DAVID CHU welcomes China,
embraces chage, and lives to have fun

 

See related story: David Chu: Made in America

 

By Marguerite Del Giudice

t was hard to miss David Chu on U.S. television this summer during the marathon news coverage of the handover of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese. Koppel, Brokaw, Rather: Chu sat with them all. He was the buoyant real-estate tycoon and pro-China member of the Hong Kong legislature they showed peeling out on his custom Harley. Or surfing the wind in his motorized paraglider. Or slurping orange sections and litchi in Deepwater Bay on the bow of his sixty-eight-foot Bertram yacht.

Just days before the big transition on June 30, there he was on Dan Rather's 48 Hours, watching out for cops as he tore down Repulse Bay Road in his Day-Glo-yellow Ferrari, doing the Harley bit and posing for the camera with a couple of lame-duck democratic legislator friends, appraising the future of freewheeling Hong Kong under the controlling gaze of the Communists.

"What are the chances if I come back three or five years from now that one of you will be in jail?" Rather asks.

The liberal legislators wear faces that are dour and dispirited; disenfranchised. Unlike Chu, they'd lost their popularly elected seats last year to Hong Kong's business elite when Beijing reconfigured the legislature for the transition, with a promise of new elections next year-something the democrats don't buy.

Albert Chan nods. "Very probable," he answers with a downcast slump.

Chu looks at Rather. He looks at Chan, eyes wide, eyebrows arched. He beams. "Don't worry," he says to his friend. "I bail you out, Albert."

David Chu Yu-Lin, a fifty-three-year-old Northeastern engineering and business school graduate and once a teenage emigré from Communist-sacked Shanghai, is by far the most colorful politician and one of the most influential personalities in Hong Kong. He's also China's biggest booster. He believes that how things take shape in these delicate weeks and months after the handover will have more to do with attitude, belief, and trust than with anything else; even in the best of circumstances, anxiety has a way of creating its own disaster. So Chu seeks to engender a positive attitude at every turn, an excited expectation that Hong Kong will continue merrily on, making more money than ever before (is it possible?), and upholding its Fortune magazine title as the "world's best city for business."

"Watch," he says over and over, like a mantra. "Hong Kong is going to change China more than China change Hong Kong." First comes economic stability and prosperity, then political evolution. "You'll see."

The island's return to the fold after more than 150 years of British colonial rule-a protracted and crushing humiliation for the motherland-will amount, in Chu's view, to "a new beginning." But to those set on preserving, and advancing, the individual freedoms recently secured under the British, it's more like the beginning of the end. To them, Chu is just a harmless big kid with expensive toys, a vainglorious sellout whose empathy for Beijing derives largely from economic self-interest. The pessimists could see the opportunistic and bullying autocrats in Beijing tossing aside Chu-the self-professed "Man Who Bet Everything on Hong Kong"-once it no longer needs him and the pro-China publicity he manages to generate as effortlessly as breath.

You get your first taste of Hong Kong know-how at Kai Tak International Airport. Touching down, you kind of swoop more than land, descending with such suddenness amid the skyscrapers and high-rise apartment buildings that you fancy you can see people watching television in their bedrooms. Pure precision. Our big crowd descends on Customs, and officers in crisp sage green uniforms immediately begin waving us along from one station to another to another, until we have sifted into many lines of equal size that now pass as readily as oil through a funnel. It's on to the taxi line, outside just past the McDonald's on the left and the Häagen-Dazs on the right, outside in the still, bad, steamy air that hits you like a wall.

There must be 200 of us, with luggage carts, standing in the kind of endless snaking line that makes your heart wilt. But the taxis know their job, the uniformed wavers-in-of-the-taxis know theirs, and the passengers are ready to board the instant the cabs pull up-smoky, red Toyotas with beeping meters and beaded backrests and steering wheels on the right. There is no wasted time; it's the most crowded, fastest-moving line I've ever been in.

They understand congestion in Hong Kong, and how to manage limited resources and limited space very, very well; they are masters of the small. Which is why, in the end, says David Chu, China will outcompete America.

"You watch."

