High tea at the Peninsula

Where else will you celebrate Handover Day?

My two friends, a Beijing-based Filipino journalist who and a British columnist once a big name in Hong Kong media, were in violent agreement when I suggested high tea at Peninsula Hotel lobby. July 1 was the 16th anniversary of the former British crown colony’s transfer of sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China and the city was in a festive mood.

I was the common link of these two gentlemen, total strangers whose memories of Hong Kong, like mine, date back to the early 1970s and 1980s.

Eric Baculinao and I are brods in the UP Alpha Phi Beta Fraternity and veterans of the First Quarter Storm. He transited through the former British crown colony in 1971 on his way to a long stay in China. For some 42 years it was his place of rest and recreation as a political exile and eventually as the long-time bureau manager of NBC News in the Chinese capital.

Glenn Gale I met through the late Max Soliven, a giant in Philippine journalism, whom the former first met in Manila in 1983.  Assigned by the Times of London to interview Imelda Marcos, he ended up a great friend of one of the regime’s fiercest critics. Many moons later, Glenn reinvented himself in Manila where he now works with various publications and has become a fixture in the social whirl just as he had been in Hong Kong.

Within a year of Glenn’s meeting with Max, the confluence of events saw Ninoy Aquino’s assassination, the sudden lifting of Max’s travel ban, and Glenn’s big career move to the South China Morning Post, to this day HK’s newspaper of record.

As the Post’s society columnist for years, Glenn was in the swim of things as Hong Kong morphed from a refugee and cheap labor center on the edge of Mao’s China into a gleaming Asian hub of multinational corporations and cosmopolitan expatriate life.

Forever in love with Hong Kong where Max and Precious spent their honeymoon in 1957, the Solivens were frequent visitors from 1984 to his last year on earth in 2006. Glenn was always Max’s sparring partner and the key to the highest circles of social, commercial and diplomatic circles. Max became a columnist of the Post and haunted the Foreign Correspondents Club. One night, Glenn brought Max and me to dinner at the very exclusive China Club on the top floor of the old China Bank building. It was understandably reeking with outsized oil paintings of the daughter of Deng Xiaoping, the Supreme Leader who brought capitalist progress to China and turned Hong Kong and Shanghai into megacities of finance and power.

I drifted into Max’s circle after the Gringo coup in late 1989, met up shortly with Glenn for the first time and we came to share many happy times in Hong Kong and Manila. Our hangout of choice in Kowloon was the Pen Lobby, always a study of understated colonial elegance with its distinct gilded ceiling decorations, white Carrara marble floors, huge urns of fresh flowers, and an incomparable band playing Viennese, Beatles,  and jazz music.

When I saw Glenn and Eric last week, the place was as usual a virtual Tower of Babel, every table taken and with a waiting line so long it was obvious people won’t be seated until dinnertime.

The chief waiter came by as we sat down. “Can we help you, Mr. Gale?” Glenn was still fondly remembered by the staff although he hadn‘t touched base for the last eight years.

High tea meant classic Ceylonese with milk or lemon and a three-tier tray of goodies from scones to cucumber sandwich and mincemeat pie, a caloric overload we couldn’t finish and had to take home in an elegant paper bag.

As always, civilized chatter wafted through the perfumed air much like in the old days, seldom louder than the melodies being discreetly played.

But things have definitely changed.

“Everybody here is from Mainland China,” Glenn observes as two designer-clad ladies lugging Chanel and Vuitton shopping bags sat down at the next table. There were hardly more than a few Brits in sight or just a sprinkling of white people. Gone were the Japanese hordes; Eric and I were the only Filipinos.

In the 1990s, this was the Hong Kong extension of the much-larger Makati Pen Lobby. In either watering hole, it was not unusual to catch glimpses of the De Venecias, Mitras and the glitzy folks our friend Maurice Arcache gushes about as Manila’s royalettes and creme de la crème.

