mankind are on display in an air of shit and Chanel. It is a filled-in city, turgid with buildings. The Sham Shui Po district of Kowloon claims a population density of more than 425,000 people per square mile—eighteen times as crowded as New York. Landing at Kai Tak Airport,†††† down one thin skid of Kowloon Bay landfill, you fly in below clothesline level, so close to apartment windows that you can watch women at bathroom mirrors putting on their makeup. You can tell them that their lipstick’s crooked. There is no space in Hong Kong for love or money, at least not for ordinary kinds of either. A three-bedroom apartment in Central rents for $1,000 a month, but there isn’t room in any of those bedrooms to even have sex with yourself. The whole home will be 700 square feet, less than ten yards long by eight yards wide, with windows papered over because, outside those windows, a hand grab away, are the windows of the apartment next door. And anything you’re going to fix in the kitchen had better be something that can be stood on end—like a banana. This is how middle-class people live. Poor people in public housing will have three generations in a fifteen-by-twenty-foot room. But when they come out of that room, they’ll be wearing Versace and Dior— some of it even real. Hong Kong is a styling city, up on the trends. Truly up, in the case of platform sneakers. You can spend an entertaining afternoon on Hollywood Road watching teens fall off their shoes. Over the grinding hills, in the blood-clot traffic, men nonetheless drive their Turbo 911s. The S-class Mercedes is the Honda Civic of Hong Kong, and for the soccer-mom set, a Rolls and a driver is a minivan. Jesus, it’s a rich city. Except where it’s Christ-almighty poor. Hong Kong is full of that “poverty midst plenty” stuff beloved of foreign correspondents such as myself who, when doing a Hong Kong piece, rush from interviews with day- laboring “cage men” in barred flophouse partitions to dinners in the blandly exclusive confines of Happy Valley’s Jockey Club, where I could sample the one true Hong Kong luxury—distance between tables. But those poor are going to get rich. Just ask them. You can call the old lady selling dried fish on the street on her cell phone. The bippity-beep of cell phones all but drowns the air-conditioner racket. And each time a cell phone rings, everyone within earshot goes into a self- administered frisk, patting himself down to find the wee gadget. You can go weeks without talking to an answering machine, because you’re not really
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