Chu sits at a round mahogany table with a marble top in the living room of his fourteenth-floor apartment overlooking Deepwater Bay, eating California peaches and thinking about his handover schedule-all neatly bound in an inch-thick binder of clear plastic sleeves.

Rehearsals, meetings, one interview after another. NBC on the yacht, ABC on the radio, the BBC and ITN down at the Mandarin Hotel, Channel 7 from Sydney at his place, News Asia, CNBC, Canadian Broadcasting, Asiaweek magazine tailing him for a day.

He doesn't need rehearsals, he doesn't need questions ahead of time. Anything he says is automatically on the record. And what with his paragliding, spelunking, pistol-shooting, hunting, and scuba-diving feats, his palace in Beijing and his experimental farm in south China, his candor and his readiness to pose, the man is made for TV. He loves attention and is a human quote machine.

"Any press approach me, if I have a time slot, I always take," he says. "I don't care what newspaper. Any, every. I instruct my staff: Anybody who call-even if he want to set a trap for me. Anti-China, anybody."

Where did he learn that? "It's my personality."

He doesn't even mind being misquoted! "I mean, there are so many people quoting me, there are bound to be misquotations," he says with pragmatism, and charity.

What about that article on Hong Kong by Paul Theroux in the New Yorker last spring? It had not treated Chu kindly, characterizing him as "loony and self-promoting" (though very possibly exactly how Chu sees himself, a "Hong Kong man of the future"). And what about when his political adversaries dismiss him as a puppet or a "verbal bouncer" for Beijing?

A tiny storm crosses Chu's face. He's momentarily perplexed, then shrugs it off. "My sense of worth does not come from others' sense of me," he says. "I don't need a job, or to be a politician. I'm totally at ease with who I am and what I am doing."

A droll expression: "I mean, really. There's so much more to life!"

Everybody knows that.

He says he and the deposed democrats are all pretty friendly. They sit around and drink coffee and joke about how now the pro-China faction guys are going to be the big shots in Hong Kong, and the pro-democracy legislators-who once controlled twenty-six of the Legislative Council's sixty elected seats-will be the nobodies. He makes jokes that when they're all in jail, he'll build them a replica of the facade of the official South China News Agency building, China's unofficial embassy in Hong Kong. "That's where they do all their demonstrations," he says. "So in the morning, when they're doing their exercises, they can demonstrate right there in the cell. I say, 'I'll come visit you once a month and bring you a month's supply of the PRC [People's Republic of China] newspapers.' "

All their gloom and doom over the future of democracy in Hong Kong and its freewheeling press, all the noise about China's predilection for violent responses to democracy and democratic demonstrations-as evidenced by the Chinese military's killing of hundreds, possibly thousands, of demonstrating students and workers in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989-all of it "is an act," according to Chu. "The world is watching, and they're acting. None of this is going to happen . . . I hang around with Communists every day in Beijing, and they are all ordinary people like ourselves, trying to hold onto their jobs and raise their children and live a good life."

He's vague about exactly whom he associates with there. "Senior government officials, children of Chinese leaders, and a few, few Chinese leaders," he says. "They don't like to have their names mentioned." They like him, he supposes, because he's a "novelty," a "maverick," a source of "entertainment." He's also got a track record of publishing hundreds of pro-China articles (he's a regular columnist for the South China Morning Post), and they see him on the speech circuit.

"I say things they like and things they don't like," he says. "Many of my speeches in China are almost censored at the last minute. They say, 'Can you take it easy?' I say, 'Don't worry, I will deliver it in such a way that it won't upset anybody.' "

He tempers it. He's being pragmatic. "It's pointless to go scream and shout. What I'm doing is 100 times more effective than what some congressmen are doing in America, shouting, finger-pointing. Any real change in China has to come from within, not from the outside."

But couldn't the pro-democracy advocates be right about the message of Tiananmen? Chu grimaces and holds up an index finger: "One incident, one image." But an image indelibly implanted around the world.

It was "an accident," he says, and, in hindsight, something that occurred against an obvious trend toward openness by China over the last twenty years.

Keeping the memory alive is the flash point through which the pro-democracy movement sustains itself here, in part. "They have to bring back June 4 all the time, because this will remind their voters to vote for the so-called democratic politicians. Like we're anti-democracy," he says, palming his chest, "because we don't think exactly the same as they think."

