June 28, 2017
Personal Journeys
By NICHOLAS KULISH
I
knocked and knocked on the door to the artist’s studio, beside the
plastic logo of a painter’s palette. It had been so hard to find the
address of this musty commercial building on Hong Kong’s Wyndham Street, I was beginning to think it was time to give up on finding my old friend Ng Tak Tung there.
In
1997, just a few days after my college graduation, I moved alone to
this island in the South China Sea to work at a business magazine. Much
had been made of the British handing over control of their colony to the
Chinese, which for many marked the symbolic end of an empire and an
era. I wanted a little history, a little adventure and a little
excitement, and ended up with more of all three than I was prepared to
handle.
From the deck of a rented junk bobbing off
Stanley Beach, I watched teams of men and women furiously paddle their
brightly painted dragon boats, the carved wooden heads, teeth bared,
jutting from the prows. I reported from a demonstration for the first
time, a candlelight vigil in Victoria Park with tens of thousands of
participants to honor the democracy protesters slain at Tiananmen Square
eight years before.
A few weeks after that, I sat
in a tiny storefront bar festooned with Christmas lights and watched a
television news report showing that, just before dawn, armored personnel
carriers brought Chinese troops over the border from Shenzhen. That
same weekend, at the red-and-white brick Foreign Correspondents’ Club, a
giant of a man in muddy black tuxedo pants and an untucked pleated
shirt head-butted me because the bar was closed and he couldn’t get a
drink.
And
I had a darts partner from the Chinese island of Hainan, a painter who
spoke as little English as I did Hainanese, which is to say none. But
Tak Tung and I became unlikely friends at the dive bar across from my
office on Hollywood Road, the Globe. He had a knack — confounding the
Britons we defeated — for missing the easy throws and then hitting the
bull’s-eye with improbable consistency.
Since
our words flew unintelligibly past each other, we communicated by
drawing on napkins and beer coasters. We sketched the people we knew. We
drew maps, of Hong Kong and China, of the world, of boats and airplanes
and the dotted lines that described our respective journeys.
The
last time Tak Tung and I saw each other, he invited me back to his
studio. He picked up the phone (a landline, of course) and dialed a
number and handed the receiver to me. A woman was on the other end — his
wife. She said she was in the hospital and that her husband was having a
difficult time because of her illness. He wanted me to know it meant a
lot to him to have me as a friend.
Soon after, I
left that part of the world. It was long before Facebook. A lot of
people didn’t even have email addresses yet. And when you made a broke,
disorderly retreat from a city as I did, you lost touch with most of
your friends half a world away.
Now two decades
on, the only relic I had of Tak Tung was a small reproduction of a
painting he had made of a bar scene in the Lan Kwai Fong night-life
district. As I prepared to return for the first time since the autumn of
1997, I searched online and found only a painting of wine bottles
sold at Christie’s a decade earlier and an ancient-looking website for
an art school with the purple-palette logo I had come to stand beside
now. No one answered my knocking.
He could have
moved back to the mainland, emigrated to the West or, for all I knew,
passed away. As a last-ditch effort, I took out a business card and
scribbled on the back that I was in town and to please call or write.
That is, I added, if he even remembered me. I slid the card under the
locked door to his darkened studio and left.
So
much had happened in the 20 years of Chinese rule — the SARS epidemic,
creeping authoritarianism, the protest movement — I did not expect to
recognize Hong Kong. Looking on Wikipedia before my wife, Rachel, and I
left for the trip, I saw that 18 of the 20 tallest buildings in the city
had been built since I departed. I could picture the modern skyscrapers
as they rose, cloaked in canvas and the city’s traditional bamboo
scaffolding.
But
as we scanned Google Maps for hotels, I pointed out my old apartment on
Lyndhurst Terrace, traced my finger along the path I used to take down
to the ferry pier. Rachel noted that I remembered the street names from
20 years ago better, in some cases, than those in Crown Heights, where
we have lived for three years.
Upon
our plane’s descent into Hong Kong, I looked out the window onto cargo
ships slowly plying through gray-green waters, the shipping containers
like so many primary-colored Legos stacked on their decks and could see
the dark masses of the outlying islands jutting up from the water. I
found it all instantly recognizable.
