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When I was a boy, growing up just south of Brisbane, and when my fellow Queenslander, Hugh Lunn from Annerley Junction, was a young journalist in Hong Kong, the Red Menace and the Yellow Peril were very real. The Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Iron Curtain, the Bamboo Curtain were terms in general use, and to my young imagination, and to those of billions of others, the world was a fragile and dangerous place.Our civilisation could be swept away in a torrent of nuclear fire at any moment, or maybe millions of Communists would stream down and occupy Queensland, forcing us to eat chook feet and pigeon heads. With chopsticks.
It was a worry.
Hugh Lunn took his Chinese girlfriend to a new position in London, and decided, because he liked Chinese opera, that he would go the long way through China and Russia. Not unknown in those days, but it took him weeks and a tonne of red tape just to get the visa.
He wrote a book about his adventure, which he titled Spies Like Us, because it seemed to the Communists that any Westerner wanting to visit Red China had to be a spy. Especially if they also claimed to be a journalist.
Years later, after working for Rupert Murdoch as the Queensland correspondent of The Australian, virtually a foreign posting in those Bjelke-Peterson days, Lunn took a year to write a childhood memoir about growing up in Cold War Brisbane as the son of a baker with very offbeat views. This story of he and his Russian schoolmate turned into a bestseller, a laugh-out-loud and whoop-with-delight hit amongst Australians, especially after Ian Macnamara serialised it on his Sunday morning Australia All Over radio program.
I purely loved Lunn’s book. In many ways it echoed my own childhood. It echoed the childhood of a great number of people, and there was something to hug to your heart on every page. A charming, engaging book. The final scene was set at Greenbank, just south of Brisbane down the road from my old home, in the army camp where I later spent a great deal of my time with Queensland University Regiment, and I could just see those lines of old green six man tents, with cadets running up the sides and over the top.
Our trip to Hong Kong was really a trip to China, with Kerri closely studying the clothing industry at Shenzhen over the border. She wanted to have some clothes tailored, and sold me on tagging along by pointing out that I could have a dinner suit tailormade for the formal nights aboard Aurora. In fact, the whole holiday was just something to keep me sweet. Forget Paris, forget London, forget the cruise, Shenzhen was what it was all about.
Getting visas for China wasn’t difficult. Perhaps we paid a little too much by getting them a few weeks ahead of time at the embassy in Canberra, but I didn’t want to take any chances on delays in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong, Sunday morning, and once we’d worked out that we actually did have a harbour view, or at least a harbour glimpse busy with speeding hydrofoils and slow container vessels, it was time to venture out for breakfast. Downstairs, out on the street, Queen Street. Macdonalds across the corner, KFC a block down, hordes of Chinese streaming along the footpath...
“Just like Sydney,” said my son.
We found a bakery, or at least a bakery outlet, where we bought sandwiches, though I chose a garlic sausage bun over tuna and egg. So far as I was concerned, exotic dining was part of the Hong Kong experience.
We aimed to catch the hotel shuttle downtown, first Sunday departure at nine thirty, just right to hit the tailors in Shenzhen when they opened at eleven. With five minutes to go, I decided that brushing my teeth to get rid of the garlic might keep me sweet for the day. In hindsight, not good timing, and picking the up elevator instead of the down wasn’t the best either.
We got to the lobby to find the shuttle gone. “There was a full load, so it left early,” explained the doorman.
Kerri was livid. Missing a few minutes shopping, let alone a half or even full hour was not something she’d let me forget soon. “Taxi!” I held up my arm, and a red cab stopped for us.
Ten minutes later we were outside the Star Ferries terminal. From that moment we took taxis whenever possible. Cheap, clean, efficient, comfortable, and, apart from some narrow squeaks between Hong Kong’s double decker buses, safe.