The Pen Lobby wasn’t and still isn’t terribly expensive and the racial bias vanished long before the British Empire signed off from its last outpost. For my money, it’s a great bargain given that Hong Kong prices have gone sky-high and rival venues at the Mandarin, Ritz Carlton and Shangri-La cost even more and they’re on the other side of Victoria Harbor.

The real moneyed crowd may have fled to the other side over the years but we count among the Pen loyalists for its historic claim to location, location and location. This was the best place to contemplate Victoria Peak before skyscrapers mushroomed at its feet in the 1970s and even along its top ridge. Tsim Sha Tsui on our side was flat and ugly, crawling with refugees and tenements and closer to bustling Kai Tak airport.

With time on our hands, we were soon reminiscing on the Hong Kong we once knew and was now sadly gone forever. For starters, there was the once-stunning view outside the giant glass doors and across Salisbury Road that has been obliterated. We face the monstrous red-brick assemblage of the planetarium and arts center where once stood an unobstructed waterfront looking across the harbor to the Victoria skyline.

Moored on the pier were the walla-wallas or water taxis, which was the only way to get across late at night before the Cross-Harbor Tunnel was dug in the next decade. People commuted back and forth on the iconic blue-and-green Star Ferry, truly a meeting point of continents where Asians, Europeans, Africans, Middle Easterners and Euro-Asians came, sometimes in colorful native wear. Only later would the jeans-and-Benetton multitudes blur ethnic and racial identities.

All three of us came when the age of ocean liners was all but over and most people jetted into Kai Tak. The move to less thrilling but colossal Chek Lap Kok airport in faraway Lantau Island was then some three decades ahead.

Spectacular and dangerous were words that hardly describe the hair-raising experience of arriving and departing from old Kai Tak. Planes, even giant 747s, threaded through the high-rises of Kowloon before making a sharp U-turn to land  on the lone water-surrounded runway and taxiing back to the terminal. You took off by being catapulted toward Victoria, high enough not to hit the mountain range that was the backbone of the island and farther on to the open South China Sea.

You always wondered why the chaotic forests of neon lights down below never blinked; they were gaudy in color but stationary. Apparently this was decreed so that the pilots would not be confused or get wrong signals.

Glenn knew HK as the harbor tunnel and the underground train system (MRT) were being inaugurated. The established grand hotels — Peninsula, Ambassador and Miramar — and mid-range accommodations — Holiday Inn, Marco Polo, Grand, Astoria — were clustered in Kowloon. In Victoria, the upmarket hotel was Mandarin near the Star Ferry as well as the Hilton near the Peak Tram.

Until Shangri-La, Marriott, Hyatt and other five-star palaces came up in the 1990s, Wanchai was a sleazy quarter of crumbling piers and girlie bars once depicted in the Hollywood film, The World of Suzy Wong. The drab shopping area around Central and Admiralty soon became skyscraper country capped by the I.M. Pei-designed Bank of China and the futuristic Hong Kong Shanghai Bank building by Norman Foster.

“Lan Kwai Fong was made up of derelict housing and noodle shops,” says Glenn of the area just up the hill from Queens Road, the main drag of Victoria. “My friend Allan Zeman, a Canadian textile trader, transformed it into LFS, a maze  of chic discos and bistros that drew the growing and high-spending expat crowd.”

Needless to add, Zeman parlayed his limited resources into a huge fortune by investing in real estate before prices rose up to the stratosphere and a non-stop building boom transformed the colony into a metropolis of the future. Hong Kong became a metaphor for success and the world’s leading  market for Rolls Royce limousines, super-yachts and other toys for the big boys.

For Eric and our exiled Filipino friends of spartan China, Hong Kong became the place to stock up on basic grocery items and to indulge in western movies and creature comforts that were not available under communism until the great turnaround began in the early 1990s.

“We had to come here every month or so just to buy infant milk,” says Eric about a time that seemed unbelievably oppressive when viewed from today’s hindsight of  post-Maoist China brimming with consumer goods and luxuries. It was also their closest link to the Philippines, which they would not see for 15 long years or until the fall of Marcos in 1986. They would meet up with parents, relatives and friends who flew in from Manila or passed through on the way to and from the United States and other destinations.

