POSTCARD FROM | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA
As if from dreams, Hong Kong suggests itself as a kind of amalgam of physical and psychic elements that I know intimately, writes Chris Wallace. The Los Angeles-born writer and photographer explores Hong Kong from dawn until dusk, sharing a beautiful postcard from a dazzling city that feels both new to him, and reassuringly familiar.
BY CHRIS WALLACE | CABANA TRAVEL | 21 MARCH 2025
We have never really gotten beyond the late-20th-century-columns-of-glass idea of a skyscraper, have we? At a time when everything else in our lives seems to be refreshing with an exponentially increasing metabolism, these giant tablets of steel and concrete, with cascading shells of mirrored glass, feel oddly quaint, outdated. Their monolithic presences so thuddingly old-fashioned in our slim, nano, weightless, wifi era.
In fact, the interior of the HSBC center reminds me intensely of the Westside Pavilion of my youth, and every shaded walkway in town, accented in the same neon pink of Andre Agassi’s signature Nikes, reminds me of the old Beverly Center, near where I grew up.
But then, I have an oddly nostalgic response to Hong Kong. Oddly, because I’ve only been a couple of times, and only since the pandemic. But the feeling is strong: I know this place. As if from dreams, Hong Kong suggests itself as a kind of amalgam of physical and psychic elements that I know, intimately, but presents them as rejiggered in a symbolic way, slightly askew. The skyscrapers particularly — their design, patina and organization remind me of the Los Angeles of my childhood. LA in the '80s.
Along Wilshire where I grew up, and through Westwood and downtown Los Angeles. The white tiles. The chrome-covered cement pillars. Smoked glass and patinated aluminum. The serpentine labyrinths of elevated highways. Even some of the street names — Pacific Place, like the Pan Pacific park near my childhood home — rocket me back to a time when I was wearing Asics sneakers and stonewashed denim. And just as I notice that, I begin to notice a lot of people wearing Asics sneakers.
It is as if, once I had been put in the mindset of the 1980s, I saw it everywhere: cars gliding along The Queens Road at dusk that looked, from above, like characters in Tron; the way that the poured concrete, tinted glass, and aluminum getting weathered in the tropical elements recall the feel of the Resistance’s gear in Star Wars.
Riding on the trolley in Wan Chai, contemplating the density of life here, I caught myself marveling that, behind each window on every building, within each of those cells, there lies an entire universe, a whole novel, a cycle of novels. All of which reminded me of a scene in Edward Yang’s Yi-Yi, a movie about his own 80s childhood in Taipei — a scene and place and movie that also brings me back to my own personal memories.
It's a funny thing to think about: the way that nostalgia inflects our way of traveling. Our wanderlust. What we see when we are out in the world. And how we see ourselves there. Our introductions to a place, if they flash particularly brightly in our mind, are seemingly very slow to fade, hard to overwrite. For Hong Kong, my flash of course was Wong Kar Wai, and In the Mood For Love, which I was obsessed with at a formative time in my life — and which, irony upon irony, was filmed in Bangkok, inspired by a writer whose most famous book is a screed about Hong Kong not having any culture (other than a lust for money).
I think in my youth I associated Hong Kong with the glamour of international travel, with Pan Am, with the Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC), the racetrack, with Tony Leung in sunglasses and a dark suit in a shootout on a rooftop in the hot sunlight, with a particularly zany John le Carré novel.
And so perhaps it isn’t all too shocking that I have grown up into the sort of person who, while in town to write and photograph a story about Hong Kong, joins the FCC, who checks into the absolute paradise that is the Upper House, in a building that could double for Nakatomi Plaza of Die Hard, but inside feels like a soft wood resort, the very place a Sofia Coppola princess would stay. Not shocking that I have become the kind of person who delights in the architectural juxtapositions in Central Hong Kong, of the red and white brick Victorian buildings with the copper-colored glass offices.
In place names like Possession Point and Kennedy Road, in rusted matte steel and '80s glass bricks, in brutalist buildings covered in aquamarine bathroom tiles, in the shards of light littering the street, as if in their fall from the skies they have been sheared off by the titanic buildings, to fall in slabs on the asphalt.
In the dense Deco iron gratings over the windows, in the pastels of the neon signs, in wandering the streets in a rumpled linen suit like a character out of a spy novel, in a feast of Peking Duck with friends at the Jockey Club, and wandering through the banyan trees of Hong Kong park, watching the macaques and the little turtles, passing under the passages, painted a faded pink, as if I were in the 80s, as if I were in a dream.
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Chris Wallace is a Los Angeles-born writer and photographer | Follow Chris on Instagram @chriswallace4
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