Published in WestEast magazine... a while ago.
One innocuous summer five years ago, fresh out of University, P.Ramakrishnan was thrown into the deep end of a social whirlpool as a Society columnist for a local newspaper in Hong Kong. Armed with a thesaurus, his father’s silk ties and a poison pen… well, digital Dictaphone (!), he wrote his weekly column. WestEast asked him to recollect Hong Kong society, as only he can.
My first memory of a society event (which I re-Christened my first lah-di-dah dinner) was at the Swanzes*, one of the wealthiest families in South East Asia, encumbered with property, hotels and restaurant chains. It was a cocktail and finger-food soiree they had thrown in honour of their daughter turning 32. For the third time in as many years.
Pink champagne guzzling socialites and their entourage were exchanging scathing reports on the previous months engagements and by consensus came to the conclusion that the dinner thrown by the ****** Consul general’s girlfriend, was, by far, the worst cocktail reception in loving memory. Even his perfectly elegant Missus, who smoked a cigarette off a lacquered black YSL filter, conceded that her husband’s taste in wine and women, was horrific.
Dressed, not unlike a sickly sweet haze of pink cotton candy, Melinda Swanze’s cheeks were coated with more foundation than the mezzanine floor of the building my polished, overpriced Italian shoes were standing on. Gravity was fast catching up on Melinda though sobriety wasn’t, and her sunken cheeks gave the charade away; this would be her last thirty-faux party.
She hugged me and stained my cheeks with her lipstick with the affection one reserves for a favourite cousin, not an intern at a paper you’ve just met an hour ago.
“Thank you sooo much for coming darling!”
I soon learned that the affectionate terms I had garnered quickly that night (“Sweetie! Darling! Cookie-dough! Babz!”) was not due to my endearing personality; the pet names and adjectives indicated nothing more than the fact they had forgotten my real, multi-syllabic name.
Cornered by her equally inebriated mother, under a preposterously large chandelier, that in any other circumstance would be a prop in a swashbuckling ‘30’s flick, I was asked, “So which part of India are you from?”
If memory serves me correctly, I’m sure I sighed and repeated, “South India, from Kerala, it’s at the very tip of the country, you know, which makes the V on the continent…”
“You’re South Indian?… but you’re not dark and you don’t smell!”
Erm... Right.
Ladies, gentlemen and the undecided, that very night, my first assignment for the Society column, is when I realised, I had long left the isles of Hong Kong, and entered La-la land. An island within an island where the uber-rich, elite and aristocratic had erased the bump and grind of daily life into a polished surface that gleamed like smuggled diamonds from South Africa.
“Manners and morality are the bane of the middle class,” was a favourite quote a blonde air-kissing ‘friend’ (I use that term loosely) had thrown at me one evening while she snapped her fingers like a flamenco dancer to the maitre-d, summoning the bill at a Conde Nast Traveller blessed restaurant.
“In any decent establishment, one would never have to hail for help,” she scoffed, outraged for being left waiting. “An entire evening should be choreographed like a fan dance, just one fluid motion after another. This place is the pits!”
After a five-course meal and four glasses of heady Chilean wine, interrupted often with amuse-bouche, I didn’t phrase it as such in my review but then, it had long been established that I was just a peasant with degrees who knew nothing about nothing important.
The decadent, the delicious, the devious and decaying (the Asia Forbes wealthiest list is brimming with octogenarian heads of various multi-national companies!), the fab and the frivolous (starlets and PR reps), whined and dined in bubbles, impenetrable, imperceptible ones where it wasn’t enough just to have money, but family, heritage, property, history and geography came into play.
Society is this labyrinth of interlocking arteries as so-and-so was so-and-so’s second cousin from his mother’s side, and owners of major buildings and landmarks were often known simply us, “Uncle and Aunty Ho!”
In this zenith-realm, seismic events like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the birth of the Euro, 9/11, SARS and tsunamis, are nothing more than headlines that affected interest rates and property prices in their global portfolio.