Political progress should be gone about in a different way, he says. "Step-by-step way."

The handover rehearsal is creeping up on him and he can't talk anymore. He downs some enzyme pills and his Rexall Bios Life liquid diet drink ("I take it as a preventative") and heads out the door, looking trim and cheerful in khakis and a white cotton shirt with a thin-stripe, crisscross design.

He sticks his head out of the elevator. "When I return we'll go take the yacht over to Causeway Bay and get a good parking space for the fireworks," he says, adjusting his Armani eyeglasses and signing off crisply with a half-wave, half-salute.

Then he stands there, waiting for the elevator doors to close, glancing at his watch and fidgeting. He's running a little late now and he doesn't like to run late. Nine o'clock in Hong Kong means nine o'clock sharp. Running late is the kiss of death.

From the sky, the buildings like the one Chu lives in and owns look pretty much the same, clustered like bunches of colored pencils, convenient and moisture-resistant, amid mountain peaks hugged so closely by clouds that it looks like snow. The effect is futuristic.

As for the range of local living arrangements:

There's the "garden" house, meaning a pool and a yard, if you've got $30­$50 million to blow; and Chu says people are waiting in line who do. In sight of Chu's living room, a $50 million red-roofed mansion is being constructed on a mountainside by a guy in the toilet business. Space is at such a premium (Hong Kong is only 415 square miles) that real-estate costs are expressed in thousands of dollars per square foot. In this context, backyards are highly coveted and romantic possessions.

More than half the city's 6.3 million live in public apartments (a world record). And an average apartment, an "ordinary person's apartment," as David Chu describes his, runs between $3 million and $4 million. Located in exclusive Repulse Bay, his place-three bedrooms, two extra rooms, and maids' quarters on the other side of the kitchen-is tasteful and lived-in. Light wood and dark tile floors, a large comfortable cloth wraparound sofa, ornate mahogany Chinese wall carvings, and two cabinets full of knickknacks and collectibles-a porcelain Buddha and a bodhisattva, model sports cars, shells, a snakeskin draped over this and that, and, up top, the dried head of an antlered deer Chu shot before the International Fund for Animal Welfare persuaded him to its cause.

David and his wife, Hing, are in the process of renovating the other fourteenth-floor apartment to expand their living space, which they share with their grown son (Casey), two Filipino maids (Marlene and Erly), two shepherd mutts (Choo Choo and Bobo), a bulldog with a perpetually cocked head because of an ear problem (Bingo), and two short-tailed cats without names.

"Why name them?" says Chu. "They don't listen."

Chu swoops back into the apartment, wrinkling up his nose about the rehearsal he's just attended. It was the usual: where to go, where to stand, when to raise your right hand. He hates this stuff. The tedium drives him crazy.

But, now, flying! His face lights up.

"I wanted to fly," he says. "Flying like a bird is the ultimate human experience."

That's why he took up paragliding. That's what made him want to climb into the harness of an engine with a propeller and a giant kite over his head. The contraption sits off to one side of the living room, where he can tinker with it at will.

He claims the world record for paragliding at the highest altitude, 10,000 feet, and is the only paraglider to have taken off from the Great Wall of China. He likes to scare himself from time to time as a reminder that he's alive. It keeps his sights on his main goals in life: to have fun, and to be acutely aware that he is having fun.

He hates to work. "Ask anybody."

Down at the water, Chu's boatman, Ah Wai, motors us over to the yacht, and we head out to Causeway Bay to get the parking space for the light show two nights hence, the city's many-multimillion-dollar celebratory extravaganza of neon floats and laser shows and spectacular fireworks. Chu slips into some swimming trunks and a golf shirt and reclines on the bow with a big dish of watermelon and litchi, the world and the water at his feet.

"Look at that!" he says, pointing out a breathtaking faraway mountain. And there's the ridge he paraglides off of. In the middle of discussing the economy or politics, he'll veer off into an aside on wine or cooking or an engineering concept, effortlessly shifting gears even when the conversation rolls around again to Tiananmen Square.

