowloon side, the harbor-front boardwalks do double duty as an open air stadium to view the nightly light spectacle of the Hong Kong skyline. Even that moves fast.

Yesterday, as I was wandering the streets of Hong Kong, I was struck by how much of the British influence remains - from the street and building names to the high tea ritual at all the swanky hotels.

With it's own money, government, and culture, as well as so much that remains British, the "Special Administration Region" of Hong Kong is an anomaly within China. But that is probably smart. The SAR allows China to have capitalism and all things western without compromising the communist state - the best of both worlds.

To experience Hong Kong's greatest contradiction, you need only take a short walk west of that world class skyline. Within a few blocks, you leave the Hong Kong you know and enter a traditional Chinese community. I explored it this morning.

The streets are lined with small independent shops selling all sorts of adventurous stuff - exotic foods, herbs, live animals. I saw one shop that sold live snakes to cure all sorts of ails. Apparently people pay to have the gall bladder taken out of a live snake and eat it raw in the belief that doing so ensures long life (not, it goes without saying, for the snake). While I was standing there, a guy came out of the shop holding an empty snake basket and scanned the sidewalk like he lost something. I left pretty quickly.

On this hot summer day, the sidewalks in front of these shops are lined with all sorts of things drying on plastic or in baskets in the hot sun - veggies, mushrooms, fish, sea slugs, lizards, and even seahorses. I guess the drying intensifies the flavor, but with all the traffic, it must also add a note of exhaust.


In an attempt to escape the heat, I ducked into the central market. Wow, that place was intense. People and food were flying around everywhere - chickens being slaughtered, boiled, and plucked; pigs being portioned; seafood being cleaned on the floor; vegetables being bundled and tossed onto tables. I saw one guy in chef's whites walking out with a slaughtered pig over his shoulder. The pig was not packaged in any way - just bound at the hind legs with twine. It bobbed up and down like it was dancing as the chef walked away. I guess pork is on the menu tonight.

After a butcher fired up his hose to clean his stall just as I passed, and showered me with specks of all the nasty protein bits he was cleaning, I decided that the blazing heat and sun outside were not that bad after all. 

I headed up another street that had many shops selling what looked like colorful toys. But these weren't toy stores. It turns out they were funeral stores selling plastic and cardboard replicas of everything and anything you can imagine. Apparently people buy these and burn them at the funeral or bury them with the deceased for use in the afterlife. 

And when I say they sell everything you can imagine, I am not kidding. I saw utensils, books, musical instruments, sporting goods, designer handbags, make up, bundles of money, food, booze, ciggies, flat screen tv's, cars, headphones, laptop computers, cell phones (talk about roaming charges) and dolls that were dressed like servants (I guess it's hard to get good help in the afterlife), all made from plastic or cardboard.

But what I couldn't find in any of the stores, no matter how hard I looked, was what I would want buried with me more than anything else - a return ticket.