Mr. China Read Free

in the cabin before the doors
opened. Damp heat.
    I still remember vividly the taxi ride from the airport to the seedy hotel in Wanchai. Night had fallen and neon characters of every size and description leered at me through the taxi window. It
was a new world. The streets were teeming. Nobody slept.
    Over the coming weeks, new sensations seeped into me. The smells, the dress, the food, the sounds, the written word. Wherever I looked, the Chinese were bargaining, unloading from boats,
hammering in tiny factories. I couldn’t believe that such a concentration of human life could exist in a state of perpetual motion. The pace of life was so relentless that I became swept up
by its momentum. I soon felt like a part of some vast machine.
    As the days passed, I quickly grew to like the place and started to take in more of the surroundings. I often went up to the little path near the summit of Hong Kong Island that winds around the
Peak from the tram station. After about half a mile in the shade of the India-rubber trees with their roots trailing out of the branches down to the ground, round a bend the leaves suddenly clear
and the path opens out on to the sky from the cliff face. On first sight, the view over the harbour to the mountains on the other side quite catches your breath, it is so dramatic: a vast modern
city with glass towers and spikes set in a huge natural amphitheatre with the ocean as its floor. I stared out over the harbour, breathing in the atmosphere as the city churned below, counting the
scores of ocean ships in the port and the planes queuing up to land at Kai Tak from the west. I could see a tiny trail of smoke from the green and white funnels of the Star Ferry as it inched its
way across the harbour. A distant roar rose up to the skies from far below: the sound of a thousand engines, the clatter of trams, the hammering of piledrivers, the occasional shout from a worker
perched high on the bamboo scaffolding around the next half-built glass tower.
    From any direction, the geography of Hong Kong draws the eye towards the mainland. The island seems to wrap itself around the tip of the peninsula opposite like a giant horseshoe, so that from
any point the view focuses on the row of nine hills behind the mist on the other side. Whenever I went over to Tsim Sha Tsui, I took the Star Ferry and sat on the polished wooden seats with the
spray on my face, taking in the smell of oil and the sound of the ropes creaking as they strained against the vast iron stubs anchoring the ferry to the quayside. As I sat there on the ferry,
gazing ahead through the heat haze, I found myself wondering about China, wondering what it was like behind those nine hills beyond Kowloon on the other side.
    Hong Kong had never really seemed English to me. Sure, there were the bars in Lan Kwai Fong where, if it weren’t for the heat, I might pretend that I was in Fulham. There might be the odd
judge hurrying along in his wig and red coat-tails near the High Court and plenty of pinstriped bankers in Central, but that was only on the surface. Scratch below that and everything that mattered
was Chinese.
    The papers were full of stories about some huge power struggle up in Beijing but I couldn’t figure out exactly what had been going on. The names were all so similar (and back to front)
that I could never quite see who had done what and to whom. There were photographs of a dour-looking man with thick glasses, an unconvincing smile and collars that were slightly too big who seemed
to be the Prime Minister. But the country was ruled by an eighty-year-old recluse who did little but play card games; that and control the Army. I found an old guidebook in a second-hand bookshop
in Hollywood Road and, as I thumbed through the disintegrating pages, I was amazed at the size of China: vast areas of uninhabited frozen wastelands in the west, huge deserts further north and then
an incredible crush along the coast. The faded sepia pictures