Under the Baobab Tree

Kowloon is totally different from Hong Kong. It's like Newark is to Manhattan. Or Mohandeseen is to Cairo. Or Setubal is to Lisbon. Or Nantes is to Paris. Industrial, working class, not posh. But still fascinating in its own way. We ate lunch at the Intercontinental which is right on the harbor and has stupendous views of Hong Kong and Victoria Peak. It reminded me of eating pigeons at a restaurant we used to go to on on the Nile in Cairo. The glare off the harbor was harsh and we watched squinting out the plate glass windows at the gray industrial life of the port of Hong Kong and the occasional Chinese junk pass back and forth. Our partner had been born and raised in Kowloon as the son of a man who runs a local Chinese brokerage company and he was very proud of the working class background of the neighborhood. He ordered our food for us -- courses and courses of Japanese food that included sea cucumber (tasty!) and yellowtail fish with slices of jalapeno peppers and some kind of remarkable shrimp number and endless other things.

Then he drove us to a meeting we had with a Kowloon toy magnate. An ancient old man who we were meeting with through the services of a liaison company called, appropriately, The Bridge. We picked this man's brain about how he thinks the Hong Kong toy manufacturing industry is dealing with the new US regulations on toy safety. We learned enough to conclude that an awful lot of people in the Chinese toy industry are crooks. Yes. Very unlikely that the Chinese government censors will let us say anything about that in our presentation tomorrow. Sigh. The weirdest part of this meeting was that it took place in a conference room absolutely packed with toys. We sat on replicas of ancient Chinese chairs as Zhu Zhu pets and Spongbob Squarepants dolls stared maniacally at us from the walls. At one point in the meeting, an invisible breeze upset a Zhu Zhu pet and it fell, silently and in slow motion, off the glass shelf and landed as if in a time lapse movie on the plush carpeted floor. Everyone paused, turned to look, and then went back to business.

But the best part of the day was back to Hong Kong for dinner at The China Club with five our partners here. The China Club is amazing -- a four story private club on top of the original Bank of China building which is a fabulous colonial affair made of white stucco and mahogany. The China Club is straight out of the 1930s -- dark uneven hardwood floors, soft yellow lighting, the faint smell of mothballs and mold like one's grandparents' house might have smelled, warm breezes blowing down the halls through the mullioned windows, damask-covered arm chairs, creaky furniture, rooms opening on rooms opening on rooms, a dining room that reeks of tropical flowers to a point that is almost, but not quite, unbearable, waiters serving gimlets and Peking duck on silver platters, a long bar designed like an old ocean liner, a big creaky, mothbally library filled with early 20th century hard back books and leather-backed chairs, one of which was Winston Churchill's favorite. And an amazing rooftop bar with views over everything including the new Bank of China building, which is the I.M. Pei building you see in pictures that has the giant white triangles on it. The walls of this club are covered with modern Chinese art. Which is arresting. Not an inch of wall space is unadorned. Some of it looks pretty Maoist, some of it looks like that Mexican painter Botega, some of it looks like Van Gogh, and some of it looks just plain contemporary. There is an acerbic portrait of Prince Charles wearing a comedy mask, for example.