Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (29 page)

Tanzania is one of those places called “developing countries,” as if the Family of Nations had teens, as if various whole geographical regions were callow, inarticulate, clumsy, but endearing, of course—you know, going through an awkward phase.

And that’s about right. Every twenty-four hours of Tanzania is like a crib sheet on adolescence. There’s the dewy-aired, hopeful dawn. All is beautiful. All is fresh. Then, as the day goes on, the dust rises. The noise builds. Everything is seen in a too-vivid light. The glaring inadequacies of life are revealed. Enormous confusion develops. There’s a huge stink. And just when you’ve really had it—when you’re ready to call for the International Monetary Fund’s equivalent of “grounding,” when you’re about to take the keys to the goat or something—the whole place goes to sleep for eighteen hours.

How a peaceful, uncrowded place with ample wherewithal stays poor is hard to explain. How a conflict-ridden, grossly overpopulated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.

Hong Kong is the best contemporary example of laissez-faire. The economic theory of “allow to do” holds that all sorts of doings ought, indeed, to be allowed, and that government should interfere only to keep the peace, ensure legal rights, and protect property.

The people of Hong Kong have been free to do what they wanted, and what they wanted was, apparently, to create a stewing pandemonium: crowded, striving, ugly, and the most fabulous city on earth. It is a metropolis of amazing mess, an apparent stranger to zoning, a tumbling fuddle of streets too narrow and vendor choked to walk along, slashed through with avenues too busy and broad to cross. It is a vertical city, rising 1,800 feet from Central District to Victoria Peak in less than a mile; so vertical that escalators run in place of sidewalks, and neighborhoods are named by altitude: Mid-Levels. Hong Kong is vertical in its building, too, and not just with glossy skyscrapers. Every tenement house and stack of commercial lofts sends an erection into the sky. Picture Wall Street on a Kilimanjaro slope, or, when it rains, picture a downhill Venice.

And rain it does for months. Hong Kong in monsoon season has a climate like boiled Ireland. Violent air-conditioning wars with humid heat in every home and place of business, producing a world with two temperatures: sauna and meat locker. The rainwater overwhelms the outgrown sewer system, which fumes and gurgles beneath streets ranged with limitless shopping. All the opulent goods of mankind are on display in an air of shit and Chanel.

It is a filled-in city, turgid with buildings. The Sham Shui Po district of Kowloon claims a population density of more than 425,000 people per square mile—eighteen times as crowded as New York. Landing at Kai Tak Airport, down one thin skid of Kowloon Bay landfill, you fly in below clothesline level, so close to apartment windows that you can watch women at bathroom mirrors putting on their makeup. You can tell them that their lipstick’s crooked.

There is no space in Hong Kong for love or money, at least not for ordinary kinds of either. A three-bedroom apartment in Central rents for $1,000 a month, but there isn’t room in any of those bedrooms to even have sex with yourself. The whole home will be 700 square feet, less than ten yards long by eight yards wide, with windows papered over because, outside those windows, a hand grab away, are the windows of the apartment next door. And anything you’re going to fix in the kitchen had better be something that can be stood on end—like a banana. This is how middle-class people live. Poor people in public housing will have three generations in a fifteen-by-twenty-foot room.

But when they come out of that room, they’ll be wearing Versace and Dior—some of it even real. Hong Kong is a styling city, up on the trends. Truly up, in the case of platform sneakers. You can spend an entertaining afternoon on Hollywood Road watching teens fall off their shoes. Over the grinding hills, in the blood-clot traffic, men nonetheless drive their Turbo 911s. The S-class Mercedes is the Honda Civic of Hong Kong, and for the soccer-mom set, a Rolls and a driver is a minivan.

Jesus, it’s a rich city. Except where it’s Christ-almighty poor. Hong Kong is full of that “poverty midst plenty” stuff beloved of foreign correspondents such as myself who, when doing a Hong Kong piece, rush from interviews with day-laboring “cage men” in barred flophouse partitions to dinners in the blandly exclusive confines of Happy Valley’s Jockey Club, where I could sample the one true Hong Kong luxury—distance between tables.

But those poor are going to
get
rich. Just ask them. You can call the old lady selling dried fish on the street on her cell phone.

The
bippity-beep
of cell phones all but drowns the air-conditioner racket. And each time a cell phone rings, everyone within earshot goes into a self-administered frisk, patting himself down to find the wee gadget. You can go weeks without talking to an answering machine, because you’re not really dialing a telephone, you’re dialing an armpit, purse, shirt pocket, or bikini top.

