China 1 July 1997 Hong Kong
To which I intend to have added:
Bowling Tournament 2nd Place
Whimsical handover T-shirts, many making hangover puns, were for sale around the city, as were such humorous novelties as “Canned Colonial Air—Sealed Before June 30th.” I suppose the same sort of things were being marketed in Vienna in 1938: “Last Yarmulke Before Anschluss, ” and so on. Maybe in occupied France, too: “Vichy Water,” ha-ha. There were grumbles in Hong Kong, of course, such as dissidentish shows by artists objecting to censorship, in case there was going to be any. Martin Lee and his fellow Democratic Party members gave a glum press conference, at which they promised to keep representing their electoral districts, even if they didn’t anymore. And a certain amount of fretting in the press was seen, but mostly of the affectless editorial page kind that mixes AFTER GENOCIDE—WHITHER RWANDA? with AFTER GRETZKY—WHITHER HOCKEY ? Hong Kong, on the whole, was awfully darn cheerful. Why weren’t 6.5 million people more upset about being palmed off to an ideology-impaired dictatorship that has the H-bomb? Even one of Taiwan’s top representatives in Hong Kong was quoted saying, “As a Chinese person, I think it is a good thing that Hong Kong is coming back to China.” Chiang Kai-shek, please. There is the colonialism issue. How did the Chinese of Hong Kong really feel about being ruled by England? It’s a complex question. Or, as a number of Chinese people said to me, “No, it isn’t.” Being an American, and an Irish- American to boot, I was, maybe, told certain things that the English didn’t hear. “We hate the English,” for instance. When a Chinese friend said that, I said, “Wait a minute, I was in Vietnam not long ago, and nobody seemed to hate Americans. If the Vietnamese can forgive Americans for napalm, carpet bombing, Agent Orange, and what-all, surely you can forgive the English for the odd opium war and some ‘Land of Hope and
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