Sunday Times 2
The Road to Hong Kong
View(s):How a fantasy land in the Far East became a ground reality for 13 lucky newspaper folk eager for adventure and a new life. Stephen Prins tells the story
How we should have all ended up in an exotic place like Hong Kong makes an improbable tale. It is a Sri Lankan story about serendipity and opportunity, about being in the right place at about the right time. It is an adventure story that stretches as far out, way out, as a Far Eastern fairytale can go.
From left: The Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank building in the Fort, Colombo 1; the former HSBC Building in Shanghai, 1923 to 1955; HSBC Main Building in Hong Kong, designed by Norman Foster, completed in 1985.
Until the decisive moment came, the concept of Hong Kong was vague and faraway; a hazy spot on the world map, a tinkle from a wind-chime whenever Asia-associated news blew our way. The British colonial port city was close to China’s belly, and that was all we knew. From time to time, Hong Kong would appear like a pearl in a strand of family conversation.
Father passed through Hong Kong as a young man on a P&O cruise in 1935 and fell in love with the Far East. The Hong Kong bell tinkled even more frequently whenever we visited the widow and spinster great-aunts, Agnes Spittel and Lottie Spittel-Jansz, who lived at No. 4, Police Park Terrace, Colombo 4.
The two aunts drew their government teacher pensions from the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, in the Fort, Colombo 1. We never asked why they had chosen a bank so far away. It might have had something to do with the romance you heard in the sound of a chime and a gong when you brought the two names – Hong Kong and Shanghai – together.
Three times a year, the two aunts wrote out gifts for birthday, Christmas and the purchase of schoolbooks in their long, horizontal HK&SB cheque-books.
Hong Kong would catch our attention again in 1962, on the big screen. The Savoy Cinema was showing the black-and-white comedy “The Road to Hong Kong”, starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and a very young Joan Collins. “The Road” movies were great hits with our parents’ generation. Father faithfully followed them all, in England, from the 1942 Road to Singapore, to Zanzibar, Morocco, Rio, Bali, and even to Utopia. His favourite song line from his favourite “Road” film contained a jewel of a pun, worthy of Cole Porter, Lewis Carroll and Ogden Nash all rolled into one.
“We certainly do get around Like Webster’s Dictionary, we’re Morocco bound. . . .”
Five years later, Hong Kong turned up again on the big screen, this time at the Empire Cinema. “A Countess from Hong Kong” was Charlie Chaplin’s last film, and it featured Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando. Like “The Road to Hong Kong,” this film too was not Made in Hong Kong, but in England.
Till that point Hong Kong was still a fantasy, made up mostly of painted sets.
Then came a couple of books and the films they inspired.
“The Painted Veil” is a 1925 Somerset Maugham novel set in Hong Kong. It tells of an English doctor and his adulterous English wife. Illicit affairs and the whiff of scandal were the stuff out of which Maugham fashioned much of his fiction about the English abroad. Because of fears of legal action, the book’s Hong Kong setting was changed to a fictional British-Chinese colony. The book was used for three feature films, decades apart, the first, from 1934, with the great, beguiling Greta Garbo.
More famous than “The Painted Veil” – in a popular, crowd-pleasing sense – were two made-in-Hong Kong Hong Kong films – “Love is a Many Splendored Thing” (1955), based on a book by Han Suyin, and “The World of Suzie Wong” (1960), by Richard Mason. Both films showed a romantic Hong Kong that is no more, to be recaptured only in vintage Chinese films, photographs, and picture postcards.
In 1986, fantasy Hong Kong turned into a hard, glittering real-life fact – one that would mean a new life, careers, and some romance, for 12-plus — one persons, a spirited group of Sri Lankan adults and young adults, all working under the same roof. Hong Kong would be their fate, for better or worse, but mostly for the better.
How it all happened
The lives of this baker’s dozen converged in the mid ’80s in a building in the business heart of Colombo. The meeting point was the office of the Sun-Dawasa Newspaper Group.
You could say the Sun in the East was rising for Alvin, Anil, Tyrone, Kapila, Siva, Duminda, Jennifer, Aruna, Raine, Dileena, Chris, Larry, self. The average age was 33. The youngest, the most eager and last on the list, was 17. The thrill in hindsight was that none of us would have known, not in our most extravagant dreams, what was to come – how we would all relocate, together, in some cases for good, and how our lives would be permanently changed, out in the fabled Far East. The eastern sky was a beckoning blaze of yellow, gold and red.
When the time came to move on to the Oriental Chapter of our lives, the group excitement was uncontainable. All – except one – were eager for change, improved prospects, a wholly new life. The least enthusiastic of the 13 was content with life as it was, here in our paradisal homeland. But family voices said go: “Chances like this come but once in a lifetime. For many, never. Be grateful. Accept. Go.”
So we accepted, with misgivings and resignation. A more joyless, backward-looking Hong Kong-bound person would have been hard to find.
For the trip, we packed less than most travellers carry on a brief vacation. The idea was to stay six months, maybe a day longer. “Give it a year,” suggested Mother. “You can always come back if you don’t like it.”
Father was not around anymore to comment; he would have sympathised, while adding that his trip to the Far East was enjoyable, and ours could turn out just as pleasant. Give it a shot, he would have said. This is a golden chance to see one of the great modern cities of the world, put in Younger Brother, and even more to the point, to see an active British colony. True, it would be interesting to observe first-hand how the Brits ran a territory and dealt with their foreign subjects. Hong Kong was the last of the big British overseas possessions. We children of post-Independence Sri Lanka had missed that instructive experience.
