Someone messaged me last night to say that only one person had won HK$193 million in the Hong Kong lottery known as the Mark Six.
The timing for being impressed with money was a little ironic as I had just finished watching what was a very nice interview with a middle aged couple who were talking about running tours of Hibbing in Minnesota.
This is where Bob Dylan had grown up when known as Robert Zimmerman, and the couple spoke about how excited they were that actor Timothee Chalamet had shown up while preparing for the role of the songwriter in the movie “A Complete Unknown”.
It made me realise just how uninterested I was in the winner of the Mark Six and how lucky I thought that the couple in Hibbing are to lead the life they are leading, and just how materialistic so many in Hong Kong are, and which is something of a serial disease.
I thought about my parents and how they had managed to look after themselves and their only child despite having practically nothing. There was then Trina, who was barely twenty, and I diving into living together, and then marrying. This was while living in a cute and very tiny Japanese style apartment on Park Road that cost us HK$600 a month.
Together, Trina and I were making HK$1600 a month, and all that mattered was being together. It was about being in love.
When a few years later, and knowing that we were going to be parents, we moved to a slightly bigger apartment down on Bonham Road.
The rather pretentiously named Bonham Villas was hardly a villa. It was a two small bedroom apartment around 700 square feet with a tiny cubicle adjoining the kitchen. That was the domestic helper’s quarters.
This apartment cost us a staggering HK$1350 including rates. When Taryn came along, the household included Trina and myself, my cat, her dog, an infant and a domestic helper from the Philippines with around $3800 being our combined income.
We didn’t just manage, we never thought about anything else- and failing certainly never entered our minds.
Sure, more money would have been good, but everything revolved around what money cannot buy- the happiness of Taryn, the unconditional love of our pets and being one together.
I still think of those days and where I lived with my parents and how I didn’t have my own bedroom until I was around 15.
I was also hiding where I lived from everyone except for my childhood friends Jose and Steve.
This was colonial Hong Kong and there were the expat kids with parents on expat packages that included apartments on the Peak, in Repulse Road and in the ritzy, glitzy side of Kowloon.
It wasn’t about wishing to be like them, but, for me, it was not wanting them to know where I lived with my parents.
My parents were nowhere near middle class, whereas with her father being a Lutheran minister and her mother being a working housewife with two younger sons living with them and two older girls married and living in St Louis, Trina’s very lovely and down to earth parents didn’t exactly have spare change for the kids.
Still, we managed like many in Hong Kong who might have appeared “hip and happening”, but were playing out these roles at budget rates.
We were also our own community within other communities and with each one still looking for that right door to open as opposed to wanting and needing money before the door opened.
This is how I have always seen Hong Kong, especially being told from when a kid that horse racing is the city’s favourite pastime and about big wins, big winners and those who married rich.
Singapore might have had SPGs- Sarong Party Girls aka Goldiggers- but being the class conscious city that it’s always been, those in Hong Kong who wanted to marry rich- and Trina and I knew many of them- they were more, well, conniving.
As in gambling, they took very calculated risks.
For myself, as always, music had come along and played a very significant role in creating a career path.
This was when being in a band in school and then when just outta school being part of the popularity of local pop bands.
We might not have all been good, but here was an opportunity to get to know others who didn’t come with well known surnames and mansions on the hill, but were down to earth Hong Kong Chinese wannabe musicians.
We grew up together and a few like Norman Cheng and Sam Hui went on to be game changers.
I started writing songs and Sam being the first to record them.
When he started singing in Cantonese, I dubbed this “Canto Rock” which I later changed to “Canto Pop”.
At this time, I was writing for Billboard, the world’s leading music trade publication, and which carried the story of what Sam Hui was doing, and the emergence of my friend Norman Cheng, the former lead guitarist with Teddy Robin and the Playboys, being seen as someone who had very quickly risen up the corporate ladder to become the most influential executive in Chinese popular music.
The sleeping giant that was China was starting to awake and be seen as potentially the biggest music market in the world and I was the first to pump those tyres.
Trina was with me and my great support system all along and when leaving advertising and becoming part of the music industry which, by now, had become international.
All this led to new doors opening, catching the right waves through good timing and god given talent and working with some of the biggest international artists- Coldplay, Norah Jones, Gorillaz, Placebo, Elton John, Lionel Ritchie, Quincy Jones- plus getting to interview and know others in show business like Peter Sellers, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese etc.
Certainly memorable was Trina and I being invited to be part of a foursome with a certain French actress I was interviewing and her boyfriend. Not for us.
There was then the time we went to the airport where I was supposed to interview Lou Reed. Lou was more interested in us taking him to wherever they sold syringes.
Trina and I did runners.
We did, however, stay in his hotel suite in Hong Kong, and share a couple of joints with Barry Gibb before a Bee Gees concert at City Hall.
Trina and I went through thick and thin and slippery times together for 27 years.
We have a daughter and have certainly had an interesting life, where we faced racism, some very difficult financial times, but we also learned much, laughed a lot, and though we might have gone our separate ways, I always carry her with me in my heart.
Hong Kong is a tough place. It can tear people apart, bring them down and rob them of their souls- if you let them.
Hong Kong also toughens you up for what might lie ahead.
It’s a city where you’re Grasshopper and have to pass many tests before winning your way to travel freely and full of wisdom.
It’s something of a temple of the weird where everything is a little off kilter, which is because Christopher Columbus might have got it wrong.
This is perhaps how the world is and how it should be approached.
This is Hong Kong.
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