Look, he says, Tiananmen was traumatizing for everyone Chinese. "Pro-China, anti-China. Everybody." Some experienced it as a defining event they are unwilling or unable to let go of; some, like Chu, have moved on and wish others could, too.

Whatever sad feelings about Tiananmen he might have had are in part compensated, he says, by the "absolute belief that if the students had succeeded in overthrowing the government, Hong Kong would be gone." China would be embroiled in a civil war, leading to swift financial ruin in Hong Kong. "Hong Kong, being an open city, people would just withdraw the money, and all the banks would be insolvent." He holds up a finger. "Within one hour . . .

"I also think I know more about the reasons for why it happened," he says, "so it doesn't mean to me, 'Oh my God, this is what the Chinese are like, this is what China will do if you protest.' You have to understand the big picture of what was going on at the time that created a recipe for disaster."

First, there was perestroika, political reform in Russia, he says. "That had just happened, Mikhail Gorbachev had just visited Beijing, and the international media was in town because of the visit. Also, developmentally, China has always followed in Russia's footsteps." All this was a signal to the students that the time for democratic reform had arrived; it was their moment to seize. "Second, some high-level corruption in the Chinese government had come to light, nepotism, involving the premier's son making a lot of money, and this fired the students' passion for reform further. Third, there was a power struggle going on between senior players in China at the time, with some leaders using the students to try and overthrow others. One was trying to unseat Deng Xiaoping. He was supporting the students by indirectly supplying them with food, tents, organization, cars, trucks. And he had openly supported the students on television and went to visit them," further stirring the pot.

The final ingredient for disaster, Chu says, was China's traditional policy of secrecy. Its official line on Tiananmen was that the military's action was a justified suppression of a counterrevolutionary riot. That spin was left to dangle, unelaborated upon, he says. Information that might have mitigated the crisis was not revealed, and a lot of incomplete and inaccurate reporting went on unchecked.

Tiananmen was a horrible shock, he says, but not a trend for China. "Most people don't realize that overall human rights have been improving there constantly for the last twenty years-not up to our standards in Hong Kong but, still, improving." People are living more freely, they have more say in their own lives, relationships are better, there's less spying on one another.

"Before, you can't go into China, it's a closed society. Reporters, nobody. Millions die in China, such as in the Cultural Revolution, and none of the press-Hong Kong press or international press-nobody knows anything, including the CIA. But China is now open. In the past, if the propaganda told the people, 'You are better off than the U.S., so don't complain,' that was how it was. They can't do that anymore."

Others who look at China see a backward central government that operates not by the kind of meritocracy that Hong Kong has managed to fashion-not a system of laws-but one of personality and personal alliances. China has always done business that way. Guanxi, it's called. Relationships. Who you know. But when Chu looks at China, he sees a coterie of increasingly forward-directed men, struggling to manage one-fifth the population of humankind (1.2 billion), including "hundreds of millions of people of crushing ignorance," that is dispersed over an enormous land mass with few natural resources-and at the same time lead the country onto the world stage as an economic player.

Chu's view is: By all means, let's help that process along in any way we can. "As a Chinese," he says, "it's my duty to help China for better or worse. It's my obligation to stay and help out regardless of what's happening there. I'm helping China to develop."

So what should the West do? "Number One: Understand China. First step is talk. These people shouting and screaming, your congressmen and senators, have no personal experience and knowledge. They don't know the reasons, which are cultural and economic. China never had a legal system or the benefit of an industrial revolution. Hong Kong was more or less the first. And it just left a feudal system. Each reason is a big reason, and China is so large!

"So our first step has to be economic reform. Russia did political reform first and it didn't work. China's approach is tight on the political front, but more incentives and private initiative. So there's more money for printing books, and then people start reading books. As people have more money, political reform comes about naturally."

What happens in the meantime to people like Martin Lee, leader of Hong Kong's deposed democrats?

Chu peels a litchi. "Nothing," he answers. "He makes like he is in danger so less-knowledgeable Americans will help him. You come back in a year and he will be doing very well as a politician and a barrister. He just wants sympathy from the West."

