A Chinese classroom. (Photo: MIKE CLARKE /AFP/Getty)

One night after my Cantonese class, a fellow student approached me to let off some steam. Like me, Jean-Baptiste was struggling mightily with the tonal language. “These evenings,” he said in a thick French accent, “would be much more enjoyable if I stayed at home and was a potato couch.”

I couldn’t have with him more agreed. Our instructor, a 60-something former “office creature,” is decidedly old-school. She follows the textbook to a T, and asks us to repeat after her. It’s immensely boring.

Sometimes I imagine that my classroom experience has been a little like my wife Wendy’s when she was in school here. She’s often told me about her teachers, who spoon-fed her information and seldom asked for her opinion.

From a young age, we in the West are encouraged to speak up in class, to voice our opinions and ask questions, but that’s not the case here. Despite some recent curriculum changes here toward more inquiry-based learning, a teacher friend of mine told me, schools are slow to change. For one thing, teachers were taught to feed information to kids; for another, students fear that they’ll ask stupid questions and embarrass themselves. Not to mention that in a place that respects Confucian values, it’s considered inappropriate to challenge your elders.

Thankfully, the parallels between my classroom experience and Wendy’s end at dry lecturing. During the week, when I fumble around for the right Chinese word, I have nothing to lose but my pride and everything to gain by amusing people with my botched Chinglish. “It’s like a game for me,” my friend Indy once told me. “Trying to figure out what it is that you’re saying.”

For Hong Kong kids, however, education isn’t a game at all. They’re saddled with a heavy workload from a very young age and face enormous family pressure to get good grades. Consider that Wendy often went to school on Saturdays, knew her class rank as early as kindergarten and had to have her parents sign any test she failed. While she was suffering through all this, I was attending a school halfway around the world that gave extra credit to students who attended basketball games.

It’s hard to believe, but since Wendy graduated in the ’80s, the pressure on Hong Kong kids has only increased. Seemingly every second of a child’s day here revolves around school, tutoring or lessons of some sort, all of which are exam-based.

This emphasis on testing has been around for a long time in Chinese society—roughly 2,000 years, in fact, since the origins of China’s Imperial Exam System, which the writer Justin Crozier called “a glorious attempt at intellectual meritocracy.” This civil service test was a grueling exercise in rote memorization of Confucian classics. As Crozier put it, “Texts of a total of over 400,000 characters had to be thoroughly memorised if a candidate was to have any hope of progressing to a civil service position.” He added that “the pass rate was only 1 or 2%.”

Even though China abolished this system in 1905 (Hong Kongers started receiving instruction from Western missionaries after British rule was established in 1841), there’s still a belief that the path to success starts with good grades.

Hong Kong Tiger Parents do anything and everything to ensure that their young children will “win at the starting line.” Many speak only English to their young kids, hoping to pass on vital language skills at an early age. Others enroll them at learning centers like “Little Academy,” which offers Little Bachelor’s, Little Master’s and Little Ph.D. “degrees” for kids aged 4 months to 6 years. While most of these tutoring centers offer instruction in English, Mandarin, math and the arts, some provide wealth management instruction for 5-year-olds and prep classes for kids hoping to nail their kindergarten interview.

All of this emphasis on tutoring squeezes parents (one estimate places the average monthly outlay at $1,000 per kid) while making some tutors rich. Buses are plastered with ads for young, attractive “star tutors,” and a silly online video produced by the team at “Super English Force” promises that studying with their native English speaker, Charles, will give you “an unfair advantage to [sic] your upcoming examinations.” A bunch of star tutors have become rich cramming kids into their numerous lecture halls. The genre’s pioneer, Richard Eng, earns more than $1 million a year and drives a canary-yellow Lamborghini (vanity plate: “RICHARD”).

In New York, there’s currently a standardized testing backlash among parents who fear that the city’s emphasis on testing and prep comes at the expense of more meaningful schooling. Last summer, New York City parents and children picketed outside exam publisher Pearson’s Avenue of the Americas headquarters with placards that read “Testing is stressful” and “I’m more than a test score.” One group, called Time Out From Testing, fears that “Bubble tests lead to bubble minds.”

And while it’s true that Hong Kong kids don’t have nearly the individualism of your average New York student, the schools here, for all their spoon-feeding and emphasis on tests, have produced some outspoken youth whose daring and intelligence would impress even a sign-waving New Yorker. Last summer, after the government tried to implement a pro-Beijing National Education curriculum in local schools, a group of teenagers formed a social action group called Scholarism. The students—cheeky, subversive and uncommonly bright—staged sit-ins, rallies and even a hunger strike. A little over a month later, largely as a result of their actions, National Education was scrapped.

Bubble minds? Not at all.

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Overflowing apartments in Hong Kong (Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

My wife, Wendy, and I live in the North Point neighborhood of Hong Kong, a jam-packed residential and commercial district once ranked the most densely populated place on Earth.

Walking its streets, I dodge and dart to avoid the throngs, but I rarely make it a single block without getting an elbow to the ribs. To avoid bumping into others, I often tuck one of my arms behind my back, but even that doesn’t work. I bounce off of people so much that I no longer apologize.

In Hong Kong, more than seven million people live in an area that’s only slightly larger than Manhattan (population 1.6 million). Put another way, it would be like living on Manhattan if everybody from Brooklyn, Queens and one-and-a-half Staten Islands moved in. 

Here in Hong Kong, my wife and I, along with our two cats, occupy a 417-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment, which is a typical Hong Kong flat.

We have no closet, so we store our clothes in a wardrobe and underneath our hydraulic bed in vacuum-packed bags. Our washer/dryer combo unit fits neatly under our two-burner stove. (Only more expensive “Western” flats have ovens, because Cantonese prefer to stir-fry, stew, steam and boil their food.)

The dryer isn’t very powerful, however, so we often hang clothing on two metal rods directly above my office desk. Our fridge is thin and short, our garbage can six inches wide, and our CDs and DVDs are stowed inside folders. We have no bathtub. Half of our possessions are in my mother’s basement.

And you thought New York was crowded.

Our flat may be tiny, but we’re fortunate to live in the space we do. Consider the city’s so-called cage dwellers. These (mostly) old men pay $160 a month to live in wire-mesh pens that measure a scant 6 by 2.5 feet—just 15 square feet—which contain a bed and little else. About a dozen of these crates are crammed into a dank, dormitory-style room.

Slightly larger spaces called cubicle apartments measure just 40 square feet and house entire families—all told, more than 100,000 people. Seeing photographs and videos of such squalid conditions makes me think that that The Economist didn’t speak with any of these people before ranking Hong Kong the most livable city in the world.

While the city’s poorest languish in cages and cubicles, Hong Kong’s upper class pays a hefty monthly nut for space that frankly ain’t all that. Recently I spotted a 1,240-square-foot three-bedroom that goes for $10,300 a month. A couple months ago, Wendy pointed out an ad for a parking spot that went for $54,000. I can’t make this up. Even Hong Kong’s top-tier apartments are small by New York standards.

There are numerous reasons why Hong Kongers live in such cramped conditions. For one thing, there are just lots of people living in a small, mountainous area with little developed land. On top of that, an influx of recent mainland money has jacked up real estate prices and overheated the market, shrinking what’s affordable to families.

But there’s also a tradition—desire, even—for a lot of Chinese to live under one roof. According to China scholar Wolfram Eberhard, the Chinese have lived in “cramped quarters and in crowded villages” since the days of Confucius.

The more people who “huddled together” not only maximized arable land, but, like a medieval European town, helped protect against invasion. It kept “the defensive radius to a minimum,” Mr. Eberhard wrote in his book A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols. “The shorter the town walls, the easier they were to defend.”

Wendy, who grew up in a 600-square-foot flat with five family members and a domestic helper, added, “We have a saying: sei doi tohng tong. ‘Four generations under one roof.’ You’re considered very fortunate to have many generations living under one roof.”

