Voyages to Kowloon

The Star Ferry is perhaps the most famous in the world, beating out even the one to Staten Island, and like its New York counterpart, it’s always filled with residents and tourists. For decades, it and other ferries were the link between the island of Hong Kong to its country cousin, Kowloon, Macau, and the smaller islands. Even now, it’s the most picturesque way to cross Victoria Harbor and hundreds of passengers forgo the more rapid and efficient subway system or a bus to catch a breeze, feel the waves, and ogle the Hong Kong skyline.

It’s a speedy little voyage, taking less than ten minutes, and is at the top of the list of ten things to do in Hong Kong. In a place where time is money, it mirrors the city that it serves, being both beautiful and efficient.

I love being on the water and after a trip or two to Hong Kong, I ignored the Star Ferry in favor of the less photogenic boats that would take me through the harbor to the port and beyond. I never grew tired of seeing ghost mountains looming like dreams behind jagged green hills and the prickly little islands dotting open water that seemed limitless and was always a different shade of blue. These small journeys were my reward for learning the crowded maze of city streets that I roamed through every day of my time in Hong Kong; on those rolling tubs, I had space and solitude. My mind no longer needed to chart landmarks and fit neighborhoods into a mental map. This was hydrotherapy and nourishment too.

On my latest trip to Hong Kong, I wandered around North Point, vaguely aware that a ferry terminal was close to my apartment. Since this journey was dedicated to making the island a coherent and navigable place for me, I ignored the signs that would lead me to time on the water. But each weekend the streets I walked every day were filled with tour groups, crowds of shabbily dressed people led by flags of different colors, headed toward fresh markets, clothing stalls, and food shops.

Hong Kong island and the edge of Kowloon are both thronged with shoppers from mainland China, but the ones I usually saw were on their way to luxurious shopping malls, international supermarkets, Cartier and the other fabulous names whose stores glamorized the streets  of Kowloon near the Star Ferry. They were the reason why I stuck to the eastern part of Hong Kong when Saturday and Sunday rolled around, but here they were, in another form that I’d never seen before. Where did they come from?

I had a map that, when unfolded, took up enough floor space to hold a bed and nightstand. It charted Hong Kong from the river that separated the New Territories from Shenzhen to the coastal communities of Aberdeen, Stanley, and Shek-O. It was detailed enough to include portions of open water that were designated for future reclamation and it was segmented by dotted lines that showed the region’s many ferry routes. The ones that led from North Point to portions of Kowloon were as long as many that led to the outer islands and they went on my list of things to do before I left.

On a morning so bright and sparkling that it could only take place in a city that lies near saltwater, I got on the ferry with the longest dotted line. Hong Kong’s skyline dominated my journey as completely as it did when I viewed it from the Star Ferry but here it was less compact, less carefully planned, sprawling in more space than it was allotted in its postcard setting. It was clearly an evolving masterpiece that was almost matched by the buildings that faced it on the Kowloon side. This voyage was a spectacle of human hubris on a mammoth scale, dwarfing even the phantom mountains that usually claimed my attention.

When I disembarked in Kwun Tong, I was surrounded by new glass towers that reeked of Blade Runner and old industrial buildings that could have inspired Charles Dickens. The older buildings still held small manufacturers with workers visible in ground floor spaces that were open to the street while the new towers were all shrouded in ultra-modern privacy. The sidewalks were a mixture of delivery carts and workers rushing toward lunch; long lines had formed outside tiny diners and mammoth restaurants whose signs featured whole roast pigs.. This part of the city was so closely related to Manhattan’s Garment District of my teenage years that I instantly fell in love.

Beyond the crowds and the buildings designed for various versions of labor, there was a gleam of color and I walked up a sloping street to see what it was. There waited another cityscape from another time, low-lying buildings painted in soft colors and in eccentric shapes, bowed like steamships or curved inward in the softened enclosure of the letter C. This area was equally crowded but the pace was slow and people of my age sat in pocket parks shaded by small groves of trees.

