Tag Archive Hong Kong

ByGD

Family Travel During Civil Unrest

{I wrote this post in December, 2019, within a couple weeks of returning from Hong Kong. Maybe I still had jetlag, because I found it in my Drafts folder a year after the pandemic erased American awareness of Beijing’s destruction of democracy in Hong Kong 25 years ahead of schedule. Anyway, troubled times don’t seem to be going away, so the topic may continue to be relevant. You know, once leaving the house at all stops being controversial.}

On November 24, 2019, Hong Kong held its local elections as scheduled. Normally, that would not be news. Hong Kong has held peaceful local elections for decades, and the results don’t decide very much. But this year, the elections came in the midst of six months of nonstop protests involving tens of thousands of residents. In the month leading up to the elections, two people had been killed and one had been shot. Clouds of tear gas as thick as the smog that blankets other Asian cities filled the streets.

On November 24, 2019, my family flew into Hong Kong on holiday.

Restive Travel

On 9/11, one of the first things I thought when coherent thought became possible after seeing the news was, “Will the school cancel my trip to India?” There was some back and forth about it, but the school went ahead with the program. On Dec. 26 that year I boarded a plan bound for Asia. I visited four countries before returning home on Easter weekend. Security everywhere was heightened, so it was probably the safest time I could have traveled. And it was probably the last time that being an American abroad elicited good will from strangers.

On that same trip, I had a week free from classes for individual travel. Against all advice, I went to Sri Lanka. This was almost exactly six months after the Tamil Tigers had attacked the international airport in Colombo. I spent my week in Colombo and Kandy, where the only signs of the war were the beggars’ missing limbs. The only threat to my safety was the advances of a Tamil-Sinhalese boy with mistaken ideas about Western women. There’s probably something literary about that.

Hong Kong

It’s one thing to travel to elevated risk areas and it’s another to drag your kids into them. We bought our tickets to Hong Kong on June 6, hours before the silent lawyers’ protest appeared in the news. But even if I had known about it, it would not have affected my decision. Hong Kong has a long and robust history of peaceful protest, and their police were once considered some of the most competent and humane crowd control agents in the world. There had been two or three protests against the extradition bill before this one, and there was no reason to suspect that the issue would not be resolved long before our Nov. 23 departure.

Of course that’s not how it worked out. Six days later, a huge protest ended in chaos, hospitalizations, and arrests. Over time, the extradition bill was cancelled, but protester demands grew to five, not one less. Police got real free with the tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons. To Americans, inured to police shootings, the police in Hong Kong didn’t look so bad. But to Hong Kongers, this level of police violence was appalling. To everyone, the specter of Tiananmen Square loomed over the whole situation. At any time, Beijing could choose to send in the Chinese Army, and there would be nothing anyone could do about it.

Discovery Bay

Although the rising violence of the protests made me nervous, I knew that ultimately my family would be safe. The purpose of our trip was martial arts. My daughters’ teacher studied kung fu in Hong Kong years ago when she lived there. Every few years, she brings her students back with her to meet her teacher, learn directly from him, and show him what she’s taught them.  

Discovery Bay is essentially a gated community of mostly expatriates on Lantau Island. It’s almost a different world from Hong Kong proper. There have been no protests there. The international airport is located on Lantau; our AirBnB and the training were in Discovery Bay. We could spend our whole trip on Lantau. Perfectly safe.

Holiday in Cambodia

Even as a kid, I knew the song “Holiday in Cambodia,” was provocative. In the 80s, Cambodia was synonymous with genocide. Holidays don’t go with genocide, or even with civil unrest. Right?

I read through the lyrics for the first time while writing this post, and … I guess the song is about me? The Dead Kennedys are challenging faux-woke privileged folks to get a taste of the real world. Or something. The lyrics, for being so blunt, are surprisingly opaque.

via GIPHY

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I’m the target. After all, I have had more than one occasion to examine the ethical implications of taking vacation in places that are experiencing existential violence. For this particular trip, I was terrified of finding myself with ringside seats to a civilian slaughter like some kind of Roman patrician at the Coliseum.

