HONG KONGJULY 2019 | NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER INDIA 77MORKHATENOK/SHUTTERSTOCK
I hop on and off the Mid-Levels—
it’s a series of 20 interconnected
escalators. Below, Central spreads out
like a graphic novel. At Gage Street,
I give way to dashing waiters in Lan
Fong Yuen serving ‘pantyhose milk
tea’—velvety and dream-creamy, made
with evaporated milk and brewed in a
polyester sock-like net. At 8 Cochrane
Street, sharp-suited bankers mill
around Good Spring Company, a
century-old Chinese medicine clinic
serving herbal teas with names that
make you sigh, like Love-Pea Vine.
Wong Kar-Wai’s locations work like
a telescope; look long enough and
vivid details of everyday life come
into focus, swaying to tunes old and
new like his characters do when no
one’s watching.
***A
round dusk, I head to
Tai Kwun arts centre
to meet a friend. C
was born in a different
Hong Kong, when it was still a British
colony in the late ’80s. As a student,
he and millions across the city rose
in protests during the Umbrella
Revolution of 2014, when Hong Kong
demanded that Beijing not meddle
with its elections. When he speaks
of how fast his city morphs, I only
have to glance around to see what he
means. There is a quiet pleasure when
we pop cans of beer on Tai Kwun’s
grounds, looking up at beautiful
mid-19th century buildings. There
is existential poetry on the walls for
hipsters to love, film screenings, and
a soft clang of drums in the air. You
almost forget that Tai Kwun complex
was originally a prison, police station,
and two courts.
C teases me when he hears about my
Wong Kar-Wai-led strolls. “So, what’s
next? You’ll hire a cheongsam and
walk around Central? Be all Maggie
Cheung in In The Mood For Love!” I
snort and decide not to tell him that
Linva Tailors, who stitched some of
those gorgeous, figure-loving dresses
for the actress is indeed a three-
minute walk away.
We talk about an exhibition that
looks at collecting everyday objects as
a way of linking the past and present.
For all the ways in which Hong Kong
hurtles towards the future, it pines for
its past like an old friend. I first sensethis wistfulness in Wong Kar-Wai’s most famous film,
In The Mood For Love (2000). It follows two neighbours—
Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung—who discover their
spouses are having an affair. It is also Wong Kar-Wai’s love
poem to the golden years of Hong Kong—the early 1960s.
Born in Shanghai in 1956, he immigrated to Hong Kong
at age five, inhabiting a city that doesn’t exist anymore. He
shapes that longing tenderly: scenes awash in crimsons and
chromes; steamy kitchens with wizened cooks packing dim
sums in aluminum tiffins; actors framed in artful, almost
voyeuristic frames to capture Hong Kong’s ever-cramped
rooms and stairways.
If that city can still be found, it will be back in Kowloon.
***T
rust me—you’ll know when you’ve arrived in
Mong Kok. Stiletto-like buildings come in all the
colours of candy in this suburb. Curvy old Chinese
typefaces outside shops will hawk things you can’t
read and don’t need, but will pine for. Somehow, almost
every street you turn into will be lined with caravans of red
minibuses. These are Hong Kong’s cheap rides that connect
the remotest corners. (If you hop on one, hold on tight as it
swerves and streaks like the Knight Bus, and scream “YAU
LOK!” when you want to get off.)
I walk into Kam Wah café, a typical Hong Kong cha
chaan teng—no-frills, 1950s-style diner serving an array
of Western and Chinese fare. It is always full, so I dap toi
(share a table) with seven others. I wave at a blur that’s the
waitress, and she zooms in to hand me an English menu. No
smiles, no small talk; in fact I feel like a nuisance when I
linger over her plastic-sheathed booklet for too long. I love it.
A feast arrives, one like I’ve never seen. The red bean
frappes and iced Ovaltine are claimed by the gang of
schoolgirls on my table. The couple with the fussy-eater kid
stuff him with instant noodles topped with ham and egg.
The uncle with thin hair and basset-hound eyes eats his
corned beef sandwich as if in meditation. It’s a frame Wong
Kar-Wai would’ve been proud of, where actors emote with
postures and glances more than words. I bite into a bo luo
bao—the gold, sugar-crusted “pineapple bun” hiding a thick
slab of butter, which tastes like my favourite song. The egg
tart and fried noodles with diced pork make me want to hug
everyone at the table. Instead, I too bend my head down and
join the orchestra of noodle-slurps. While leaving I nod at
the blur-waitress, but she scowls, and somehow that makes
me happier.
I begin to see how Hong Kong wasn’t just the setting in
the movies I’d loved; it was the lead character, always. Wong
Kar-Wai rarely came to the set with a script, he scouted for
locations before he wrote anything. “[In this city] the space
tells you what the characters are, why they’re there,” he
once said. So I too begin moving through Hong Kong like
he would, intuitively, not just tracing film locations. I walk
around Mong Kok in circles, in saturated, neon-filled streets
I’d seen in As Tears Go By (1988), Wong Kar-Wai’s directorial
debut. I enter just about any place, like the underground
videogame arcade, GameZone, where everyone’s half my age
and no one can hear each other over the metallic scores. I
follow a girl dressed in a pinafore—a lacy white bow in her
hair, game face on. She wins every Mai Mai game she plays.DAI PAI
DONG
All of Hong Kong
smells of food all
the time, and it
has something
to do with these
open-air food
stalls. Try egg
waffles at stalls
lining Mong Kok,
chicken’s feet
at Keung Kee
in Sham Shui
Po, and crab,
clam, and beef
in oyster sauce
at Sing Kee in
Central.TOP STOPSCHUNGKING MANSIONSMONG KOKYAU MA TEISHAM SHUI POMID-LEVELS ESCALATOR