Of the dozens of liberty ports lodged in memory, none shines so brightly in retrospect as exotic Hong Kong. Thirty years ago, it was a welcome respite for Vietnam-weary sailors. After shackling their anchor chains to buoys, ships’ crews could forget about many of their normal duties. Mary Soo and her female side cleaners even came around and painted warship hulls for a price, thus relieving Navy men of a chore that rated with mess cooking at the bottom of the shipboard pecking order.
After riding a liberty launch ashore, one ran into an odd mixture of cultures. It was a city that was simultaneously British and Chinese, going back to a 99-year lease that the British exacted in 1898. There were cricket games; what could be more British than that? The government was British, and so was the China Fleet Club, the name of a decades-old relaxation spot for Royal Navy men. In the local English Methodist Church, the minister preached in an accent that had doubtless been imported from the United Kingdom. Indeed, the very designation of the area, as a British Crown Colony, stamped it as part of the once-great empire that began a series of transformations to independence in the wake of World War II.
And yet the real Hong Kong was still Chinese. Tailors in Hong Kong—and a ferryboat ride away in Kowloon—could make suits, slacks, and sport jackets during the few days a ship would be in port. Merchants were aggressive to the point of pushiness—implying that you had no choice but to buy their wares. Widely available were gifts for those back home: silks, perfume, and jewelry. Narrow streets downtown were a blaze of neon signs beckoning to visitors to part with their money. Inevitably some of the crew members found their way to what they called “skivvy houses.”
A car ride took one around the island, seeing a floating restaurant with a gaudy Chinese decor. There was the tramway ride up to Victoria Peak and the opportunity to look down on the grandeur of one of the world’s most magnificent ports. The Tiger Balm Gardens, built with the proceeds from sales of an oriental remedy, had a series of brightly painted statues of dubious artistic worth. Farther along in the tour was the far less attractive side—the hillside housing, the boat people, the slums of those who lived in poverty only a short distance away from the opulent part of the area.
The American influence was present as well, especially with so many servicemen, business people, and tourists stopping by on their visits to the Far East. The gathering place for many was the Hong Kong Hilton. The food was fabulous, including the only caviar I’ve ever eaten. (It was on the salty side.) Crewmen could rent rooms and stay away from the ship entirely for a while, especially if wives were visiting or single men got lucky.
At the top of the Hilton was an elegant, glassed-in restaurant. What a treat to look down on the harbor, which was glittering with the reflections of lights from ship and shore. In the background a band played a then-new song, “Strangers in the Night.” After a few dances, strangers didn’t seem strange at all. The mood was one that transported a man on liberty far, far from the cares of shipboard life or the horrors of time spent in country in Vietnam. You knew that the pleasures would end in a few days, but for the moment life had a magical quality.
The enjoyment of the time was enhanced when I went to Kowloon, on the mainland, to visit the home of American missionaries. They were friends of our family, people I had known as long as I could remember. The minister, a man named Sterling Whitener, took me hiking, including a climb up Lion Rock. It afforded a great vista of the harbor in one direction; in the other were dark, jagged mountains that he told me were “Red China,” in the terminology of the period. I recall a feeling of foreboding, as if this were something we should speak about only in hushed tones. This mindset was a legacy of having lived through the McCarthy era and the constant references to “godless Communism” as the incarnation of evil.
That evening I went to dinner with the Whiteners and got my introduction to chopsticks. Holding the top one like a pencil and the bottom one between the third and fourth fingers, I gradually got the hang of maneuvering them together to pick up pieces of food. It was a necessarily acquired skill, because the middle of the table featured a pot of boiling water. The trick was to pick up a piece of thinly sliced meat and use the chopsticks to hold it in the water long enough to cook. Combined with the other elements of the meal, the result was something akin to Japanese sukiyaki. The chopstick training took and is still useful. Evidently it’s akin to riding a bicycle, something you never forget.
I never will forget Hong Kong itself, despite all the changes that have taken place since then. “Red China” is now known by Americans much more politely as the People’s Republic of China. The country as a whole has opened up to American tourism, though civil rights violations still give our government considerable pause. But the mathematics of the passing years have inevitably caught up with Britain. The 99-year lease expires this summer, and Hong Kong becomes officially Chinese. One more light is being extinguished in that old British Empire upon which—in years long since gone by—the sun never set.