This is a tricky time to be young in Hong Kong. The challenges facing the colony after July 1- questions of identity, autonomy and community-are all playing out right here, right now for its young people. In a city that has produced great wealth but little culture, the young are left to cobble lives cud identities out of what their overworked parents have left to them: the malls and arcades, “The X-Files” and NBA broadcasts. They are the children of the economic boom, but also of Tiananmen Square: heirs o a hyperactively giddy present, an ominously uncertain future. “We cannot blame his generation [for its materialism],” says Rosa Mok, 23, a student at the University of long Kong. “People can get security from noney. All the rest is uncertainty.”
At the feng shui-correct Private I hair sa-on, stylists Suki Chan and Nicky Chow negotiate the complex cultural patchwork of Hong Kong life. Suki is 21; Nicky is 26, and does not, she will tell you, have a boyfriend. Like most people their age, they live at home, leaving them few expenses other than clothing. Suki shares a 400-square-hot fiat with her parents and her brother; Nicky also lives, cramped, with her parents and a sibling. If she should meet a man at a party, she says-well, she doesn’t know. “Good question. I won’t take him to my house-I don’t want to wake my father up. I don’t go to hotels–we don’t want to spend money” She laughs, a tiny explosion, as if she has just uttered the one extant truth more outrageous than the last. “I think we are spoiled,” she says of her generation. “Anything you want you can get but not a car or a house.”
To spend much time around Hong Kong youth is to hear not about the handover but about the housing crisis. With rampant speculation, housing prices have doubled in the past six months. “Kids share rooms here,” says Michael Lee, publicity director for Star TV’s mu-sic-video station, Channel V. “Talk about having control over your environment. If you can’t arrange your room, how do you manage your community?”
The answers play out in places like the towering Times Square shopping complex. These are the halls of Hong Kong’s public culture. On a spring afternoon, groups of young people in clashing designer uniforms kill time with the same furious intensity with which Hong Kong does business. The Mandarina Duck backpack, a $200 necessity a year ago, is already history; the Prada bag is ascendant. Mobile phones, beepers are everywhere. “Our generation gets very little support from our families or our culture,” says Anita Lain, 19. “[Young people] don’t have a sense of belonging in the government or the family. They want to be a gang. So they fit themselves into a fashion trend. Right now it’s the Prada bag.”
On Easter evening, the Hard Rock Cafe has a two-for-one happy hour. Anita and a friend race through the hour at tempo, ordering in bulk, consuming on the fly. Anita wants to be a journalist, and worries about the future of Hong Kong’s free press. But more immediately, she worries about the competition from all the incoming main-landers. “I’m afraid I can’t get money, I can’t get a good future.” She raises a question a foreigner once asked her, one she didn’t know how to answer. “He asked, ‘Why do people in Hong Kong walk on the escalator?’” She looks up, still baffled by the question. In a city that has neither time nor space for its young, sometimes the only comfort zone lies in .acceleration. Hong Kong, she says, “is a place of tragedy and confusion. It is like my life.” She doesn’t need to obsess over the turbulence that may follow July 1. Like her peers, she’s been living it all along.
