Reporter Volume 25, No.22 March 24, 1994

Hong Kong:looking into the past and the future

Howard Wolf will be returning to UB as Professor of English after a
three-year leave as Visiting Lecturer, University of Hong Kong. His
ninth book, Life at the Top of the Bottom: A Tableau of Provincial
Life in America, is now in press. A novel, Broadway Serenade, will
soon be published.
	
By HOWARD WOLF

So let me imagine what I will reimagine at some point in the near
future: what prospective retrospective sights, sounds, images, scenes,
words, (some of the constituents of knowledge) will haunt me during
long and cold winter nights in Buffalo, New York where the glow of
lamplight in the hollow of great snowdrifts provides a wonder-ful
resting place for historical reverie.
	I will reimagine sitting at my computer screen (loyal,
constant companion) and looking through the sliding glass doors of my
high-rise apartment beyond Mt. Davis and across the harbor to Kowloon,
the New Territories, and, on a clear day, China.
	The harbor itself is a study of composure and motion, hundreds
of still ships lying-to at anchor and hundreds of others in constant
and seemingly random motion, the "yin" and "yang" of commercial life
in Hong Kong.
	The harbor, in this doubleness, is an emblem of Hong Kong's
relentless enterprise and its ability, despite its relentless
expenditure of mercantile energy, to pursue a steady course, to
maintain a sense of (dare I say Confucian?) calm in the midst of a
fierce market-driven economy.
	This doubleness is visible in the ladder-streets leading down
to Kennedy Town and Central and in the thousands of  "walls in the
holes" where the small operators have found a niche for themselves:
carefully carved out and protected commercial spaces which,
collectively, cry out against the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
	When a politically correct colleague in Buffalo asked me
before I came out to Hong Kong why I wanted to go to such a center of
"predatory capitalism," I should have said, but didn't know enough to
say, "Because it lets people accept responsibility for their own
lives, and it lets the individual work for the family. Can you think
of a higher ethic for a Chinese person? Would you prefer
sado-masochistic socialism?"
	My window view is also a point of view. The weather is
visible, sweeping mist and rain, usually from West to East (reversing
the tide of contemporary history), in constantly shifting patterns.
Chaos and probability are played out in the sky beyond my window, an I
Ching of atmospheric destiny.
	The patterns remind us of human and historical mutability;
and, as I look to the hills beyond, to the trail of lights following
the line of the KCR (Knowloon Canton Railroad) beyond Beacon Hill, I
wonder, with everyone else in Hong Kong, about the future of this
(what shall we call it?) Crown ColonyITerritoryISpecial Administrative
RegionIstillborn RepublicIentrepotIcollection of Hong Kong people I .
	No one can predict the future of Hong KongQany more or less
than Kremlinologists were able to see beyond the fall of the Iron
Curtain in 1991Qbut this much is clear: after July 30, 1997, Hong Kong
will be cut off from its British colonial past and rejoined, in some
fashion, with a motherland (dominated by male "paramount" leaders)
whose future is precarious and unpredictable.
	Everyone outside of Hong Kong asks, "What will happen to Hong
Kong after 1997?" But the question really should be: "What will happen
to and in China after 1997?" Future-gazers and prognosticators need to
look into the right crystal ball for starters.
	In this sense, Hong Kong is an emblem, again, of our lives, as
we look back to past lives we cannot retrieve and futures we cannot
predict. But those of us who live as more or less free individuals in
nations which embrace versions of Liberty will be able to make choices
about the kind of future we would like to make for ourselves; but Hong
Kong peopleQthose who stay (most)Qwill be playing at the gaming table
of history.
	But, of course, Hong Kong people like to gamble. One nation's
Elysian Fields is another's Happy Valley race course.