On the other hand, tourism and travel to Hong Kong dropped 40% this year, and in November, Hong Kong officially entered a recession. Normal people, whether they believe in the protests or not, are suffering hardships in the name of self-determination. Visiting Hong Kong at this time could be supporting its people. It’s a tempting line of reasoning. But I’m always suspicious when spending money is presented as the solution to a moral question. I tried to find evidence of how the people of Hong Kong would feel about it. Do they feel exploited or supported by foreigners who choose to visit during this crisis? I found nothing to either ease or confirm my ethical queasiness.

But ultimately, despite ethical doubts and shifting circumstances, the purpose of the trip was for my kids to study kung fu. They had been training for a couple years and were advanced enough to benefit from the exposure to a more senior teacher. Their sifu in Hong Kong is getting older, and had hinted at the possibility that he would not be teaching much longer. Their sifu in Seattle had hinted that if Hong Kong was turning into a different city than the one she loved living in years ago, she might not return again. This could be their only chance to train with a master in their style.

Plus, the tickets were nonrefundable.

Hong Kong 2019

As it turned out, pro-democracy candidates swept the elections, and the week we spent in Hong Kong was relatively peaceful. Although there were signs of the struggle, we were able to move about the city in safety, and we were able to see most of the things we wanted to experience as tourists.

The girls made tremendous progress in their training. The weather was perfect all week.

When I visited Hong Kong in 1995, it was still a British colony. At the time, my plan was to return in a few years to see how it changed under Chinese rule. To tell the truth, I didn’t like Hong Kong very much on that first trip, and nearly 25 years passed before I had a reason to return.

Nobody, even the protesters themselves, has very much hope that their five demands will be met, or even that they will come out of this conflict safely. Honestly, I don’t think there are very many people who can see the way out of the impasse Hong Kong and Beijing are in right now.

But I’m so grateful to have been able to see Hong Kong as it is in this, the actual critical moment of transition between before and after. I have so much respect for the people of Hong Kong who are putting their lives on the line to protect limited democratic representation and civil rights far short of the ones that we take for granted in the United States. I fervently hope their after is a good one.

ByGD

Getting to Hong Kong

At Thanksgiving my family went to Hong Kong. Fortunately, our trip fell during a rare week of safe travel. We visited during a lull in protests after the local elections and before the pandemic. Even though the timing of our trip was lucky, getting to Hong Kong was hard.

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ByGD

Discovery Bay – Home Away From Home

I have never come closer to cancelling a trip than last November. When I booked our tickets to Hong Kong, the protests hadn’t started yet. But in the two weeks before we left, the protests resulted in a death and two shootings. Visiting Hong Kong didn’t seem safe. Ultimately, we decided to go because we knew we had a safe base in Discovery Bay.

Geography

First, a geography lesson. Hong Kong is an island. The governmental entity called Hong Kong comprises that island, plus a bit of land sticking out from mainland China called the New Territories, a peninsula on the tip of that land called Kowloon, and 262 other islands. Most of these islands are small and many are uninhabited. But some are more densely populated than Hong Kong and one, Lantau, is larger than Hong Kong.  

Lantau Island

With much more land than Hong Kong, Lantau has many fewer people. It houses the international airport, Disneyland, the Po Lin monastery with its giant bronze Buddha, lots of mountains with natural forest and hiking trails, a few villages, and a couple urbanized areas, notably Tung Chung and Discovery Bay.  

Discovery Bay

Discovery Bay is exactly the sort of place I usually try to avoid. A privately-owned residential development posing as a community, the town is closed to all vehicles except public buses, a chartered taxi company, and golf carts. It is essentially a gated community. There are two commercial plazas and a ferry terminal connecting it to Hong Kong proper. There is only one Chinese restaurant. The population of 20,000 residents represents 30 different countries and includes a lot of airline employees. It’s essentially an island within an island. This is the stuff of my Truman Show nightmares.