Despite our
extreme jet lag, I goaded us into a lengthy walking tour, each memory
pushing me a few more steps, and the next sight leading to another
memory. I showed Rachel the incense-filled Man Mo Temple and the stone
wall trees, banyans whose sprawling gray roots clung to the faces of old
retaining walls like dense webs. The rank markets of raw flesh and
living sea creatures still defied the advances of sterile supermarkets.
And when there was no answer at Tak Tung’s studio, I pushed us onward.
The
Star Ferry chugged us across the harbor, cheap as ever, offering
amazing views of the bristling forest of high-rises scaling Victoria
Island. We disembarked and surged into the crowded insanity of Tsim Sha
Tsui at the tip of Kowloon, on the mainland side, more densely packed
than ever but the explosion of warm neon light
largely extinguished in favor of cheaper LED. We plunged into the
themed clusters of shops in nearby Mong Kok, touring the Goldfish
Market, with thousands of colorful little fish swimming tiny circles in
the rows and rows of plastic bags where they were displayed.
We
saw Flower Market Street’s profusion of blossoms, including locally
grown lilies and chrysanthemums. And we watched proud owners introduce
their brightly plumed, squawking parrots at the Yuen Po Bird Garden.
This
was a far cry from my old routine in Hong Kong. When I first arrived in
the city, I discovered that I was working semi-legally at best,
dispatched by hydrofoil to the Portuguese colony of Macau (now part of
China) when my tourist visa was about to expire for a new stamp upon
re-entry. The only room I could afford was hardly bigger than the single
wooden-framed futon I slept on; once I put it down, the tiny bed filled
the entire floor. My clothes hung on a pressure rod above my head so I
could stand up only by pushing my shirts and slacks aside.
Instead
of a shower there was a hole in the bathroom floor and a spray nozzle
attached to the sink. The kitchen consisted of a single burner attached
to a propane tank.
I
did not spend a lot of time on Flower Market Street perusing fresh
blossoms. I spent most of my time at the Globe. For anyone raised on
back-to-back syndicated episodes of Cheers as I was, the Globe
represented an ideal: not just an after-work hangout, but a lifeline in a
new city, with a built-in group of friends.
One
night we decided we didn’t know enough jokes so we required all
customers to tell one before they could order a drink. We drew up lists
of countries and cities each had visited for fun. Bets were settled with
a paperback Guinness book, a dictionary and a complete works of
Shakespeare. The darts matches went late into the night, and even when
you had to wake him up for his turn, Tak Tung still hit the bull’s-eye.
One
of my starkest memories was from the night of the handover fireworks
display. We had propped open the door to the stairwell of a nearby
office tower and expected one of the best unauthorized views in the
city.
When the time came, we hiked the auxiliary
staircase to the roof. But as the fireworks started, all we could see
was a flickering halo around a dark rectangular silhouette. The hulking
unlit mass of a skyscraper under construction, which had sprung up since
the last fireworks display, eclipsed the light show for this political
theater piece.
The handover was planned and choreographed far in advance, but the Asian Financial Crisis
was pure improvised catastrophe. The magazine where I worked was Thai
owned and after the baht collapsed they stopped paying us. I was
evicted.
I had no recourse or safety net but the
bartenders at the Globe, who adopted me. I found myself sleeping on the
sofa of a kindly barmaid and her electrician boyfriend. As my financial
position deteriorated, my beers were slipped surreptitiously on to the
checks of rowdy bankers who were never the wiser.
By
the time I visited this year, the Globe had shut down on Hollywood
Road, but avid patrons had chipped in to reopen it around the corner.
The old metal sign from outside had been salvaged and now hung on a wall
inside. The signature painting of a map of the world presided over a
nook filled with games and books. At the old Globe, meals were made — or
should I say, cheese was melted — in a toaster oven. The new iteration
was a full-on gastro pub with delicate fish and truffle polenta.
Rachel
and I ate in Hong Kong as I never could have back when cut-rate
scallion pancakes and cheap, filling McDonald’s value meals were all I
could afford. We had Sichuan fried chicken and pork belly buns at Little
Bao; dim sum at the traditional Luk Yu Tea House, with its wooden
booths and ceiling fans; and black truffle dumplings at the Sohofama
restaurant in the converted police barracks, the PMQ, now a hip mix of art, retail and dining in Hong Kong’s Soho neighborhood.
