The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [41]
The Chinese moved there in droves. They walked, they took boats, they swam. They still do. No one really knows the population of Hong Kong, especially since 1949, when Mao took over and made things hot for people with an aptitude for your basic capitalism with the gloves off, and inspired several hundred thousand of them to go for a moonlight swim in the South China Sea.
So Hong Kong is crowded. Now, arithmetic will tell you that five million or so people in 366 square miles isn’t that bad, but long division doesn’t tell you that most of those 366 square miles go up and down. Most of Hong Kong is made up of steep hills, many of them uninhabitable, so the population is crammed into relatively small segments of the colony. When you get a lot of people in a small area where lots of money changes hands, what you also get is great extremes of wealth and poverty, because the fingers on some of those hands are pretty sticky.
The rich tend to live on the tops of the hills, of course, especially on “the Peak,” more properly called Victoria Peak, the oh-so-exclusive neighborhood founded by the early Western drug lords but later dominated by Chinese financiers. Your status on the Peak is determined by your altitude; the goal is to literally look down on your neighbor. In many ways, the Peak is a little piece of England. It has the cultural airs of the English aristocracy fortunately modified by Chinese love of life. The Peak’s inhabitants send their children off to Oxford or Cambridge for college, take four-o’clock tea, play croquet, and complain that the servants get cheekier every year. At the same time, they drive pink Rolls-Royces, the tea tends to be jasmine, they light incense to Buddhist saints to ensure good luck in gambling, and the servants are a part of a hugely extended family.
The poor have hugely extended families, too, and most of them would be thrilled to get a job pouring tea in a mansion on the Peak. That would mean they could get enough to eat and maybe a place to sleep where they could stretch their legs out. A lot of the poor live on the mainland section called Kowloon, where there’s a person for every nine square feet and where the real-estate moguls plowed some of the hills into the ocean and put up huge blocks of high-rise tenements.
Kowloon has a lot of people and a lot of everything else, too, especially neon. The neon proclaims the sale of cameras, watches, radios, suits, dresses, food, booze, and naked ladies dancing for your pleasure. The main street is called Nathan Road—the “Golden Mile”—and walking down Nathan Road at night is like having an acid flashback, a trip through a tunnel of bright, flashing lights with surround sound.
Walking up Nathan Road, on the other hand, is like walking from Europe into Asia, and in the old days that was at least symbolically the case, because the Orient Express began down near the Star Ferry Pier at the bottom of Nathan Road. If you walk north up the road from there, you’re pointed for China proper: the People’s Republic of China, the PRC, the Middle Kingdom. Where East and West don’t meet. So you don’t want to walk too far up the Nathan Road. You get too far up the Nathan Road and you’re not necessarily coming back.
Unless you’re Chinese, that is, which makes all kinds of sense when you think about it. As crowded as Hong Kong is, as rough and tumble in its unbridled, unchecked, unregulated commercial competition, the Chinese keep going there. Sometimes the gatekeepers at the PRC border simply open the gates, and