At a pre-fall/winter show dinner at the Grand Hyatt, one of the ladies-who-lunch bemoaned, “Did you see that poor Nate Berkus on CNN? The one who designed Oprah’s walk-in-closet? I wanted his company to do my New York penthouse… it’ll never be done in time now.”
Indeed, the interior decorator stuck in Sri Lanka during the horrific Tsunami was a favourite name to throw around among the crème de la crème (for about a month, it was, as everything is, a fad).
He was on Oprah, he was on People magazine, he was a demi-god for the day. His plight and utter devastation seemed minute when compared with an apartment denuded of carpets and well-appointed tea light holders.
Sympathetic nods bobbed up and down around the table and had their foreheads been free of snake venom (botox was for sissies), the coterie of divas would have expressed their concern with furrowed brows.
“Look, she’s here…” uttered the head of local charity (not unlike their counterparts in US and US, you’re really not society unless you’re on board of a charity, glamourous ones that shone with celebrity dust on gala nights), while slightly tilting her head in the direction of the grand foyer entrance, brocaded with obsequious penguin-suits.
Strutting in as though she never left the catwalk a decade ago, the former-model hyphen socialite was pouting for the wife-beater clad paparazzi. Aglow with flashbulbs, her poise hadn’t left her the way her husband had.
“Please don’t write about her in your column dear, she is NOT society,” whispered someone in my perked ears. “I’ve seen her take public transport…”
“But of course,” I replied in the thickest English accent gulping an outrageous giggle that always cropped up facetiously when I heard one of those quotable quotes. My other favourite was, “God, is that an Esprit?”
Let me rewind; at a Dior gala dinner, the laminate invitation card heralded the motif (black, red and diamonds) in a scripted font that indicated, with each curved alphabet that aberrations to the dress code would not be taken lightly. The suit was black, my shirt was red and though my bank account said otherwise, I looked like I fit in well. Bracketed with two mega-watts of the social circuit, the night of haute couture and cuisine was near-perfection. Or so I thought.
In the midst of drink and dance, my friendly neighbour saw a lapel protruding out of my shirt that unquestionably indicated that I was indeed wearing an Esprit shirt. She inhaled deeply and said, “God, is that an Esprit?” in the same tone one would say, “God, is that a blood-charred body in the library?”
In the harem, there was a charlatan in the mix! Though I essayed the role of an ingredient that mixed in well in any cocktail, like a bloated olive, I really wasn’t part of the drink at hand.
“Um, yeah. I didn’t have any red shirts and I couldn’t find one quickly…”
With a sympathetic nod she turned away and feigns ignorance, till date, that we ever met and slow danced to Unchained Melody one drunken night at Backroom*. Being the soul of propriety and decorum, I return the favour.
Not to be an ungracious prat, I must concede that I did meet some truly fine and refined folks – but their scandal and quirk free existence does not make a decent read. But what they know, ah, that’s another tale.
Sitting in a well-cushioned living room facing a postcard panoramic ocean view, at a brunch over the weekend I asked a true-blue socialite scion to analyse the local scene, under the solemn oath that no names shall appear in print.
“Only in Hong Kong will you find someone waiting to be photographed in a blouse which has a label of the brand slapped right across the front,” she says as her man Friday leaves a saucer full of slivers of soft-cheese. “You’d never see that in Paris or Milan would you? A big sign like ‘Eat-at-Joe’s’! A walking advertisement, who the **** does that? No sense of subtlety. They’re as sad as those who want to buy a title from England and come back. I’m Sir this and that from Wanker-shire. Oh please,”
As a circle of guffaws echo in the living room, even the portrait in the corridor of the lady-in-residence’s ancestors seem to smirk in concurrence.
Is there sex in the city? Are there Dallas and Dynasty like scandals burgeoning up at the Peak that we philistines know nothing about?