The cell phone has to be there, or somebody might miss a deal. Everything’s a deal. In a store you ask, “What’s your best price?” then “What’s your Chinese price?” and on from there. I was trying to buy a bottle of cognac in a little restaurant. The owner produced a brand I’d never heard of for $100 and a brand nobody’s ever heard of for $80. I got my friend Annie, who let fly in Cantonese, and we had a bottle of Remy for one dead U.S. Grant. “I didn’t know you were going to bring my sister in here,” said the owner. “
Hwa-aaah!
”

It’s a Cantonese exclamation halfway between
oi vey
and
fuhged-aboutit.
Which is Hong Kong in a nutshell—a completely foreign city that’s utterly comprehensible. It’s a modern place, deaf to charm, dumb in the language of aesthetics, caught up in a wild, romantic passion for the plain utilitarian. The only traditional touches are the catawampus walls and whichaway entrances dictated by
feng shui,
the art of placing things so as to ensure luck and not disturb spirits. One building in Repulse Bay has an enormous square hole in its middle so that a certain invisible dragon can get from the mountain to the sea. Knowing Hong Kong, it was probably a scam with a paid-off fortune-teller helping architects and construction companies boost their fees. Some of Hong Kong may believe in geomancy, but it was my local bookstore in New Hampshire that had thirteen
feng shui
titles.

Everything else quaint within reach in Hong Kong has been torn down. Just a few poky colonial government buildings are left. Landfill has pushed the waterfront a thousand feet into Victoria Harbor. Ferry terminals block the water views, and tides are cramped into a raging flume between Central and Kowloon.

The statue in Statue Square is of a business manager, the nineteenth-century chief executive of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Behind the square, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building itself rises. Here the local taste for functionalism has been carried to an extreme that arrives at rococo: a massy, looming, steel Tinkertoy of a thing with its whole construction hanging, suspension-bridge fashion, from eight enormous towers. Very functional, indeed, whatever that function is. Maybe to be expensive. It cost a billion dollars to build.

To the west is Jardine House, an aluminum-skinned monolith covered with circular porthole windows—Thousand Assholes, as it’s known. To the east is the I. M. Pei–designed Bank of China Tower—all big diagonals and tricky, skinny angles. Its purpose was to be the tallest building in Asia, which it was for about five minutes before being overtopped by Central Plaza a few miles away, and then by twin towers—the tallest enclosed structures in the world—being built in Kuala Lumpur.

A competitive place, Southeast Asia. And it attracts some types that can compete with anything I’ve seen. I sat at dinner one night between a tough-as-lug-nuts young woman from the mainland who lives in New York and deals in used motor oil—sparkling table talk—and a large and equally adamantine chick from the wrong side of somewhere’s tracks in America. I turned to the suicide blond.

“I’m uh arht cunsultunt,” she said.

“Come again?”

“Uh
arht
cunsultant.”

“That’s interesting. Who do you art-consult for?”

She named a large Saudi prince.

“What kind of art does the prince like?” I asked.

“Nineteen-cenchury reuhlist—you know, Uhmerican.”

“Any particular artist?”

“Andrew Wyeth.”

I’d been under the impression that Andrew Wyeth was still alive—rare in a nineteenth-century artist. And you’d think Hong Kong would be a strange place to look for one of his paintings. But who knows? They shop hard in Hong Kong. Buy hard. Sell hard.

They drink hard, too. On Friday nights, police are posted in the Lan Kwai Fong bar district because people have actually been crushed to death there during happy hour. Nobody takes it easy in Hong Kong. The only idleness visible is on Sundays, when thousands of the city’s overworked Filipino maids come to Central, spread cloths and plastic sheets up and down the sidewalks, and picnic in the least attractive and most heat-baked part of town.

The Filipino maids are Hong Kongese, too. They’re in Central because it’s practical to get there on the subways, trams, and buses. Hong Kong is a practical place, down to earth, or, rather, down to concrete. The complimentary city guide in my hotel room gave advice on pricing whores and noted, “Some of the conservative hotels don’t allow a man to toddle in with a rent-a-bird in the middle of the night. But as you can imagine there are plenty of ‘cheap guest houses.’”

