Batgung

The Talls have recently returned from a highly satisfactory trip to New Zealand. I won’t bore you with the tedious details, but I will expand upon one cultural comparison that came to mind as we enjoyed our visit.

I can sum up the constrast in one word: pace.

That is, on this trip I thought again and again about how much easier the pace of life is in New Zealand compared with Hong Kong. This contrast makes a trip to New Zealand so refreshing to someone like me, who’s from a small town, but who’s now lived in Hong Kong for many years.

But saying this is just repeating a cliché; everyone knows that mostly-rural places such as New Zealand are slow-paced, and cities like Hong Kong are fast-paced. In day-to-day situations, where do these varieties of pace show up? And what effects do they have on new arrivals in places such as Hong Kong?

First, let’s dispel a common misconception.

It has to do with walking speed out on the street. The conventional wisdom assumes that people from big cities like New York, London and Hong Kong stride smartly down the pavements, driven by the urgencies of their highly varied, wildly exciting lives. Small town folk, by contrast, saunter, stroll, amble and mosey, stopping altogether at points to hitch up their overalls and to insert fresh blades of straw in the gaps between their teeth.

Well, I missed a down-home memo somewhere along the line, because I find my walking speed is about double that of most Hong Kong people. I’ve explained elsewhere how this gets me in trouble in Hong Kong’s steamy summers. It also frustrates me no end in the crowds in Mong Kok, Causeway Bay, and various shopping malls. 

But the pace of life in Hong Kong really is fast in other areas.

One obvious example, especially noticeable on trips to places such as New Zealand and Australia, is the pace in restaurants – both in the service you receive and the way in which you’re expected to behave.

In Hong Kong restaurants, the speed at which you’re served typically starts at fast, and ranges right up to amazing. I can recall the first few times I was taken to huge Chinese seafood restaurants here, with dozens upon dozens of tables, sound levels through the roof, waiters glaring at everybody – but excellent food appearing on the table in an uncannily brief interval after we’d ordered.

This is not the case in antipodean countries (and, frankly, most other countries in general). Service is casual. In NZ, I found myself checking my watch plenty of times as food seemed (according to my spoiled sense of timing) inexplicably late in appearing. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, my ‘Time to Eat Now!’ clock goes off just minutes after I’ve ordered food.

Ordering itself, however, is the exception to this general rule. The odd thing about Hong Kong restaurants is that no matter how busy they are, no matter how stressed your waiter looks, it’s fine to take a good long time placing your order, complete with a long conversation about the evening’s specials, the freshness of the scallops, the suitability of a particular combination of dishes, and so on. But beware: you may be lulled into thinking that your waiter really wants to lavish time and attention on you, since you’re such a discerning and generally worthy diner. You are not. Once your order has been placed, good luck in tracking your waiter down ever again – at least until it’s time to pay the bill!

Even in fast food places, Hong Kong wins the service race hands-down. I submit as exhibits my own local Fairwood in comparison with the world’s dirtiest McDonald’s. For whatever reason, fast food restaurant staff in Hong Kong work hard and quickly, and simply don’t let things get out of hand, even though many fast food places here are utter madhouses.

So a fast pace has some obvious benefits in some areas – but maybe not so much in others.

For example, one of the things I enjoyed in New Zealand, and that I miss about my homeland, is the brief, but friendly and chatty encounters you can regularly have with service staff in supermarkets, gas stations -- just about anywhere. In Hong Kong, there's not only a language barrier for us expats, but so many businesses are often so busy that I feel a bit guilty making a transaction take any longer than necessary.

There's also a deeper sense of 'fast pacing' in Hong Kong that's initially hard to put a finger on, but that manifests itself in many ways. It's a sense that you must be doing something, that you must improve yourself, that you must make more effort to get ahead.

It shows up on weekends, when almost no one in Hong Kong would think of just staying home for a couple of days and not really getting much of anything done. It drives people to keep studying for advanced degrees long past the point at which acquiring another qualification will do their careers much good. It lights a well-stoked fire under parents whose children seem to be lacking sufficient motivation in pursuing their schoolwork and extra-curricular activities. 

This high-octane pacing is a big part of Hong Kong's frenetic charm, but it can also wear you down like a high-pitched background noise if you let it get too deep into your psyche.

Trips out of Hong Kong to slower-paced places do serve to remind us expats that life can indeed be lived on different terms elsewhere. And although on most days I go right ahead and mainline Hong Kong's lifestyle amphetamine, it's also good to go cold turkey once in a while.