“Some… but nothing heavy-duty. Its all acquisition of another kind. The in-the-sheets business is the realm of the younger, gauche lot. But feuds and family dramas – well, its been splashed in the papers all the time. Murder, kidnapping, illegitimate children, drugs, infidelity. But nothing out of the ordinary that you wouldn’t find in New York or LA or London or Parisian society,” she says as a silver enamel toothpick, stabbed with the finest cheese home delivered from The Peninsula, tickles her Swiss-chalet attuned palette. “They’re just not as well attired…”
“And its just as vulgar as it is in London. Tattle-tales and lurid pictures in the tabloids,” says her sister-in-law, originally reluctant to speak out against the fraternity but diving into the conversation. She relinquishes, “There’s no style and dignity. Using the p.a. to make sure they are photographed by the snappers entering clubs or shopping at a luxury store. Remember that insane woman who walked around saying, ‘I am the mistress of whatshisname, the property tycoon?’ It was all whispers at first – but then, there she was, herself announcing it to the photographers!”
Agreeing whole-heartedly beside her, the one-who-must-not-be-named continues in the same vein, “It’s the folks dying to be treated well by somebody – if its society editors, chefs or concierges and they try so hard. I see it as psychological displacement, they were not treated well before or they’re not at home so they demand it outside.”
With a slow pause she concludes, “It’s rather sad.”
Can you tell new money from old?
“If they treat waiters shabbily. Or their maids or their drivers. When they’re just rude for no reason, I hear warning bells! Anyone with any dignity treats others with such. Classic nouveu riche mistake.”
“When they have to ring up people to make sure they’re in print. Even the retarded press knows who’s who and who’s not.”
“The head-to-toe covered in bling girl. I call her Brandi Shopsalot. No style or substance, everything they’re wearing is a flashy label and she picked it out of a magazine. These are the folks that think Jennifer Lopez is a style icon.”
“Yes, there was this ex-stewardess who was wearing a plain silk blouse but she wanted everyone to know she got it from Prada. Why announce it? Just reeked of insecurity and it just made it even more pathetic. Who cares? Wear a Giordano T-shirt but don’t be apologetic about it!”
“Anyone who’s ever said, “Do you know who I am?”
“Overdressed for an event. For a mall event, that Lane Crawford shoe-thing at IFC, this woman turned up decked up to the hilt in a cocktail dress! Hello, it’s a 5 o-clock pre-everything! Dress for the occasion, not the picture!”
“Lack of humour. I don’t mean being funny-ha-ha but, taking everything so seriously.”
“The name-droppers. Just as bad as the brand-name droppers”
“Oh the star-****ers. They’d get so excited if Ekin Chan was in the same room and would hound a photographer to make sure they’re caught together!”
“Anyone who makes a scene at a restaurant. If it’s the fault of the management, you leave quietly and never return but screaming in public is so down-market. Anyone caught screaming or shouting in public. Nothing nearly as civilised as a law-suit!”
“When they’re at every event and opening. If they knew the press would cover it, they’d be there at the opening of a 7-Eleven!”
“The false identities – you know when they say they went to Oxford, but really went to Oxford Brooks.”
By the end of the flurry of quotes, polite laughter made room for belly-clutching laughter as re-enactments of well-known wanna-bes were performed in the room. So what makes Hong Kong society so special? So different?
“The local flavour. A wife and mistress having lunch is almost French but how about when the first, second and third wives live across each other?!” she says. “I don’t know... you have to see it for the fish tank it is. Bulbous goldfish that are swimming near the top but it’s a big fish in a small pond who thinks what he sees around him is “it”. Everything’s a bit distorted, the vision is myopic. Take that floater out and throw him into the sea and he’ll choke… so he stays put.”
“That’s rather deep for a lofty conversation about high society in Hong Kong…”
“Or… I’ve got the Jones for sushi.”
Ah!
* Backroom - Private Club on Arbuthnot Road, Central, Hong Kong. Now closed and where Cafe O is.
UPDATE: Most of the bars and restaurants in this feature sadly have closed since publication .
June 2020
TOP DRAWER
One innocuous summer five years ago, fresh out of University, P.Ramakrishnan was thrown into the deep end of a social whirlpool as a Society columnist for a local newspaper in Hong Kong. Armed with a thesaurus, his father’s silk ties and a poison pen… well, digital Dictaphone (!), he wrote his weekly column. WestEast asked him to recollect Hong Kong society, as only he can.
