Hong (Hong Kong) Character Analysis

The avatar of Hong Kong, Hong is a tall, frowning Asian man who wears business suits and looks 50-something, though he is actually around 200 years old. Before he became Hong Kong’s avatar, he lived as a human being during the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century. Though he may have romantic feelings for São Paolo’s avatar Paolo, he and Paolo have a tense relationship. For instance, when Paolo suggested that the Woman in White somehow sabotaged the births of New Orleans and Port-au-Prince, Hong unwisely dissuaded Paolo from investigating his hunch—an intervention Paolo resents. Paolo contacts Hong early in the novel about New York City’s birth and the Woman in White’s attacks, but Hong doesn’t appear until later in the novel, when he brings an unconscious Paolo to the Bronx Art Center and confronts Manny, Bronca, Brooklyn, and Padmini about Aislyn’s betrayal of the city. Dismissive of the boroughs’ avatars’ feelings, Hong bluntly reveals to them that New York City’s avatar may need to eat them to save the city. When he joins Bronca, Brooklyn, and Padmini to recruit Aislyn, Aislyn banishes him from Staten Island and transports him back to Hong Kong. At the end of the novel, he has organized a meeting of all living cities in Paris, to which Paolo invites New York City’s avatar and the boroughs’ avatars.