When I walked back toward the water, the area beneath the elevated highway was brilliant with painted concrete pillars that held the weight of the traffic above. Each set held a different color, another pattern, a unique mood. A small building encased in bamboo held public restrooms and facing the waterfront were benches and covered shelters. A single food truck sat beneath the overpass with a sign in English;  it claimed to have chocolate-covered frozen bananas. A young white guy wearing a dashingly piratical bandanna that held back his mane of hair apologized. “This is our first day and you’re our third customer. The bananas aren’t completely frozen yet.”

Without other customers to distract him, he was in a mood to chat. “When I first came here, three years ago, this area under the highway was covered with all kinds of scrap, waiting to be recycled. Things change fast in this city.”

Near the water, next to the long promenade that had been built on the shoreline were abstract constructions, squares that tilted on edge or rectangles that claimed a patch of ground. Many were built from wood and were covered with glass windowpanes, in memory of the recycling that they had replaced. After dark those windows gleamed with light, sending small signals to the ferries that docked nearby.

I passed a woman in full bridal dress, her attendants holding a wide train of white fabric that struggled to join the harbor’s wind, and a community of old men on benches, chatting and scrutinizing the marine traffic that dotted their view. Less than a block away was an old Victorianesque shop front that now, in gilded letters, announced Cafeholic; a long line of chicly clad office workers waited outside to eat Italian pasta dishes.

“They say it’s going to become the new Central,” a young businessman said, and I shuddered. Right now Kwun Tong was known for illegal loft-dwellers and independent music clubs. It was a pretty safe bet that condos and chic nightspots weren’t lagging far behind.

In the first half of my Hong Kong visit, I stayed in a building with a doorman and an elevator that was bigger than any of my Hong Kong bathrooms. There were four apartments on my floor and the carpeted hallway was immaculate. The building was new, sandwiched between shops and facing a street filled with market stalls. The tram clanged its way through shoppers and delivery carts all day and into the night and my twelfth-floor flat gave me a fabulous view of the whole scene.

Unlike any other place that I’d stayed in Hong Kong, this one didn’t shrink from light. Its outer walls were banked with windows and my bed was wedged against most of them. It had to be. The main room was in the shape of a hallway, rectangular with the door at one end and windows at the other. A spattering of basic furniture lined the facing walls: a wardrobe and shelving unit flanked off against a desk and a refrigerator that were separated by a shoe rack. Two doors had been placed on the inner wall, one leading to a tiny bathroom with the smallest bathtub that I was too claustrophobic to spend much time in and a kitchen that was just big enough for one person at a time. Beyond that was a covered balcony for drying laundry that I would have washed in the tiny machine placed under the kitchen counter if I hadn’t been afraid of breaking it.

If my efficiency apartment in Seattle were partitioned into two rooms, each half would be approximately the size of this flat. But my place rented for what amounted to 6000 Hong Kong dollars and from what I’d read over the years, this spot was probably closer to 20,000 HKD a month. Its market street setting was humble but it was on Hong Kong Island, and down the block from it were two new, spiffy-looking hotels. Although North Point wasn’t chic yet, it wasn’t cheap either.

I knew I could never afford a place as palatial as the one I was staying in now but I was curious. What would my Seattle rent yield me in Hong Kong?

I went to Craigslist and discovered that the answer was not much. For 800 US I could rent a room with shared bath that had probably been partitioned off from a larger room and would have just enough space for a bed. Quite a few of these Spartan domiciles were in North Point, which was the only advantage I could see.

One of them was in one of the many Hong Kong neighborhoods that I’d never heard of and, curious, I looked it up online. To Kwa Wan was a place in Kowloon which wasn’t yet on the subway system. It was a low-income, industrial neighborhood with a waterfront. In fact, it was one of the destinations that I could reach from the North Point pier.

