Free Hong Kong by Jan Morris Page B

visual artists express themselves in western modes as well as oriental. There are of course innumerable Chinese concerts, exhibitions and operas too, more every year, but few are the Europeans who attend them: look though at the bemused earnest faces of the young Chinese at the City Hall or the Hong Kong Arts Centre when Kiri Te Kanawa sings Mozart, or the Manhattan Ballet comes dancing! 16
    And among the tycoons, the richest of Hong Kong’s rich, it sometimes seems to me that a kind of osmosis has set in. Foreigners and Chinese share the uppermost ranks of business and finance, and it is a back-handed tribute to the personality of the place, honed by so many generations of astute commercial practice, that whatever their private attitudes, in public the descendants of the Celestial Empire behave so like the Outer Barbarians.
    Those suits help of course – those beautifully cut English-style suits, figuratively admired by Auden so long ago, which are worn by rich Chinese and European alike, and which proclaim all their wearers in some sense members of a club. Then there is the language. Few of the foreigners are likely to speak Chinese, but the Chinese all speak Oxford-or Harvard-accented English, the lingua franca of business Hong Kong. The mannerisms of the two sides are curiously alike – self-deprecatory, restrained. The same jokes may not always amuse both parties, but common to both is the jovial tolerant laugh with which they make allowances for each other’s inadequate sense of humour.
    Most tellingly of all, they seem to share a sense of permanently watchful calculation. By heredity at least they have all been making money on this China coast for a long, long time. They are wise to all ruses of profit, cognizant of all legal loopholes, and they are wary not only of every supplier, customer, diplomatic innovator or Government inspector, but not least, Chinese or gweilo, of themselves. They understand each other very well, and this makes a subtle community of them.
12
    Whether there are underlying racial prejudices and dislikes, waiting for events to unleash them, I cannot tell. I can only say that I have never myself felt any inkling of ethnic ill-will from a Chinese in Hong Kong, while most of the Europeans I know profess admiration, if often baffled admiration, for the Chinese. In most Hong Kong homes the races never mix, but it is usually because of lack of opportunity, the language gulf, varying boredom thresholds, plain shyness or the restraints of ‘face’ – the Chinese reluctance, so pervasive in all circumstances, either to lose it oneself, or to make others lose it. 17
    It was not always so. For much of Hong Kong’s history a profound mutual suspicion divided the two communities, and was crossed only by the very rich, the holy or the truly innocent – the good-natured entertainer Albert Smith, visiting Hong Kong in 1858, made friends so easily among the Chinese that when he left they saw him to the quay with anti-demon music and banners emblazoned with his praise. 18 AGovernor of the 1850s could describe social intercourse between the races as ‘wholly unknown’; a Governor of the 1860s said it was his constant concern to preserve Europeans and Americans from the injury and inconvenience of mixing with Chinese; a Governor of the 1920s said the Chinese and European communities moved in different worlds, ‘neither having any real comprehension of the mode of life or ways of thought of the other’. The very jargon by which the races conversed, when they conversed at all, was a barrier between them. Pidgin English really meant no more than ‘business English’, and was devised in Guangzhou in the days when miserable foreigners were forbidden to learn Chinese, but its comical and child-like phrases – ‘Missee likee more tea? Massa likee whisky now?’ – paradoxically made the British feel all the more contemptuous, and put Chinese at a permanent disadvantage.
    Even when I first went to Hong