Someplace Far Away – Hong Kong (2007)

You will notice, dear reader: Sometimes I write about a first visit to a place, sometimes the articles are a summary of previous visits – and therefore more like reports from memory and about memory, about change and about what remains constant. I have been to Hong Kong four times in total – in 2007 for two months, in 2011 for one month and then in 2017 and 2018 for a few days each time. I can summarize: I don’t love the city, but I love it. If that makes sense.

It’s loud and crowded and confusing and for someone who doesn’t like to eat anything that comes out of the water, it’s really a disaster, because even the vegetables are cooked in fish broth. Nevertheless, when I think back, I miss the city, and more than just a little.

And there was Hamburg, the port – and Freddy Quinn. So I have to go a little further.

The port of Hamburg was the livelihood for a large part of my family; as a child, of course, that was already rather distant for me, because even in the 1980s, the port of Hamburg was no longer what it used to be. But I grew up with the stories and anecdotes, the stories of people who really came from there and had experienced first hand what Hans Albers and Freddy Quinn were singing about and what was represented on the stage of the Ohnsorg Theater (theater playing in the local, low German language). People who knew the reality and yet were inclined towards the romantic glorification of ports and seafaring in songs, in films and on stage – also because, despite all the romanticization, there was always a lot of truth in it. For me, seafaring and the port had become a symbol – for adventures in foreign countries, letters from faraway places with exotic stamps, hair blowing in the wind from the salty sea air, souvenirs brought for those back home… freedom, last but not least. (I should be more specific about which freedom I mean, but I’ll come back to that topic elsewhere.)

To be honest: I still can’t forgive the world for letting this glorious ship called “adventure and freedom” sink in an ocean of globalization. In any case, all these pop-cultural, Northern German-Hanseatic elements were certainly the things that had the most lasting impact on my identity. I have never felt particularly German, but I have always felt Northern German. I lived in and loved a Northern German world that was actually already dying out when I was born. There’s hardly anything left of it today. But back to Hong Kong – getting there is a long way, I have to ask for your patience.

There is a song by Freddy Quinn, “Unter fremden Sternen”, from the 1959 film of almost the same name, “Freddy unter fremden Sternen”, but most people know the song better as “Fährt ein weißes Schiff nach Hong Kong”, I am tranlating the lyrics here, even if they sound far more poetic in German:

“The day comes when you want to go abroad
Everything seems far too small where you live
The day comes when you move abroad
And don’t ask for long: What will the future be like?

When a white ship sails to Hong Kong
I long for the distance
But then far away
I long for home
And I say to the wind and clouds:
Take me with you, I’ll gladly trade
All the many foreign lands
For a trip home”

(Check out the German version of this article for the original lyrics.) I don’t think there is another song that expressed my sense of travel as well as this one; and in my mind, it has forever connected Hong Kong with a white ship that I would have loved to use as means of transportation to this faraway place.

But of course I have to start at the beginning. Hong Kong has been on my travel bucket list since at least the early 90s, when we regularly flew to the USA and Canada. This had to do with my parents’ work, relatives and cheap airfares, but also with a genuine affection for this subcontinent. In the vast majority of cases, there were no direct connections from Hamburg – so we usually flew via Frankfurt, Amsterdam or London. And on the display panels there – not yet digital at the time – there was one destination in particular that appealed to me: Hong Kong…!

But it was not an unconnected, spontaneous attachment to the somehow abstract, distant – at that time still – English colony. There was also the airport. This legendary Kai Tak airport, where you could almost touch the skyscrapers of Kowloon on approach. Unfortunately, I was denied the adventure of this approach, as the airport was closed in 1998, nine years before my first trip to Hong Kong.

With a bit of luck and money, I might still be able to manage the white ship in the end… It would have to be a container ship, of course.

I’m also afraid there’s no guarantee for the color of the ship. But if need be, I’ll make do with a black or rust-colored ship. After, one has to remain flexible. Be that as it may, my route to Hong Kong took yet anpther detour … via Florence. In 2004, I went to Florence for a language course, where I met Ellen, a Hong Kong Chinese, who visited me in Germany the following year; my return visit to Hong Kong took place in 2007.

But that’s just a side note; what’s more important is that one day I opened the door – and only just saw something small and wriggly before it disappeared under the door of the room next door. Under the door, because according to some mysterious law, doors in Chinese houses must apparently always miss the floor by at least one centimeter. (I think this is something that hasn’t changed to this day).