The ferry docked near a public pier where a family was busy with poles and nets in search of their Sunday dinner. A walkway led past land that was fenced off with chain metal but held unmistakable signs of habitation: clothes hung on lines that were tied to bushes, a smattering of children’s toys, a bicycle. Just beyond that was a phalanx of parked buses and many, many people, all in motion.

Off to the side was a huge building with a sign that identified it as a shopping plaza but none of the other markers were evident. It held no Starbucks, no MacDonalds, no Watsons or Sasa or Cafe de Coral but it was busy. I followed a crowd inside where I hoped to find a restroom.

The shops were filled with merchandise that looked quite a bit like the stuff for sale in my North Point marketplace and the shoppers all looked familiar too. They were arranged in separate throngs, each led by a person carrying a colored flag.

Beyond the shopping center things got eerie. The crowds bustled behind their flagbearer down a main street that was otherwise vacant. The buildings that they passed were closed and had the distinctive Brutalist architecture of Hong Kong's small industries, glass bay windows that ran the entire length of a structure from top to bottom and held elevators, objects that looked like exterior baskets but were actually ventilation systems, placed near huge white numerals from one to four that identified each floor of the building.

Lanes that led from this thoroughfare were the magnet destinations. Here were small shops that sold food, traditional Chinese medicine, small electronic items, their windows filled with beckoning ceramic cats of varying sizes. Above these shops laundry hung from metal window frames. A grim diner on a corner that was locked and barred bore a sign in Chinese and English. The words I could read said Cafe de Joy.

Squatting on the sidewalk outside a more hospitable dining option was a large group of women, all with shopping bags, all wearing clothes that had seen better days. Each of them had the unmistakable look of people who were ready to go home. Others with more energy were following their flags to the North Point ferry.

How did this part of Kowloon become a shopping mecca for ordinary people, I wondered, and how did the ordinary people who lived above the beckoning cats react to the weekend invasion? The only way to find out would be to rent my own set of metal-framed windows and hang out my laundry--but I’d have to do it fast. The street of industrial buildings where I’d followed the crowds had construction barriers running down its center. The MTR was on its way and Starbucks wouldn’t be far behind. I would need to take up residence while the ferry to North Point was still the quickest way to leave Kowloon..

There was one last ferry route from North Point that I hadn’t yet taken and I had deliberately saved it for last. It went to Hung Hom, an area of Kowloon that I’d always thought was a bit bedraggled, but from there another ferry would take me back to Hong Kong Island. The ferry to Wanchai was a longer route than the Star Ferry but had much the same view of the skyline, with the same expansiveness of the other North Point seascapes. If I made a complete round trip, it could take hours perhaps and I couldn’t think of a better way to end the day.

The sky, water, and distant mountains had all taken on different shades of blue, from azure to cerulean to the pale and smoky navy of spectral shapes silhouetted against the horizon. When I stood on the open lower deck of each ferry, I was wrapped in a brilliant monochrome, broken only by buildings and the surprise of green hills that rose behind them. A sailboat with a black sail floated in front of me, followed rather improbably by one whose sail was pure white, and suddenly I realized the day I was living had become visual poetry.

Then the ferry pulled into Hung Hom, where I learned there was no other route. The ferry to Wanchai had been discontinued several years earlier.

Drowning my sorrows in a drink from Starbucks, I looked at where I had ended up. There was a luxurious hotel in a park-like setting that was edged by the waterfront walkway that every neighborhood seemed to provide, but this one was studded with signposts that said the Hung Hom Promenade would lead to the one that ended in the Star Ferry.

One reason I rarely went to this part of Kowloon was because it seemed so cut off from the rest of the world, broken and scarred by highways and railway lines. My walks there had never been ones I’d cared to repeat or expand upon, so this promenade was an unexpected present. It was a wide and almost empty path with an unfamiliar sense of space that gave me a fresh jolt of energy, until it came to an end.

A sign directed me toward a new walkway that curved up a tree-covered hill and I obediently followed. Suddenly I was above the harbor, with the entire Hong Kong skyline on my left and a thick screen of greenery on my right. Beyond that was the ugly elevated highway that Hung Hom had turned into an asset.