There's nothing to be gained by anguish and negativity, particularly at this juncture in China's history, Chu says. There's nothing to be gained by not giving the motherland the benefit of the doubt at the start. Or by pressing all its buttons about the possibility of Hong Kong being used as a staging ground to stir up unrest, or as an entry point for foreign aggression, or to promote the evolution of individual rights at a faster pace than Beijing is ready for. Besides, what could China possibly have to gain by killing the golden goose?

His gaze suddenly shoots off behind my head. "Look there," he says, pointing at a cumulus cloud mass. "Look like an elephant."

Back in rush mode, he hops into street clothes and heads off to the Hyatt for lunch with John Birt, the director general of the BBC. Then it's home to meet with a television crew from Sydney and some reporters and photographers from the local newsweeklies.

"They want to get me on my Harley."

He's down in the garage before they get there, attaching flags to the back of his bike-China's and Hong Kong's. The crew from Sydney arrives and does its thing. The reporter presses Chu on human rights and the legacy of Tiananmen, and Chu tries to get across what he said to me earlier, but in shorter sound bites.

As they leave, he hands them a full-color, card-quality invitation to an "I Told You So" luncheon he's throwing for journalists here next June at the Furama Hotel. "It is you eating your words or I eat mine," the invitation reads. "Chances are, though, we will all eat our words to some extent and that is why I will be serving Campbell's Alphabet Soup." Signed: "David Chu Yu-Lin. The man who bet everything on Hong Kong . . . and won?"

The TV people go and he beckons Marlene, one of his maids, for his daily bowl of peeled sugarcane stalks. She forgets the garbage can for spitting into. "She thinks it's ugly and I should not do this in front of you," he says. "She probably right." He chews sugarcane to exercise his teeth and gums. You swallow the sugar water and spit out the rest. "It is disgusting," he says. "Try it." Marlene brings a bowl for me to spit into and we continue our discussion this way, trading Italian recipes and then thumb-wrestling.

He is utterly content.

"I hate work, any kind of work," he reiterates. He doesn't handle the day-to-day management of his real-estate firm, Wah Tak Fung Holdings, which went public last year-just the Friday meeting of all the managers. And his office is equipped for high living, with a kitchen and a wine cellar that features a Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1945.

"I'm going to be the legislator who attends the least meetings," he vows, spitting into the blue plastic garbage can in his lap.

Lost momentarily in thought, he stops chewing. It has occurred to him that he's going to be up all night the night of the handover; he's going to have to work a nap into his crammed schedule. Wait: "I can sleep at the ceremony!" he says. I think he's kidding and laugh. "No, no," he says. "We all do that. Really. I have a collection of pictures of people sleeping at LegCo meetings."

LegCo. It stands for Legislative Council, the governing body of Hong Kong. Chu had won a seat during popular elections two years ago, and made the cut through Beijing's selection process for the provisional LegCo that will rule until new elections next year. They say it ledge-ko.

For dinner, we head into town to meet his wife, Hing, her sisters, and friends at Ngai Chun Yau restaurant. The plates of food keep coming and we all reach over one another, Chinese family style, to take what we want: escargots, fish soup over noodles, tiny asparagus-looking strips, whole-clam soup, deep-fried salty five-inch fish, big flat shrimp cut in chunks, and a crab dish smothered in crumbled crispy garlic so hot it makes my inner ears itch. "Too bad you not here longer," Chu says. "I take you to the farm and teach you how to eat insects." Then he says something about cockroaches that I block out.

When the inevitable subject of the handover comes up, Hing makes a face like she's been hit with a bad smell. She is sick to death of talking about it. "I'll be glad to have it over with," she says, deftly downing a clam with her chopsticks. "All these reporters, they all ask"-she mimics our grave Western whines-" 'How Hong Kong is going to change after the handover?' As if it's just like that.

"Who knows!" she says and frowns at me.

Monday, June 30: Handover Day. By noon, Chu has already come and gone from a CNBC live-feed "semidebate" with Christine Loh, one of his political adversaries, and a roundtable discussion with an American delegation led by Senator Frank Murkowski and Representative Christopher Cox. "The senators were all pro-democrats," Chu says. "They point fingers. 'Why you thwart democratic reform?' 'Me?' I say." He palms his heart, the way he did when they accused him. "Then when leaving," he says, "they whisper in ears to all pro-democracy guys, 'Keep up, keep up.' " He shakes his head and places his hands over his ears, but he's smiling.

