Column

Letter from Hong Kong...

In 1990, economic philosopher Amartya Sen drew the world's attention to the skewed sex ratio in Asia and, in particular, to some 100 million "missing women" owing to familial and societal gender discrimination and neglect. In Hong Kong, however, as in most other parts of the "developed world", the gender balance tips the other way.

The number of men per 1,000 women in the population has fallen steadily over the decades from 1,087 in 1981 to 912 in 2006. That's projected to fall even further to about 709 by 2036. In other words, there won't be enough menfolk around!

The inversely skewed sex ratio is already having some curious sociological repercussions: increasingly, women of marriageable age in Hong Kong are looking beyond the region's borders into Shenzhen, in mainland China (where, as in India, there are countless "missing women"). A happy union of yin and yang, it would seem.

Whenever Hong Kong's dizzying opulence and synthetic civility gets a trifle too excessive, I nip across the Victoria Harbour to a slice of the Third World that lives in the heart of Hong Kong. In particular, I head straight for Chungking Mansions, a run-down 17-storey building that Time magazine recently cited as the Best Example (in Asia) of Globalisation in Action.

The building accommodates a vibrant world of commerce: guesthouses offering cheap lodgings, curryhouses from the Indian subcontinent, money-changers, South Asian and African tradehouses, shops selling pirated Bollywood DVDs, Indian provision stores - and even sleazy sex establishments and drug pushers.

A recent anthropological study of Chungking Mansions showed that at least 120 different nationalities had stayed in the cheap digs. At any time of day, you can hear snatches of up to 15 different languages spoken there. It's a delightfully chaotic world, with a uniquely global sub-culture that soothes the savage beast in travellers from afar by offering them a fleeting memory of home - wherever that may be.

Out on the streets, I managed to dodge South Asian peddlers of copy watches and cheap suits, but was stopped short by a greasy man who offered an arresting opening line: "Sir, you have lucky face!" He was only one of many Indian con artists I've encountered often enough on these streets.

Typically, they approach foreigners and pass off as "face-readers" and "fortune-tellers", brandishing photo-montaged images of themselves with Indian celebrities whose careers they claim to have launched. When I responded in Hindi, the greasy bird darted for cover and lost himself in the crowd.