It ended in construction when the path descended into the harbor neighborhood of Tsim Sha Tsui and the Star Ferry.  Even so, I was delighted by the unexpected beauty of a neighborhood that I had been quite certain had none and the promise of an expanded harbor walk to come. Kowloon was capitalizing on its gift of space, turning that portion of Hong Kong from a grim and dingy sprawl to a destination point that would match its more sophisticated neighbor across the harbor. Although many of the area’s changes made me queasy, this was one I looked forward to watching and hoped I’d be able to return and witness its completion. ~Janet Brown

Traveling on My Stomach

When I travel alone in countries where I don’t have language, food takes on a dimension that goes beyond nourishment, or even pleasure. It ensures that I’ll have company at least once a day.

Because I’m the kind of woman who thinks facing the world before my morning coffee ranks right up there with being flogged in the town square, I usually have breakfast in my room. This sounds far more luxurious than it is, since any food that might accompany that coffee is often a couple of bananas, ziplocked in their skins with no need for refrigeration and functioning more like a vitamin pill than a meal. The best accompaniment I’ve ever found was one I’d  often buy from a Shenzhen street cart to eat the next morning, crisp, flaky little pastries that were like round discs of phyllo, filled with slightly sweetened bean paste. They were just sweet enough to make my instant coffee bearable, and the texture of crisp and smooth was irresistible. Three of those with Nescafe was like jet fuel, and if anything ever takes me back to Shenzhen, they’d be a major factor in my decision.

Since coffee is the main component of my mornings, food doesn’t come into play with any sort of complexity until later in the day, but when it does, it hits full force.

On a good day, I’ve wandered and stared and fed myself with my eyes until my blood sugar level plummets to absolute zero, With any luck at all, I find an egg tart or a croissant from Starbucks, something to eat quickly without having to stop. Days like that are so satisfying that I don’t need anything more than a return to my room with anything that’s portable and not messy: supermarket sushi and a tiny bottle of red wine when I’m in Hong Kong, unsalted cashews and a beer in Shenzhen. After a day of sensory assault, I don’t have enough energy to muster an appetite or to face any sort of human interaction. I’m so full of images and questions that there’s no room for anything else. It’s that kind of day that makes me get on a plane and leave home for a couple of months, but it isn’t, as current jargon has it, sustainable.

In most of the places where I go, I try to avoid preconceptions, which means I don’t do a lot of research ahead of time. I do my best to be as unburdened with information as possible so I can start from nothing at all. The most preparation I submit to is finding a place to stay for the first few days and then I start asking questions. This technique goes straight to hell in places where not only do I have no language, I have no internet. That’s when I often hit the wall and head for a place where I know I can get comfort food.

In Shenzhen, there was a spot near my hotel that called itself Granville Whale’s Cafe. After a humiliating lunch that involved plastic chopsticks and slippery dumplings, I stopped there for a cup of coffee and a chance to recover my equilibrium. The coffee turned out to be stratospherically above Starbucks, the menu offered smoked salmon, and the manager had gone to school in the U.K. It was a place where I could get a meal without effort and a dash of conversation in English. I went there several times a week.

I had the bad luck of being in Shenzhen during Chinese New Year. Although the streets and the subways were uncrowded, the only places that were open were shopping malls. The day that I discovered that the mall near my hotel had an outdoor cafe attached to Emporio Armani where I could have a glass of wine and a plate of truffle fries was a triumph. The wine was mediocre but it was the only by-the-glass option in my neighborhood. I would go there to sit in the sun, surrounded by chic, cigarette-smoking girls and their companions. It shouldn’t have been soothing, but it was.

Spending time in Hong Kong can be difficult for a claustrophobe like me, with its tiny rooms, crowded subways, and spiderweb streets. There are days when the rush of people that usually exhilarates me makes my pores clench and every nerve shriek. Familiar spots like Starbucks or McDonalds where I would never have a meal but  depend on for free internet and clean bathrooms usually are packed solid with every seat taken.

