Culture Shock in Hong Kong

Culture Shock in Hong Kong

At the doorstep of Hong Kong is Shenzhen, the city developed by Deng Xiaoping to be the mainland's version of Hong Kong. Now the whole area is pretty much one seamless web of business and development. Getting across from one side to the other still requires paper work and passport stamping for foreigners but for HK residents the process is very easy. Needless to say the many comings and goings are very beneficial, that is, economically profitable, particularly for the mainland side as HK shoppers and investors stream into Shenzhen for lower prices on goods and labor.

An interesting thing about Shenzhen is that all the workers at the airport and along the bus route to Hong Kong spoke very nice putonghua (Mandarin Chinese) and were very disciplined about keeping it up even among themselves though Cantonese was surely their native dialect. The reasons might have been the rather large number of non-Cantonese speaking mainlanders getting off the planes and/or strict enforcement by their supervisors. The only recalcitrant one was the bus driver, a young guy in his 20s. When I asked him in putonghua how long it would be before the bus left he answered "20 mintues" in Cantonese. Only after the bus was under way did one of the woman workers switch to Cantonese to talk to him. This dialect switching is a very interesting linguistic phenomenon and it remains to be seen if it contributes to a coexistence of equality between the dialects or the eventual erosion of the regional dialects.

My first culture shock came when we were heading up to where we would stay with friends on better heeled Robinson Road: White people. Some of them even had blond hair. Since the end of August of last year I had seen a total of two white people in all my time in Xinxiang. Oh, I forgot I saw one one the street in Hohot in Inner Mongolia too. It's like sperm whales or lynx. You know they exist and you know people have seen them, but you don't expect to see one yourself. It's the same thing that produces that look on the faces of rural people when I bicycle in the countryside. Somehow I never expected this feeling and it even took me a while to realize what it was that I was disoriented about.

It has been ten years since I was in Hong Kong last and 30 years since I first lived there. In many ways nothing has changed. HK is still a place where you make money and go out to eat. Not that much else happens there. Yet there are some changes. On a TV program giving out awards to new young vocal artists, there were three MCs, 2 of whom spoke Cantonese and one who spoke putonghua. Of the vocalist winners, maybe 2 or 3 of the 4 sang putonghua songs instead of Cantonese songs. Government workers are getting "encouragement" to learn putonghua but it does not seem that they are resisting. It's just harder for them because they didn't grow up with both as the airport workers did. On the subway trains and in other public locations announcements are now made in putonghua as well as Cantonese.

Housing in HK is about the same as in previous years except higher—both in price and the number of storeys above the ground. More and more high rise office and residential buildings are replacing older smaller ones, but this is a quantitative change, not a qualitative one. Increased housing costs leave moderate income people in a difficult situation, an international phenomenon. Living space is very limited. If one looks out of a window the only thing to see is the walls and windows of the next building. To see sky one has to look pretty much straight up. To be sure, if one goes high enough up on the mountain, where the wealthiest live, the size and luxury of the flats grow and the angle for seeing sky gets cut down, but these are my assumptions as I have never been in such places. Even in front of the new building next to where I was there was an outdoor swimming pool about 30' x 60' a full 4 or 5 floors off the ground.

There's now an escalator that goes up and down the mountain side from the mid-levels to the central district of downtown HK. It is reversible and goes uphill most of the day but downhill from 8 to 10 a.m. when one can see all the suits and briefcases and spiked high heels flying past on the left with earphones and cell phones buzzing even before they make it to the office—buy, sell, move, deliver. Along the escalator a new neighborhood catering to foreigners and their Chinese counterparts has sprung up. Mostly there are bars but also coffee shops, health food restaurants, taco shops, fast food places, a huge health center and, interestingly, lots of places to buy wine—a sure sign of a full-scale yuppie invasion. In fact, it seemed to me that there are more white foreigners in HK now, but maybe I just never saw such places before. From overhearing conversations, I felt that there were still lots of Brits and a larger number of Australians but relatively few Americans. I'm told that overall the population of HK has increased and it certainly seems to be the case. Except for fewer Indians, HK looked overall to be more cosmopolitan than before, but this impressioin too might just have been due to my relative isolation in the mainland hinterland for nearly 5 months

One can still tourists wandering around HK because it remains a shopping mecca even though there's not much else to see or do except eat. On the tram I sat opposite a young French speaking couple. Each one had a canvass bag with "Beijing" on it. Hers was pink and his was blue, and each had a striped shirt to match the bag. He had blue canvass loafers too, but hers, mon Dieu, had gold trim instead of pink!

