The Summers of My Discontent

August 2009

Arrival, mid-July, is too hot, but “time off” in America (longer than usual this year) means I must go home again to my city. On Mum’s rooftop—my Alzheimer’s mother who has forgotten our roof room exists—I swelter. I appear before my mother after an eight-month absence, and what she says is, oh there you are, as if I’d never left.

Summer is not the time to be in Hong Kong, but this year seems particularly inauspicious. To begin with, July’s “solar eclipse of the century” only favors us a partial viewing while on the mainland some three thousand tourists flock to see the real thing. My consolation is that Shanghai’s view is marred by rain, while our city gets six glorious minutes. We get plenty of rain though. Six typhoons hit us this summer, and signal 8 or higher is hoisted thrice. The first, Molave in July, rises to signal 9, and the mean temperature that month is 0.4 degrees above normal. Goni’s visitation disrupts the annual secondary student scramble for form 6 places. What really hits home, however, is when my internet dies in August. Morakot, the typhoon and earthquake that shakes up Taiwan’s government, forcing President Ma to apologize for emergency mismanagement, also damages PCCW’s undersea telecom cable. I batten down discontent, my internet intermittent, unable to access life. Chastened by nature I bury myself in books. Even right into mid-September, Koppu rages the night before my departure until morning, and the plane sits on a traffic-congested tarmac more than an hour as the rains and winds subside.

What people do to nature is yet more galling. My old school, Maryknoll, is a heritage site graced by a seventy-year-old Norfolk pine, which is threatened by destruction. Supposedly in danger of crashing, and hence a safety risk, the tree withstands all typhoons this summer. The legal frenzy surrounding its destruction is absurdist drama, but it’s safe for now, having won a reprieve thanks to conservationist common sense. Meanwhile, at Big Wave Bay, where my sister lives, at one of our more pristine and less polluted beaches, the government proposes to erect a six-meter-long wall, two meters high, supposedly to prevent further sand erosion that resulted from damage by last year’s Typhoon Hagupit. This makes me think of numerous silly walls erected in China over the centuries—often more offensive than defensive—erroneously considered part of the so-called Great Wall, but which simply means “long” wall in Chinese, as Julia Lovell points out in her excellent 2007 book about the history of the wall. Residents and surfers are up in arms. With luck bureaucrats will rethink this eyesore plan because Big Wave Bay is where my sister lives and surfs.

In the meantime, two vacant lots, the controversial West Kowloon arts hub and the former airport site, are still in the Hong Kong Government’s Property Purgatory. Development Goliath continually battles human well-being in our capitalist enclave.

Then, in mid-August, a new rail link opens, causing chaos, complaints, and confusion. The fast ride to my gym in Tsimshatsui, which averaged eight to ten minutes, is now a longer transfer trip that can take up to twenty-five. The integration is not yet seamless, which is what happens when a rural railway merges with an urban subway system. The former has outdoor platforms; the latter began underground. A railway builds public toilets; a subway does not but should now that the MTR Corporation serves all of Hong Kong and more, having swallowed up the Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR). We will, however, adapt and adjust to our city’s never-ending growth spurts—this hormonally challenged adolescent thing—as population body heat rises closer toward 8 million.

Confounded by the heat, my air conditioner hums more often than not, hastening environmental meltdown. On television Mother’s Dead Upset is a Korean soap opera about discontented mums. Real news is grim. During high winds two workers fall off bamboo scaffolding and die. One morning a water pipe bursts, closing down the main artery linking business districts, further disrupting life. At the construction site of what will be the city’s tallest building (stay tuned for this commercial phallic enterprise), six workers plunge twenty floors down a lift shaft, the worst industrial accident in years. None survive.

But these discontents are just another summer in the city except for this last. On Sunday, September 13, hundreds took to the streets to protest the beating of three Hong Kong journalists in Ürümqi and to condemn the Xinjiang government’s response. In the Chinese University poll commissioned by the News Executives’ Association, a sizable majority (78 percent) did not believe the Xinjiang investigation reports, and nearly 60 percent said the incident shook their confidence in Beijing. The situation simmers; a local delegate to the National People’s Congress now counsels “patience,” saying Premier Wen Jiabao is not the one raising the nightstick, as if a leader bears no responsibility for the actions of its government officials, as if a citizenry should accept violence and denial as norms. Is this what life must be now that tianxia—under heaven—we’re all “one China”? Is the best recourse to stick your nose in a book, ignoring these murmurs of discontent?

And will Beijing one day, like my mother, simply gaze blankly at us and say, oh there you are, forgetting we ever left?

August 2015

The prediction for typhoons in 2016 is iffy because of El Niño’s uncertain effect. At Maryknoll, the Norfolk pine is gone, despite prolonged protest, though the government’s proposed wall construction at Big Wave Bay was defeated by a residents’ group, much to my sister’s relief. West Kowloon is now a large hole in the ground—reminiscent of Boston’s never-ending “big dig”—this construction for the rail link to China controversially delayed, while the arts and cultural district is still more virtual than real. But the former airport is now a cruise terminal, a government project meant to revitalize the area with a new park, shopping, and the like but which most consider a resounding failure. The KCR is now fully subsumed into the MTR, which suffers notable service delays, and the public toilet situation at its stations has not appreciably progressed. However, the new line that extends to the western side of Hong Kong Island has opened, and the University of Hong Kong no longer exists in its former splendid isolation, at least not in terms of speedy public transport. Korean telenovellas have been shunted aside in favor of Under the Dome, a TV serial sci-fi horror based on Stephen King’s novel on what is now more or less Hong Kong’s only free station, the other now reduced to a shadow of its former self. High-rise construction sites still bring us regular horrors of industrial dangers, alongside the usual quota of suicide jumpers, enhanced these days by accidental falls from on high of the selfie-obsessed, stepping too far back. And China is one country, one large and super-powerful nation, flexing muscles under a president who knows what’s best, like Father.