The most difficult thing to find in this city is a spot where you can sit in a quiet place, without being rushed away by people eager to take your seat once you leave. It took me years to find one but once I did, I clung to it. It was on a bar street and probably was a raucous little joint at night, but in late afternoon I could sit near the huge glass door, look at passersby, read the South China Morning Post, check email, and think. The food was Western and starchy, the wine was marginally drinkable, but the background music was unobtrusive and the people at the other tables seemed to be there for the same reason as I.

The neighborhood I stayed in was once heavily populated by immigrants from Shanghai in flight from post-Liberation China. They had left a legacy of flavor that I loved, but so did hundreds of other people. I learned that I could eat well or I could have supermarket sushi in my room or I could relax at Big Bite. It wasn’t a matter of taste, it was a question of need.

Silence or good food? Solitude or the presence of others?  Solo travel carries Faustian bargains like this one and I’m always grateful for places that makes this choice a part of my journey. ~Janet Brown

On and Off the Train

My friend the Cosmopolitan Dutchman was a catalyst--when he was around, things happened. He had the energy of an elegant jumping bean in human form, tempered with a delightful sense of humor and amazing kindness. He was always sheer pleasure to spend time with, so since my train was passing through his hometown of Hua Hin, I asked on Facebook if he would come to wave me out of Thailand as I moved on to Malaysia. "I'll be there," was his monosyllabic response, leaving me to think that he would probably salure the whistle of my train from the balcony of his apartment.

 Leaving Thailand was harder than I expected and I was in tears for the first half of my departure day. By the time the train pulled out, I was in a state of emotional numbness, in no mood to chat with the friendly Muslim lady who sat across the aisle from me. She was part of a tour group, all Muslim, all aging, all from the same Malaysian town, so my community for the next twenty-three hours was, I knew, abstemious and conservative.Get used to it, I told myself, and refrained from ordering my customary beer with my supper.

 I was too preoccupied to notice that we had stopped at Hua Hin, but not too stupified to be unaware that there was loud pounding on the Malaysian lady's window. She peered into the darkness in some confusion and I shrugged. I had been on a train once in Thailand where someone threw a rock at my open window and that was in far less volatile times. Whoever was pounding was not my concern, I thought, but I was wrong.

 Seconds later there was the Cosmopolitan Dutchman, smiling, dressed in only slightly rumpled linen, with a plastic glass full of beer in one hand and a long-stemmed red rose and a bag with two cans of beer in the other. "I told you I'd be here," he announced, "Why didn't you come to the window?"

 He saluted me in European fashion with a kiss on each cheek and the Muslim lady's eyes widened to the size of those of a disconcerted owl. "They got me," he told me. "Look, my shoulder is broken," and he pulled his shirt to the side to reveal a hefty bandage, "Seven stitches," he continued, pointing to his head.

 "How?" I demanded and he looked toward the door, "Hell, the train is moving," and he rushed to the exit but with no luck. Inexorably, the International Express to Malaysia was in motion and there was no way to stop it.

 There was only one thing to do and we took our beer to the dining car, far from the Muslim village, and began to interrogate train staff about the next stop. They were quite insouciant that the C.D. would have to travel three hours before getting off at Chumpon until they discovered that he had no ticket. Then somehow a stop was pulled out of a hat and his impromptu journey was cut to one hour instead.

 This was just about long enough to discover who "got" him and how. He had gone to an ATM one evening and was aware that a woman was close behind him but thought nothing of it. Pocketing his cash, he started to make his way down a dark and untrafficked street, when the blow struck and took him to the ground. Two Thai women stood over him, methodically bludgeoning him with a baseball bat. He lost consciousness and woke up without his cellphone or wallet. When he was able to investigate further, after several days in the hospital, he found that they had also managed to get his PIN while standing behind him and his bank account was considerably less than when he had made his last transaction.

