Reflections on Hong Kong - Part I

Written 8-9 January 2014

When I lived there, I desperately wanted to escape it. I wanted for clean air. I wanted for green space that didn't require me to travel out of the city. I wanted for a uniquely local alternative youth culture – whatever that meant. And – foremost – I wanted for quality eligible men. Yet just over five years after I left it for greener pastures (England), I have fallen in love with Hong Kong again. So much so that I have now ordained this curious place my second home (after London). (Curiously, my feelings towards New Zealand, the country where I was born and raised, are as remote as its geographical distance from England!).

So how did this about-face happen?

My visit to Hong Kong took up the latter half of December 2013. Unlike all previous visits with my partner, M, this trip was enveloped in a bubble of expectation and excitement. We were, after all, getting married there (which I'll write about in a subsequent post).

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So our 2013 trip revolved around a pretty momentous life event. It was shot through with a vigour and abandon that previous trips lacked. Even my outlook on Hong Kong became positively tinted.

My chronic misgivings with the city are many but can be roughly summarised as: “Hong Kong is a hyper-commercialised cultural desert propped up on senselessly high property prices. Children are raised to be top engineers, accountants and financiers but not to ride a bike or swim.” Indeed, a recent article in the South China Morning Post, the city's major English language newspaper, reported that many parents actively discourage their children from taking up sport due to the increased risk of getting hurt and because it's “a waste of time”.

I still have such misgivings. But the exuberance I felt on this trip did much to shove them out of earshot, however temporarily. So freed I was from the usual skeptical mental chatter, my intuition kicked in. It quickly detected an exciting nascent energy emanating from the grassroots, which is poking ant holes at the city's meticulously tailored image as a slick financial destination for Big Business.

This grassroots appears to be comprised mainly of Gen Xs through to the millenial generation, individuals who have observed what innovations against Big Industry and Big Food are taking place in countries like the US and UK. Despite the odds, these young enterprising folk have begun importing this anti-Big progressiveness to their city, where tycoons and oligarchs have maintained a stranglehold.

This homegrown DIY energy quite overwhelmed me because it defied all expectation. It stoked my hunger to learn and experience more of it. Thankfully, my search was greatly aided by Mum who had dutifully kept 3 months' worth of back issues of HK Magazine, the city's reigning bible for cultured English speakers. (For the record, tainted memories of interning at the publication as a naïve 22-year-old no longer cloud my consumption of it.)

Something in the air... and it's not pollen

Armed with an eagle eye and pencil, I diligently circled all the 'cool' places mentioned by HK Magazine where local hipster foodies go. My emphasis on food – rather than music or art, my other loves – was partly out of necessity. A month before the December trip, I had gone on a depressing diet – drastic enough to warrant a Reflection of its own. I had completely eliminated sugar, carbs, gluten, dairy, caffeine and yeast for 35 days. As I wasn't about to let all that hard work go down the sinkhole, it meant I had to prepare to make some difficult and unpopular decisions when faced with all the culinary delights that make Hong Kong worth visiting: MSG- and soya sauce-laden everything, pork dumplings, char siu bao (barbecue pork buns), Portuguese egg tarts etc.

(This new ascetism had initially been motivated by my wish to look pearlescent for the wedding but it quickly transmogrified into a happiness-sucking beast.)

In order to allow this masochistic hunger strike to go ahead and thrive during the holiday season, I decided I had to (a) stick with Mum's lovingly prepared but purified home cooking (she had spent two weeks mastering recipes using coconut oil and turmeric) and (b) find 'healthier' restaurants and cafes, no matter how painstaking the search would be.

But find I did! And it wasn't that hard.

The glut of Delicious Digestion Disruptors available everywhere has long given rise to a national obsession with keeping slim ('fit' in the local parlance). This has resulted in a growing market for low calorie, health foods, including 'gluten-free' alternatives. Even though this is a well-known fact, I was genuinely astonished to be as well served as I was. Otherwise I wouldn't have packed a whole suitcase of supplements and superfoods to take with me. Even as I sit here typing this, my mind is struggling to square the notion of a predominantly Chinese city, with a very strong culinary heritage, importing Pukka teas, Tea Pigs, NOW supplements, organic Biona health foods, Spirulina and certified organic flaxseed and chia seeds...? The city's internationalism is truly mind-blowing.

But the real excitement rests on the fact that people are slowly waking up to the need for clean, responsibly-grown food, and responding to this need in their own way.

Grassroots to green shoots

Back when I was living in Hong Kong (2006-2008), I had dismissed any talk of there being an 'eco-friendly' or 'going green' movement in the city. As long as the haze imported from China's coal burning habit continued to hang thick over the city and corporate money continued to outshout the urges of the collective consciousness, being responsible to the Earth just seemed faddish. In terms of a market for health foods and eco-friendly products (in cosmetics, mainly), it was skewed toward the tai tais (housewife married to money) and lavishly paid corporate workers who slavishly followed any trend rumoured to help maintain one's appearance. The 'green' consumer trend was like the yoga craze before it – the preserve of the few and not always adopted for the right reasons.

The reality appears to be different now. As alluded to above, younger generations are walking the walk by staking money and pride on the fledgling green movement. They have become movers of the trend away from the kind of nutritionally-deficient, processed foods that are common fare in the city. They are making, growing and cooking their own. Farmers markets have sprung up – notably the Island East farmer's market in Quarry Bay – in addition to organic farms on Lamma Island and the New Territories. This local activism, however small in scale, gives the 'buying local and organic' phenomenon more than a patina of authenticity. 

