dialing a telephone, you’re dialing an armpit, purse, shirt pocket, or bikini top. The cell phone has to be there, or somebody might miss a deal. Everything’s a deal. In a store you ask, “What’s your best price?” then “What’s your Chinese price?” and on from there. I was trying to buy a bottle of cognac in a little restaurant. The owner produced a brand I’d never heard of for $100 and a brand nobody’s ever heard of for $80. I got my friend Annie, who let fly in Cantonese, and we had a bottle of Remy for one dead U.S. Grant. “I didn’t know you were going to bring my sister in here,” said the owner. “ Hwa-aaah! ” It’s a Cantonese exclamation halfway between oi vey and fuhged-aboutit. Which is Hong Kong in a nutshell—a completely foreign city that’s utterly comprehensible. It’s a modern place, deaf to charm, dumb in the language of aesthetics, caught up in a wild, romantic passion for the plain utilitarian. The only traditional touches are the catawampus walls and whichaway entrances dictated by feng shui, the art of placing things so as to ensure luck and not disturb spirits. One building in Repulse Bay has an enormous square hole in its middle so that a certain invisible dragon can get from the mountain to the sea. Knowing Hong Kong, it was probably a scam with a paid-off fortune-teller helping architects and construction companies boost their fees. Some of Hong Kong may believe in geomancy, but it was my local bookstore in New Hampshire that had thirteen feng shui titles. Everything else quaint within reach in Hong Kong has been torn down. Just a few poky colonial government buildings are left. Landfill has pushed the waterfront a thousand feet into Victoria Harbor. Ferry terminals block the water views, and tides are cramped into a raging flume between Central and Kowloon. The statue in Statue Square is of a business manager, the nineteenth-century chief executive of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Behind the square, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building itself rises. Here the local taste for functionalism has been carried to an extreme that arrives at rococo: a massy, looming, steel Tinkertoy of a thing with its whole construction hanging, suspension-bridge fashion, from eight enormous towers. Very functional, indeed, whatever that function is. Maybe to be expensive. It cost a billion dollars to build. To the west is Jardine House, an aluminum-skinned monolith covered with circular porthole windows—Thousand Assholes, as it’s known. To the east is the I. M. Pei–designed Bank of China Tower—all big diagonals and tricky, skinny angles. Its purpose was to be the tallest building in Asia, which it was for about
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