I’ve been back from Hong Kong for forty hours, but I can’t let it go. Here are a few more observations from my notes and my camera that didn’t fit into my earlier posts on my visa run and visits to Wan Chai.

• Top-flight tutors here dress and are paid like pop stars and advertise in the subway. This gladdens my little academical heart.

• Speaking of the subway, the MTR is wonderful: efficient, clean, quiet and cheap. But why are Wan Chai and Chai Wan both stops on the same line? Doesn’t that threaten to rupture the space/time continuum or something?

• One reason to take the subway is because cabbies are fickle. I was refused a ride three times when I wasn’t going the way the driver wanted. If you want a cab going east, you’d better not try hailing one heading west.

• Chunking Mansions is a decaying commercial building incongruously set in the upscale Tsim Sha Tsui where you will find Ivorians, Nepalis, Sikhs, Somalis, Indians, Saudis, Pakistanis, and many others manning food stalls from all over the world and selling all kinds of goods, legal and otherwise. I was urged to buy Nepalese karaoke CDs, a bed for the night, hot SIM cards, discounted foreign currency, DelMonte Kernel Corn, visas to anywhere in the world, ketamine, Japanese pornography, and the iPhone 7 (“not available yet, special for you, Sir!”), but declined all such offers. Instead, I got my Indian food fix: some yummy samosas and chicken curry. The strangest shop I saw sold both halal food and Hennessy cognac. I was a little reluctant to shoot pictures in this environment, settling for a stairwell shot of the wiring that powers the building.

• There seem to be a lot of very tall white guys here. What is it about Hong Kong that attracts guys north of 6’5″? I’m not used to this.

• You gotta love a town where the Alpha Romeo dealership is next to the Maserati dealership is next to the Lotus dealership is next to the Lamborghini dealership. Makes those impulse buys so much easier.

• There’s something strange about a place where cigarette boxes are required to display large gruesome pictures of smokers’ corpses but Coke Zero is marketed as a sports/health drink.

As one wag put it, there are two primary modes on Lockhart Road: either you pay to get laid or you splay to get paid. The street runs like a vein full of Viagra through Wan Chai, the legendary home of Suzie Wong and her ilk.



Suzie’s descendants circa 2013 are Filipina B-girls with big anime eyes, Asian/Spanish genes, and flexible ethics. They’re beautiful, but they don’t want their pictures taken; that would be like giving it away.

For old times’ sake, I stop into the Wild Cat, one of the smaller ecdysiastical venues. Mama-san has worked there ten years and is expert at separating slightly buzzed and horny round-eyes from their dollars. Her girls rotate out every six months when their visas expire. They wire money home every week, fabricating tales of their profitable jobs as “receptionists” in Hong Kong. Then they return to Quezon or Cebu or Manila or Tagaytay.

A drunk blonde Brit is guided in by the street touts and almost immediately passes out on the couch by the door. This is prime real estate, since the area can be curtained off for costly lap dances and other more intimate activities. Mama-san gets the bouncer, a middle-aged accountant with thick glasses and a knuckle-duster, who gently but firmly expels the inebriate. A girl dances topless and bored on the tiny stage behind the bar. Her expression confirms that she knows she has the worst job in the place. The B-girls at least get a commission on the HK$240 thimbles of red wine they wheedle the clientele into buying for them, but the strippers get near zip.

A little later, I repair to The Old China Hand for ethanol and quiet reflection. It looks like a real bar, something familiar and comforting that I haven’t seen for ten weeks.



But though it looks like a proper British pub, it can’t escape its environment. “You want a massage with a happy ending?” the barmaid asks me. I am amused: “Is that how this place got its name?” The barmaid looks embarrassed. She leans in close. “I’m just doing a favor for the girls outside,” she says. “You know.” Yeah, I know. A favor and 25% off the top. That’s Wan Chai.

I survey the crowd: mostly older Brits at this hour. I wind up talking to Geoffrey, who really is an old China hand, a merchant marine navigator who’s traveled all over the world and has lived in Hong Kong for the last 15 years. He’s obviously a regular here.

He’s also a terrific raconteur, with stories of being chased by a mob through the streets of Jerusalem into the safety of the King David Hotel, of revenges visited upon nouveau riche and fatuous cruise ship passengers, and of his obsessive and psychopathic housekeeper here in Hong Kong. I left when he started nodding off.

The whole Wan Chai scene was intoxicating–and I don’t just mean the Carlsberg. The mix of old Britannia, the oldest profession, Filipina morsels and Cantonese cuisine is just right. If I’d had more time, I would have stayed. There are a million stories waiting to be written about such a place.