June 15, 2001

HONG KONG (June 5, 2001)

Dear Friends and Subscribers,

Hong Kong's new airport is a technological dream, one of the most convenient airports I have ever seen. The old HK airport was a narrow landing strip so close to town that you could look inside people's windows during landing and practically snatch their wash from the line on the way in. This new airport is further away, but incorporates every modern technology. We breezed through customs, changed some money, bought round-trip train tickets at the same counter, and headed for the exit to look for the train station. As the automatic doors opened, we realized that the exit was the train, running right through the lobby. A woman materialized seemingly from nowhere to wisk our luggage into the waiting car, and was gone before we could even offer a tip. Within minutes of deboarding the plane we were barreling at high speed toward town, with stops at each island. Express buses waited at the Hong Kong station to take us directly to our hotel, where bellhops were waiting outside to grab our luggage and bring it to our room as soon as we had a key. What service!

We're staying at the Conrad International Hotel, a 5 -star establishment of exquisite luxury. Soft mattresses, downy comforters, pillows that cradle the head, every possible amenity in the spacious bathroom--even a mini-stairmaster next to the bathroom scale, and a rubber ducky on the edge of the tub! Our full-length picture window looks out on a vast wooded mountainside, and the curtains open and close with the touch of a bedside button. And chocolates on the pillow are so passe--our turndown service included little Conrad teddy bears on the pillows! Our hosts in India were wonderfully hospitable and the hotel was clean and comfortable, but this is almost decadent in its opulence. We sank into our soft mattresses for a 2-hour nap, then went searching for a tailor to have some suits made for Mark.

The shopping center attached to the hotel is quite modern, upscale, and American, with shops representing all the major designers around the world. Very posh, but not what we were looking for. We like the old shopping arcades and alley ways we remember from previous visits, with tailors, souvenir shops, and fine craftsmen side-by-side. So we took the Star Ferry across the bay to Kowloon, where we were pleased to see that the Ocean Terminal still houses the arcade shops we remembered.

Choose a tailor, any tailor. How does one decide? As we walked into Misbah Tailor, Danny, the proprietor, hailed Mark and said, "I remember you. You bought a suit from me before, didn't you?" We hadn't, of course, but it was a good sales ploy. We did a little dickering, checked fabrics, and decided to have him make two suits, which he promised he could have ready for the first fitting in just an hour, and the suits ready and delivered to our hotel by midnight. "I have 40 tailors working in my shop!" he proudly proclaimed. "No problem!" Mission accomplished, we took the ferry back to get ready for our dinner at the Dynasty Club with Richard Wong, chairman of the economics department at the University of Hong Kong.

From Third World to Lap of Luxury. Hong Kong is as different from India as Arnold Schwarzenegger is from Danny DeVito in Twins. The comparison to that movie is appropriate, since India and Hong Kong have twin beginnings as British colonies. But there the comparison ends. If anything, India started out with Schwarzeneggerian advantages: more land and more natural resources. But Hong Kong is the one with the better economy and one of the highest per capita incomes and standards of living in the world, despite its barren land and dense population. Why the difference? Richard Wong explained some of the differences. He said that India had been a vast land populated by warring tribal kingdoms when the British arrived, so the British tactic was to maintain the existing hostilities and impose a strong bureaucracy to manage them. In essence, the British were simply another tribe, 5,000 strong and more powerful than the others. When the British left, the bureaucracy remained, and India continues to be choked with British-born red tape.

Hong Kong, on the other hand, had been little more than a barren rock when the British arrived. The Brits set up a government, and imported workers from China to do everything. The Chinese saw this as an opportunity to make money, and for the first 200 years they tended to come from the mainland to work for two or three years, earn their fortune, and then return to their families in China with money to build a legacy at home. I suggested, "So Hong Kong was just an extra-long commute to work," and Professor Wong laughed approvingly at the comparison. After 1960, with the introduction of communism, the Chinese stopped going back to China and used their jobs instead as a way to bring the rest of their families to Hong Kong. But the principle remains the same: Hong Kong has always been a place to work and earn money, while India has been a place of varying tribes and cultures that needed to be managed.

Another stark contrast we noticed between India and Hong Kong is that Hong Kong quite literally grew to the sky, while India grew outward. Hong Kong is a compact nation of skyscrapers, allowing us to enjoy the luxury of a huge hotel room despite the density of the population. When you think about it, a 60-story skyscraper increases the square-footage it sits on by 60-fold. Meanwhile India is a sprawling nation of nineteenth century shops and government buildings, where space is a premium despite the country's vast acreage.

Hong Kong's transportation system keeps getting better, too, with taxis, express trains, metro, and ferries; India's transportation continues to be chaotic. And it isn't just government intrusion or centralized planning that makes everything run so smoothly in Hong Kong. We thought the Star Ferry, at 22 cents per ticket, must be heavily subsidized, but according to Professor Wong the government contributes nothing to the Ferry. Oh, it's subsidized all right, but not by government. The businesses inside the Ocean Terminal, which benefit most from a constant stream of customers, join to keep the price down and the ferries full.

Even the walkways in Hong Kong are a modern dream: We were able to walk from our hotel to the Star Ferry, a distance of about seven blocks, in the rain, without ever getting wet, because covered walkways connect the highrise buildings, both on the sidewalk level and again about four stories up. Lest I seem overly negative, I must add in India's defense that its economy is expanding and improving all the time. They are becoming a strong center for computer software development, and their movie industry is second only to the United States, producing over 600 films a year (most of them musicals, for some reason.) While still a problem, poverty is abating. We had braced ourselves for the onslaught of maimed and mutilated beggars we have heard about for decades, but while there were many street vendors, we saw only half a dozen outright beggars displaying deformities for our sympathy. Perhaps this is partly because Americans have been told to look away and not to respond to (and thus encourage) begging, but Parth and Barun told us that a more significant reason is that the standard of living is improving, and families are more able to care for their handicapped relatives now.

Our time in Hong Kong was much too short, just over 24 hours. After a delicious breakfast on the executive floor we took a cab to the downtown station for the express train back to the airport (we could have taken the free shuttle but we didn't want to wait). A friendly United agent was waiting at the train station to check our luggage and give us our boarding cards, so all we had to do at the airport was present our passports and scan our luggage. At the airport I was reminded of one more difference between India, the land where people accept with grace and patience the imposition of cows and other obstacles in their paths, and Hong Kong, where a huge sign above the shuttle bus to the gates urges passengers: "RELAX. ANOTHER TRAIN WILL ARRIVE IN THREE MINUTES." In India, meditation and relaxation are a natural part of life; in Hong Kong, as in America, citizens must be reminded of its importance.

-- Jo Ann Skousen

email: jaskousen@mskousen.com

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