My first memory of a society event (which I re-Christened my first lah-di-dah dinner) was at the Swanzes*, one of the wealthiest families in South East Asia, encumbered with property, hotels and restaurant chains. It was a cocktail and finger-food soiree they had thrown in honour of their daughter turning 32. For the third time in as many years.
Pink champagne guzzling socialites and their entourage were exchanging scathing reports on the previous months engagements and by consensus came to the conclusion that the dinner thrown by the ****** Consul general’s girlfriend, was, by far, the worst cocktail reception in loving memory. Even his perfectly elegant Missus, who smoked a cigarette off a lacquered black YSL filter, conceded that her husband’s taste in wine and women, was horrific.
Dressed, not unlike a sickly sweet haze of pink cotton candy, Melinda Swanze’s cheeks were coated with more foundation than the mezzanine floor of the building my polished, overpriced Italian shoes were standing on. Gravity was fast catching up on Melinda though sobriety wasn’t, and her sunken cheeks gave the charade away; this would be her last thirty-faux party.
She hugged me and stained my cheeks with her lipstick with the affection one reserves for a favourite cousin, not an intern at a paper you’ve just met an hour ago.
“Thank you sooo much for coming darling!”
I soon learned that the affectionate terms I had garnered quickly that night (“Sweetie! Darling! Cookie-dough! Babz!”) was not due to my endearing personality; the pet names and adjectives indicated nothing more than the fact they had forgotten my real, multi-syllabic name.
Cornered by her equally inebriated mother, under a preposterously large chandelier, that in any other circumstance would be a prop in a swashbuckling ‘30’s flick, I was asked, “So which part of India are you from?”
If memory serves me correctly, I’m sure I sighed and repeated, “South India, from Kerala, it’s at the very tip of the country, you know, which makes the V on the continent…”
“You’re South Indian?… but you’re not dark and you don’t smell!”
Erm... Right.
Ladies, gentlemen and the undecided, that very night, my first assignment for the Society column, is when I realised, I had long left the isles of Hong Kong, and entered La-la land. An island within an island where the uber-rich, elite and aristocratic had erased the bump and grind of daily life into a polished surface that gleamed like smuggled diamonds from South Africa.
“Manners and morality are the bane of the middle class,” was a favourite quote a blonde air-kissing ‘friend’ (I use that term loosely) had thrown at me one evening while she snapped her fingers like a flamenco dancer to the maitre-d, summoning the bill at a Conde Nast Traveller blessed restaurant.
“In any decent establishment, one would never have to hail for help,” she scoffed, outraged for being left waiting. “An entire evening should be choreographed like a fan dance, just one fluid motion after another. This place is the pits!”
After a five-course meal and four glasses of heady Chilean wine, interrupted often with amuse-bouche, I didn’t phrase it as such in my review but then, it had long been established that I was just a peasant with degrees who knew nothing about nothing important.
The decadent, the delicious, the devious and decaying (the Asia Forbes wealthiest list is brimming with octogenarian heads of various multi-national companies!), the fab and the frivolous (starlets and PR reps), whined and dined in bubbles, impenetrable, imperceptible ones where it wasn’t enough just to have money, but family, heritage, property, history and geography came into play.
Society is this labyrinth of interlocking arteries as so-and-so was so-and-so’s second cousin from his mother’s side, and owners of major buildings and landmarks were often known simply us, “Uncle and Aunty Ho!”
In this zenith-realm, seismic events like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the birth of the Euro, 9/11, SARS and tsunamis, are nothing more than headlines that affected interest rates and property prices in their global portfolio.
At a pre-fall/winter show dinner at the Grand Hyatt, one of the ladies-who-lunch bemoaned, “Did you see that poor Nate Berkus on CNN? The one who designed Oprah’s walk-in-closet? I wanted his company to do my New York penthouse… it’ll never be done in time now.”
