Traveling In Style : IRRATIONAL HONG KONG : Racetracks, Fortunetellers and Fantastic Festivals Are as Much a Part of This Seductive Metropolis as Business Deals and Shopping Malls

The British colony of Hong Kong has the reputation of being rational and money-minded--a Manhattan sprouting from the South China Sea. In the choked streets of Victoria, the business district on the most populous of the colony’s 236 islands, and in Kowloon, a shoppers’ nirvana across the water, it is easy to feel that you’re going to be late or are in someone’s way. Parsimonious with time and space, people in Hong Kong phone from cellular devices at bus stops, cut business deals on 10-minute ferry rides and hammer and drill through the night to construct new family shops. One result of all this energy and determination is that Hong Kong, with only 5.8 million people, is the world’s 11th-largest exporter of goods.

Hong Kong may also be the only large city in the world where locals with spare time mostly do what the tourists do--go shopping. Money seems to be not only the colony’s raison d’etre, but also its religion and mistress as well. Nothing seems to matter here except the business of the moment.

Yet there is another side to Hong Kong. Surprisingly, there are moments when its people, 98% of whom are Chinese--mostly Cantonese--turn superstitious and unscientific, and when everything that seems “true” of Hong Kong ceases to be so. The fortunetellers in Kowloon are well patronized by successful businessmen. The Department of Transport holds monthly auctions at which supposedly lucky automobile license plates (8 and 3 are auspicious numbers for the Cantonese) are snapped up for hundreds of thousands of dollars. (The currency in Hong Kong is also the dollar, but for purposes of clarity, the previous figure and all dollar figures that follow are in U.S. dollars.) One evening in Hong Kong, I ran into a real estate agent friend who had just come from a meeting of the UCLA Alumni Assn. of Hong Kong, and the program of the evening, for a packed audience of youngish business people, had been a talk on feng shui (“wind and water”), the ancient art of geomancy. By this supernatural yardstick, people choose the “propitious” location for a house or the “safe and lucky” date for a wedding.

Any visitor who wishes to know the real Hong Kong should experience its spiritual as well as its commercial side. The many traditional festivals celebrated here are one example of this aspect of the place. But so, surprisingly, is the local love for horse racing. One afternoon not long ago, I joined 30,000 race-goers for the Champions and Chater Cup at the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club in Shatin, the semirural New Territories section of the colony. The stands and boxes here swarm with the business and political elite of the colony, yet also with blue-collar workers and taxi drivers and shopkeepers--a classless fellowship held together by the mysterious lure of betting. (Jockey Club proceedings are easily accessible to the English-speaking outsider, since all official business is conducted in that language, and racetrack rules are similar to those in England and America; see Guidebook, page 55, for details).

Before 1 p.m. on this occasion, about $2.4 million had already been bet on the day’s events--and on the day’s last race alone, about $18 million would be wagered. I met Judge Raymond Sears of the Hong Kong High Court, a Shatin regular, in the Hong Kong Club Box, where he told me, over drinks, that “more money is bet on one race here than in a week’s racing in Britain.” In the 1990-91 racing season (which runs from September to May), total bets placed at the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club totaled more than $6 billion. About $77 million of that amount went to charities, including the Street Sleepers Shelter Society and the Yan Oi Tong Woo Chung Multiservice Center for the Elderly.

From the Hong Kong Club Box, I wandered to the public stand at ground level. Between the second and third races, old Chinese ladies in blue jackets and straw hats were shuffling along the track, smoothing out hoof marks with wooden blocks fixed to the end of orange poles. Here I found Peter Singh, originally from Sri Lanka, a former jeweler who had lost money in the stock-market crash of 1987, had heart problems and now owns a pest-control company. Singh mused on the Cantonese love for gambling. “The amazing thing about the Chinese is that people both make much money and gamble,” he said. “They’ll bet thousands and thousands, lose, and still be very happy. It can’t be just the money.”

At the far side of the track stands what is claimed to be the biggest TV screen in the world, on which races are displayed; between races, there is satellite transmission of track action from England or Australia. “We are too busy to go to the Melbourne Cup and the other big races abroad,” one racing official told me, “because we are feverishly organizing the TV hookup and betting on them right here.”

It isn’t even necessary for would-be bettors to come to the track. Deep in the bowels of the large stand at Shatin, 1,600 clerks with earphones sit at TV terminals accepting bets by phone. Above the screens, stickers proclaim, “Good Service Is the Policy of Our Jockey Club” and “Be Polite, Be Gentle to the Customer.” Manager David Lam told me it is the biggest such facility in the world; 450,000 people have accounts into which they have put a deposit. They call in with their code number and place their bets. A dowager calling from the exclusive Peak district above Victoria is so nervous about her large bet that she drops the phone. A young stockbroker places his bet in a monotone voice from a cellular phone on a ferry as he goes home from his office to Kowloon.

A great Hong Kong racetrack character, Frank Knight, a large man of British origin dressed in a natty beige suit, welcomed me to the Golf Club Box. Chinese and Westerners sat at tables laden with chicken and oysters and caviar, poring over programs and the racing pages of the Chinese- and English-language newspapers.

Do drinking and betting go together, I asked Knight as he ordered wine. “Not generally,” he said with a grin, “but because we just won that race we’ll have a glass of champagne.” I asked if he made much on the just-concluded race. “Enough to keep the wolf from the door,” said Knight, who has been betting on races for 41 years, 16 of them in Hong Kong. “I’ve got a 9-year-old wolf to look after.”

As I looked out the windows to the hills of Shatin, everyone had grown silent, nervous about the fifth race. I retreated to the food table and took a plate of oysters so that I wouldn’t intrude on the serious betting atmosphere.

