While people celebrate how the "hardware" of Hong Kong, for example the new airport, has become impressive in the past 20 years, to me the most pleasant surprise is how much more gracious, polite and caring Hong Kong has become in the same period. It has some way to go of course to achieve the levels of Japan but anyone who has visited Hong Kong in the 1980s can testify to how much ruder and dirtier Hong Kong was then, and how the "every man for himself" mentality prevailed in colonial Hong Kong where the main objective was supposedly to make as much money as possible before 1997 rolled along, then migrate to Canada.

The shops were mostly mom and pop stores in those days and "chains" such as 7-Eleven had yet to take over the retail scene. It is fashionable now to recall that era with a tinge of nostalgia but I remember only too well how churlish, brusque, artful and even insolent many of those "traditional" shopkeepers were. In fact, among Southeast Asians who had come to visit Hong Kong after being seduced by TVB soap operas, it has become a parlor game to compare how one had been cheated by the Tsim Sha Tsui's "bait and switch" shopkeepers and how lousy the food was in one of those "tourist" restaurants one was corralled into. And, of course, it was also common to have them repeating in Malaysia and Singapore the colorful Cantonese curse words that were hurled at those who dared to walk out of a shop without making a purchase.

Now I find that shop assistants are friendly and knowledgeable and are falling over each other to persuade you to "try" the garment, something you would attempt only short of braving a death threat in those days. It seems Hong Kong retail staff are second only to their Japanese counterparts but handle a much greater volume of business.

Passengers on the MTR, who in the 1980s rushed into coaches before the hapless people trapped inside could alight, now politely stand aside. I don't ever remember seeing anyone getting up to offer a seat to the elderly or the infirm in those days but I notice our youngsters now are almost competing to offer seats to the elderly.

A sense of "community" seems to have replaced the every-man-for-himself attitude of old and ordinary people, fireman, policemen, and doctors nowadays are literally willing to die to defend other members of the community. To me the most touching moments that I have personally experienced in Hong Kong were during the SARS epidemic crisis when tragically several female frontline medical staff, both doctors and nurses, willingly sacrificed themselves in their heroic attempts to save strangers. If it were up to me, I would erect a large memorial in Central to commemorate these genuine heroes of the people instead of irrelevant statues of colonial administrators and British royalty there and elsewhere.

Will you believe it that in the 1980s worldly Hong Kong people used to tell me that Hong Kong people are apathetic about politics and that it is unlikely that they will ever become interested!

In short, the greatest achievement of Hong Kong in the past two decades, in my view, is that it has gelled together as a "community" from a refugee-camp culture with its parochial mentality. Societies normally take centuries to progress to maturity. The United States underwent a civil war, which at that time was the bloodiest conflict that the world had ever seen, before it emerged as a full-fledged democratic nation. Even old England which everyone remembers as a redoubtable, stable and peaceful nation had bloody civil wars. Comparatively the SARS and other tragedies that have beset Hong Kong are far less traumatic challenges. But we seemed to have come out stronger and better as a city and people.

Maybe people here should spend more time and money to tell the world that Hong Kong is now a safe and polite city and quite unlike what it was in the 1980s. Old-timers in Southeast Asia, who have not visited Hong Kong recently, often ask me whether Hong Kong is as filthy and its people are just as foul-mouthed and ill-mannered as they remember them. They look astounded when I tell them that water trucks routinely wash all pavements and that no shopkeeper has cursed me for years, not to mentioned that I was politely greeted in many stores regardless of whether I walked out making a purchase or not. Being too close to the scene and distracted by other problems, most of Hong Kong people don't seem to realize how much more of gracious their city has become. But this year, 20 years after the historic return of Hong Kong to China, it is a pleasant truth worth bragging about by its government and citizens whenever they travel abroad.

(HK Edition 06/28/2017 page9)