Indeed, the interior decorator stuck in Sri Lanka during the horrific Tsunami was a favourite name to throw around among the crème de la crème (for about a month, it was, as everything is, a fad).
He was on Oprah, he was on People magazine, he was a demi-god for the day. His plight and utter devastation seemed minute when compared with an apartment denuded of carpets and well-appointed tea light holders.
Sympathetic nods bobbed up and down around the table and had their foreheads been free of snake venom (botox was for sissies), the coterie of divas would have expressed their concern with furrowed brows.
“Look, she’s here…” uttered the head of local charity (not unlike their counterparts in US and US, you’re really not society unless you’re on board of a charity, glamourous ones that shone with celebrity dust on gala nights), while slightly tilting her head in the direction of the grand foyer entrance, brocaded with obsequious penguin-suits.
Strutting in as though she never left the catwalk a decade ago, the former-model hyphen socialite was pouting for the wife-beater clad paparazzi. Aglow with flashbulbs, her poise hadn’t left her the way her husband had.
“Please don’t write about her in your column dear, she is NOT society,” whispered someone in my perked ears. “I’ve seen her take public transport…”
“But of course,” I replied in the thickest English accent gulping an outrageous giggle that always cropped up facetiously when I heard one of those quotable quotes. My other favourite was, “God, is that an Esprit?”
Let me rewind; at a Dior gala dinner, the laminate invitation card heralded the motif (black, red and diamonds) in a scripted font that indicated, with each curved alphabet that aberrations to the dress code would not be taken lightly. The suit was black, my shirt was red and though my bank account said otherwise, I looked like I fit in well. Bracketed with two mega-watts of the social circuit, the night of haute couture and cuisine was near-perfection. Or so I thought.
In the midst of drink and dance, my friendly neighbour saw a lapel protruding out of my shirt that unquestionably indicated that I was indeed wearing an Esprit shirt. She inhaled deeply and said, “God, is that an Esprit?” in the same tone one would say, “God, is that a blood-charred body in the library?”
In the harem, there was a charlatan in the mix! Though I essayed the role of an ingredient that mixed in well in any cocktail, like a bloated olive, I really wasn’t part of the drink at hand.
“Um, yeah. I didn’t have any red shirts and I couldn’t find one quickly…”
With a sympathetic nod she turned away and feigns ignorance, till date, that we ever met and slow danced to Unchained Melody one drunken night at Backroom*. Being the soul of propriety and decorum, I return the favour.
Not to be an ungracious prat, I must concede that I did meet some truly fine and refined folks – but their scandal and quirk free existence does not make a decent read. But what they know, ah, that’s another tale.
Sitting in a well-cushioned living room facing a postcard panoramic ocean view, at a brunch over the weekend I asked a true-blue socialite scion to analyse the local scene, under the solemn oath that no names shall appear in print.
“Only in Hong Kong will you find someone waiting to be photographed in a blouse which has a label of the brand slapped right across the front,” she says as her man Friday leaves a saucer full of slivers of soft-cheese. “You’d never see that in Paris or Milan would you? A big sign like ‘Eat-at-Joe’s’! A walking advertisement, who the **** does that? No sense of subtlety. They’re as sad as those who want to buy a title from England and come back. I’m Sir this and that from Wanker-shire. Oh please,”
As a circle of guffaws echo in the living room, even the portrait in the corridor of the lady-in-residence’s ancestors seem to smirk in concurrence.
Is there sex in the city? Are there Dallas and Dynasty like scandals burgeoning up at the Peak that we philistines know nothing about?
