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"EVERYONE WANTED TO GET OUT"
Unlike the previous 10 generations of his forebears, Kwan-wai fathered a daughter, as well as three sons. In another radical departure from tradition, none of the children were born into wealth. Not that you would know it from the tanned and smiling demeanor of his eldest, Allan Fung, the founder and CEO of Panorama Entertainment, a publicly listed film-distribution company. Visitors to his office—it comes with a fully equipped music studio that Allan uses for relaxation—are ushered across a vast expanse of polished concrete floor before reaching the inner sanctum where the man himself, slim and ponytailed, leaps up in welcome.
"It was tough," is Allan's précis of his 1950s boyhood. But overcrowding, lack of social services and limited educational opportunities meant that it wasn't just the Fungs who were undergoing hardship. "Neighborhoods were run by street gangs. Everyone was poor and struggling," he remembers. "I spent my childhood on the streets, playing marbles to try and win five or 10 cents."
These constricted horizons were further narrowed by the menacing presence of a country in the full throes of famine, violent political repression and socialist revolution, just a few miles from the Kowloon tenements. "Everyone wanted to get out because we were so close to the communist threat from the north," Allan says. "It could have been the effect of British propaganda, but to us China was not our motherland. We were definitely not part of China." To Allan's wife Janet, the China of her middle-class upbringing was a phantasmagorical other. "We thought of it as a place where you could get kidnapped," she says, with the air of a child being told a horror story. "I was intimidated by it, and partly still am."
The escape Allan found in the foreign movies that he became an obsessive fan of ("I loved David Lean and Stanley Kubrick") took on literal form when he completed secondary school and resolved to study filmmaking overseas. He enrolled, of all places, at a technical college in the industrial port of Hamilton, Ontario—partly because it sounded so absurdly remote from Hong Kong. "My mother had started a small sewing business," says Allan, "so they could afford to buy me a one-way ticket." (Touchingly, Kwan-wai confides that he and Miu-kuk in fact had to borrow the money.) In 1970, Allan left for Canada with Janet, whom he had just married. Like thousands of Hong Kong émigrés, they believed that they would never return. As is equally common, they were back in less than a decade.
It was not that they didn't make a success of Canada. Far from it. Allan graduated at the top of his year and became a producer at the country's Global TV network, Jackie was born, and they had plenty of friends. ("It was like 'Oh, here's this cool Japanese guy!'" Allan laughs. "Everyone wanted to take us home and show us to their parents.") By spending the 1970s in Canada, however, the Fungs missed out on the start of colonial Hong Kong's greatest age. The city they had left behind was no longer populated, in the main, by refugees treating it as a transit camp, but by the locally born, with a stake in its future. Their energies were adroitly harnessed by a reformist administration under Governor Sir Murray MacLehose, who expanded housing and welfare programs and forged a sense of community through civic education. The economy was booming, corruption had been tamed, and huge infrastructural projects were underway. It was a transformation nobody of the Fungs' generation could have possibly foreseen, but it hit Allan with full force when he passed through on his way to film the visit of a Canadian trade delegation to Beijing in 1978. Within a year, the Fungs were home.
"NOWHERE I WOULD RATHER LIVE"
The ensuing years have been extremely good to the Fungs. Panorama, Allan's company, has flourished. (Reflecting his early interests, it specializes in foreign films.) Janet helps him administer it, sitting in an office bedecked with photographs of Pocket Money, a racehorse they co-own. Jackie also works at Panorama, and, until she became pregnant with her and my brother's first child, spent her time flying off to screenings at Berlin and Cannes. Her 27-year-old brother David is a menswear buyer for one of the most fashionable chains in town. A bout of pre-handover jitters in 1995 saw Kwan-wai and Miu-kuk remove themselves to Canada for a few years—a lapse of form they now smile at—but today they are living in a modern apartment in Kowloon and appear very hale.
If the 1980s and 1990s strengthened the family's economic ties to Hong Kong, the post-handover years have reinforced their emotional connections. Many Hong Kong people have agonized over a place of domicile or a cultural identity, only to accept that both have been here all along. And that is what has happened to the Fungs. "There is nowhere I would rather live while I have the choice," says Allan. Jackie's sense of belonging followed from the removal of the stigma of colonialism. "Back then, things were just handed down to you," she says. "Now, we are more a part of our place."
But they are also forgiving toward their former colonizers. The only aspect of the British legacy that Janet quarrels with is the prestige attached to English. "It's inbred into our kids that English is a must for survival," she says in rapid, eloquent Cantonese. "Kids fight to get into English schools, but why should this be?" Marvelously, Miu-kuk believes British rule exerted a restraining influence on the high-decibel gruffness the Cantonese are notorious for. "The English form of politeness may have been fake," she says, "but at least it was polite." To Allan, the British instilled the sense of civic duty that Hong Kong people displayed during the SARS epidemic in 2003. "Hong Kong people were so determined then," he says. "The typical Chinese reaction would have been to scatter in all directions but we stayed on and fought. That wasn't us. That was the Brits!"
Barring Miu-kuk, they have also come to an amicable truce with China—in fact David has embraced a greater Chinese identity with youthful enthusiasm. "Am I Chinese or a Hong Kong person? Both are the same, really" he says. "I'm actually proud of being part of China." Allan, meanwhile, no longer speaks of oppressive threats from "the north." He says, "If you asked me 10 years ago, I would have wanted Hong Kong to remain British. Now, we are running ourselves and the Chinese government gives us a lot of maneuverability. If there are things we haven't done well, it's been because of ourselves, not because of the Chinese."
Hong Kong's recent crises—SARS and the economic downturn, quarrels over the pace of democratic reform, pollution—have concerned the Fungs, but not enough to make them question their commitment to the city. In fact, by giving birth here in August, Jackie will be making one of the greatest votes of confidence in Hong Kong it is possible to make. "The future gets more exciting every day," she says. "And my baby will have a Hong Kong identity card, which is the most important thing." The most? "Well, I'd also like him to have as many passports as he could—Irish, Canadian, Australian, we'll have to see."
Evidently, there are some things about the Hong Kong mind-set that will take more than 10 years to change.