The Crown Colony and a Diplomat’s Son Leave a Happy Past Behind

We were four boys who knew our friendship wouldn’t last.

We might remain friends in letters, maybe even phone calls, and certainly in our hearts, but probably not in person.

We loved Hong Kong, but most of us knew we weren’t going to stay there all our lives.

Now I live in Thousand Oaks, where I watched the sun finally set on the British empire on television Monday, when they gave up my childhood home. Hong Kong may now be a part of China, but for me, it will always be free.

Remembering Hong Kong is easy. It’s a city of wonder and light, neon and candles, seaside castles and corrugated tin roof shacks, Victorian columns and soaring steel.

A place of great wealth, and great poverty, too. A perfectly sheltered deep-water harbor, where the world passes by each day in supertankers, passenger ships, aircraft carriers, ferries and cargo ships. And in jets coming to Kai Tak Airport, gliding over the harbor surface like gnats before landing on a runway that juts into the water, where junks crowd side by side or sail out for a day of fishing, red sails fluttering over faded teakwood decks. A few islands and a peninsula, separated from the most populous country in the world by a train trip or a long, treacherous swim.

That’s the way many people came to Hong Kong when I lived there in the 1960s and the 1970s. I was just a few months old when we sailed there in 1957. My father, a career diplomat who worked in embassies and consulates from Hamburg to San Salvador, was finally taking a permanent job as director of the Hong Kong office of the International Rescue Committee, a refugee assistance agency.

I went to English schools, learned rugby and cricket and soccer, and the words to “God Save the Queen.”

I met Stuart, Ollie and Mark there, and we became fast friends. We spent our summer days in Repulse Bay or at the latest Bruce Lee movie. Lee was a god to us.

We roamed the city of 6 million as if we ruled the place, from the financial towers and hotels of Statue Square to the swimming holes of Pokfulam to the pool halls and nightclubs of Wanchai. We drank beers with British soldiers and occasionally scuffled with them, too.

Stuart, part-Chinese and part-English, still lives in Hong Kong, and says he feels the way many others do--that maybe the concept is simple. Maybe it’s time to right an old wrong--that the British, who took Hong Kong 155 years ago in a war designed to protect their lucrative Asian opium market, should give it back.

He is the only one of us who still lives there. A journalist who had a talk show on Radio Hong Kong before moving on to a local magazine, Stuart never gave a thought to leaving before the takeover. He never wavered--he wasn’t going to abandon his homeland, even if this does turn out to be its darkest hour.

Ollie, with roots in Portugal and China, grew up in Hong Kong and lived there until he earned a visa to move to Canada three years ago. He lives in Vancouver, where he sells cars and seems to be happy and unconcerned with the future of the former crown colony.

When I called to ask him about it, he didn’t even realize it was time. He hadn’t even watched on TV as a terribly British ceremony ended with the Union Jack lowered and the royal yacht sailing off into the haze.

Mark lives in South Pasadena, but I haven’t seen him in years.

He got into the movie business as a makeup/special effects man. Every now and then I see his name on a list of credits, and I remember sweltering hot days and San Miguel beers on a clear-water beach.

When I went back to Hong Kong for a visit a few years ago, I tried to talk him into going, too, but he couldn’t do it. Or maybe he didn’t really want to see the place one more time.

If you’re in the refugee business, there was no place like Hong Kong. It’s been a beacon for people fleeing repression and poverty for a long time, including those who fled after the crushing attack on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

That sanctuary is about to shut down.

China was my father’s biggest customer when we lived there, and I don’t think much has changed.

Thousands of people fled across the border some years. Many died in the effort, either drowned swimming, attacked by sharks or shot by border guards.

In 1966, the Cultural Revolution began, Mao Tse-Tung’s effort to cleanse the country of impure thought. He called it the blooming of 100 flowers. All I saw was bodies floating down the Pearl River into Hong Kong Harbor.