Free Hong Kong by Jan Morris

numerous and dedicated of its morning pilgrims are the scoresof Chinese men and women, mostly elderly, who go up there to practise Tai Ji Quan, the Great Ultimate Fist – the measured position of the limbs, the controlled silent contortions, the expression of inner deliberation, which sometimes seem to me the most haunting of all symptoms of the Chinese mystery.
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    That it is a mystery, most Europeans in Hong Kong would concede. The vast majority speak no Chinese language, and are almost completely in the dark about Chinese attitudes and intentions. As was once written by A. A. S. Barnes, a British officer with long service among Chinese soldiers: 10
    ‘The Chinee [
sic
] is unlike any other man on earth, and can therefore be judged from no known standpoint, and not even from his own, if it can be found.’
    Nevertheless in Hong Kong today there is an inescapable overlap of the cultures, which is partly simply an aspect of the general familiarization of east and west, but is partly specific to the place. Here more intimately than anywhere else, Chinese and Barbarians have been thrown together. The Chinese have never been exactly subservient, thinking of themselves at least as equals. The British have never been very adaptable, assuming their own ways to be a priori the best. Yet the result has been, in certain parts of Hong Kong society, an ironic blend of manners, usages and even appearances.
    An unbalanced blend, one has to say, few Europeans of Hong Kong ever having ‘gone Chinese’, or even been noticeably orientalized, except perhaps in business method. Ordered British colony that it is, the place was never on the multi-ethnic hippie trail of the 1960s, and no young devotees found their gurus in the Daoist temples of Hong Kong. As for the expatriate residents, so different of build, so alien of mentality, they find it awkward to adopt Chinese ways – witness any solid European housewife in a
cheongsam
, the tight split skirt that elegant Chinese women wear so delightfully. However most of them have mastered the use of chopsticks, nearly all of them have mastered the use of Chinese food, the more cultivated among them have acquired a taste for Chinese art, and not a few have acquired Chinese husbands orwives. The principles of
feng shui
are accepted, if a little bashfully, by many European residents, and a few Chinese words have entered the local English vernacular: for example taipan (literally top class, hence great manager or company head), hong (a merchant house), gweilo (literally a ghost or a devil man, hence a foreigner), or cumshaw (which is thought however by some philologists to have been itself derived from ‘Come ashore’, the cry that used to entice foreign sailors to temptation). Only the very crudest of redneck expatriates nowadays expresses any racial bigotry towards the Chinese.
    For their part the Chinese, especially Chinese of the educated classes, deftly and shrewdly absorb Europeanisms. At the end of the nineteenth century the Chinese reformer Zhang Zi-dong enunciated the precept ‘Chinese learning for essentials, western learning for practicalities,’ and it is still honoured. As a college song at the Chinese University of Hong Kong has it:
    China’s still evolving culture, grateful, we retain
East and West, through fully sharing, further strength obtain.
    At least 400 practical English words have been adopted by the local Cantonese vocabulary, and many a western influence has been assimilated to perfect naturalness. I was walking one day down one of the most tumultuous shopping streets of Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon-side, amidst the tireless pandemonium of your archetypal Chinese market, when I heard familiar music coming from a record-player in one of the shops. It was the allegro movement of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, and there amidst the crimson banners and the neon ideographs, the jostling Chinese crowds and the unforgiving Chinese traffic, its exuberant confidence sounded absolutely