Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong

 

Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong by Vaudine England was an insightful history of Hong Kong, but not told with a primary Chinese or British colonial focus. Instead, England wrote about those who came to the port city in the middle of the nineteenth century who helped establish the community. Hong Kong wouldn’t be the place it is today without the Portuguese, Armenian, Jewish, Indian, Parsi and Malay immigrants who sought a better life. England told the stories of these immigrants and their descendants, the Eurasians, a term that had first been used as a pejorative. She went to great lengths at the beginning of the book to explain the term and to differentiate its pejorative and neutral connotations and its evolution to an elite class and a term of pride.

As Hong Kong grew, different ethnic communities flourished. They mixed in social milieux and England refuted the claims that the international community only intermingled in the marketplace:

“The result when all these varied peoples and practices collided was bound to be rough and ready. Imagine a frontier town settled by such distinct and different cultures, combining ideas and practices from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean to Malay river ports, coming up against Chinese habits and a numerically insecure but militarily strong Britain. Such freedom must have been exciting, yet there was little time to think about it, as docks had to be built, warehouses filled, and ships dispatched. As Hong Kong was settled, some British would cling desperately to a notion of a white, ordered society. But Hong Kong’s hybridity would prove irrepressible. This was perhaps no true melting pot, but rather a glorious mosaic.”

England drove home the point repeatedly that Hong Kong history has been “whitewashed”, leaving only two official and distinct histories, coming from the Chinese and British. Yet she asserts that the core community was neither entirely Chinese nor British, but a mixture of both, and more:

“Many are the histories and sweeping claims made about racial segregation in empire, asserting that the British and the Chinese had no intimate connection–yet they were sleeping together most nights.”

Hong Kong history has ignored all but the Chinese and British sides and the author wrote of dozens of families from all over the world who settled there to make their fortunes. Many of the top companies that are still in business today have roots outside of China or Great Britain. England mapped out elaborate family histories and the pages resembled Genesis chapter 5 with generation after generation of names. This was the only part of the book I found the most tedious. A family tree flow chart would have been more appropriate. If I could look at a diagram I could place the names in an easier-to-understand context. Since I am not of Chinese or Parsi descent and am unfamiliar with these nationalities’ nomenclatures, the similarity of these names was confusing and after a while my eyes glossed over all the personal names. That is my only complaint about this book: there were simply too many names to keep track of.

In the earliest days of Hong Kong’s history as a British Crown colony, settlers–overwhelmingly men–arrived from all over the world. England cited census figures to show that the the sex ratio was seriously skewed. In order to satisfy the libidos of thousands of young men, brothels were established. A generous photo insert showed the brothels along Spring Garden Lane in the 1920’s. A client could find any kind of woman he wanted: Chinese women for Chinese men; Chinese women for European men; other nationalities; all with varying degrees of sophistication. Many men led double lives, with families left back in their home countries and additional children with a Chinese wife in Hong Kong. The author was sensitive in her depictions of these women’s–and girls’–lives, often sold into sexual servitude, but also wrote of the “protected women”, who lived affluent lives as the partners of wealthy (usually western) men. There was no shame amongst those who shared their lives with protected women, and they and the women themselves mingled with high society.

England covered the period of Japanese occupation during World War II, and the efforts to evacuate Hong Kong citizens. Discriminatory policies, often contradictory and impossible to enforce with so much ethnic intermixing, enabled some people to leave the city while others had to remain. Some people of mixed race may have had more western physical features but lived, dressed and spoke Chinese, regardless of what their name was. Some people “flipped” nationalities to whatever was the more convenient at that time.

I knew hardly anything about Hong Kong before I read this book, and was unaware of its multicultural background. The author created a more accessible history brought into the present when she interviewed descendants who told their family stories, passed down through generations. England also wrote about more recent events since the colony was transferred back to PR China in 1997, and the ensuing threats to democracy.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue