On the Scene

The Long Goodbye

Hong Kong—The Rolls Royces still fill the forecourt of the Peninsula Hotel, waiting to ferry guests to and from the airport. The Sikh guard, hawk-nosed and hirsute, still sits outside the art-nouveau Luk Yu Tea House on Stanley Street. And the cityscape still bristles with ungainly new office buildings—newest and ungainliest: I. M. Pei’s Bank of China—which somehow fail to mar one of nature’s loveliest settings. Yet at their backs Hong Kongers hear time’s winged chariot hurrying toward 1997, when one of the most libertarian regimes on earth will give way to one of the most oppressive. Their minds are fixed on refugee problems—their own, down the road; and that of the Vietnamese boat people, which is on their doorstep.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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The Long Goodbye

Hong Kong—The Rolls Royces still fill the forecourt of the Peninsula Hotel, waiting to ferry guests to and from the airport. The Sikh guard, hawk-nosed and hirsute, still sits outside the art-nouveau Luk Yu Tea House on Stanley Street. And the cityscape still bristles with ungainly new office buildings—newest and ungainliest: I. M. Pei’s Bank of China—which somehow fail to mar one of nature’s loveliest settings. Yet at their backs Hong Kongers hear time’s winged chariot hurrying toward 1997, when one of the most libertarian regimes on earth will give way to one of the most oppressive. Their minds are fixed on refugee problems—their own, down the road; and that of the Vietnamese boat people, which is on their doorstep.