Hong Kong? No change!

Author: By Michael Grunwald, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, June 8, 1997

Page: M7

Section: Travel

No one, that is, except the Hong Kong Tourist Association.

``As a Special Administrative Region of China, Hong Kong will enjoy a high degree of autonomy with no change in its lifestyle,'' the association's weekly newsletter assures us. ``It will be free to continue its own political, social and economic systems and for the visitor, that means no change!''

Well, maybe. Or just maybe, the end of 150 years of colonial rule will be somewhat noticeable. The queen's face is already disappearing from the postage and the currency, Victoria Park is being reborn as Hong Kong Central Park, the People's Liberation Army has arrived in the city, and Jardine's famous noonday cannon is about to fire its last shot. As laborers toil around the clock to finish a new convention center for the handover ceremony and the colonial governor begins his farewell rounds, the new China-backed provisional government is already making noises about reining in civil liberties.

In reality, if you can be sure of anything in Hong Kong, under British rule or Chinese rule -- or Martian rule for that matter -- you can be sure there will not be no change. This is a city of perpetual motion, in a state of constant flux, and that predictable unpredictability is part of its appeal. In a perverse way, the tourist association is right. Sure, a vistor to Hong Kong in 1997 will be thrust into the year's biggest story. But for this metropolis of superlatives -- the world's freest economy, tallest outdoor Buddha, most expensive real estate, busiest McDonald's outlets, densest neighborhood, longest escalator, highest per capita Rolls Royce ownership and largest concentration of public housing, to name a few -- the extreme is the routine.

The experience begins as you begin to descend to the airport, which was built so deep into a bustling urban neighborhood that if your pilot isn't careful, he might knock someone's barbecue off the roof. Very Hong Kong. Next year, a new airport is scheduled to open in the rural outskirts of the territory, which may not seem very Hong Kong, except that it is expected to be the busiest airport in the world, which is quintessential Hong Kong.

The true Hong Kong approach to sightseeing would be to cram. But assuming you find a reasonable place to stay -- which, given the cost of lodging here, is sort of like assuming you cure the common cold -- it's best to absorb Hong Kong over time rather than trying to hit all the attractions in your guidebook. Some of them are pretty lame, anyway. You can skip the 24-meter, 200-ton Buddha-on-steroids at Po Lin Monastery; it's just a big, ugly statue. Bag the Space Museum, too; you can see IMAX films at our own Museum of Science. And the 19th-century village at Tsang Tai Uk is basically a long walk spoiled.

The essential Hong Kong is more accessible than that. Take the Star Ferry, running between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. In fact, take it as many times as you can. It costs two Hong Kong dollars, or about 25 US cents, and it crosses Victoria Harbor every 5 minutes. From the upper deck, as you glide past the constant traffic of freighters and barges and junks, you can watch the boomtown in all its splendor: the armies of construction cranes expanding the famous skyline, the frenetic land-reclamation projects extending the city even further into the harbor. Today, most Star Ferry passengers are gwailo (Chinese for ``foreign devil'') tourists with instant, automatic cameras, heading to the museums or the shopping district on Nathan Road. But it's worth knowing that 30 years ago, Star Ferry commuters were local commuters; they started some of the worst anticolonial riots in Hong Kong history after the fare rose 5 cents, or less than one US penny. It was the ultimate Hong Kong riot, a product of the gap between rich and poor, with the political consciousness of the masses awakened by the all-important bottom line.

That's part of the beauty of Hong Kong, the contrast. On the third floor of the art museum, you can see British paintings of Hong Kong from the 1840s, when it was just a barren fishing village. Then you can look out the window and see the exact same view, plus 7 million people and 549 banks and a $346 billion stock market and the world's busiest (of course) container port. Check out the landscape paintings on the fourth floor, and see how little Chinese art changed for thousands of years. Then go back and stare at the endless rows of skyscrapers sporting corporate logos like nametags on conventioneers, and suddenly an age-old tradition of pastoral art seems laughably irrelevant.

The point is that times are changing, and as any decent guidebook will tell you, the ongoing clash between modernity and tradition is the key to the flux. This clash will continue under Chinese rule, and it will be interesting to see if tradition keeps getting whipped. There are still a few rickshaws here, but there are scads of luxury sedans. Herbal medicine shops at street markets still peddle eye-of-newt remedies made from seal testicles and deer livers, but the typical store is an upscale boutique in an air-conditioned mall. Tanka fishermen still live at sea, but their boats have outboard motors, and some of those quaint Hakka women wearing traditional spliced-bamboo hats with black-curtain fringes now sport cellular phones. There is still some surprising beauty in Hong Kong, especially in the remarkable network of country parks dotting the New Territories and the outlying islands, but every year the march of asphalt and industry advances further into the peninsula.

The guide to understanding all these changes is Hong Kong's one must-see attraction -- not the much-hyped (but usually fogged-in) view from Victoria Peak, or the equally ballyhooed (but wildly overrated) Stanley Market, but the history museum in Kowloon Park. It traces Hong Kong from prehistoric times to the present, and it shows how the peninsula grew from an empty spit of land to a sleepy 19th-century opium center to a modern financial powerhouse. Once you hear the history of money and power here, the rest of Hong Kong seems to make sense, from I.M. Pei's 74-story bamboo-inspired Bank of China tower to the garish Temple of 10,000 Buddhas to the solitary statue of a British banker in Statue Square. Even the return to China will seem a bit more comprehensible.

Who knows? Maybe when the pomp and circumstance of the handover is said and done, they will still serve high tea at the Peninsula Hotel. Maybe Queen's Road and Queensway and Queensgate will keep their quaint colonial names. Maybe all that suck-up work by the British sycophants who run the Hong Kong Tourist Association will pay off, and the Chinese won't toss them out. But whatever happens to Hong Kong, in 1997 and beyond, you can take this to all 549 banks: It won't be boring.