With him as he sits eating fruit at the table overlooking the bay is a reporter for Asiaweek magazine who's following Chu around for the day. I'm watching her watch Chu and she's watching me watch Chu. Then another local newsweekly crew shows up from Next magazine, whose stated aim is to fight for democracy, and then another photographer.

Chu changes into a motorcycle outfit and grabs a black helmet. We all squeeze into the elevator and push the wrong buttons and go up and down a couple of times. Chu jokes that the two Hong Kong magazines are trying to sabotage each other and that the writer for Next is plotting how to take the worst picture of him.

We split up into a taxicab and the Next magazine van and start following Chu down Repulse Bay Road on his motorcycle with the flags. He's got on aviator sunglasses and buttery tan cowboy boots. The photographers are craning out the windows with long lenses, taking turns getting shots. Now he's on Queen's Road. They shoot from the front, they shoot from the back, they shoot from the side, finally parking outside the concrete, Victorian-style LegCo Building in the city's Central district, where other photographers stationed there for who knows what take their turns shooting Chu, who leans serenely against his machine, staring pensively into the sky.

Then it's home for a quick shower and under the covers for that nap, his silky navy blue suit laid out on Hing's side of the bed for the big night.

The photographers continue to fire away in the bedroom, reminding Chu to close his eyes and stop smiling. "Okay, okay," Chu says. "This is real, this is real." With that, he purses his eyes shut and folds his hands together under one ear, like a child in a storybook, and puts himself to sleep.

Outside in the living room, Hing is sitting on the sofa reading a magazine. I ask if I can interview her, and she says, "No," without looking up. She is understandably fed up with reporters descending on her home, and here I am, one of those dreaded Western journalists, sleeping in her daughter Kok-ann's old bedroom. "I have nothing to say. What do you want me to say?" she asks, mad at me already.

How about what all this was like from her end? How about her husband: was he getting a big head now that he was in power?

She rolls her eyes, drops her shoulders, flops the magazine in her lap. "In the house, he got nobody to order around," she says drolly. "Nobody to listen to him, not even the dogs." They're running back and forth between us as we speak, Choo Choo and Bobo, and we keep having to bob our heads to maintain eye contact.

"Everybody have sudden idea that because you're pro-China there's a backdoor policy and he have power," she continues. "I don't believe in that, and I don't think it's true. I hope it's not true. He has as much power as he has power. Who knows. You work hard, you going to have more power. You deliver, you have power. You don't deliver, you won't. Even in China things are becoming this way. The West looks at things through their black eyeglasses."

Now she starts rolling, about the West, its horrendous double standard toward China, its irresponsible press-and don't get her started on Tibet.

"If you do social welfare, that's okay. We do it and it's Communism. Your country didn't allow the South to secede. You do it, it's fine. We do it, it's imperialism. You say, 'Tibet is not part of you.' Tibet was in China 300 years ago! You say it should be independent, that you know best what China should do. Why not give the U.S. back to the Indians? You like to pick because it's Communism. We sick and tired of being picked on."

Her arms are folded over her sleeveless white shift, her legs are crossed, and she's tapping her foot, thinking, thinking-about America, where she attended Mount Holyoke College. Another burst: "Most people in America have never left their own country and make so much judgment about the rest of the world! Most Americans don't even know where is Hong Kong and they don't care. Politicians want to make it this big deal. You speculate all the time, giving stupid questions. It's not the truth you want to hear. You want to see the worst scenario. But the fact is, nothing is falling apart."

She can't even read the newspaper anymore, just the financial section (she runs her own stock brokerage firm). Something in the news section always sets her off. "Like [U.S. secretary of state] Madeleine Albright not coming to the [handover] ceremony," she says, dropping her chin and pursing her lips. "So don't come. Who cares? We won't miss her, either. These things belong to the Hong Kong people. She do it for her own importance. Westerners doing what they do at others' expense all the time. Very, very bad. So she don't want to come? So go soak your head.

"I really think the top brass in China feels the same way. They don't care about Madeleine Albright. We've been suffering for thousands of years. This is China's life. We suffer. You want to give us most-favored-nation status? Fine. If not, makes no difference," she says, and makes a world-weary face.