One of my favourite discoveries of this 'new wave' is the suitably named Grassroots Pantry. Ensconced in an easy-to-miss cul de sac just off Third Street in Sheung Wan, what this cafe lacks in square footage (the bane of all small businesses in Hong Kong) it more than makes up for with its truly tasty vegan, allergy-free menu offerings. On top of its fresh produce and ingredients, it uses and sells dairy-free ice cream, made from ground coconut, made by a local brand Happy Cow. Both times I went I savoured a pumpkin curry on a generous bed of wild rice, followed by a devilish gluten- and dairy-free affogato. The chilli Mexican chocolate cake wasn't bad either. Each spoonful gave the palate a mild dark cocoa sensation that then burst into a substantial but not overpowering spicy kick. Not surprisingly, after these satisfying naughty-but-nice taste sensations, my self-imposed dietary privations seemed needlessly heavy-handed. I'm still apologising to my gut.

As I did not speak to the proprietor of Grassroots Pantry whose identity is in fact a mystery to me, I can only posit that the cafe is the audacious brainchild of a Gen X or Y'er seeking a bright opportunity within the city's dawning green foodie movement. Here's wishing him/her/they all the very best!

I Heart Sheung Wan

In my mind, the Sheung Wan district, down the hill from my parents' apartment in the Mid-Levels was once a byword for 'uncool'. Dusty and fusty, its narrow, crooked streets croaked with old businesses that the young and progressive had no business in. I'm talking family-run apothecaries helmed by Mahjong-loving men in their 50s and 60s selling a pot pourri of exotic animal parts (including that much maligned sharks fin) for medicinal uses; snoozing antique shops run by passionate collectors; and small food stores flogging anything and everything that could be eaten in preserved form.

Thankfully there still remains a crop of such small businesses in the area, including numerous cha chan teng or Hong Kong-style teahouses. This is despite the ruinous pressures of sky-scraping rents. Why thankfully? I now see these businesses as intrinsic to the unique but endangered flavour and texture of Hong Kong. Their continual but by no means guaranteed presence is touching. They form after all a definitive stand against the city's aggressive mall culture. Picture the little old guy holding onto a bit of localism – his life blood – like a white flag as the crushing wave of sanitised multinational commercialism, fortified behind faceless steel-and-glass facades, washes in.

And now they are joined by a new generation of small independent creative and food businesses that have chosen to make Sheung Wan their home.

If the word 'trendy' can be used to describe an area of Hong Kong, Sheung Wan is no doubt its best deserving contender. It is to Hong Kong what Shoreditch is to London. Roughly a decade has past since the first creative enterprises (in publishing, architecture, interior design) moved in, driven by the wish to be close to the CBD while avoiding Central's killer rents. Expatriates looking for cheaper residences also gravitated to the area surrounding the electric tramway on Des Voeux Road and the antiques and art gallery mecca along Hollywood Road. But, thanks to exorbitant rent hikes, the past few years have seen a mini exodus of creative types and expatriates to other parts of Hong Kong - most notably those offering up disused factory buildings and cheaper postwar walk-ups (i.e. Aberdeen, Kwun Tong, Kennedy Town, parts of the New Territories). This is akin to all those poor artists and young professionals who have set up shop on the fringes of Hackney because they were priced out of Hoxton and Shoreditch.

Yet, like Shoreditch, Sheung Wan retains its cutting edge. Assisted by its historical interest (more on that below), the close proximity of and narrowness of its streets, and the relative lack of commercial outlets bringing unwanted foot and car traffic to the area, it readily lends itself to be a creative cultural hub. Antique shops and art galleries line the streets as does a host of new independent design-oriented boutiques: Square Street, Konzepp, Lomography, Eclectic Cool.

A feast for the senses

On this trip, I came to notice just how visually interesting Sheung Wan is. The old and the new endearingly and peacefully coexist, giving visitors like us a picture perfect example of why more identikit malls do not necessarily = progress. Its colourful array of ramshackle old (ie. circa 1950s) four-storied residences garlanded by water stains, hung laundry and precariously perched air conditioning units have given tourists and seasoned photographers much to snap on. Finally, if one is looking for quirky, one can hardly do better than Square Street, where funeral parlours and coffin makers neighbour design retailers.

Speaking of the dead, Sheung Wan remains a bulwark against the city's rampant development. Hong Kong may have paved and built over much of its heritage, but it is in Sheung Wan that one can just about still capture something of it. A dozen or so remaining colonial buildings appear among new towering residential blocks like lonely vessels in a port that long ago lost its eminence. ('Sampans' might be a better metaphor to use.) Then there is the fact that Sheung Wan's sleepy, carless steep hills and narrow streets form much of the historical trail highlighting the activities (some of them revolutionary) of modern China's founder Sun Yat Sen.

Hong Kong through a new set of lenses

Hong Kong is still very much a place where money is made the old fashioned way – through traditional businesses, trade, financial services and property. It's easy to be critical of its shallow commercial culture, gaping wealth gap, snarky politics and incessant environmental woes. But for now at least, after sensing something fresh and spirited in the air, I am choosing not to promote my misgivings at the risk of becoming blind to the changes taking place at the grassroots. Hey, I may even join in one day!

And speaking out of self-interest, the city's hyper-commercialism is very good for consumers like myself. Shops hardly ever close, services like banks are generally efficient (I got a new ATM card in the post within a week despite running into the Christmas and New Year holidays) and the public transport ticks like clockwork. I may want a bit of soul in my life, but equally, I don't mind being able to travel anywhere within 20 minutes or rustle up some last minute Christmas shopping.

Now for a coffee break...