People with only a passing acquaintance with me know I love Taipei. Mention Taipei to me and I say, “Taipei? I love Taipei!” (Or, “Taipei? Jay Chou! I love Jay Chou!”) I am as animated and unsurprising as a wind-up toy about the city I have loved like a boy with a new toy.
Hong Kong and I, we are quieter. I go to Hong Kong as, I imagine, a man goes home to his wife. There is more than a touch of inevitability; it has been years since anyone said anything about love; she is too tired to even look at him today. She is old and ordinary – and he sees it – and yet she is somehow lovely.
So it is with Hong Kong and me. As a very Cantonese girl going there for the very first time in the 1990s I was a little like a visitor at a club realising I had membership after all. (I had done my homework. When classmates busied themselves with foreign languages I filled my timetable with Cantonese, from the TVB shows on TV3 to the Leslie Cheung concert on LD.) I have gone there a zillion times since. Only on the trip before last, however, did I see for the first time in years how gorgeous Hong Kong was. A city of peaks and harbours, thrills and spills, alive with buildings and billboards and bamboo scaffolding coming at you at all angles such that when you and your tram go around them intact it feels as spectacular as a Jackie Chan stunt and as exquisite as a taiji exercise; a city of accidental Daoist aesthetics. On the last trip I was floored by how posh Hong Kong was. To go to ifc mall is to grasp once and for all that we don’t know how to do posh; they do. On this trip I saw Hong Kong’s trees. I was with S, who was visiting for the first time, and whenever she stopped to photograph trees I saw them too, pushing their way out of walls along sloping, winding streets. I saw the banyans on Nathan Road. I had never noticed them. Am I as bad as men who don’t notice their wives’ hairdos or what?
I like being in Hong Kong all the same. When I have been away for too many moons – distracted by Taiwan, Turkey and other destinations – I always gravitate towards it.