Hong Kong is a land of hot, wet hand towels at the dinner table and ubiquitous boxes of tissue. Tycoons and typhoons and mud slides. Of very fast walkers down very crowded streets, artistically agile with their umbrellas. Of "cage people" living in spaces the size of a bunk bed, and spic-and-span businessmen in Italian suits marching down the street with cell phones at their ears. You hear the phones ringing all the time. And if some business puts you on hold, the Muzak is liable to be a harpsichordy rendition of "Home on the Range" or "Winchester Cathedral." Then you look down and a very tiny, very old Chinese woman is beating a piece of paper with her shoe as she performs some ancient ritual to crush the influence of malicious neighbors.

So it is the night of the handover. The strolling mobs are festive and relaxed; nothing wild. A typical Hong Kong weekend night, as someone described it in Causeway Bay-an amazing compression of people and cars and neon lights.

The official ceremony for 4,000 invited guests-including, of course, the Chus-turns out to be a rain-soaked event featuring clashing cymbals, throbbing drums, dragon dances, crisp military salutes, Prince Charles in military whites sitting stoically in the rain without an umbrella, bagpipers playing "Ode to Joy," hundreds of marching British Navy, Army, and Air Force troops, and decent but less-than-spectacular fireworks launched from three barges in Victoria Harbor. An affair described a couple of weeks later on David Letterman by Hong Kong martial arts movie star Jackie Chan as "Eight hours, total boring."

I watch the fireworks from someplace in Central, surrounded by Filipino women-the local maid population-who are spread out on the street, under building overhangs, and at the subway stops, huge clumps of them, with all their stuff. It's a social phenomenon here. The Filipino maids are out in Central every Sunday in droves. This time, they're on handover holiday. They've got their shoes off, they've got food, they're talking, braiding hair, giving manicures, pedicures, and massages, covering their mouths when they laugh like shy child angels, and oohing and ahing at every report lighting the dismally drizzling sky.

At midnight, the colony of Hong Kong is officially relinquished when three British honor guards lower the Union Jack at the convention center to "God Save the Queen." Immediately thereafter, the Chinese military band strikes up China's "March of the Volunteers" as three soldiers raise the red flag of China and Hong Kong's new red flag with a white bauhinia flower on it. Thus, after more than a century and a half, does one of the world's most dynamic capitalist societies revert to the world's largest Communist country.

Martin Lee, Hong Kong's best-known democracy advocate, has rushed over to the LegCo Building from the ceremony-where, ironically, he and Chu had been photographed holding hands, Chu reports later-to address 3,000 demonstrators waiting in the rain, struggling to keep their white candles of solidarity lit in the warm, wet breeze.

Standing behind the heavy granite balustrades of the balcony, eloquent, noble, bookish, and thin, Lee exudes the drawn, pained sway of a martyr. He speaks in Cantonese about democracy and hoarsely vows, "We'll be back!" while other demonstrators tie a four-foot-wide yellow ribbon around the LegCo Building and then head off with banners and torches to the offices of the incoming Beijing-approved chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, a paternal-looking shipping tycoon with a crew cut.

Through it all, something seems to be missing. Around this tiny spot on the map a great deal of the world's future seems poised to revolve, and I find myself expecting something tangible to show itself-something like, I don't know, the smell of ozone after lightning strikes. But ever since the Joint Declaration between Britain and China confirming the handover was signed in 1984, Hong Kong has been preparing. Thirteen years is a very long time to be poised for history, and the actual moment of handover turns out to be colossally anticlimactic.

What is going on in the hearts and minds of the Chinese people of Hong Kong, the only people to whom this moment truly belongs, I can only guess. It's not something I can understand or hope to accurately tell about, because that end is not for the cameras and the reporters and the other voyeurs.

In the early morning hours of July 1, the "dreaded" People's Liberation Army begins streaming into town. With the exception of Central, where their arrival is met with silence, the estimated 4,000 grim-faced troops are greeted, at border crossings and along the routes to barracks where they would be based, by thousands of Hong Kong people who wave, dance, and sing. Advance reporting on their debarkation has been treated in the Western press more like an invasion, with the anchors' dropped voices and serious gazes seeming to import certain doom for Hong Kong and implying that the PLA is coming in to line the streets, police the crowds, and forcibly "take over"-when all they are doing at this point is changing places with the thousands of British soldiers who were there before them.

