Travelers in My Backyard

Travelers invaded my childhood. They were always there—well-heeled Westerners who stayed at the Peninsula Hotel; less affluent tourists from other hotels at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula jutting into the Hong Kong harbor; American sailors who poured out of battleships for their R&R, especially during the Vietnam war years; British and other expatriate hires relocating to their well-paid jobs as civil servants, university professors, medical, legal and other professionals, teachers in the foreign schools, diplomats and foreign correspondents.

I would spy them in the streets around my family’s home in Tsimshatsui from our top-floor penthouse flat’s open-air veranda. Our building, Far East Mansion, when first erected in 1959, was the tallest in all of Kowloon. It was featured in my Primary 2 civics textbook titled 社會, meaning “Society.” This was a fact my sister and I proudly told anyone who listened. However it was probably not glamorous enough, at a mere eighteen stories, for the Hong Kong Tourist Association to have featured it in their brochures back then.

International tourism is replete with marketing glamor: Pristine beaches at exotic island resorts afford peace and privacy, where everything is brought to the traveler by invisible local servers. Cosmopolitan cities of the world offer exotic dining, imbibing, shopping. And behind the walls of luxury hotels, restorative spas rejuvenate the body before it jet-sets off to the next destination. The traveler need not venture beyond the boundaries of their itinerary. The location, location, location of my childhood home was a district out of which most visitors and expatriates seldom ventured further north to where most residents lived. For too many global travelers, it’s all about destination, destination, destination for bragging rights back home.

Only the missionaries—and Hong Kong always had a large share of these visitors—seek out locals to offer consolation and conversion.

“No one needed to see those districts where ordinary people lived.”

As a girl, I was proud of my privileged perch, surrounded by this influx from the rest of the world. My father’s mining business and our Indonesian-Chinese roots with large extended families meant that travelers flowed through my home in a never-ending stream. Our home Air-B&B-ed itself, gratis, long before that concept existed. By the time I was eleven, I had become a creditable tour guide, especially for our Indonesian visitors who spoke limited English and no Chinese. The itinerary was generally the same: A short walk to the Star Ferry for the ride across the harbor to Hong Kong Island. We always rode first class, the ferry’s upper deck, so that the visitor could take magical memory photos. Once we disembarked, we would head to the Peak Tram—there were never terribly long lines back in the sixties, even on weekends—and we would ride to Victoria Peak so our visitors could gawk at the view. For the hardier traveler, we might do the mile-long ramble around the peak and pause midway at the hill. I loved to scramble up to its peak whenever our family went there on excursions. But most visitors were inclined to simply take in the view or maybe have a cup of tea or coffee at the Peak Café, its garden setting a green respite from urban grey. Then, we would descend and ride a city tram along the track that traverses from west to east along the harbor front. We’d rarely ride the entire track, however, because no one needed to see those districts where ordinary people lived. They only wanted the picture-perfect ones with grand colonial architecture and a bird’s eye view of Victoria Park; and to hop off at the lanes in Causeway Bay or Central, where shopping deals were found.

Globalization has been generous to my birth city. It prospered and grew and became one of the must-see destinations for the jet-setting party crowd and appears on many bucket lists. Prior to Covid in 2018, visitor arrivals had reached an all-time high of 65.15 million—in a city of 7.39 million. Since the new security law came into effect in 2020, the population fell by 87,100 when some residents took flight. Even so, this outflow was surpassed by an inflow of 91,938 travelers. Numbers tell a vicious truth: globalization means my city is inundated each year by many times more visitors than its actual populace.

When I returned to live and work in Hong Kong in 1992, after about a decade away in New York and elsewhere, I was daunted by that influx and how it had changed the city. My office was on Canton Road in Tsimshatsui, a stone’s throw away from Far East Mansion that still stood, as did the adjacent building, the Ambassador Hotel, although the latter long ago lost its harbor view when the Sheraton was erected in front of it. My family’s former home still had a harbor view, although the lower floors’ view had long ago been blocked by a multi-story car park. But the deep-water harbor had shrunk from land reclamation and the sparkling blue vista was replaced by a congested, filthy waterway. The verdant hills of the island, its winding roads lit by streetlights that were the fairy lights of my childish imagination had disappeared, pasted over by myriad buildings with lights that transformed the skies into perpetual daylight. Day and night were equally gray, the skies so polluted that it was difficult to tell the difference. And everywhere, day or night, the streets and public transport were packed full of travelers who jostled with locals. To live in Hong Kong meant to fly away at every opportunity to less congested cities or still-pristine beach resorts. Even the Rambler Channel flowing along Kowloon’s northwestern shore, where I used to swim from my girlhood and into my twenties, had been decreed environmentally hazardous to human health.