“We’ll need to pray for this one,” a Chinese businessman said to his wife. “It’s going to be a photo finish.” A tip for the race was passed on to a lady in a broad pink hat. She rasped, “I’ve heard the whisper about that, but I’m not convinced.”

Frank Knight came over with a champagne glass in his hand. “Look at this sixth race now,” he said, pointing me to the TV screen. Ten million dollars had been bet for a win, 4 million for a place. Comparing racing venues around the world, Knight said the Thoroughbreds are better in Australia, but nothing equals the Hong Kong Jockey Club for excitement over betting.

“Do you win all the time, Frank?”

“Nobody wins all the time,” Knight replied in a flash. “Otherwise you wouldn’t gamble.”

The Cantonese will bet on almost anything--even, literally, on crabs crawling along an alley. They gamble, no doubt, because in the tight confines of Hong Kong there are limits to the range of leisure activities. And, for some, the advent of Chinese Communist rule in 1997 no doubt spurs a desperate last-ditch effort to make money, by whatever means, in order to buy mobility if life under the Communists turns out to be as bad as most expect it will be. Beyond all this, though, I believe that gambling provides the calculating and industrious people of Hong Kong with a necessary periodic plunge into the irrational. And I suspect that the many colorful festivals that dot the Chinese lunar calendar serve much the same purpose.

Chinese New Year in February is the great family festival. Ching Ming in the spring is a time to visit, clean house and bestow food upon the graves of relatives. The Dragon Boat Festival in June offers boat races in honor of the 4th-Century BC poet Chu Yuan. The Ghost Festival (Yue Lan) is dedicated to giving food, wine, entertainment and paper money to hungry ghosts who temporarily come out of hell to wander the Earth during the seventh lunar month; the offerings stop them from doing harm to living persons.

In May, Hong Kong is diverted by the Cheung Chau Bun Festival, which celebrates the birthday of Pak Tai (“Northern King”), the leading god of Cheung Chau island. For another look at irrational Hong Kong, one golden afternoon I took a ferry from Victoria to this charming island. “Please Do Not Gamble on the Ferry” say notices on board the crowded boat, where many people play cards (some, I think, for money). After an hour’s ride, we reached Cheung Chau, home to tens of thousands of Chinese fishermen plus 200 or so expatriates. No cars or motorized vehicles of any kind are allowed on the island--except the local firetruck.

The smell of salty squid drying in the sun assailed my nostrils. The sounds of drums, cymbals and trumpets pierced the air as a procession of lion dancers and Taoist priests in red robes appeared. Floats bore children on ingenious frameworks of metal and bamboo, each boy and girl heavily made-up as a figure from Chinese folk tradition. At Pak Tai Temple, the seat of the festival, thousands of steamed buns--meat-filled dim-sum-style dumplings--were stamped in red with characters for good luck and good health and tied on three 60-foot-high bamboo poles. A theme of the Cheung Chau Bun Festival, as of many Chinese festivals, is feeding and placating respected but potentially menacing deities. Huge papier-mache figures of three such gods stood near the temple: Dai Sze Wong, with horns on his head, is the god of the underworld. Kei Kung, with a pale, resigned face, is the household god. Shang Shang, with a crimson visage, is the god of earth and mountains. After nightfall, all three figures are burned--symbolizing their return to the world of the spirits--and the buns taken down and eaten.

The Royal Jockey Club and the festivities on Cheung Chau give me a different sense of Hong Kong. East and West blend here: Intermarriage between Chinese and Westerner passes without notice; everyone moves with ease between chopsticks and knife and fork. “East and West are not in love with each other,” Japanese movie director Mitsuo Yanagimachi once observed, “but in Hong Kong, East and West are having sex.” In a nicely mixed-up fashion, perhaps Western rationality and Eastern mysticism have found a mutual attraction in Hong Kong.

The yin and yang paradox of Hong Kong brings us back to the devastating certainty of 1997. Face to face with the impending Chinese Communist takeover, the Hong Kong citizen is like the bettor at Shatin or the worshiper at the Temple of Pak Tai. The biggest gamble Hong Kong people have to make is on the course of development in China: By 1997, will Beijing be as repressive as it is today, boding ill for the colony, or will it be freer--even perhaps free of communism altogether--allowing Hong Kong to continue its life somewhat as before? Perhaps the rational and the supernatural are not so far apart after all, if 1997, not yielding to any computer’s analysis, calls for a bet or a prayer. As that year approaches, body and soul may converge.

GUIDEBOOK: IRRATIONAL HONG KONG

At the track: The racing season at the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club in Shatin runs from September to May. The daily South China Morning Post gives details of upcoming races. Go well before the first race to ensure admittance. Admission to the public areas is about $1.25, and the Off-Course Betting Center, near Star Ferry, can organize guest admission to the members’ enclosure for foreigners who present their passports.

The Bun Festival: In 1992, this will take place sometime between May 3 and 17. Call the Hong Kong Tourist Assn. (213-208-4582) in late February for exact dates. Ferries run almost hourly between Victoria and Cheung Chau Island. Phone the Hong Kong and Yaumatei Ferry Company (local telephone 5-423081) for exact times. Fares are approximately 80 cents (lower deck) and $1.30 (upper deck) on weekdays and on Saturdays before noon and $1.30 and $2.30 respectively on Saturday afternoons, Sundays and holidays. Small hotels on Cheung Chau offer overnight accommodations.

Where to Stay: On Hong Kong Island, the centrally located Hong Kong Hilton, 2 Queens Road (for reservations call 800-445-8667); in Kowloon, the Ambassador Hotel, 26 Nathan Road, Tsimshatsui (telephone 011-852-3-666321).