The driver headed the Packard toward the Broadway Mansions Apartment, built in 1933, home of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents' Club where the engaging Korean singer, Karen Kim, sang every evening at 10 p.m. and midnight.
We pulled up in front of the imposing brick building but the doorman set me straight.
"This is now a hotel, the Shanghai Mansions. Sorry."
I decided to go to one of the cabarets I'd read about. Maybe dancing with a Chinese or White Russian hostess would cheer me up.
"They've all been closed since the Communists came in 1949," the driver said.
The only thing left was to do some sightseeing the following day. I made a mental note to visit the former homes of Sun Yat-sen. Chiang Kai-shek, Zhou Enlai, Soong Ching-ling and other members of the Soong family, Big-eared Du (Yuesheng) the notorious gangster, the old Cercle Sportif Francais now the Garden Hotel with a pool where Mao Zedong used to take a dip, and the site of the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party.
I awoke to find I was in Shanghai 1997 not 1937.
Outside on fabled Nanjing Road there were no rickshaws to be seen, only a traffic jam of burgundy-colored Volkswagen Santana (made in Shanghai) taxis, buildings with ATM machines protruding from their sides, and a skyline crowed with construction cranes. (3)
Speaking of comparisons, anyone arriving in Hong Kong for a brief visit, as I did in December 1998, might feel compelled to ask out loud "whatever happened to laissez faire?"
It doesn't take long to perceive from talk in the Central District that many money men are appalled at the extent of government intervention. Returning to Tokyo but keeping abreast of Hong Kong developments, I find that the trend of government to behave as a "know it all" is continuing. Market forces are being ignored to the detriment of the Special Administrative Region's future.
Laissez faire is the doctrine opposing governmental interference in economic affairs beyond that necessary to maintain peace and property rights. No one believed Hong Kong was absolutely free but the light administrative hand of the old British colonial government was the closest thing to allowing the market to rule.
