May 11, 2005 – June 1993: Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel

May 11, 2005 – June 1993: Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel

After our harrowing landing at Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport on June 10th 1993, both my boss JA and I were in dire need of a drink. We were doubly shaken because this was the second time this week we had a narrow escape from a catastrophic event. We kept making morbid jokes about “buying the farm” in Southeast Asia. JA is a big guy, easily a foot taller than me. He’s in his late 50s, with the freckled light complexioned skin that accompanies red-haired Irish men and women. He wears glasses, has a slow deliberate manner of speaking, and loves telling jokes—the trademark of a good salesman, which he was, and still remains, his vice president title notwithstanding. I’ve heard a good number of his jokes since they tend to get repeated meeting after meeting. One of his favorites is intended to convey the Cleveland Publisher’s philosophy regarding its many publications. Upon acquiring Electronics and its sister magazines, we did a dog and pony show to all existing and likely advertisers for the publications. To punctuate the company’s stance on its new acquisition, JA said when it comes to making bacon and eggs, the chicken participates, the pig is fully committed, which presumably was what Cleveland was—fully committed, not a pig.

We clear customs and find a taxi and tell him to take us to the Peninsula Hotel, on Salisbury Road, Tsimshatsui, a grand hotel, overlooking Victoria Harbor, first opened December 11, 1928. The Peninsula sits on Kowloon with an unobstructed view of Hong Kong across the harbor. It has seen a great deal of history in its time. On the afternoon of December 23rd, 1942, Hong Kong Governor, Sir Mark Young—Time magazine described him as a man of the Imperial tradition: Cambridge-educated, a High Churchman, a cricketer and big-game hunter, a stubborn-hearted fighter—surrendered to the Japanese besieging the British Colony. He remained a prisoner there—though I’m sure our accommodations would be a bit better than his.

The hotel—I suspect is one of the reasons JA wanted to make this trip—is a U-shaped building at its base, with the back of the U towering skyward. The hotel was undergoing a major expansion when we arrived, scheduled for completion in 1994. The cab drives into the curved driveway in the center of the U shaped base, where it is surrounded by a couple of the Rolls Royces belonging to the hotel as well as a few other luxury automobiles belonging to hotel guest waiting their turn to be parked or occupied and driven away. It’s past teatime, but before dinner, and the hotel entrance is busy with comings and goings of guests leaving tea or arriving early for a later dinner engagement. Jim and I check in and he and I are escorted to our respective rooms, his, a smoking accommodation, mine non-smoking. When we later visit each other’s room we discover that I got a newer room, but we each have a view of the harbor. After putting our belongings away we meet below in The Bar on the first floor to relax and get ready for a great dinner in Gaddi restaurant, the hotel’s haute cuisine French Restaurant also on the first floor.

JA orders a gin and tonic and I have a glass of champagne as we ramble on about the trip so far, continuing to return to JA’s harrowing escape in Taiwan and the close call with disaster we both experienced a couple of hours earlier. We also discuss the hotel, which has a special place in JA’s heart. He recently remarried after a contentious divorce several years earlier. He and his new bride had stayed at the Peninsula among a series of other equally upscale hotels throughout Southeast Asia. Raffles in Singapore is one I remember him mentioning as well as the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, where we would be staying after our Hong Kong visit. JA waxed poetic about his new bride and their idyllic honeymoon but would become vitriolic when speaking about his divorce settlement. I suspect it was a combination of the Peninsula bringing back the high and the gin reminding him of the low. After a couple of drinks we walked the short distance to the Gaddi where we were seated for dinner. The dining room had only a few guests, as we were early at 7:00 PM. I don’t recall the dinner itself though I do remember feeling a bit awkward at some point during the meal when I spied a full dining room or men and women diners. We were the only two men dining together in the room—a younger oriental-looking man in the company of an older Caucasian man, humm?

I slept in on Saturday, getting up around 8:00—JA had suggested breakfast at 10:00 as he planned to catch up on some lost sleep. I donned my jogging outfit, shorts and a tee shirt and the new counterfeit Nike running shoes I had purchased in the Itaewon shopping district of Seoul the day before. I exited the hotel lobby and joined the early morning runners and walkers that were making their way along the wide promenade that ran both ways in front of the hotel. I turned left with the goal of running about 25 minutes and returning. Despite the early morning hour, the sun had driven the temperature into the high 80s Fahrenheit and the humidity had to be over 90 percent. I was sweating within the first couple of minutes of exertion; something in cooler climes would have taken a good ten to twenty minutes of running. I’m not a competitive runner, managing to do just under seven miles in about fifty-five minutes, when I’m timing myself. Today, I would not be running for time and I was being regularly passed by younger men and women runners, who seemed undisturbed by the heat and humidity. The view around me was stunning—an expanse of blue water separating the promenade from the Emerald-City-like vista of tall concrete and glass skyscrapers comprising the Hong Kong cityscape. The buildings appeared to be floating in the expanse of blue, jutting skyward in a display of wealth and opulence.

Back at the Peninsula after a shower and clean clothes, I meet JA in the lobby for breakfast. I order the two Scottish free-range chicken eggs—I imagine the eggs making the journey from somewhere around Inverness in the north of Scotland all the way to Hong Kong—and bacon, no country of origin specified. Curiously, I remember breakfast but not the haute cuisine meal the night before. Saturday, JA has said we should tour Hong Kong. He wants to show me the sights he and his new bride saw on their last trip out. We take a taxi out to the floating city of Aberdeen and had the taxi wait as we took a walk about. JA recounted his trip here with his new bride and how they had spent time wandering along the pier watching the families in their boats go about their daily routine. I was struck by the wires providing electricity and perhaps telephone communications to the boats and the Styrofoam littering the water surrounding the boats. On the other side of the small harbor were windowed apartments of a uniform gray color and all built in the same narrow and tall boxy shape, one apartment box next to another, the front of each uneven with its neighbor. One box further out, its neighbor set back, the third neighbor down jutting further out than the first. The uneven disarray of building placement relative to one another would incense an anal-retentive person. The other attraction to Aberdeen was the largest floating restaurant I had ever seen, appropriately named Jumbo Floating Restaurant in English. JA described his meal there with his new wife. We found a water taxi and did a short tour around the floating city before returning to our waiting cab to take us back to Hong Kong’s city center.

The remainder of Saturday afternoon was spent shopping. JA had to buy some pricey jewelry for his wife. I found a pair of earrings for my wife IM. Shopping the next day on the Kowloon side of the harbor in the many shops behind the Peninsula Hotel, I bought a wooden Buddha that IM found as endearing as the earrings. Small enough to fit into the palm of my hand, the chubby figure seated crossed legged, had an ear-to-ear smile adorning his cherubic face. He occupies a space in IM’s treasures display to this day.

The remainder of our stay in Hong Kong was uneventful. We dined in the Chesa Restaurant either Sunday or Monday night. I don’t recall which. Chesa is the hotel’s Swiss cuisine restaurant. We had our meeting with local representative on Monday and then spent Tuesday morning trying to sell local companies our publishing company as well as advertising space. We had better luck in Hong Kong than in Taiwan or Korea. Here we were visiting subsidiaries of large U.S. companies. Those we met in these subsidiaries were familiar with our magazines. As we expected no immediate business was forthcoming. I was imagining the creative trip report I was going to write for this trip as we collected our bags we’d checked with the bellman at the Peninsula and loaded ourselves into a cab for the ride out to Kai Tak Airport. There we boarded our routine Singapore Air flight to Narita. I was looking forward to two days in Tokyo before flying back to San Jose on Friday.