By Stephen Lawson
Years ago, just after buying the ticket for my first journey from San Francisco to Hong Kong -- a vacation that would begin with 14 interminable hours in Economy class -- a co-worker who visited family there said it was "like San Francisco Chinatown, except it just goes on and on like that."
He was right. At a level deeper than mere appearance, yet perhaps not quite in the soul of the place, Hong Kong is like Chinatown: There are grocery store bins spilling out on to the sidewalks, elderly women shuffling by carrying big shopping bags or wheeling them along in carts, longtime residents living in public housing and new arrivals in tenements, a sense of traditions being kept alive not for sentiment but simply because they are the way things are done. In point of fact, San Francisco is a Chinese city, with its own Chinese name -- pronounced "Joe Jin Shahn" in Mandarin -- which translates as "Old Gold Mountain." New York doesn't have one of those, and neither does Los Angeles. San Francisco holds a place in Chinese history as the destination for thousands of Gold Rush-era migrants who are now the ancestors of people on both sides of the Pacific.
However, apart from Chinatown, San Francisco is almost a reverse image of Hong Kong. Whereas Hong Kongers acknowledge sheer accumulation as the primary goal in life, San Franciscans tend to call their lives "lifestyles" and work ceaselessly to keep them interesting -- and convince other that they are -- through pastimes such as yoga, cycling, body-piercing, and finding deep philosophical meaning in movies from Hong Kong. San Francisco has been called the city of 30-year-olds, because it is here so many young professionals celebrate freedom from parents and school loans and the discovery of hobbies they don't yet call hobbies. Hong Kong is a city of 60-year-olds, where people revere the graying tycoons who have outmaneuvered or outlived their rivals to achieve the only real source of power there: wealth. San Francisco musicians come up with outrageous band names and ever more odd fusions of styles; Hong Kong pop sensation Eason Chan recently told the South China Morning Post, without a hint of irony, that he considers himself "a singer of the people": Whatever "the market" wants to hear, he'll sing it, he said.
Perhaps the most obvious difference between the two cities is also, strangely, a commonality: language. San Francisco and Hong Kong may be the only cities in the world where Cantonese and English have coexisted as major languages for more than a century. Any well-stocked San Francisco newsstand has four or five English-language newspapers and one or two Chinese titles. Its Hong Kong counterpart invariably offers several Chinese newspapers and one or two in English.
Likewise, the longest-lingering incongruities in my own mind on this visit back to San Francisco have been misplaced worry, and surprise, about language. I still hesitate before asking a store clerk for help or passerby for directions. Part of my mind is still in Hong Kong, where either move usually involves a fair bit of effort and awkwardness. Because I speak only English, rough Mandarin, and twenty words in Cantonese, nearly every time I speak to a stranger in Hong Kong, I don't know how well I'll be understood, if at all. There's a level-setting process similar to two modems sending tones back and forth to find the highest level of bandwidth they both can use. I start out with simple English. From the way the other person responds, I get an idea whether they understood me and we can continue. Sometimes I have to ask a question in different words. Most of the time English works. If all else fails, I try my rudimentary Mandarin, because most Hong Kongers are actually trilingual at some level. This give-and-take has become second nature to me in Hong Kong -- and, presumably, to thousands of new immigrants here in San Francisco.
Another odd experience here is the slight shock when I overhear a conversation on the street or in a public place and realize that it's in English. The feeling is a strange combination of familiarity and unfamiliarity, and it's most common in places that remind me of Hong Kong, such as Chinatown. There, the shock is mixed with quiet embarrassment. Having spent half my life with Chinese-Americans, suddenly I'm vaguely surprised to hear Chinese people speaking English among themselves. The intellect understands, but the brain is fooled by a familiar environment.
From the IDG building here in San Francisco I can look out the window and see ships from China anchored in the bay. At my office in Hong Kong we see the freighters and cruise ships come and go through Hong Kong's narrow harbor. In Chinatown, as in older parts of Hong Kong, little stores sell discount phone cards for calls to the other side. You scratch them like lottery tickets to reveal the passcode. The service is spotty. Voices on the touch-tone menu, available in three languages, break in and out without warning like winter turbulence.
Copyright © 2001 Stephen Lawson