While it’s rare to find four generations living together in modern Hong Kong, many locals continue to live at home until they’re well into adulthood. The motivation is cultural, but also financial. Most children support their parents in retirement, thus making the already pricey real estate market out of reach.

But there’s a movement by an alliance of politicians and professors called “Underneath Flyover Action” to help those recent graduates find affordable housing. Last month they suggested that young adults could live in old shipping containers beneath overpasses and pedestrian bridges.

So far the proposal has received a lukewarm reception, although in a recent letter to the South China Morning Post, one reader supported the plan, which would place the recycled dwellings near busy, polluted roadways. “I would much prefer to live in a standard 6-metre container,” he wrote, “than in a caged-dwelling or coffin-sized bed space, no matter the location.”

As for the cramped lifestyle, we’re still adjusting. Our apartment certainly beats the 105-square-foot shoebox I endured for two years on West 71st Street. (The first night, while assembling a desk from Ikea, I broke down in tears and cried out to no one in particular, “What have I done?”)

And any apartment, no matter how small, remains preferable to a Hong Kong sidewalk, where a granny once elbowed me so hard, I nearly grabbed her cane and snapped it into kindling.

But the busy streets and crowded public transportation? I’m not sure I’ll ever adjust to that. Once, while waiting for the train, I stood in line for 20 minutes, as each car only had enough room for about a dozen people to enter. When I finally made it on, I had what amounted to a three-way. Some guy’s cellphone was pressing so hard into my butt that I had to do the same to the poor woman in front of me. I hope she forgave me. And I hope it was his cellphone.

editorial@observer.com

Chinese New Year decorations on display in Hong Kong. (Philippe Lopez/Getty Images)

A few weeks ago, my wife, Wendy, came to me with some troubling news. “Don’t freak,” she said. “But we have to give Lai See for Chinese New Year.”

Lai See, which literally means “Good Luck,” are red envelopes that elders give to juniors. There are lots of different traditions, but in general, married couples give them to unmarried relatives, friends or colleagues.

This might not sound like something to freak about, until you consider that the envelopes are filled with money. 

Typically people slip a HK$20 ($2.86) note in the packet, but for closer relations (a nephew, say, or a goddaughter), the denomination can rise significantly, to HK$100 ($12.90) or more, depending on the relationship. Last week on the mainland, a recently retired Communist party official complained that people no longer give his kids Lai See packets worth 10,000 yuan ($1,603). That’s called “bribery.”

I thought Wendy was joking. I didn’t think people would expect a white guy who’s only lived in Hong Kong for five months to partake in an ancient Chinese custom. No such luck. “I’m Chinese,” she said. “We’re married. People will expect it.”

I don’t like to give money away. I come from a long line of tight-fisted, industrious Pennsylvania Germans. When I lived in New York, I never took a cab, even if it was 2 a.m. and negative seven degrees and I was stuck on 11th Avenue.

Christmas is my family’s most important holiday, and my parents have always been incredibly generous with me, but when it comes to our extended family, we don’t give away cash like people do here. (If we did, we’d definitely claim it on our taxes). Rather we hold an annual gift exchange, in which we spend 10 bucks or less on a gift. Pasta, toilet paper and a gift card to the local gas station are three sample items from our grab bag.

I’m pretty sure I need to see a therapist about my money issues, but I’m too cheap to pay for one, so I’ll just take a stab in the dark and say that it all has something to do with the fact that my generation is just selfish. In New York, friends and I would go Dutch to dinner, bring our own beer to parties and expect our parents to treat us when they visited. Part of this had to do with how expensive it is to live in New York, and part of it is just cultural. My generation doesn’t often do much for other people because we fear that the favor won’t be returned.

So you can imagine how I felt when, a few days before New Year’s Day, Wendy and I withdrew HK$3,000 ($387) from our bank account. As I folded the crisp new HK$20 and HK$100 bills and slipped them into our red envelopes, I felt anxious, like I was on the losing end of a tradition that had nothing to do with me. What was I going to get out of this? I’m married. I’m not going to get any money.

On New Year’s Day, Wendy placed about 100 Lai See in her purse and we set off for her parents’, where we’d spend the day with 20 of her relatives. Because Lai See translates to “Good Luck,” people are sure to carry plenty with them during the holiday. Getting caught empty-handed isn’t just bad form, it’s bad luck. “No Lai See” equals “No Good Luck.”

As we stepped out of the elevator, our doorman, Uncle Lee, stood up from behind his desk, clasped his right hand over his left, and shook them in a traditional greeting. “Kung hei fat choy!” he said. (May you become prosperous!) “Lai See dou loi!” (Lai See come here!) It’s not polite for children to use this rhyme, but jovial Mr. Lee said it with a touch of humor. I think.

I dug out one of the special Lai See we’d prepared for such an occasion. (Like Christmas in New York, it’s the time of year when residents tip the building staff.) Inside was a HK$100 bill.

For all the anxiety I had felt leading up to the holiday, I was practically giddy giving money away. Perhaps it was the wide smile on Uncle Lee’s face, so bright that his wispy eyebrows floated above his head, or the fact that I was participating in the local custom rather than observing it from afar. Or that it was a small gesture of thanks to someone who’s been kind to me since I first arrived.

“Kung hei fat choi!” I replied.

“Your Cantonese, very good!” he said.

“Sun tai geen hong,” I said. Be healthy.

Over the next few days, I handed out money to the other doormen and every unmarried person I met. Mostly children, but some single adults, too, and parents who’d deposit it in their kids’ college savings accounts. To my surprise, Wendy and I got some Lai See too, from older business associates and relatives. I liked getting money, but it wasn’t the cash that made me happy. It was that everyone was acting generously. Everybody was on the same page.

Later, our friend Olivia would put it in context. “Chinese don’t grow up like Americans,” she said. “We’re not told to put ourselves first, to pursue our dreams at all cost. We have so many obligations other than ourselves. To our family and elders. We want to create a harmonious society. And that means sacrificing a part of yourself for the greater good.” It was such an easy concept—and one I just might try next Christmas.

editorial@observer.com

A Hong Kong taxi. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty)

A couple weeks after I moved to Hong Kong, I had coffee with a British woman named Margaret.

Margaret had lived in Hong Kong for many years and was the director of business for a communications consultancy. When I lived in New York, I had occasionally worked as a corporate trainer, and wanted to resume that work now that I lived in a financial capital again.

A friend recommended me to Margaret, and I liked her immediately, even though she told me I talked too much. “But that’s okay,” she said. “We can work on that.”

She took a nibble of her biscotti and flipped her Hermès scarf over her shoulder. “You’re just the kind of person we’re looking for. So let’s talk compensation. We pay $5,000 a day.” I clamped my lips so as not to spew English Breakfast all over her.

Even as a moderately successful actor—I portrayed “Mr. Pussy” on Sex and the City—I’d rarely made more than $5,000 a month, let alone in a day. I resisted the urge to fist-bump Margaret.

She told me that her company would train me for three months, and that I’d coach business leaders in presentation and negotiation skills about four times a month, for five grand apiece. “But this is a full-time job,” she said, scrutinizing me. “We’ll need you in the office the rest of the time, ringing up potential clients. We want someone who is fully committed.”

I calculated my annual salary: over $240,000. “Do you want me to sign in blue or black ink?” I asked.

She looked me square in the eye and sighed. “You’re an independent spirit. I fear a corporate role may be too restrictive and dull for you.”

She wasn’t wrong. I’d worked the last six and a half years as a magazine editor and hated the 9-to-5 life. I couldn’t understand the appeal of rush-hour commutes, vapid office chatter and having to wear pants to work. When I quit in August, I vowed never to do it again. I wanted to be my own boss again, like when I was an actor in New York. But still ... $240K?

“I can change,” I said extending my fist for a bump.

“From what I see on your C.V.—actor, writer, radio producer, teacher—flexibility is what you want. Be honest with yourself and get back to me in a few days, alright love?”