In the window of an antique shop, I saw an ivory carving of the familiar row of monkeys:
SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL
; but this one had a fourth monkey with his hands over his balls:
FUCK NO EVIL
.

City of hardheads. City of rough tongues. You’re a
gweilo
right to your face, meaning a white goblin or foreign ghost or old devil or any number of other things, according to how it’s said (none of the meanings being complimentary). You can give back as good as you get, however (or try to, since
gweilos
are famously dim). For instance, the Cantonese really can’t distinguish
l
s from
r
s. “Ah, you ordered flied lice,” said Annie’s
gweilo
husband, Hugh. “That’s
fried rice,
you plick,” said Annie.

I met two women who seemed barely into their twenties but were the publisher and the sales manager of a prominent Hong Kong business magazine.

Publisher: “You’re really well-dressed.”

Sales manager: “For a journalist. We understand you’re a popular writer.”

Publisher: “In Japan.”

City of straight faces. I was looking at some animal figurines representing Chinese astrological signs. The ancient woman behind the shop counter asked, “What year you born?”

“1947.”

“
Hwa-aaah.
Year of pig! Good luck!”

“Oh, ‘Good luck! Good luck!’” I said. “That’s what Chinese always say to shopping
gweilos.
Stolen Ming dynasty grave offerings: ‘Good luck!’ Can of tuna fish: ‘Good luck!’ Lacoste shirt: Good luck!’”

“Not so!” she said. “Some years bad luck.”

“Such as?”

“Year of buffalo.”

“Which year is that?”

“This one.”

“This one” being 1997. I had come to Hong Kong to watch the best contemporary example of laissez-faire be surrendered to the biggest remaining example of socialist totalitarianism.

Hong Kong was (and to be fair to its new commie rulers, remains, for the moment) socialism’s perfect opposite. Hong Kong doesn’t have import or export duties, or restrictions on investments coming in, or limits on profits going out. There’s no capital-gains tax, no interest tax, no sales tax, and no tax breaks for muddle-butt companies that can’t make it on their own.

The corporate tax in Hong Kong is 16.5 percent of profits. The individual tax rate is 15 percent of gross income. Hong Kong’s government runs a permanent budget surplus and consumes only 6.9 percent of gross domestic product (compared with the 20.8 percent of GDP spent just by the federal government in the U.S.). The people of Hong Kong have not been paylings of the state. They’ve owned their own. They’ve been able to blow it, Dow Jones it, start a sweater factory, hire, fire, sell, retire, or buy the farm. (And there actually are some little-bitty farms in the New Territories.)

Hong Kong has never had democracy, but its wallet-size liberties, its Rights-of-Man-in-a-purse, have been so important to individualism and self-governance that in 1995 an international group of libertarian think tanks was moved to perhaps overstate the case and claim, “Hong Kong is the freest nation in the world.”

Free because there’s been freedom to screw up, too. Hong Kong has no minimum wage, no unemployment benefits, no union-boosting legislation, no Social Security, no national health program, and hardly enough welfare to keep one U.S. trailer park in satellite dishes and Marlboro Lights. Just 1.2 percent of GDP goes in transfers to the helplessly poor or subsidies to the hopelessly profitless.

Living without a safety net, people in Hong Kong have kept a grip on the trapeze. The unemployment rate is below 3 percent. In America, a shooting war is usually needed to get unemployment that low. The “natural rate” of unemployment is considered to be about 5 percent in the U.S., which rate would cause natural death from starvation in Hong Kong. But they aren’t dying. Although smoking is the city’s principal indoor athletic activity, life expectancy in Hong Kong is about seventy-nine years, compared with seventy-six in the States. And the infant-mortality rate is comparable to our own. This from people who consider crushed pearls, dried sea horses, and horns from the dead rhinos of Tanzania to be efficacious medicine. Even the babies are too busy to die.

Economic growth in Hong Kong has averaged 7.5 percent per year for the past twenty years, causing gross domestic product to quadruple since 1975. With barely one-tenth of 1 percent of the world’s population, Hong Kong is the world’s eighth-largest international trader and tenth-largest exporter of services.

I’m not exactly sure what “exporter of services” means, unless it’s fly-by dim sum, but, anyway, it’s a fine statistic and helped make dinky, terrifying Kai Tak Airport the third-busiest passenger terminal in the world and the second-busiest air-cargo center. And Kai Tak’s solitary runway sticks out into a container port that’s the world’s most busy of all.