Living in Hong Kong
We lived, until the end of 1998, on the campus of the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology on the northeast coast of the Clear Water Bay Peninsula, in east Kowloon. My husband, Stuart, was employed in public relations at HKUST and we chose to live in that bucolic setting, rather than in the dense urban atmosphere afforded by my institution downtown. The snapshot here illustrates the view from our flat, looking northeast toward the Sai Kung Peninsula and beyond toward the Guangdong foothills. For a detailed and scaleable view of this situation, you can visit the dynamic GIS mapping application Centamap, created by the Survey and Mapping Office of the Hong Kong Lands Department. Starting from the 1:300,00 view at zoom level 8, look due northeast from Hong Kong Island. Place the crosshairs (click) just above the "ng" of Tseung Kwan O. You will now be in a 1:80,000 view (level 7). Relocate the crosshairs, moving a short way northeast again, to just below the "Po" of Tai Po Tsui. You will now find yourself in the 1:25,000 view with crosshairs centered upon the HKUST campus.
During my first year of teaching in Hong Kong we were actually a commuting couple, visiting back and forth between there and Honolulu. Taking a job in Hong Kong had represented, for me, an opportunity to revisit my fieldwork in Yunnan and to participate, as time allowed, in academic exchanges with scholars and consultants in Beijing who had graciously assisted in my dissertation research. In the event, however, teaching and administrative obligations at the Hong Kong Polytechnic rarely permitted me to capitalize on the close proximity to China. But I am grateful, now, that I was able to launch four additional trips to Yunnan from Hong Kong, allowing me to recheck data collected earlier and to extend my research to include participant observation at a corpus-building symposium on the Bai language held in Kunming.
Local Culture & Diversions
My days in Hong Kong were mainly spent in staying afloat in a punishing 14-hour lecture schedule. Later, negotiating the gruelling workdays that are part and parcel of law firm culture everywhere, I learned a different type of endurance as a legal translator. Both my jobs left little time for research, yet looking back I see the time spent in England's last colony as irreplaceable and all-too-short. I feel lucky to have been able to witness the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, a heartwrenching yet exhilarating experience, no doubt, for everyone who lived and worked through the transition.
Busy schedule notwithstanding, really just the norm for everyone in Hong Kong, as an affiliate of the Centre of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong I kept in touch with local and visiting scholars, attending as many colloquia on the local language, culture and society as I could manage, and occasionally learning about research by visitors to or from China. You can catch the flavor of "Hong Kong scholarship" in English over the past 40 years by glancing through the contents of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, which despite its colonial origins remains a vital organization even today. During our last three years in Hong Kong, too, I served on the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, an endeavor that allowed me to keep up with the local community of linguists through the organization's program of publications and research forums. In preparation for the LSHK's tenth Annual Research Forum, I designed and coordinated the production of an LSHK anniversary coffee mug, and I take pleasure in knowing that many colleagues in Hong Kong today still use their LSHK mugs daily.
Recreation & Travel
Aside from my field trips, we did find opportunities to travel only for pleasure, squeezed in as a function of getting "home" to the US to look in on Roberta. In fact from 1994 onward, my trips to Connecticut were planned at about six month intervals, in response to my growing awareness of the need to impose unobtrusive supervision from our remote location. The future demands upon us had not yet been fully faced, and thus we enjoyed several carefree romps en route either to or from North America: an auto tour launched from Edinburgh, up and around the northwest coast of Scotland through Wester Ross and thence to Skye; a similar automotive tour across Brittany, from Vannes to Loqmariaquer, to St. Malo and thence by train to Paris; and a post-conference folly by train from Paris to Venice, and thence eastward to the "Italian Riviera" for a magical trek through the villages of the Cinque Terre, of which our favorites were Portovenere and Riomaggiore. Perhaps because the travel industry was acutely competitive in Hong Kong, we were even able to work in several long-distance "weekend getaways" -- one to Kathmandu, the other to Florence.
And for local amusement, while on the job, we followed the comings and goings of international symphony orchestras. In 1994, we rejoiced in hearing the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Seiji Ozawa, perform works of Hector Berlioz in a series of memorable concerts; in 1995, the Dresden Staatskapelle visited on its tour of the Far East, and under direction of Giuseppi Sinopoli, won our allegiance to the music of Richard Strauss. These were peak musical experiences that have somehow become inextricably tied up with our memories of life in the incongruous city of Hong Kong.
