The outflow of expatriates is taking its toll on the trendy new Soho area (South of Hollywood Road) where the Bistro Manchu (run by a lady from Harbin in China's Heiloongjiang province), and a few Nepalese eateries run by discharged Gurkhas from Britain's departed garrison) may survive. The temporarily popular Yelts-Inn, a Russian pub has a thinning clientele as do a couple of Cuban restaurants.
Hong Kong's drift is toward being a service center for interior China. It is behind Taiwan and Singapore in high tech manufacturing. The latter accounts for nearly 25 percent of Singapore's gross domestic product (GDP) and only 9.9 percent of Hong Kong's.
It is not necessarily negative but just a fact: the outward identities of Hong Kong and Shanghai will merge and become more and more alike in the coming years.
John Yue and T.K. Ann were two of the first gentlemen I met in Hong Kong. I met Yue first, on a visit introduced by Robert Hill of British Overseas Airways (BOAO)--"better on a camel," the joke went-- in 1957. Hill was on loan from BOAC to Hong Kong Airways, the forerunner of Cathay Pacific, which flew nifty Viscount aircraft around Asia.
John Yue had tailored at least a dozen suits for me by the time I moved from Tokyo to Hong Kong in 1962, to stay seven years as a China Watcher and covering the Vietnam War.
I will never forget Yue standing in the middle of my living room on McDonnell Road directing a Cantonese wallpaper hanger in mounting a 6-ft.. x 12-ft. map of the world, with teak frame, on my wall. They both thought I was crazy but the huge colored map made a hell of a conversation piece.
Yue had fled Shanghai in 1949 when the communists came. In Hong Kong he opened a modest shop on Kimberley Road in Kowloon and soon prospered from his old customers and referrals. A Methodist, he arranged the christening for my daughter Carolyn. Yue was an adamant anti-Communist, not pro-Taiwan but anti-Communist. His property had been seized by the invaders, his brother beheaded, and he didn't like it one bit.
Ann had been a successful Shanghai textile manufacturer. When the communists came, he fled to Hong Kong and showed up there penniless.
Within a few years, Ann was on top of the textile world again, serving Hong Kong's capitalism and becoming a millionaire several times over.