 And yet, with seven stitches and a broken shoulder, the C.D. had still come to my train, rose in hand. There were far too few men like him in the world and I was lucky he was my friend. At least I thought he was still my friend--the train that was meant to take him home was two hours late and he wasn't in bed until after 2 am. The message that conveyed that information was a bit terse.

 The next morning the Muslim lady peered into my sleeping compartment the minute I opened the curtains. "Where is your friend?" she asked. "Oh hiding at the foot of my 5'6" pallet here," I didn't say. She was charmed to hear his travel tale and so was everyone else on the car who asked me about him during the remainder of our journey. The rose cheered me all the way to Penang, where the Cosmopolitan Dutchman had promised to come for a visit. I knew he would--he was a man of his word--but heaven only knew what would happen when he did. But I was certain it would make a great story and we'd have a very good time.

Spirit of Christmas Past--Hong Kong

It was sweater weather in Kowloon on Christmas Eve, with a crisp breeze giving an autumnal touch to midwinter. There were hordes of shoppers in the subway and on the streets but there are always shoppers in this community. People in clothing that was far from haute couture waited in roped-off lines to get into Chanel and Louis Vuitton, gleefully taking photos of each other as they stood under the designers’ logo. Crowds milled along a side street filled with fake watches and poorly-copied Birkin bags. In the downmarket Yau Ma Tei area, women scrutinized stalls crammed with polyester clothing and infant garments that look highly flammable. Even Chungking Mansions had put out bins of gilted key rings with Hong Kong scenes and little plastic trees and gaudy Christmas balls. Tis the season after all.

 Westerners decry holiday commercialism in their home countries but Hong Kong has a death grip on that particular talent. Why just commercialize a holiday when you can strike directly at the heart of it--the Christmas tree?

 A prominent public square in the heart of Hong Kong had a mammoth Christmas tree that was purportedly made of Swarovski crystals--at least that's what all of the nearby signage proclaimed. And in my own temporary neighborhood of Nathan Road, Christmas was brought to us by Chula Pops, giving us a tree decorated with gigantic versions of these confections, which "make Christmas sweet." There were probably far more co-opted trees all over the city, but I didn’t have the energy to hunt them down.

 To escape Christmas trappings, I went to Lantau Island's Big Buddha, a statue so glorious that it transcends all of the hype that surrounds it. A "village" dedicated to shopping and Starbucks was what I walked through before climbing the 200+ stairs to reach the Buddha, and suddenly I was surrounded by snowflakes. As Johnny Mathis crooned over a "white Christmas," a snow machine blew bits of dandruff onto passersby. Before I could indulge in my usual cheap cynicism, I caught sight of the very small children who were transfixed by what was coming from the sky and suddenly the snowfall was real and the carols were sweet and Christmas was really and truly in the air.

 Merry Christmas to all--even (or perhaps especially) to those who manufacture a phony snowfall and make little children happy.

Chungking City

 

I was feeling frazzled when I stumbled off an evening flight from Bangkok to Hong Kong. I had come to spend a month in Chungking Mansions, and this was a plan that had me apprehensive. People had told me it was a center for all sorts of risky business so my curiosity had prevailed over caution. But now I wondered how I would find my way through the labyrinthine hallways that I’d seen Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express,and whether I would end up sharing my bed with hungry insects. I tried not to think of advice given to a friend before she stayed in that notorious spot: “Bring a gun.” She had moved to a hotel farther up Nathan Road only a few days after  checking into a Chungking Mansion guesthouse.

  Deciding I needed a little pampering before I faced my destination, I swerved away from the Airport Express signs and headed off in search of a taxi queue. I’d changed a substantial sum of money to Hong Kong dollars before I’d boarded the plane; it would be an expensive indulgence but I would be living the Spartan life soon enough. I deserved that taxi, I told myself.

  I wasn’t a neophyte traveler. I’d gone alone to cities in Southeast Asia and China, and had always been successful in finding my way from airports to my destination. So with no trepidation I joined a crowd of travelers heading down an exit hallway that I was certain would lead me to a taxi stand. When a shabbily dressed man approached me and asked me if I wanted a cab, I was more than happy to hand over my suitcase and follow in his wake. Just like Bangkok, I thought,  taxi queues are for chumps.