Star Ferries, I’ve got to say, is one of the great public transport bargains of the world. Staten Island Ferry aside. For something like 25 Australian cents, you get a nine minute ride over the harbour. That’s on the upper deck, where you get air-conditioning in summer. The lower deck is even cheaper. The harbour is lined with huge skyscrapers. Just by themselves, they make the harbour crossing a spectacular sight, especially at night when they are inventively illuminated. Behind the city skyline you get steep green mountain slopes, and here and there along the ridges, wherever there is flat land enough for a tennis court, they’ll whip up a twenty or thirty floor apartment building.
And then there is the harbour traffic. Everything from inflatable boats to cruiseliners. In the old British days, they would have had battleships and aircraft carriers coming in and out. But the harbour is extraordinary. Apart from the Star ferries, which sail other harbour routes apart from simply back and forth, there are several other ferry companies, including the hydrofoil to Macau. Ships of all sizes cruise grandly to and fro, sampans scour the harbour for floating rubbish, junks and tourist vessels laze around, patrol craft of the PRC zip along, tugs and pilot boats and police vessels make their own way.
The waters are never still.
We’d had a glimpse from the Harbourview Hotel, more glimpses in the taxi, but on the ferry ride across there were 360 degree views. We found seats at the bow and drank it all in.
All too soon the ride was over and we made our way past tailor touts, following signs to Tsim Sha Tsau station along narrow surface streets, all with very British street names. Then down long tunnelways to the station. Here we bought stored value Octopus cards, good for travel on all public transport. An Asian Oyster. Sydney should get the same system, rather than the expensive jumble of tickets they confuse people with.
We swiped our Octopodes over the gates, followed more signs to the platforms, and found our train. The actual trip was about forty minutes, I guess, making our way north through Kowloon and the New Territories. I’d like to say that the tower blocks declined in size, we passed through the suburbs and out into the countryside, but no, it was pretty much high rise all the way to the border, where there was a narrow green strip.
Along the way the train gradually filled. People got on and off, a lot of young people near the university, complete with iPods and bright jackets. At one stage there was a heated argument one carriage down, and I told my family, having read the guidebook, that this was just a friendly Hong Kong discussion, loud and animated, but friendly. We pulled up at a station and all of a sudden there were men fighting outside, the argument turning physical. With a speed unmatched by any other police force, a squad of black-uniformed cops hit the fighters, separating them, pulling out batons, knocking them to the ground and handcuffing them in one fluid motion. Two monks in maroon robes looked on with keen interest.
On alighting, we just followed the crowd through the railway station. Most of the passengers were ethnic Chinese, and they streamed through the various barriers with the ease of long practice. Most just swiped a card to cross the border, but we foreigners went through a normal exit and entry process. Just a matter of filling in cards, presenting them with passports and getting them stamps.
And here we were, painlessly in Communist China, in a hotbed of capitalism. Everyone from this point onwards wanted to sell us something. Lo Wu Commercial City was our destination, a five story shopping mall the size of a city block, crammed solid inside with tiny stalls and shops in a confusing maze of narrow passages.
“Fifth floor,” ordered Kerri, her little red shopping guide in hand. The glass elevator took us up through a shiny atrium to the top floor, where we turned left and right to the textiles market. A hall dwindling into the distance, racks and swatches of textiles in every possible variety, colour and pattern stretching out ahead of us. My son and I looked at each other with horror in our eyes as the female half of the family dived in with chirps of pleasure.
Now I don’t mind standing around while my wife does her thing, but really, this was asking a lot, and my son, who fidgets even in a bookshop, was contemplating suicide.
“Ah, we’ll just be outside, by the atrium,” I told my wife, who was fingering , looking much as I imagine one of those monks would appear if he found Nirvana on a commuter train.
Son and I leaned on the shiny rail outside, looking down on five floors of bustling shoppers. We fended off touts every few seconds. Pirate DVDs were to be had in great abundance and incredibly low prices, if we just stepped this way, sir.
Scarlet and gold government banners promised swift punishment to the fakesellers, which apparently meant that the stalls in the mall couldn’t display counterfeit goods, but if you selected an item from a catalogue, the stallholders would fetch the discreetly wrapped item from a nearby warehouse and sell it to you. Later on, my daughter bought a Louis Vitton bag at the foot of the escalators, hurrying Chinese stepping around us, and an accomplice keeping a sharp eye out for the copyright cops.