After waiting forever in line among too many travelers to take a nostalgic ride up the Peak Tram in subsequent years, I rarely rode it again. What had most transformed, however, was Canton Road, formerly Kowloon’s western waterfront. North of my office building along the extended, reclaimed shoreline were virtually all storefronts for luxury global brands, jewelry, electronics and camera stores, numerous restaurants most locals eschewed and several new hotels that dwarfed the likes of Far East Mansion. Plus a Hard Rock Café for the global party crowd. My mother used to buy fresh vegetables and flowers at the wet market on Haiphong, a street off Canton that led back to the district’s center, but now only a few stalls remained along with a few flower vendors. Travelers had taken over my backyard.

The Ambassador Hotel had since been demolished. It was replaced by a much taller commercial building, its lower floors a food court for all the tourists who must eat and rest between shopping and more shopping. As for the car park that blocked the view from the Far East Mansion, it was taken down in 2014—locals no longer have an affordable place to park in the neighborhood. My father used to park our car there for a monthly fee, and my sister who lives in Hong Kong always parked there whenever she was in Tsimshatsui. Even the Hard Rock Café is now “permanently closed,” as its subsequent relocations within the city did not survive, a victim of the tides of capitalistic fashion waves, like traveler tsunamis who arrive to ravage before leaving for the next destination.

In 2003, SARS hit Hong Kong badly and the city emptied of travelers. I was living transnationally by then, shuttling regularly between New York and Hong Kong and was in Hong Kong when the city shut down. Life came to a weird standstill, but for a local like me, the streets became avenues of heavenly peace. I got a call from an editor at the travel magazine DestinAsian who was looking to commission a feature on Hainan Island, “China’s Hawaii,” which was fast becoming the latest tourist hotspot. He assured me he wanted someone who could write a “real story,” transparent flattery, because he couldn’t find a real travel writer in time for his looming publishing deadline. Since nothing was open in Hong Kong I agreed, especially since they paid well, and the newly-opened Sheraton resort would comp my stay. I met the assigned photographer at the gate in an eerily quiet airport. There were hardly any passengers on our flight. A week or so earlier, I had flown in from New York to a noisy, crowded, bustling Hong Kong International airport. The quiet felt unreal, despite the welcome respite from too many travelers all of the time.

“But all my own travel…told a vastly different story.”

I have rarely written for travel magazines, but one of my jobs in the late 1970’s was as a publishing coordinator for Discovery, the inflight magazine of Cathay Pacific Airways where I worked in the marketing department. The magazine was published bi-monthly and my job was to track production, ensuring the photographs and copy in English, Chinese and Japanese made it to layout and design on deadline at the publishing company, all of which had to be coordinated with ad material from the sales agency. Each issue, I would scan through the proofs, gaze at gorgeous color photos of destinations on the airline’s route. Urban night scenes and birds eye cityscapes, exotic native people in costumes of their rural villages or island nations, and everywhere, the beautiful people who traveled. Readership appeal depended on stories that skimmed the surface of life in Asia, targeted at those who aspired to be the privileged class, meaning white or westernized local elites who could afford such travel. Exotica skims efficiently.

But all my own travel, whether for work at that airline or my other corporate and business jobs, or from years as a writer who traveled and lived in or spent long-ish periods in different countries, told a vastly different story from those in the pages of Discovery. While I certainly relished the luxury hotels I stayed at on business trips, and loved the sights, sounds and cuisines of every destination, what persists in my memory is much more about the people and their lives and what such travel encounters and experiences really mean. Exotica pales and fades under the spotlight of reality. Hainan Island, still relatively untrammeled and the flight path less traveled at the time of my visit, was already poised to transform into the next bucket list destination, destination, destination. Minority tribal groups sang, danced and performed in their colorful native garb, locals vied to pose for the photographer and everywhere people were busily selling trinkets, souvenirs, tchotchkes for visitors, stuff no one needed for real life.