What I remember most vividly was the week in July 1971 that I spent with a young Chinese pastor I met at a Tokyo conference. I boarded in his parish house in the midst of a densely populated low-income tenement area on the northern fringes of Nathan Road. Mostly refugees working in nearby sweatshops, people had cramp living spaces, which made them spend more time outdoors just to meet each other or eat at roadside stands.

I was horrified to go out for breakfast one morning and be presented with a plateful of boiled chicken feet. I didn’t want to offend my hosts and pretended to eat the awful stuff. I had become a vegan and it was an effort not to embarrass myself to death.

A decade later, in 1982, near the end of my exile in New York, I went back to a slightly more pleasant Yaumatei district. The grimy buildings were gone or cleaned up, the hanging laundry from the windows no longer too blackened by the soot. I had come to write a piece on boat people or minorities living in sampans clustered in foul-smelling typhoon shelters. They were refusing relocation to tenements on land to make way for yet another massive land reclamation project. A few years later, there would be no trace of the boat people and in its place would stand row after row of impressive public housing.

On that late December trip, I met up with Dad and my brother Paul for the first time since 1971. They flew in from Manila and on our first day we had a great time in Ocean Park and Repulse Bay. I saw a more affluent Hong Kong because we stayed with my expat friends Gary and Baby Olivar, who lived in Mid-Levels or between the Peak of the super-rich and the lowlands of the struggling wannabes.

In another six years’ time in 1988, just after I relocated to Manila following the fall of Marcos, I was hosted by another friend, Oliver Laurel, who moved from New York to take a cushy job in marine insurance. He had a whole house bristling with art with a small lawn and servants in hilly Happy Valley, near the racetracks.

I no longer identified Hong Kong with starving refugees and Asiatic squalor. It had become second to none in modernization and culture. Quite a number of my Filipino friends were part of this great surge to prosperity and the good life that was associated only with the western world not too long ago.

Unfortunately, I could not also ignore the highly visible signs of the continuing downturn of the Philippine economy even after Marcos was driven from power and democracy was restored. Year after year, the number of Filipino domestic helpers  surged until they were unflatteringly billed as a tourist attraction on Statue Square by the foreign media.

We could have gone on and on replaying our half-forgotten Hong Kong stories  until Glenn noticed that the lobby had almost emptied and he had a dinner to go to in a few hours.

Glad that we were able to squeeze four hours together, we could only be reminded of the common friend we all missed and would have wanted to join our company.

“You couldn’t have missed Max at that table,” says Glenn, looking towards the corner near the Cartier shop. “He always had his pipe on hand and he roared with laughter at the slightest provocation. From here, we would walk up Nathan Road to Sam the Tailor, who made suits for everybody including Bill Clinton. Max also spent hours at Swindon’s Bookstore some two blocks away. He always brought home a suitcase of books, paying excess luggage all the time.”

Eric knew of Max from way back as a student but they only met in the mid-1990s when Max made a trip to Beijing and I asked him to see Eric. Max came back bringing me a cute alarm clock with Mao’s face in it, a gift from Eric.

Max never lost his sense of grandeur and naughty, childlike quality. He was flattered to the gills when Glenn arranged to have him billeted in the royal suite atop the Peninsula’s tower extension. I was staying in the more affordable Hong Kong Hotel nearby. Max made it a point to give me a tour of his baronial digs, pointing out that its most recent occupant was the President of the United States.

To prick his balloon, I commented that, unlike Clinton, he had not arrived via Marine helicopter on the helipad one floor above. He could only grin in mock surrender.

But what truly impressed me was the humongous marbled bathroom in a floor-to-ceiling glass corner of the suite. It was high up in the sky with no building just as high or higher. You could bathe in your Jacuzzi in full naked splendor or stage an orgy and have no fear of being ogled to spoil the fun. Well, Max wryly noted, unless some stray chopper passed by or somebody with bionic eyes could pick out the X-rated action from across a few miles of Victoria Harbor.