But with such a large short-term and foreign population, Discovery Bay has been completely unaffected by the protests that rock the rest of the city-state. The expatriate enclave was also where my daughters’ teacher lived when she studied in Hong Kong and would be the location of their training while we were there. It was not my usual style, but it was a perfect base for this particular trip.

Strangely Pleasant

Because of its proximity to numerous hiking trails, Discovery Bay is as attractive to pet owners as it is to foreign residents. So there are almost as many dogs as people in Discovery Bay. You would expect a place like Discovery Bay (DB to the locals) to be filled with elaborately groomed, pedigreed, rare breed dogs. But there is a very active animal rescue group on Lantau, and the dogs at the end of their well-heeled owners’ leashes in DB were as motley as any group of mutts you’ve seen. I saw more limping geriatrics and tripod dogs in a week in DB than I would see in a month of shelter visits at home. It went a long way towards endearing DB to me, even as I couldn’t help but repeatedly reference the old TV show, The Prisoner. “I’ll be seeing you.

I didn’t take pictures of people walking their dogs, but I did snap this cute community garden.


The Plaza (and its smaller neighbor to the north, helpfully named North Plaza) also contributed to the strangely pleasant feeling. During my years in the green building movement, everyone was struggling with how to recreate the town square where people would choose to park their cars and walk around instead of driving between errands. Despite the myriad golf carts, people mostly walked around in DB, and even on a Monday night (it may have helped that we arrived the day after happy election results) the Plaza was filled with families. Adults drank on pubs’ outdoor patios, children rode tricycles around, and people of all ages wandered in and out of the various shops and restaurants. It was a lovely place to relax in the evening and I can see how it might be exactly what a lot of people need after the overwhelm of a day in downtown Hong Kong.

A rare empty moment on the Plaza

The Greens

There is one big hotel in DB, and a couple more over by Disneyland, but everyone in our group rented Air BnBs in the neighborhood. Many of us ended up in the Greens – a series of identical skyscrapers with names like Greendale, Greenland, Greenvale, etc.

Sunset view of the Greens from outside the Plaza

Finding lodging in Hong Kong, or almost anywhere, actually, with room for 4 people – especially if it’s for more than a week and you really want two separate, proper bedrooms – is really hard. But we found a perfect 2-bedroom apartment in The Greens at a really good price. Then, weeks after booking and months before our trip, our host cancelled the reservation without explanation, and we had to start the search over.

This time, there were only 7 search results for the parameters I set, and two of them used the same pictures. We finally settled on an apartment that was technically more than we needed – and nearly half again as expensive as our original choice. But it turned out to be perfect for us.

Our Home Away From Home

Our apartment was a rare three-bedroom. The master bedroom, second bedroom, and the living room had views of the Bay, Hong Kong island, and Disneyland (which didn’t look like much during the day, but when the nightly fireworks shows are running, you can see them from our apartment). We even had a view down into the park where the girls practiced kung fu every day. We were too high up to see what they were doing, but we could tell when they took breaks and finished practice.

There were bunk beds in each of the secondary bedrooms. Our girls chose to share the room with the view. That left a spare room for storing suitcases, which helped us keep the living/dining room cleaner. My husband was frustrated trying to cook in the tiny kitchen, but for anyone accustomed to Asian apartments, it was actually spacious and well equipped.

Even though we got super lucky with the timing of our trip, and we were able to go into Hong Kong several times, we spent a lot of time relaxing in that apartment. With the glass doors to the balcony open, it was cooler in the apartment than it was walking around outside, and the girls needed lots of downtime after their training.

Travel Home

Maybe other people don’t do this, but wherever I travel, I imagine what it would be like to live there. When you stay in an apartment instead of hotel rooms, it’s so much easier to pretend you live there. I know it’s not the same thing as having a job and a commute and budgeting on local wages. But using the washing machine, navigating public transportation, and shopping at the grocery store give you some feeling of life in a place. I love the monuments and museums, too, but to me getting a sense of what a place feels like to people who live there is one of the best parts of being there. There’s no place like home, but home can be anywhere in the world.