Batgung

I didn't intend to come to Hong Kong at all. Instead I was heading to Australia courtesy of their working holiday visa. But, there was a lady I'd met previously in Canada that I'd taken a fancy to. She was living in Hong Kong, so I thought I'd stop here on the way.

Near to the departure date she announced she would have left Hong Kong by the time I arrived, but with the plane tickets already booked, I figured there was no harm in spending some time here. I left Britain on a frosty October morning in 1989, flying in to the old Kai Tak airport. I remember the bus ride from the airport to Tsim Sha Tsui (TST) through Hung Hom, all grey concrete with not a Western face in sight and me thinking "What have I done?".

Following the guidebook I was clutching, I headed for the backpacker's haven in TST, Chungking Mansions. I was quickly spotted by a tout and whisked up to one of the guest houses. Since I was planning to be around for several months, I started looking for a room to rent and ended up in Kimberley Street, also in TST. $2,800 for a room in an old walk-up building, shared with two other gweilos that I hardly ever saw. One was a DJ who slept all day then went off to do his DJ thing at night. The other worked in a hotel and basically lived there, just returning to the flat late at night with what seemed to be a different attractive Asian lady each night.

With somewhere to live, the monthly expenses were lower, but I still needed to find work ASAP. Cue that old 'White face in Asia' standby, and MrB was teaching English. Not very well. One lesson sticks in my mind where we were practising 'vocabulary around the house'. The conversation went something along the lines of:
MrB: "This is the bedroom, where people sleep, and this is the living room where we watch TV. Which room do you sleep in?"
Student: "The living room"
After repeating this sequence several times, another student who spoke more English put us out of our misery by explaining that the flat had two parents, five children and two bedrooms. Several children slept in the living room... Thankfully for all concerned, the teaching work didn't last long.

Now what I really, really wanted to do was write computer programs. Sad but true, I am a shameless geek, and in the UK had been a happy programmer. But, despite writing lots of replies to job ads, I had very few interviews. Was it that my skills weren't exactly right, I was asking too much, or employers worried I wouldn't fit in with a Chinese team? (Remember that at that time a UK passport meant no visa worries). I eventually found work by attending a computer show, and asking at any likely looking booths whether they had any work. One gave me a name to call, which turned into a lunch, and eventually a job to pay the bills.

I left around the middle of the following year, making my way to Australia via Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. During that time I thought how much I'd enjoyed living in Hong Kong, and how much speaking Cantonese would have helped. I arrived in Australia in Sydney (not the original plan at all, but there were some shenanigans getting flights out of Bali, so I ended up taking whatever flight I could to arrive in Australia before my visa entry date expired - I arrived on the last day!). A happy benefit of living there was that it had lots of people who wanted to learn Cantonese - some were second generation Chinese immigrants who couldn't communicate with their aging Grandparents, and the rest were Westerners who'd married into a Chinese family. So I signed up for an evening class in Cantonese, read my 'Teach yourself Cantonese' on the bus to work, and gradually picked up some basics in Cantonese.

When the time in Australia was over I headed home to the UK for a couple of stints as best man, got a job, saved enough to buy a plane ticket, and flew back to Hong Kong. That was in early 1992, and I've been here since.

How about you? What brought you here - and kept you from leaving?