And with that she kissed me on both cheeks and exited down the shopping mall’s polished floors. Margaret really had a flair for the dramatic. I collapsed into my chair and thought: Okay, doofus—if you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere. 

The first time I visited Hong Kong was in 2001. Back then, I was a proud New Yorker living in a Park Slope railroad apartment that tilted at a 15-degree angle. Despite the funhouse accommodations, I loved the city: popping into Stromboli for a slice, making wacky experimental theater with friends and trying to predict what The New York Post’s headlines would be. Wacky Jacko Backo? New York was the grad school I never attended, a place where I was constantly stimulated and pushed to be more inventive, clever and competitive. It wasn’t the greatest city on earth—it was the only one.

Growing up in Pennsylvania, my parents took my brother and me to the city a couple times a year. We’d make the usual tourist rounds, but what really captivated me were the skyscrapers, with their lighted windows at night. Riding up Madison Avenue, I’d look out the window of our Ford Escort and wonder what people were doing in those offices and apartments. At that hour in my hometown, people were calling it a night. In New York, they were just getting started. Ten days after I graduated from college, my bus pulled into Port Authority. It was January 1995. I was 23 years old and my dreams were big.

Being a struggling actor wasn’t easy. At first, I shared a cramped Hell’s Kitchen walk-up. My room looked out onto a shaftway flecked with pigeon poop, and I slept on a grubby single mattress that had once belonged to my great-uncle when he lived in New York in the 1920s. Later I moved to a 105-square-foot shoebox on 71st between Central Park West and Columbus. The bathroom was so tiny that to reach the shower I had to step over the toilet. But I was willing to make these sacrifices. After all, I lived in New York, and I was certain that if I stuck it out, I could make it.

By the time I moved to Park Slope, I was fast approaching 30 and wondering if I’d ever experience anything remotely close to a civilized life. While my living situation was bleak, I had all my teeth and most of my hair and was scratching out a living acting in film, TV, theater, commercials and corporate diversity training programs. Those last were the gigs that first took me to Hong Kong.

Here’s how they work: rather than asking employees to sit through a training video, companies invite actors into their offices to perform scripts designed to help participants better communicate with people from different cultures. After the scene is over, the actors stay in character and interact with the audience. In 2001, one of our clients liked what we did so much that it asked us to train its employees across the globe.

In Hong Kong, I played “Patrick,” a young ex-pat investment banker who botched Cantonese names, pried too deeply into his Chinese co-workers’ private lives and bossed around his dutiful but suffering assistant “Suzie.” It was a fun role to play—jerks always are—and during my three weeks there, I got to see the world as a privileged Westerner. I was flown over in business class, put up at the Shangri-La Hotel and treated like a rock star in a city known for its superior customer service.

Like Patrick, I knew little about Hong Kong. Unlike him, I loved it. There, it felt like the natural order of things had been dialed up to a furious speed. Restaurants served food fast and hard, slamming down bowls on tables and whisking them away as soon as you’d eaten your last grain of rice. Hong Kongers hustled and talked away on their mobile phones at all hours. This was a place where business got done. 

When I returned to New York, the city felt positively Schenectady. Times Square’s neon lights and billboards looked small and dim, and walking along Madison Avenue at lunch hour felt like a leisurely stroll down Main Street. Hong Kong was taller, brighter, busier and more exciting. It was, as my dad would later put it, “New York on steroids.” When I was there I felt like anything was possible.

I loved this so-called “Asian Manhattan,” but more than anything, I loved Suzie—or rather Wendy, the actor who played her. Two and a half years later, we got married. I wanted to move to Hong Kong immediately. But I knew that wasn’t practical. I was an actor, and the clock was ticking on my career. If I was ever going to have a successful film career and live in an apartment larger than a storage unit, I felt like I had to go to L.A. I moved there in 2003. Wendy joined me a year later. My New York dream was over.

I quickly soured on the L.A. acting scene. Driving an hour to audition alongside 50 guys who looked exactly like me felt like an utter waste of time. I transitioned to writing and radio producing, in large part because I wanted to be flexible, to work anywhere. Now and then I thought about moving back to New York, but it was a great place to be when you’re poor and in your 20s—or when you’re rich.