“Some… but nothing heavy-duty. Its all acquisition of another kind. The in-the-sheets business is the realm of the younger, gauche lot. But feuds and family dramas – well, its been splashed in the papers all the time. Murder, kidnapping, illegitimate children, drugs, infidelity. But nothing out of the ordinary that you wouldn’t find in New York or LA or London or Parisian society,” she says as a silver enamel toothpick, stabbed with the finest cheese home delivered from The Peninsula, tickles her Swiss-chalet attuned palette. “They’re just not as well attired…”
“And its just as vulgar as it is in London. Tattle-tales and lurid pictures in the tabloids,” says her sister-in-law, originally reluctant to speak out against the fraternity but diving into the conversation. She relinquishes, “There’s no style and dignity. Using the p.a. to make sure they are photographed by the snappers entering clubs or shopping at a luxury store. Remember that insane woman who walked around saying, ‘I am the mistress of whatshisname, the property tycoon?’ It was all whispers at first – but then, there she was, herself announcing it to the photographers!”
Agreeing whole-heartedly beside her, the one-who-must-not-be-named continues in the same vein, “It’s the folks dying to be treated well by somebody – if its society editors, chefs or concierges and they try so hard. I see it as psychological displacement, they were not treated well before or they’re not at home so they demand it outside.”
With a slow pause she concludes, “It’s rather sad.”
Can you tell new money from old?
“If they treat waiters shabbily. Or their maids or their drivers. When they’re just rude for no reason, I hear warning bells! Anyone with any dignity treats others with such. Classic nouveu riche mistake.”
“When they have to ring up people to make sure they’re in print. Even the retarded press knows who’s who and who’s not.”
“The head-to-toe covered in bling girl. I call her Brandi Shopsalot. No style or substance, everything they’re wearing is a flashy label and she picked it out of a magazine. These are the folks that think Jennifer Lopez is a style icon.”
“Yes, there was this ex-stewardess who was wearing a plain silk blouse but she wanted everyone to know she got it from Prada. Why announce it? Just reeked of insecurity and it just made it even more pathetic. Who cares? Wear a Giordano T-shirt but don’t be apologetic about it!”
“Anyone who’s ever said, “Do you know who I am?”
“Overdressed for an event. For a mall event, that Lane Crawford shoe-thing at IFC, this woman turned up decked up to the hilt in a cocktail dress! Hello, it’s a 5 o-clock pre-everything! Dress for the occasion, not the picture!”
“Lack of humour. I don’t mean being funny-ha-ha but, taking everything so seriously.”
“The name-droppers. Just as bad as the brand-name droppers”
“Oh the star-****ers. They’d get so excited if Ekin Chan was in the same room and would hound a photographer to make sure they’re caught together!”
“Anyone who makes a scene at a restaurant. If it’s the fault of the management, you leave quietly and never return but screaming in public is so down-market. Anyone caught screaming or shouting in public. Nothing nearly as civilised as a law-suit!”
“When they’re at every event and opening. If they knew the press would cover it, they’d be there at the opening of a 7-Eleven!”
“The false identities – you know when they say they went to Oxford, but really went to Oxford Brooks.”
By the end of the flurry of quotes, polite laughter made room for belly-clutching laughter as re-enactments of well-known wanna-bes were performed in the room. So what makes Hong Kong society so special? So different?
“The local flavour. A wife and mistress having lunch is almost French but how about when the first, second and third wives live across each other?!” she says. “I don’t know... you have to see it for the fish tank it is. Bulbous goldfish that are swimming near the top but it’s a big fish in a small pond who thinks what he sees around him is “it”. Everything’s a bit distorted, the vision is myopic. Take that floater out and throw him into the sea and he’ll choke… so he stays put.”“That’s rather deep for a lofty conversation about high society in Hong Kong…”
“Or… I’ve got the Jones for sushi.”
Ah!
* Backroom - Private Club on Arbuthnot Road, Central, Hong Kong. Now closed and where Cafe O is.
UPDATE: Most of the bars and restaurants in this feature sadly have closed since publication .
June 2020
This was a fun assignment. I had bottled up sooo much over the years of trolling the high-end parties in Hong Kong, to spill the ink was bril. After a horrific stint at HK Tatler (my editor at the time made life hellish - more on that laters, with delicious quotes from ex-colleagues) in particular, I think I got the above done in one sitting. When I filed, the editor sent me a text within minutes and said, "Love every word, its going in as is."
ReplyDelete= )
fabulosity!!!
ReplyDelete