There was no doubt about what I had seen: it was a small snake, probably a juvenile, maybe twenty centimetres long. As I’m not particularly familiar with snakes, but find them rather unappealing to begin with, I thought about how I could stop the creature from slithering into my room, because who knew how adventurous a young snake can be. So I stuffed thegap under the door with kitchen paperand went to Bo, my contact person for all problems concerning the apartment. I explained to him that I had seen a snake slithering under the door into the next room. Bo looked at me the way you look at a particularly stupid three-year-old to whom you are explaining something for the tenth time.

“There are no snacks in Hong Kong,” he stated. Now this is obviously wrong – there are indeed snakes in Hong Kong, and quite a few – but that there are none in Kong Kong is something that many locals, as I discovered, are firmly convinced of. Perhaps it calms the nerves. In any case, I explained again that it was, indeed, a snake. In fact, this was not at all far-fetched, as a group of children from the Outer Islands had just arrived in the neighboring rooms. Perhaps the little critter had simply hidden somewhere in a rucksack. In any case, Bo gave me a slightly annoyed look and asked: “Did it have lecks?” No, I explained, it had no legs, it was a snake and moved like one. He didn’t believe a word I said, but eventually went upstairs with me and looked in the room next door. Unfortunately, we didn’t find the corpus delicti. “It was probably lizard,” Bo stated again, “They are no snacks in Hong Kong.” Since I couldn’t get through, I did the only thing I could in my utter desperation: I lived with kitchen paper under my door for the next six weeks, stuffing it back under there from the outside every time I left the room, and from the inside when I came back. To be on the safe side, I wrote a note to the cleaners in uncertain Chinese letters: “Please don’t take any paper out from under the door!!!! Thank you very much!” That was a bit impractical, but at least I didn’t see the snake again and slept reasonably soundly.

The English language was another thing. I may have been able to understand almost every toothless southern redneck, but I was very slow to warm up to the Chinese accent. Once I interviewed an informant I was supposed to meet in a shopping mall. Five minutes before the meeting, I was already on site, she called to give me precise directions. “Te-ka-dee-es-sa-ka-le-taah-too-crown-flo-aaah”, she explained. Then she went on, telling me I would then turn left, and right again, past some store to get to our meeting point. Okay, fine, but for the life of me I didn’t understand where my route was supposed to start. Even asking for the third time didn’t enlighten me – and so I stood helplessly in the gigantic shopping center, waiting for inspiration as to where I should actually go. After a few minutes, my brain finally came up with a suitable translation: “Take the escalator to ground floor.”

The interviews, which I unfortunately never used for scientific purposes, were incredibly interesting. They were about Chinese Christians and the confluence of Christian beliefs with traditional Chinese beliefs. For example, all of my informants continued to practice the traditional care for their ancestors, and they believed in local deities and spirits in parallel or intermingled with Christian beliefs, which was not a problem or contradiction to them. My actual research question was a more abstract and overarching one, but that is not of relevance here. In any case, I had plenty of opportunity to learn about the beliefs of the Chinese and especially the Christian Chinese in Hong Kong.

I had a particularly impressive experience during a stay on Cheung Chau, one of the smaller offshore islands that is very popular as a recreational destination, mainly because of its beach. Of course, I had imagined something different: The beach was barely recognizable under all the people and was downright tiny either way. In any case, I didn’t really feel like swimming and going to the beach in the humid July heat, so I explored the otherwise really cute island.

As I was still planning to come to China for further research at the time, I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to perhaps look for accommodation. After all, it was much quieter here on the island than in the middle of the city. It also smelled less like dried seafood. So I strolled through the small alleyways and actually spotted a sign advertising vacation apartments. Curious, I walked down the little street to look for the house. I didn’t have to search for long, because after less than 100 meters I was intercepted by a woman of about 60 years of age who had unerringly identified me as a tourist. I spoke to her briefly, and she then offered to show me the apartment.

I can hardly put into words what I saw there. Not that there was anything fundamentally awful about the apartment… It was a little run down, yes, but nothing out of the ordinary. There was a terrace directly overlooking the sea, with a beautiful view. Nevertheless, I could hardly bear being in the apartment. There was something terribly gloomy and depressive about it; the apartment felt like it was an abruptly interrupted process, but in a very eerie way. Like when you see the pictures from Chernobyl, where the children’s toys are still in the rooms, but everything has been abandoned for years… that was the atmosphere. I thanked the lady politely and couldn’t leave quickly enough. I stayed on the island for a while and walked around, but I had lost all joy. Only the wind on the ferry ride back lifted some of the heaviness from my soul.

The next day, I told my friend about the experience. She asked exactly where the apartment had been. “It’s a good thing you left,” she then told me. “A couple committed suicide in this apartment two years ago, they jumped off the terrace.” She showed me an old newspaper article. It was undoubtedly the same house. If I had doubted the existence of ghosts or energies before – after that, I was certain they existed…