Glory’ karaoke.” “It’s a different thing,” said my friend. “You just killed the Vietnamese; you never snubbed them.” Hong Kong’s people are also realists. Calling in to complain on the Larry King Show wasn’t going to do much. Thus the tepid response to the handover’s endless television and newspaper “streeters,” the interviews with random locals: “Excuse me, I understand you’re about to get secret police in your neighborhood. Would you care to tell the world how much you hate Jiang Zemin?” There are real reasons for Hong Kong’s realism. In 1945 the population of the territory was only 1.2 million. Today, the whole city is filled with refugees and children of refugees. Until 1980, Hong Kong had a “touch base” asylum policy where, basically, anyone from the mainland who made it to downtown could stay. The Chinese who fled the civil war, the communist takeover on the mainland, and the lunatic deprivations and slaughters that followed know that there’s only one real safe haven: money. And they’re serious about making it. The hours posted on the door of the fashion-forward department store Joyce are, MONDAY-SATURDAY 10 A . M . –7 P . M . , SUNDAY AND PUBLIC HOLIDAYS 11 A . M . –6 P . M . Take two hours off for Christmas. And the in-case-of typhoon notice in my hotel room read: Signal Number 9 and 10:
When these signals are hoisted, extreme weather conditions will prevail, meaning that the typhoon is centered over Hong Kong. May we suggest that while you are confined indoors, you enjoy the facilities of our restaurants and bars.
Finally, the residents of Hong Kong were putting a good face on things because . . . what the hell else were they going to do? There’s a joke they tell in Shanghai about the Hong Kong handover. Mao asks Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, “How do you get a cat to bite a hot pepper?” Zhou says, “You hold him down, pry his jaws open, and shove the pepper into his mouth.” Mao says, “No, that’s force. We want the cat to bite the pepper of his own free will.”
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