Elizabeth Becker’s Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, published in 2013, is still one of the best books of immersion journalism on the problem of global travel. Beyond the gigantic carbon footprint of all travel transportation, beyond the destruction of local residential neighborhoods and industries to make way for hotels or businesses that cater primarily to tourists, beyond the crowds that overwhelm our shrinking world, there is the compromise of humanity that is irreversible. An ex-brother-in-law (Australian) who had traveled and worked around Southeast Asia, once regaled our family with stories of how dirt cheap it was to live in Malaysia or the Philippines in this town, or that village or beach, and what deals there were to travel around. A huge meal cost nothing, he said, while mooching off our family at home or in restaurants. He rarely contributed to my sister’s household expenses, but told you the price of every deal he was so very smart enough to snag, in Hong Kong or elsewhere. After fifteen minutes of his non-stop bragging, I finally snapped back, it’s only dirt cheap because those economies suck, locals are paid shit and must kowtow to foreigners, just so you get to lord it over them, which shut him up, temporarily, until my sister demolished his presence in our lives, permanently.

As devastating as Covid has been on the world, it has proven a weird respite from global travel. Skies cleared, a glorious silence allowed us to hear ourselves again, and worldwide, people reclaimed their cities, towns, villages and islands back from the madding, overwhelming crowds. In Overbooked, Becker’s accounts about Venice and the cruise ship industry are memorably horrifying. Venice is the city I used to dream of visiting, especially when I was young and hyped up on romance. Yet the descent of these giant vessels on the city’s tiny harbor, vomiting out swarms of travelers day after day after day, has transformed Venice into an unromantic, overcrowded and pointless destination, a city choked on people and fumes, a city that is sinking. My hope, post-Covid, is for Italy to impose far more stringent controls on tourism so that the citizens of Venice may reclaim their backyard. Then perhaps it will once again be a city for dreamy romance I can finally visit.

Yet even in the midst of a global pandemic, travel has already returned to our world. I conceded to one, short, domestic roundtrip flight since my last flight back to New York from Lisbon in 2020, right before borders shut down worldwide and I canceled all trips and stopped flying anywhere, either internationally or domestically. As of this writing, Hong Kong’s harsh quarantine requirements make a return impossible. However, I have already booked a flight to Greece, to where I last traveled in 1980 and spent almost a year trying to become a writer. Athens, where I once hunkered down in a tiny hotel on Peta Street near Syntagma Square, has transformed completely, as Google readily shows. I can no longer wander around a Parthenon without barriers to prevent a traveler from chipping off a piece of history as his souvenir. Of course, there were fewer travelers behaving badly then, although there have always been travelers who did, and who today are far more performative and unscripted on Facebook, Tik-Tok, Twitter or Instagram, because it appears to matter so much to brag to the world look at me and where I am!

What are the ethics for global travel today? It’s a difficult question to answer well, short of agreeing to never travel again.

The Hainan I did not include in my piece featured an ambitious young driver we hired who drove fast and kept dozing off dangerously at the wheel. He was exhausted from working far too many shifts, and being young, probably partying too hard as well on the promise of the good life to come on his island when it finally becomes that gloriously rich and desirable destination, destination, destination.

For a writer like myself who ponders many facets of transnational life, inextricably tied to travel, I can at most choose not to contribute glamor to the exotica of foreign travel in what I write. Childish notions simply must grow up.

In pondering my backyard, since overrun by the weeds of globalization, it is my fervent hope that the next generation will travel their world with eyes more widely open.

XU XI 許素細 is Indonesian-Chinese-American, born and raised in Hong Kong. An author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction, she is one of Hong Kong’s leading writers in English. Recent titles include This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (2019), Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories (2018), Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for A City (2017) and the novel That Man in Our Lives (2016). She is also editor of five anthologies of Asian writing in English, most recently, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, released by Bloomsbury in 2021. Forthcoming is Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations (Signal8uk, 2023). She is co-founder of Authors at Large and also established the Mongrel Writers Residence™ as a hideaway for “mongrel” writers like herself. She currently occupies the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. A diehard transnational, she has long split her life between the state of New York and the rest of the world. Follow her @xuxiwriter at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.