While living in L.A., I constantly dreamt of Hong Kong, and after the U.S. economy tanked, I thought about it even more. I knew that if I quit my magazine, I’d have little chance of landing another job. And yet I couldn’t stand the lifestyle. I wanted to live in a land of opportunity again. This past summer, we packed up our things and headed to Hong Kong.

Wendy arrived two months before me and found a 417-square-foot apartment in the North Point neighborhood, an area once ranked the most densely populated place on earth. We live on the 18th floor in a newly refurbished two-bedroom. There’s no pigeon-poop shaftway, and our mattress is firm and new. Still, the building has its quirks. Recently, the Filipino maid upstairs hung the children’s Snow White sheets so low that they blocked half of my office window. It’s a local neighborhood. Very few Westerners live here. In our building, I’m one of two white guys. And that’s just how I like it.

I feel like I’m in the center of the action, a pasty-white gweilo observing Hong Kong’s uncomfortable transformation from former British colony to bustling Chinese city. Before Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, the city-state was a bastion of free enterprise, long rated the most economically free place on earth. A place with no sales tax, a capped salary tax of 17 percent and few unions of any significance.

Today Hong Kong is booming, with an unemployment rate of 3.3 percent, helped tremendously by China’s rise and the 77,000 mainland tourists who pour into the city, a place one writer deemed the “Great Mall of China,” every day. Hong Kongers may deride these “Strong Country People” for wheeling large suitcases through department stores (and packing them with everything from Louis Vuitton handbags to baby formula), but they contribute to a strong economy that continues to draw Westerners to this South China Sea archipelago.

Some 55,000 Westerners call it home, many of us sponsored on work visas arranged by banks and architecture firms. We come from New York, London, Paris and Sydney to escape gloomy economies and to join the workaholic workforce. It is, to most I’ve talked to, a relief from the bleak climate back home.

Here the air, while not great, is better than on the mainland. The taxes are low, and people enjoy personal freedoms unheard of in China. Of course it’s not as culturally rich as New York. You won’t find witty tabloid headlines or a capella singers on the subway, and nobody comes here for Broadway shows. But hurrying down Hong Kong’s sidewalks, you’re surrounded by something else equally electrifying: opportunity.

I turned down the gig Margaret offered me, along with the $240,000. I continue to write and produce radio spots for the U.S. market, but what I never expected was that I’d return to the acting I’d given up years ago. It only took me a couple weeks to get back into it here. Now I’ve not only returned to corporate diversity training, but I’m recording voice-overs and dubbing movies and TV shows. And while these gigs may not be as glamorous as a memorable appearance on HBO, it’s steady work. In the past five months, I’ve worked more days in a recording studio than I ever did in New York.

Hong Kong is, despite its urban density and exorbitant rent, far more liveable. Old buildings are (sadly) torn down and replaced with efficient, modern ones. Heading to the airport? A bus will cost you $5. Public transportation is blissfully smooth, efficient and cheap—a ride costs anywhere between 30 cents and $1.25. Lunch at a Hong Kong-style restaurant will set you back as little as $2.50. I could barely save a dime in New York. Here I’ve already saved three.

The comparisons between Manhattan and Hong Kong are endless. They’re skyscraper cities on islands with similar citywide populations (8.2 million in NYC and 7 million in Hong Kong). Hong Kong is often called the “Manhattan of Asia.” The other day, a bus whizzed by me with a real estate ad pasted on its side. It was, like all other new developments here, a gleaming collection of high-rises boasting modern amenities and glass façades. “Iconic Residence, Manhattan Lifestyle,” it read. As exhaust swirled around me, I thought of my Hell’s Kitchen and Upper West Side apartments. They looked nothing like the Manhattan Lifestyle being touted here. I still love New York, but for now I like living in the Manhattan of Asia a bit more. It’s the place I wanted to move to nearly 20 years ago, when I first got off the bus in Port Authority.

editorial@observer.com