Son and I loitered for a while. A small eternity, and when we looked back into the textile hall to see if there was an end in sight, we found my wife had found a tailor, who was guiding her through the stalls with practiced ease. “This is Stephanie,” Kerri said, introducing a Chinese woman maybe five years younger, “She’s very good. Oh, we’ll be a while yet.”
We beat a hasty retreat. I could see that the girls were in for the long haul. Outside, we explored a bit. My mobile phone with the cracked display needed replacing, and I was hoping to buy a cheap iPhone. I found something that looked very similar, even down to the silver Apple logo on the back, but it wasn’t quite the thing, and the display didn’t have more than a passing resemblance to Apple’s elegant interface.
The price was good, but no matter how swiftly the stallholder dropped it down even lower, it was still money down the drain, so far as I was concerned. I wanted Apple’s ease of use, not a generic cellphone tricked up to give a superficial resemblance.
I took the opportunity to release a BookCrossing.com book into the wild, setting it down against a glass wall and sauntering away. In what I’d planned to be a theme for this trip, I chose a copy of Hugh Lunn's classic boyhood memoir, Over the Top With Jim, hoping to send out a little bit of Australiana into the wider world. Heaven knows what the Chines thought of it, if one of them picked it up. “Copied it, made a dozen cheap fakes, and now wheeling them round in a barrow offering them to tourists,” suggested my daughter, when I told her.
Around a corner from the scene of the crime, I found a tailor shop. I needed a dinner suit for the ship. My previous dinner suit fitted my son perfectly, having inexplicably shrunk over the twenty years since I bought it. And here was a tailor shop with a dinner suit in the window.
They whipped out stools for us in the narrow space inside, and gave us little plastic cups of green tea, while we discussed colours and styles. What I don’t know about formal suits is enough to fill several large sets of encyclopaedia, so I guess my stool wasn’t the catbird seat.
“Um, they’re all the same, aren’t they?” I asked. “You know, black and um, formal?”
The two tailors smirked in delight and explained subtle differences of notches and texture. I pointed at a design in the book, we sorted out details of trouser stripes and vents (I didn’t want either), and then it was on to prices.
Maybe I should have haggled, but it wasn’t the done thing in tailor shops, my wife had told me out of her little red guide. The price for tailored suit, including shirt, cummerbund and bow tie, worked out to about $250 Australian, which I thought was pretty good for a garment expressly designed to turn my pudge into elegance.
They measured me up, I arranged for delivery in Hong Kong in two days time, got my son to take a photograph of me with two of the staff, and we returned to the textile hall to find Kerri still going strong. They were buying buttons now, and the tailor led them to a booth that sold buttons and frills, where they sorted out the right size and colour and price and took off for the next bit of kit. My womenfolk were buying about thirty pieces of clothing all up.
I mentioned that I’d sorted out my dinner jacket, and I was very pleased with how smoothly it had all gone. “Oh, what did you pay?” Stephanie the tailor asked.
I told her how much, and she named a price a third the amount. I wasn’t quite so pleased now.
We finished buying stuff, Stephanie insisting on carrying all the bags of buttons and cloth back to her own tiny shop, where she found stools for us all and a pile of fashion magazines to browse through while the women got measured up.
By this stage, we were into mid afternoon, eight hours from breakfast, and there were rumbles of hunger all round. The Laurel restaurant earnt top marks in the little red shopping book, and we trudged around the maze of little twisty corridors, all alike, until we found it, and the queue of people to get in. We took a number, looked at our watches for the twenty minute wait, and promptly got lost again while we killed time.
I think my son, whose mind is never far away from food, was about ready to snap the leg off a stool and munch on that, but I consoled him with descriptions of the glorious traditional Chinese food we would soon be enjoying. My wife, who is a tiny woman, was also near faint from hunger, but I held everyone together.