In a single suitcase were just enough clothes for a limited visit. We would not know that our 12-month experiment would be extended indefinitely, from one year to another, for one reason and another, none sentimental or pecuniary in our particular case.
Given time, Hong Kong starts to exert a strange effect on the long-haul visitor. It is a hard, challenging city. Hard-nosed, hard on sensibilities, hard to get to grips with; but it is also brilliant, vibrant, magnetic, and even magical. Once it has its grip on you, the grip does not loosen easily. Your centre of gravity slowly and surely moves to the core of the rock on which the city is built. The allure gets stronger. The love-hate intensifies. The years roll on.
Most of the original group of Sri Lankans stayed on, working at one or the other of Hong Kong’s two English-language newspapers. In several cases, the road that first led to Hong Kong continued and branched off in other directions, leading to a fresh start and new lives elsewhere, in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada, the US.
All were success stories, to one degree or another. The most successful, the person who went furthest in terms of acquiring impressive corporate credentials was the youngest. This was the cheeky, plucky, determined 17-year-old who walked around the newsroom with TIME and NewsWeek stuffed into his denims. He was the last to come on board and was the least tolerated by the rest. His success story was the result of a winning synthesis of skills learnt on the job. From processing local and general news at the two Hong Kong publishing houses, he moved on to business, and finally technology. This interwoven savviness in publishing, finance, and hi-tech, combined with sky’s-the-limit ambition, eventually took him into the gleaming glass-and-steel world of high finance, at the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, or HSBC, the city’s iconic bank and the second largest bank in the world.
The auburn-haired Burgher lad with a Scottish name, alumnus of Arethusa College, Wellawatte, now heads a global HSBC business entity of his own creation. He works at HSBC’s headquarters in Canary Wharf, London. His office is down the corridor from that of HSBC’s top executive. The first important Hong Kong building pointed out to us on our first day in the city, in September ’86, was the towering futuristic HSBC structure, at No. 1 Queen’s Road, Central. Designed by the British architect Norman Foster and completed the year before, in ’85, it dominates the skyline, viewed from Kowloon, across Victoria Harbour. The red-and-white structure’s salient feature, we were informed, was that it wore its inside on the outside. That is to say, the steel framework normally hidden in a high-rise building is in this case exposed. So, in a sense, you see the inside even before you get to go inside. We had a very long wait, 22 years to the day, to get in.
Unless you have a job there, or globally significant business to discuss, outsiders do not have access to the HSBC building. But you can walk under it. The “ground” floor is high above road level, leaving an enormous, 3,200 square-metre, open-sided pedestrian space beneath. On Sundays, Filipino domestic helpers gather in their hundreds to spend their day off sitting, sleeping and singing on mats in the shadow of HSBC.
No one who comes to Hong Kong escapes the pervasive shadow of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Group. The ubiquitous bank stands tall in the story of Hong Kong; it is a fixture in the city’s daily life. It was only on the very last evening of our 22 years in Hong Kong that we got to see the inside of the famous HSBC building. That was in order to say bye to our highly successful HSBC friend and former newspaper colleague, Larry Campbell, who was visiting from London.
In our variously circuitous ways, at our own pace, we were all coming full circle. The other Chinese port city entwined in the HSBC name is a two-hour flight from Hong Kong. During a visit to Shanghai in 2010 on a newspaper assignment, we stood for photographs on the famous Bund of Old Shanghai, facing the great Huangpu River. Though a sunny day, the pictures came out grainy because of air pollution. Behind us was a domed 1923 building, a former home of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. It was HSBC’s second Shanghai residence. The building was completed in 1865, the year the parallel bank in Hong Kong was opened, and only 27 years before the Ceylon HSBC was unveiled.
The famous Shanghai building is impressive on the outside, while saving its grand aesthetic surprise once you are inside. By the time we had completed our walk that afternoon on the historic Bund, alongside the “Oriental Wall Street”, and crossed Zhongshan Dong Yi Road to see No. 12 close-up, it was after hours. The bank was closed for business, but the building was open to tourists. Entering the lobby, we thought we were in another world, in a church or a cathedral in Europe. All around was marble and mosaic – classical pillars and tiers of frescoes rising up to a dazzling climax of colour and design in the dome overhead. The bank is a tourist must-see. The friezes of zodiac signs, mythical beings, and symbols of the bank’s presence in world cities, were a forgotten secret for many years. The artwork had been plastered over for protection during the Cultural Revolution, to be revealed once again in 1997, during repair and restoration work.
Of the three landmark HK&S Bank buildings we have visited, the one in Sir Baron Jayathilake Mawatha, formerly Prince Street, Colombo 1, may be the smallest, but it is venerable and imposing in its way. Whenever we ascend those stairs, we think of the two great-aunts who made the same visit to Prince Street in the ’50s and ’60s, going there once a month to collect their pensions until they were too advanced in years to climb those 16 stately, stone-and-marble steps.
Present and absent family members – Lottie and Agnes, Father and Mother – would have smiled on encouragingly during our long years in Hong Kong. They must have, for we are back from that tumultuous journey safe and more or less sound. And with a suitcase containing some precious pieces of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain – and some bits of golden Chinese wisdom.
(HSBC marks its 150th anniversary worldwide this month)