After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes

I felt an affinity for Hong Kong from my first visit in 2002. With steep mountains ringing a majestic harbor lined with skyscrapers, it had a geography that changed the way I looked at the possibility of a physical space—a futuristic city implanted on an improbable landscape. As a British colonial outpost, Chinese city, and global center of finance, it gave off—street by street—a sense of being a bridge or portal between worlds: East and West, Communism and capitalism, open and closed societies. Here, one could imagine, there had been all manner of intrigue over the decades—opium traders; dissidents escaped from mainland China and the spies looking for them; foreign correspondents and organized crime; Chinese tycoons and Westerners who’d never lived in the West.