In fact, if anyone is in danger, it's the PLA. There are something like 150,000 residents per soldier, and the journalists in town outnumber them two to one.

"It was all mechanical things: raising right hand, pageantry, the Prince of Wales," Chu says the next day over hot and sour soup at the Mandarin Hotel café. "It was so well done and so formal that it was boring. No accidents, nothing. No warmth or emotion. You know how the British are."

He doesn't have any hard feelings toward the British, he says, nor does he feel indebted. They did a lot for Hong Kong-"all for selfish motivations"-and they took a lot.

The British started smuggling opium into China to balance the books on the tea trade beginning in the late seventeenth century. After China banned the drug and destroyed several million pounds of it around 1840, England twice went to war in the name of "free trade." And that's how Hong Kong was won. "Now," says Chu, "this is my home."

ITN, Independent Television News of London-the BBC's commercial rival-meets us in the lobby and we head up to the seventeenth floor to a studio in one of the rooms. Chu's got an on-air tête-à-tête with Emily Lau, a far-left pro-democracy legislator who lost her seat in the transition. Lau is Chu's "archenemy," he says-the fire-breathing dragon lady of Hong Kong. "When she look at you, you get scared," he says, making a deer-in-headlights face. "Her eyes like a shark eyes, with lot of white space and tiny black spot in middle. Very scary."

Lau shows up, a petite woman with dark hair drawn off her face and gathered in back. Blue jeans, red golf shirt, pearl earrings. She has a purposeful bearing and a crisp verbal delivery.

Chu takes her hand in both of his. A warm smile, a slight bow. "So, Emily, what are you doing these days?" he asks. "We're marching," she says drolly. "Come march with us, David."

The two take their seats for the crew to get camera angles and do sound checks. Chu bends over, examining the treaded rubber soles of her shoes. "High-traction shoes," he says, pointing. "For running away from police."

"For running away from Communists," she says. He laughs. She drops her chin and lowers her eyes. "You can bail me out, David."

The interview itself turns out to be a lively back-and-forth of the usual: Lau claims that the Chinese leadership has a track record of breaking promises and cannot be trusted, that open elections will never be held, and that criticism will provoke dire consequences. And Chu vows that the provisional legislators will go out of their way to involve Lau and other deposed reformers in their deliberations ("because if we don't, she will let us know anyway"), that he will personally give her 10,000 Hong Kong dollars if she isn't reelected next year, and that the city will continue to prosper under the late Deng Xiaoping's promise of "one country, two systems."

"To use a business metaphor," Chu says, closing out the segment, "I think what's going to happen here is a reverse takeover."

Lau removes her mike and heads out to the march. "Don't run too fast and, please, don't lie down in the road," Chu calls after her. Lau throws her head over her shoulder and shoots him a look of contempt. He grins.

So the Brits are gone and now the real work begins.

"What I feel now is the pressure on my own shoulders," Chu confesses. "The ball is in our court. Plus, I am under pressure because I talk so much about my own confidence in Hong Kong. So if you see me hunching down, you'll know why."

Whatever's going to happen, he believes-notwithstanding some huge misunderstanding or accident-will happen osmotically over a long period of time, with China and Hong Kong each giving in toward each other. And in the middle of the cauldron there will be David Chu, who expects Hong Kong to play what he calls an important "impedance-matching role" in China's dealings with the rest of the world.

"It's an engineering term," he explains. "When a signal travels from one medium to a different medium-air to water, say-part of the signal will bounce back and create distortion. But if you have impedance-matching in the middle, then nothing will be reflected. Everything goes straight through without distortion and without changing direction. And Hong Kong is the impedance-matching device for China."

He grins suddenly, wide-eyed with revelation, and points to himself. "I learned this at Northeastern."

Marguerite Del Giudice, LA'75, a free-lance writer in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, wrote the profile of poker player John Lukas in the January 1995 issue.

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