Measured in Money

     Last March I spent a few days doing a lot of wandering around the Kowloon area of Hong Kong while waiting for our flight back to Minneapolis.  I remember feeling more and more overwhelmed and even sickened by all the retailing/banking/business activity just about everywhere I went.  It felt soulless and empty, and I was glad to leave it.
     On the flight over here last weekend, somewhere I read a native's comment on what she liked least about Hong Kong:  everything is measured in money here, she said.  That resonated with what I remembered feeling last March.  I thought of that comment again a couple days ago when I walked by this business pictured at right.  I should have crossed the street to see what exactly is displayed in the windows, but at the time I was just focused on the mocking name.
     One help for me in looking beyond the usual aspect of money in Hong Kong is a book recommended by our friend Colin Fong.  Gweilo is Martin Booth's memoir about living in Hong Kong as a child of a British civil servant in the early 1950's.  Booth weaves history and culture into his personal stories about places and people and adventures.  He writes, for example, about secretly exploring Kowloon Walled City, which his mother had told him was strictly off-limits because it was a well-known haven for the Triad, the Chinese mafia.  During the Communist revolution in 1949, not only did Nationalist Chinese flee to Hong Kong, but also Chinese gangsters.  Many of these gangsters enterprisingly set up opium dens and brothels in Kowloon Walled City, taking advantage of its being a virtual city state within Kowloon that was ruled by neither the British nor the Chinese.
     More later about Gweilo.