Marryam Reshii on why it’s destination Hong Kong for her?

Everybody’s favourite question to a frequent traveller is “What is your favourite country?” That’s the most difficult one to answer. Usually, I cop out and name the most recent destination I have been to, but if I sit down and think hard, I will probably come up with Hong Kong. It is the one place that has exceeded my expectations every time I have visited it. It has the capacity to enthrall one, whether you are looking to shop till you drop, to eat till you burst or to sight-see till your feet cry out for mercy. But that’s not all. Hong Kong has the capacity to reinvent itself over successive visits and to let you discover facets of itself that you would never have dreamt of. Hong Kong has British names of streets and landmarks yet signs written in Chinese lettering. It has a western sensibility to it yet is completely South Chinese.

Hong Kong is actually a group of islands, of which the most dizzying is the eponymous one. That is the one with the unbeatable buzz and vibe and the perfect blend of China and the west. Other nearby islands (including Lantau where the airport is) have dramatically different skylines and population densities. You can trek, visit a monastery and a fishing village. All away from The Island, true, but owing to the superb connectivity, just an hour or so away. If shopping is your thing, you have the choice of waiting till nightfall and roaming the street called Ladies Market or the other one simply called Night Market. You can bargain for knock-off watches and silk purses and have change left over from 20 Hong Kong dollars! But equally, you can get down from your limousine at Central and get rid of a vast fortune in half an hour. You can choose from the best couture, jewellery, watches, footwear and handbags. But the magic of Hong Kong is that there’s loads more you can do with your credit card. You can, for example, take it for a walk to Cat Street, more properly known as Upper Lascar Road. There, you will find every curio and every collectible that you have dreamed of.

I dreamed of a Chinese painting of a peony rendered in water-colour with the foliage and other details painted roughly in black ink, rather like Chinese calligraphy. How, pray did I think up this impossible fantasy? I have no idea. I just knew that the one day that my Hong Kong Tourism guide and now a good friend, Fred Cheung, was off, would be the day I would scour the rarified air of Cat Street alone. I did feel a frisson of fear as I blithely made up a story about going to a spa for the day to put Fred off the track, and went to the street that is where the rich and the famous shop for antiques of South Chinese provenance. If Fred knew that I was about to embark on a Serious Expedition, he would have cancelled his leave and made sure he accompanied me for my own good! However, I was determined to have a bit of an adventure unchaperoned. As it happened, I was left alone by the majority of store owners after the initial glance at an unpromising foreign tourist who wasn’t wearing a single brand of note!

Everyone has a passion in their life. Mine is Chinese antiques. The simple curve of a table leg that echoes a bamboo reed sends a shiver down my spine and the sight of hundreds if not thousands of figurines, camphor chests, pickled ginger jars and a cornucopia of objects had me in a coma of oblivion for several hours. And then I saw it. Or rather, it saw me. It was the picture of my dreams. The watercolour of a peony was lovingly delineated in countless shades of pink and white and the tender petals at the centre seemed to be just about opening in the dim light of the store. The leaves and stalks at the periphery of the painting were just fillers for the central theme, and had been done by an artist who knew how to get the effect called ‘flying clouds’ in Chinese calligraphy. That is, you pass your brush with just the right amount of black ink over the paper so that you get a patchy effect, the better to contrast with the loving delineation of the central flower. There are, however, no retakes and second chances, so you have to have considerable practice in the art.

The price shocked me senseless initially but a bit of friendly bargaining whittled away a couple of dollars and before better sense could prevail, I had become the proud possessor of a painting that was to dominate my walls at home and give me hours and hours of sheer joy. Hong Kong is the only destination where my credit card got the workout of its life. No sooner that Fred Cheung had taken me to Des Voeux Road to see the dried seafood than I spied a shop selling Chinese medicine. And that is where I saw the largest single piece of cinnamon bark that I ever did. It was eighteen inches long and six inches wide. The store owner told Fred that it had to be boiled with several other ingredients, all herbal, to make Chinese medicine. I bought it and it adorns another wall in my house, framed in an ingenious glass box, where it looks nothing like a piece of cinnamon bark.

On my very first visit to Hong Kong, I was to hear of the cuisine of Chaozhou, but then, those few days were when I received a crash course in everything to do with Chinese food. For example, that seafood was what defined the cuisine of Hong Kong. Or that Fred could be so tiresome in his quest for the perfect Guangdong-style conjee as opposed to the Chaozhou style rice porridge! I learnt that expensive is not necessarily better. We went to a working-class eatery, shared a table with two middle-aged men who evinced no interest in us at all and had the only item on the menu: beef noodle soup with a few leaves of kale, two slices of beef and a handful of noodles that were being made with lightning rapidity in the little restaurant itself. The deep savouriness of the broth still plays around in my mind after all these years. It was the same for dimsum. It is not the first course in a Chinese meal, but a breakfast washed down with endless cups of tea. The yum cha house that we went to seemed to have elderly men, many with bird-cages. The men read their newspapers, the birds warbled beautifully and I stuffed myself silly.