There are still working class neighborhoods that are more or less similar to those of past times, where one sees few if any servants (more on this important phenomenon later) or foreigners. No busy businessy foreigners or overdressed women or yuppie watering holes, just people who work for a living. Working class people, though certainly as many as before, are more hidden these days in post-industrial HK. However, when one stops to think of the legions of cooks, vegetable choppers, waitstaff, drivers, cleaners, etc., there can't be fewer. In the old neighborhood we had 芝麻雾 'sesame mist' a kind of sweet black thick liquid made of sesame seed. We used to go there 30 years ago, and it was still busy with pretty much the same kind of local people. At the place where one pays on the way out, I asked this old guy taking money if he was there 30 years ago, the last time I was probably there. It took a few seconds for him answer no. Then he repeated, "30 years!?" Indeed.

We had dinner with a 30-something couple who have a child in the first grade. He brought his homework with him to the restaurant because he had a big important exam the next day. During the meal his father stopped eating occasionally to quiz him. It was pretty impressive/scary to see what he had to know in terms of Chinese characters at that age. Furthermore, he was only in an average school, not the most high-pressure accelerated place he could have been in. Indeed, his father said he's somewhat concerned because his son doesn't care much for study and is nearly at the bottom of his class. Because his father got a Ph.D. in the US and speaks English fluently, this little 8-year old also speaks English quite well. In one of the mid-level parks where I went out for a walk and in some other locations, I overheard parents who were obviously not native speakers of English speak only English to their very young children. This education situation bears semblance to that of the mainland, where "stuffing the duck" （填鸭）education is also the norm. Though US education is gratefully different in this regard, it suffers from other problems and just as successfully avoids the teaching of critical thinking by other means. The common factor in all these places is the separate educational paths for children of the priviliged and everyone else.

While we were in HK, a demonstration organized by the HK "democracy movement" took place though I knew or heard nothing about it until seeing it reported in the newspaper the next day. According to the report about 6,000 people turned out though organizers claimed the number was over 20,000. In any case, it was down considerably from 250,000 in December of 2005 when the larger numbers turned out to oppose the mainland's decisions about the election of the territory's chief executive and legislature in 2007 and 2008 respectively. The current Basic Law gives the mainland an upper hand in determining HK policy because of its power to appoint the chief executive and enough of the legislators to have its way. Thus, the demonstrators' main demand is for "real universal suffarage," not just limited input from those neighborhood legislators who are elected democratically but constitute only a minority.

I've always found it interesting that while HK was totally a British colony with a London-appointed absolute power governor, there was never a peep from the English-speaking HK elite. Of course, that's probably due to the fact that this elite had far more in common with the British imperialists than with HK workers and average citizens. Now they are torn because they want to maintan their elite status and wealth, the source of which is now autocratic Beijing, not the former "democratic" albeit imperialist Britain, but they are unsure as to how to accomplish this without looking too much like they are the willing todies of Beijing. It's the appearance of the thing that troubles them, not the reality. It's maybe not so different from the US corporate elite flip-flopping between Republicans and Democrats. Expediency overrules all other considerations. The fact that public support for the movement has dwindled also reflects the absence of fear of economic change or rather the continuity of the economic status quo since 1997, when Beijing first took over.

What excited me about living in HK in my 20s would very quickly tire me now—too much running around and very little living space. When I think of culture shock potential, I think of my students from the countryside of Henan who have had serious problems adjusting from village life to even a medium sized city like Xinxiang in the hintherland of China. Hong Kong would overwhelm them--not only the pace of life and the din of traffic but also things like the ads with women in scanty lacey underwear plastered 3-storeys high. It would be sensory overload to dangerous proportions. I don't know how they would manage, but I suppose given time, aggressive advertising and the profit motive all things can be accomplished.