Jan Morris once caricatured Hong Kong in a 1959 piece thus: More people live in Hong Kong that the rest of the world put together, and they make more noise than a million electric drills, and they work like automation, and their babies are beyond computation, and their machinery chitter-chatters away for twenty-five hours every day, and in their markets they sell every fish that was ever caught, and every shrimp that ever wriggled, and every crab that ever pinched, and their excellent shirts cost fourpence-ha'penny apiece, and there are five million Chinese for every European in the city, each one of them more energetic than a power station: and all these unbelievable paradoxes of prolixity and profusion are a lesson in the impermanence of power and the mutability of history.
It's not so far from the truth. Nothing reminds me so much of etiolated plants as HK people, all struggling to succeed on an overcrowded piece of rock where the most abundant resource is human power and ingenuity. So everybody is on the move, move, move here. If you don't squeeze past people in crowded venues, then other people will squeeze past you. When the Beatles wrote the hit Can't Buy Me Love, Hey!, a Cantonese version came out, set to the same tune, entitled Haang Fai Dit La, Wei! (Hey! Walk a Bit Faster). I think that epitomises HK so well.
Of course, manners get a bit, er, streamlined in the process. None of that lengthy Japanese patter. The difference is like heaven and earth. Most of the time you'll get just Thanks at the cashier, sometimes you'll just get your change in silence. Don't think though that HK people are rude or taciturn. If you are examining the goods, the vendor will engage you with a view to closing the sale quickly. But fear not, if you make your needs clear, you can be sure that they will do their best to find something that suits you. And after all that's what successful business is about, giving the customer what they want.
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