Short
for “South of Hollywood Road,” I remembered Soho as a smattering of
bars and mostly quiet restaurants near the giant series of escalators
that eased the steep commute from the Mid-Levels. Now throngs of young
people spilled out of the many locales, a group of young women in
colorful wigs even drinking as one sat on a yellow fire hydrant. We had a
couple of quick Gweilo Pale Ales at the local craft beer bar 65 Peel
before succumbing to jet lag.
The next day, to
escape the rain, we hopped one of the old trams and coasted along the
busy waterfront all the way to North Point, where we watched thousands
of maids from Indonesia and the Philippines picnic wherever there was
shelter, under bridges and overpasses clogged with their day-off
celebrations.
At
the western end of the subway line in up-and-coming Kennedy Town, I
toasted my old bartender friend Scott Wrayton at his new restaurant,
Shoreditch. Scott, a small-town English boy, recalled arriving a
quarter-century before in a neon city where the clouds shrouded the tops
of the skyscrapers from view and thinking he had landed in the movie
“Blade Runner.”
The change in the city’s skyline
was most evident from the clamorous, ever touristier vantage of Victoria
Peak. I.M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower, once a dominant feature on the
island with its twin masts and white triangular patterns, was now easily
lost among the many Goliaths that stood shoulder to shoulder in
Central.
We
had just finished eating egg tarts at Tai Cheong Bakery, as I puzzled
over which fancy boutique had moved into the ground floor of my
once-grimy old apartment house, when I received a WhatsApp message. “Hi
Nick, I’m Tak Tung! So excited to see your name card! Are you in HK
now?”
I
arrived at his studio to find the door propped open. Wooden frames were
stacked against the wall, along with a few brightly painted pink and
blue canvases of flowers. Ng Tak Tung had round, black-framed glasses I
didn’t remember and a white goatee now covered his chin. Despite the 20
years that had passed, he was instantly recognizable to me.
The name on the cover of the books of his paintings, however, was not. According to them, he was now Ng Chung.
Then I understood why it had been so hard to trace him. He brought out
two Cohibas to celebrate. We puffed on the Cuban cigars as I admired the
books.
His assistant translated for us as we
spoke and occasionally had questions of her own. “How did you talk to
each other when you don’t speak Chinese?” she asked. I explained that we
would draw on whatever we could find. As she related what I had said,
he flipped through the books excitedly and pointed to reproductions of
his sketches on the backs of beer coasters and scraps of paper, two nude
women, a fish biting a finger, a scrawny youth who looked a little
familiar.
I joked about how he was so good at
hitting the bull’s-eye and he squeezed one eye shut and mimed holding a
rifle. His aim was so good because he had been a crack shot in the
People’s Liberation Army, including during skirmishes on the border with
Vietnam.
His story began to pour forth, more
complicated than I ever could have guessed. He came from a family of
property owners and they had a difficult time during the Cultural
Revolution. After military service he went to art school at the
Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, where he met his wife, and followed her
to Hong Kong.
Was his wife sick in those days, I
asked, testing my memories; in the hospital even? Yes, she was. Did she
speak English? Yes, she did.
As
part of his artistic transformation, Ng Chung had abandoned his realist
training and thrown himself into neo-Expressionism, sinking into Lan
Kwai Fong’s dissolute bar scene like Toulouse-Lautrec into Montmartre.
“He started off from this foreign place, discerned the feeling of
alienation everywhere he went, and comprehended what loneliness and
helplessness meant,” as one of the essays in the book put it.
Like
me, he had only just moved to the city at the time. More than I
understood then, our friendship sprang from a shared loneliness that
neither of us had been able to articulate. He changed his name, he told
me, to change his luck, to start fresh. He had found success — his
paintings now belonged to the collections of major museums and he lived
on the Peak, the aspirational address high above the city.
In
the years after I left, the stories I told about this place were always
fun and lighthearted, the dragon-boat races, Chinese dice games,
Cantopop karaoke. Then I found an old leather-bound journal I had kept
and was dumbfounded at the misery. Down and out wasn’t fun, getting
rocked by a financial crisis didn’t feel like a roller coaster, losing
your first job out of school, getting evicted and spending all your
savings just to survive was romantic only in retrospect.
The
city was too big, too expensive and too tough for me. What made it
tolerable and, through the hazy tint of memory, a wonderful time, were
the friends I made. Ng Chung led me down a back staircase, to a bar
where they knew him as well as they used to know us at the Globe. His
assistant left and we drank happily, as before, chattering away without
comprehending the words but still understanding.
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