After my last exam freshman year at Stanford, I hopped on a plane and headed to my uncle's wedding in Hong Kong. It was my first visit to the territory, and even before the plane reached the gate at Kai Tak International Airport, the beauty and vitality of this gleaming city seduced me.
It wasn't long, though, before I began to see that it was also a troubled place. On the way to the wedding, our taxi passed a middle-aged man waving his clenched fist and shouting to a crowd of demonstrators. I couldn't understand what he was saying, but I guessed at the reason for his anger: It was the summer of 1989, just weeks after the Chinese government's bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square. With only eight years remaining before Hong Kong passed from British to Chinese rule, the people of Hong Kong were angry and scared.
I returned to the territory six years later, this time to work as a research assistant at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. With the Western media portraying the handover as a calamity just two years off, I expected to find people even more frantic and agitated than they'd been on my first visit. Instead, as I reacquainted myself with the city, I found little evidence of concern. And the more I talked to colleagues and friends, the more I began to understand that the people of Hong Kong have made their peace with the idea of Chinese rule. In fact, they now expect to thrive under it.
This is especially true at the university where I work. After word came in January that democratic reforms would be rolled back, civil rights groups held a few angry demonstrations, but they never spread to the campus. The students -- most of whom study business or computer science and walk around armed with cell phones -- are too focused on finishing their degrees and landing high-paying jobs. Yes, they want personal freedom, but not necessarily the kind that the New York Times has been worrying about for the past year.
That's how my friend Albert explains it to me. He's studying for a master's degree and plans to work in his native Hong Kong after graduation. And why not? With a more vibrant economy than most Western countries, Hong Kong provides more opportunities, higher wages and lower taxes than he would likely find elsewhere. "First, Hong Kong people care about making money," he says. "Second, we care about being able to travel." But, I ask, what about the recent legal changes that limit freedom of speech and assembly? He just laughs and offers a pragmatic solution: "If I have enough money and I can travel where I want, then I can go someplace where I can say what I want."
In the months following Tiananmen Square, thousands of Hong Kongers made plans to get out. They scrambled for foreign passports and bought houses in cities like Vancouver and Los Angeles. Many left the territory. Now some wonder whether they might have overreacted. My investment banker friend, Lam Lay Leng, has an Australian passport, but she has no plans to use it for escape -- business is too good. As long as that holds true, she and her family expect to stay put.Another friend, Li Leung Fai, recently returned to the territory. He came back from the United States because he now believes his fears that China would destroy Hong Kong's free market and way of life were overblown. He holds an American passport -- he calls it his "insurance policy" -- but the lure of home and direct access to the Chinese market make Hong Kong irresistible.
It's not only the high-powered professionals who are carrying on under the assumption that business will continue as usual. In the village where I live -- about an hour outside the city -- I run into Wai Ping almost every morning. She waits for the bus into town, where she sells vegetables in the market or exchanges aluminum cans for a small rebate. When she runs to catch the bus with her bags draped across her shoulders, she looks much younger than her 84 years. Her son left the territory in 1990 to make a life for himself in Vancouver, and he invited her to come along. She decided to stay here, where people speak her language, where she doesn't have to drive a car, where she can make her own living.
In her own way, Wai Ping embodies the essence of the Hong Kong way of life: stubborn self-reliance, economic freedom, competitiveness. And this seems unlikely to change when the Chinese take over. In fact, in these last weeks before the switch of sovereignty, the atmosphere has been dominated not by dread, but by a sense of optimism and a feeling of relief that the moment has arrived.
And like Albert, Wai Ping, Mr. Li and the rest of Hong Kong, I'm going to stick around to see what happens.
Lydia Chiu, '93, works on an environmental research project in Hong Kong.