  The man led me across a parking lot to a large van. In Thailand this is a common form of public transit and although I’d looked forward to the privacy of a taxi, at least the additional passengers who would ride with me would help defray the cost of the fare. I climbed in, the man tossed my suitcase on the floor beside me, and then slid the door shut. I was the only person in the vehicle aside from the man in the driver’s seat. As the door clicked into place, he started the engine.

  “How much?” Knowing that I should have asked this question several minutes earlier struck me with full force. There was no reply, and the driver pulled onto the open road without picking up any other fares.

  I began to feel incredibly stupid, How many times had I read about naïve tourists being taken for a ride in New York City, one that ended in a demand that approximated a small fortune? But I was in Asia, I consoled myself, not Manhattan. The most I’d ever been overcharged in Bangkok was twenty dollars—Hong Kong, of course, would be more expensive, but certainly not up to New York standards.

  I made myself relax and began to enjoy the lights of the approaching city that gleamed on the dark water. The driver broke into polite, pleasant taxi conversation and I responded with a sense of relief.

  He proudly identified the neon extravaganza that was Nathan Road and waved at a building that we passed, “That’s Chungking Mansions,” he told me. “Stop here, please,” I said. He kept going.

  We pulled into a dimly lit, empty street and parked near an ATM. The driver pulled out a laminated card with rates printed on it; this much for a passenger, so much for a bag, another sum for the privilege of using a highway tunnel, and the final amount being the fare to Kowloon. When the numbers were added up, the sum was substantial and I tried a feeble attempt at bargaining. He laughed.

  “That is the rate. If you don’t have enough, we can use the ATM.”

  He was no longer smiling and neither was I. The phone I had played with at the beginning of our journey, hoping he thought I was texting a local contact, was useless. I hadn’t yet bought a SIM card for Hong Kong. I opened my bag and pulled out my Hong Kong dollars.

  The fare he demanded wasn’t quite as much as the money I had with me, but it was about $200 US dollars. As pleasantly as I could, I asked, “May I have one of your business cards?”

  “Why? You want to use me again?” He smiled as he handed me a card with a name and number that I was certain would be useless.

  And of course it was. When the Nepalese tout who greeted me at the entrance of Chungking Mansions looked horrified at the amount of money I had lost and tried to call the printed phone number, it didn’t exist. “What did the man look like?” When I gave him a description, he said, “He’s done that before to many people; they paid him more money than you did because they didn’t know. Here, give me your phone.”

  He led me to a place where I could buy a Hong Kong SIM card and then put his number into my contact list. “Call me if anybody gives you any more trouble,” he said. He took me to a guesthouse where I was given a clean bed in a quiet room and suddenly Chungking Mansions felt like a place where I would be comfortable and safe—just so long as I took public transportation to get there.

  For years after that, I stayed in Chungking Mansions when I was in Hong Kong, always for at least a month at a time, and the only thing that ever frightened me during my visits was the possibility of a fire. The electrical wiring was often visible, tangled in terrifying clumps above the entrances to guesthouses, and kitchen carts filled with cooked food traveled in the elevators from the upper floors to the ground floor food stalls every morning. Although I loved the smell of curry and freshly baked naan that drifted into my room at night, the thought of propane tanks and open flame being used somewhere close to my bed did nothing to make my sleep tranquil. I never stayed higher than the ninth floor and had my escape route down the staircase timed to the second.

  It was the ugliest spot I had ever spent time in. The windows I insisted on having gave me a view of grey, mildewed concrete walls, windowsills strewn with garbage that was eaten by pigeons, and clothing suspended from air conditioners, drying in air that smelled like wet mops. The stairway was blotched with the red stains of spit from betel chewers and the windows on the landings often sported tiny holes that looked as though they had been made by bullets. The food gave me Delhi Belly if I ate it for more than two days in a row. My rooms were always clean with walls of immaculate white tile, but were so small that I took my morning shower only after putting towels under the bathroom threshold to keep rivulets of bathwater from trickling under my bed.

