Hong Kong Here I Come
I lived 223rd from the left
As you might expect, when you move to somewhere with the energy of Hong Kong, you arrive and hit the ground running. First night I went out for a beer with colleagues, second night out for dinner with old workmates, third night to the pub, networking to meet new people. This was on top of meetings all day in the office to meet and greet as many people as I could, all the time fighting off brutal jet lag and the residual tiredness that comes from packing up your whole life and moving country within a period of a few weeks. Which, I know now, is a lot of tiredness – you have to try it for yourself to really understand.
Having arrived on a Tuesday, by the Saturday I had managed to get myself invited to a black-tie dinner being held with clients, an event that I made my mark at by getting drunk and disappearing off with one of the clients to the dodgiest of nightclubs until very late at night. This particular client was a guy who had worked in Hong Kong for thirty years and taken his retirement back in Scotland. He had then found that, after a year back home, he was bored, and had turned round to come back to Hong Kong to start work again, this time for the rivals of his first employer. Hong Kong has that sort of lure over people.
After that much time in Hong Kong, he obviously knew his way around pretty much every part of the island, something that he demonstrated by looking very at home in the nightclub at 4 a.m., particularly with all of the female attention that he was getting – as drunk westerners tend to do in certain Hong Kong nightclubs late at night. Even for a hammered Hong Kong novice like me, though, at that time of the morning it was clear that something strange was going on, and I finally headed for the safety of my hotel room.
First thing back in the office on Monday morning I was greeted by my boss of five days shouting, “Motey, I hear you were hammered on Saturday night!” I froze and thought of the potential embarrassment, professionally and personally, of being fired from my job and sent home less than one week after such a big move. Surely it could not be all over already? Thankfully, though, he just thought it was extremely funny, and he went on to tease and remind me about it for some time afterwards. Welcome to Hong Kong.
In my second week, as the jet lag began to fade and I began to settle into my new surroundings, I took a trip to the top of the Peak. Victoria Peak is the large hill that sits in the middle of Hong Kong Island, and at the top there is a big viewing gallery, shopping centre, and some very good restaurants, especially Cafe Deco – they make a mean Bloody Mary. You can travel up to the top by car, by walking if you are feeling energetic, or also by tram: the Peak Tram takes tourists up the vertiginous track every day. In fact, the track is so steep that it is a source of an amusing game if you have had a few glasses of wine at the top. Given the angle of ascent, as you travel, you can stand in the aisle and lean at what looks to be a forty-five-degree angle to the floor, without falling over. Makes for some interesting photographs.
However you have chosen to arrive, once you are there, the Peak looks out on one side over all of Hong Kong harbour. You can see the skyscrapers, the water, the lights, and on a clear day, the whole city shimmering in front of you. I stood there on that evening, with Hong Kong as my new home, looking out at the potential and the adventures that the city was offering me. Here was a new start, with so much to see, so much to do, so many new opportunities and new adventures waiting to be experienced. I felt the anticipation and the motivation coursing through me. This was my home now. I could not wait to get started.
Carrying on the enthusiasm for Hong Kong life that I had shown on that first weekend after I landed, I made a life for myself. I found a pleasant apartment to live in, I joined a football team, I began to explore Hong Kong outside of work and the pubs, and of course, I started to make friends. Work, though, took a little longer to build up, not helped by the fact that my direct line manager, Lawrence, had been fired the day before I had arrived, leaving me to walk into the office on my first day as the sole member of the team. I had expected him to show me the job, and not having Lawrence there meant that I had to represent the team in every aspect of the business, even though I did not really know much about it yet. Starting a business off from pretty much scratch had the effect that I had to market myself internally as much as going out to sell to clients, even when I still found it hard to articulate exactly what it was that we did. Thankfully, before long, a new manager, named Rita, joined, and she started pointing the ship in the right direction; she explained a little to me about what we were supposed to be doing.
As the team became more established, I started travelling. Our team was covering North-East Asia, with responsibility for putting together structured lending solutions (in other words, complex loans) for the Bank’s clients. That meant that we had to liaise with our offices throughout the region. First off I took a trip to Beijing, where I ended up in Tiananmen Square – feeling somewhat healthier than I had the first time. From Beijing I carried on to my first trip to Shanghai, and not long after that I went to Seoul and Tokyo also. Nice though it was to go to Korea and Japan, even within the first few months I had already realised that most of my trips would be China-related.
When I heard about that initial business trip to Beijing, it immediately brought back memories of 1995, when I had returned home from that first ill-fated trip there a few kilos lighter than when I had left. Even though I had stood on the Great Wall, China still seemed a long way away from home, and though I was now living in Hong Kong, it was with some apprehension that I realised that I was going back to the mainland, and indeed Beijing, this time to our local office. I was travelling with my colleague Robert, who at the time worked in Singapore and was my regional boss. I had worked for Robert for many years in London also, before we had separately moved out to Asia. In fact, he was the one who had called me while I was painting my wall, to offer me the job in Hong Kong.
The business trip went smoothly – no dodgy food or being sick in strange places this time round. We had some meetings, some better than others, but on the last morning of our time in Beijing, and with our meetings all done, we had some free time, so the two of us crammed into a Beijing taxi to go to Tiananmen Square to walk around. Getting in the taxi was no mean feat, as most Chinese taxis were and still are Volkswagen Santanas which have seen a fair bit of usage in their time. Even now the driver always has a cage around his seat, for reasons I have never really understood. Did they used to be victims of theft all the time? I wondered? Having the cage there meant that if you sit in the front passenger seat you are cramped up. Not that the back is any better, sitting behind the cage is not ideal for the taller gentleman such as myself, as more than one person in the back seat and my knees end up somewhere around my ears. And of course the cabbie has the radio on full blast.
Taxi notwithstanding, we eventually arrived. Here was I, seven years after first stumbling through the Square trying not to be sick, and now I was being paid to be there and to do business with Chinese companies. It took a while to sink in, and I turned to say to Robert, “When we started working together in London all that time ago, I never thought we would be standing in Tiananmen Square together one day.”
Robert smiled and agreed.