THE DESTINATION74 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER INDIA | JULY 2019GLOWONCONCEPT/SHUTTERSTOCK(EGG TART),ALAN BENGE/SHUTTERSTOCK(TRAM),JONAS GRATZER(STALL, ROBOT & WOMAN),PHOTO 12/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO/INDIAPICTURE(CHUNGKING EXPRESS STILL)(Tony Leung), freshly dumped and talking to soaps and
towels around his house, encounters Faye (Faye Wong), a
pixie-cut girl working at the snack bar he frequents.
There’s the Hong Kong one imagines: vertigo-giving
skyscrapers, business districts, branded boutiques. Some
shrines and colonial landmarks thrown in. But for me it was
filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai who unravelled spirals of other
Hong Kongs within. In Chungking, his shaky, hand-held
camera took me to the nooks of his boyhood; the blurred
photography made me feel like I was looking into someone’s
daydream. I could taste a loneliness peculiar to living in
a city of millions, of fleeting relationships that leave you
feeling chipped and off-kilter. There are larger metaphors
too: The film’s opening cello score is a fit of nerves, invoking
a Hong Kong eyeing a ticking clock, jittery about its
impending handover to the Chinese in 1997. “I’ve become
every cautious,” says the woman in the blonde wig, “When I
put on a raincoat, I also put on sunglasses. Who knows when
it will rain or when will it turn out sunny?”
***T
hat night, I take the ferry from Kowloon to
Hong Kong Island (they’re the city’s two main
islands) and come to Lan Kwai Fong, the city’s
nightlife district. Its hillside streets are strung
with nightclubs and restaurants, and a techno beat is
always in the air. What I’m looking for—Midnight Express,
the snack bar in the second part of Chungking Express—
has closed down. A 7-Eleven has replaced the corner
where Faye mixes sauces and salads, bobbing her head to
“California Dreamin’,” blasting it to keep out the world. So
I pick up a bottle of the local Tsingtao beer and walk down
D’Aguilar Street that slants like a drunk, humming the tune
to myself.
I return in the morning because Old Town Central is the
nucleus of Hong Kong. It is the first map I’m handed at the
airport, so I see why many tourists make the mistake of
never venturing out. Almost two centuries after the British
navy arrived at the ‘fragrant harbour,’ its lanes don period
costumes and playact both their colonial and Chinese
past. One minute I am standing beneath spirals of incense
hanging from the ceiling at Man Mo Temple, the next I am
opposite murals of Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin,
and the third I am walking up Pottinger Street. It is steep,
and lined with vendors selling party costumes and freakishly
life-like masks of Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un and Vladimir
Putin. I deliberate over which one to pick for the night.
Imagining a flat Hong Kong is like imagining Russian
vodka without its bite; it wouldn’t constantly brawl with
space if wild, bosky mountains didn’t tower over its
highrises. Neither would it come up with utterly ingenious
inventions like the Mid-Levels Escalator in Central. The
world’s largest pedestrian escalator cuts through over
2,600 feet of Hong Kong’s steep hillside, carrying about a
lakh of people every day. In Chungking Express it ferries
Faye’s infatuation as she crouches and spies Cop 663’s house
beside the escalator. She has work to do—breaking into his
home to redecorate it so he gets over the memories of his
ex. Swapping sardine tin brands, new fish in his tank, even
spiking his water with sleeping pills after he complains of
insomnia. It makes sense.CHA CHAAN
TENG
Hungry in Hong
Kong? Visit these
old-world diners.
Egg tarts—warm
custard in ready-
to-crumble
pastries—at
Honolulu café
in Wan Chai are
bites of sunshine.
Kam Fung, a
5-minute walk
away, serves
delish chicken
pie and
pineapple buns.DING DING
Hop on a ding
ding (tram) to be
whisked away to
the Hong Kong
of the early
1900s. Bag a
seat at a window
of the upper
deck and watch
chaotic, colourful
neighbourhoods
of Hong Kong
Island unfurl, be
it Causeway Bay,
Happy Valley, or
Wan Chai.