Back In The Nasty Colonial Day

The other evening I chanced upon two copies of the TV & Entertainment Times from 1986. The magazine has long folded, but it was widely read in late colonial Hong Kong—my family were subscribers—and as an indicator of expatriate attitudes at the time it’s marvelous.
One article warns readers that the percentage of Chinese passengers in the carriages of the Mass Transit Railway may be “up to 99.9%!” (yes, that’s their exclamation mark) and cautions that “there is little in English anywhere to help you” (untrue, by the way).
There is an editorial and a two-page feature devoted to the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson (“for sheer color and grace, it was unmatched”).
The phrase “colored gentleman” is used in a caption to refer a non-Caucasian male.
There are letters from readers about racial door policies at local nightclubs, and an interview with a nightclub owner who says that racially integrated venues have “never been popular.”
Tips are offered for the perfect party (“Are your parties swinging occasions?”). John Mortimer’s latest novel is reviewed. One columnist complains that radio presenters are “mangling” English because they pronounce words like “research” with the stress on the second syllable, while another mocks a Chinese newsreader’s pronunciation of “lightning.” Listings are provided for British Forces radio.
1986 was a long time ago. But it wasn’t that long ago. There were such things, for example, as PC viruses (the world’s first was discovered in January 1986), electronic stock trading (October) and hiphop (Public Enemy signed to Def Jam records that year). The TV & Entertainment Times and its readers, however, inhabited a parallel universe where everything was 1952.
I mention this as a sociological curiosity and because a lot of former residents have a tiresome nostalgia for Hong Kong before Reunification, or the “Handover,” to give it the colonial term (you can see that nostalgia at work in middle-aged Facebook groups like this one). And what I want to say to them is that just 11 years before 1997, Hong Kong was, on many levels, utterly backwards. It was the kind of place where terms like “colored” appeared in print and where white elites hesitated before boarding a subway car, and any nostalgia for those times is inseparable from the awkward reality.