We were a little late and the queue had all but vanished. It was more afternoon tea time than lunch, but the restaurant was bustling. A platoon of smart young women in red tunics made unintelligible announcements over the loudspeaker and via walkie talkies, and directed diners to their tables. Eventually they found a table for us, and in short order, we were given a pot of green tea, some condiments, a little plate of bean sprouts and beans, and soy sauce. The drought had broken. We studied our menus, made our selections, gave our orders, and waited.
And waited. Minutes passed, eternity stretched before us. Around us, fresh diners arrived, were served, and began eating. Kerri began munching on the relishes. My son gazed wistfully at the steaming plates arriving on adjacent tables.
It was a long time, but finally my order of pigs knuckles arrived. It was all but impossible to eat them with chopsticks, but we tried. I stole a glance at the next table and noted that the technique was to place the morsel in a Chinese spoon, hold it up to the mouth and tear off small pieces with chopsticks. It worked after a fashion, I found, but it was a messy, glutinous affair. Delicious, but all too soon consumed.
We waited some more. The bean sprouts vanished completely. We complained to the staff, who seemed unconcerned. Finally we spotted our Peking Duck arriving, a magnificent, golden glazed bird on a kind of trolley pushed by a smiling water. Cripes, I thought, looking at the glorious dish, we’ll never be able to get through all this.
“Thin?” the waiter asks, holding his fingers close together as he held a sharp knife at the ready. We nodded. Sliced thin rather than in chunks, it would be easier to pick up with the chopsticks. He made a few incisions, neatly slicing squares off the crispy skin, which the waitress arranged in a serving bowl. She placed this in the centre of the table, and we waited for the actual flesh, a steaming mountain of duck, to follow it.
But the waiter had vanished, along with our duck. Perhaps he had gone off to the kitchen to chop it up completely and lay the succulent meat atop the squares of skin.
But no, he never returned. Nor did our duck. Perhaps some lucky Chinese family gorged themselves on duck that night, but we didn’t. We had squares of golden skin, wrapped up in some thin pancakes.
Eventually a couple of other dishes materialised, but all in all, it was a strange and puzzling meal. A couple of hours to eat not a lot. I paid the bill, and we found our way back through immigration and customs to the railway station.
We’re not used to land borders in Australia, you see, and it felt very odd to go through immigration as part of getting on and off a train. The concept of a border where you could actually see the other country is one, in every way, foreign to Australians.
This time, the train was crowded. We had to go down to the far end of the very long train before we found seats. Sunday afternoon must be the time for Hong Kong residents to return from China. We spotted one gentleman carrying a large plastic bag full of a fine white powder. Probably not anything illegal going through customs, but we certainly speculated as to its nature.
This time around, we used our new Octopus cards to take us all the way through to Sheung Wan on Hong Kong Island on the MRT. All the platforms were well signposted in English and Chinese, and it was a doddle. The railway ended a couple of kilometres shy of the hotel, so we filled in the gap with a taxi.
“Proper meal,” my wife announced, and we crossed the street to the Golden Pearl restaurant, hoping for better luck with the tucker. We were served promptly and well, and the food was definitely tasty, but still, we had misgivings.
“Mmmmm, pickled pig’s face!” I exulted when the first dish arrived, a sort of Oriental pork brawn.
“You’d be lucky if it’s the pig’s face,” Kerri offered, turning her own away. Whatever, it was delicious.
I ordered the pigeon in yellow wine sauce as a trial. Pigeon is eaten, as squab, in the West, and it was certainly presented well, sliced up neatly, the plucked and boiled head as a sort of centrepiece.
Nobody had the appetite to eat the head.
We gave the Peking Duck a miss, and chowed down on other dishes, relishing the taste and celerity of service. Tsingtao beer to wash it all down with, and my son and I clinked our glasses together happily. We had survived the terrors of the textile hall, and in two days time when Kerri and my daughter returned to Shenzhen for a second bout of shopping and fitting, we wouldn’t have to go.