But there was an honest sense of community in Chungking Mansions that appealed to me. Many of the people who worked there lived in the place and at that time, most of the people who stayed there were repeat visitors from third-world countries who had come as traders, business people. They left pushing carts stacked high with bags and boxes that had been swaddled in duct tape, on their way home to Africa and the Subcontinent. When they returned to Chungking Mansions, they were greeted as friends and surrounded by colleagues as soon as they came in from the street. They would stay in the same guesthouses they had used for years, chatting in the reception area with people from other countries, all of them using English as their common language. The long lines standing in wait for the building’s elevators were convivial spots and at night the hallways on the ground floor were boulevards where passing men clasped hands in greeting and stopped to stand in small clusters of conversation.

High stacks of brightly printed fabric from African countries gave welcome splashes of color to shops that sold bolts of cheap Chinese cloth, glass cases filled with Indian sweetmeats gleamed like displays at Tiffany’s, and on the floor above, shops sold Bollywood videos, packaged temple offerings, sticks of kohl, and wizened vegetables. Bob Marley’s face stared into the stream of passersby from a stall that sold hip-hop clothing and at the end of a corridor that led from the building to Nathan Road, an old man had racks of paperback books attached to the wall, along with postcards and an impressive collection of skin magazines. At the end of the corridor was a newsstand where the proprietor usually was in the company of a cat. Behind him were stacked cages, each holding a feline; I never found out why.

It was a self-sufficient urban village where I could find laundries, meals that had flavor, drinking water, newspapers, phone cards, toilet paper, and a stunning collection of cosmetics and shampoo in the adjoining building that paid homage to the classic film by calling itself Chungking Express. If I had been able to wait until eleven o’clock, I could have had tiny cups of dark, lethally strong coffee at a Turkish food stall.  And I could do all of this in English. I would have spent my entire Hong Kong visit without ever leaving this place if it hadn’t been so dark and crowded. As it was, I had to go out all day, every day to keep from going stir-crazy and even then my claustrophobia set in after the first month.

Hong Kong is a city where every need can be filled, but this is difficult for people like me who come with a small supply of cash without knowing the territory or the language. Local friends would lead me to a small counter in a busy shopping mall where they conducted  a transaction in Chinese for whatever I happened to need at the moment. I soon learned that I could do that on my own at a small counter, in English, in Chungking Mansions.

No matter where I stayed years later, whether it was halfway up a hillside in the New Territories, in a Shenzhen hotel room, or an Airbnb apartment in North Point, I ended up on the ground floor of my first home in Hong Kong. It was where I bought my SIM cards, exchanged currency, had luggage repaired, and in a pinch, could always find a place to sleep. But each time I returned, I found a different place.

Nathan Road had been discovered by tourists from the mainland, who came with their wheeled suitcases that they filled with everything from instant noodles to finery from Chanel. They clogged the aisles of the international supermarket that was across the street from Chungking Mansions, heaping their grocery carts with cans of baby formula, boxes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates, and packages of disposable diapers. They stood in line at Cartier and filled the seats of every Starbucks for miles around. And because they saw no reason to spend a fortune for a place to sleep, their headquarters became Chungking Mansions.

Although Chungking rooms were still cheap in a city where hotel room rates were stratospheric, guesthouse prices were soon jacked up to meet the growing demand. Rumor had it that one place had rooms that commanded a nightly rate of 200 U.S dollars. One night, on a weekend, when I came looking for a room after ten o’clock, I ended up paying 100 U.S. for a room that in the past would have topped out at under 50, even during Chinese New Year when prices soared.

Food stalls began to disappear on the ground floor, replaced by rows upon rows of currency exchanges, all proclaiming the rate they offered for Chinese money, and by many shops that sold wheeled luggage. The hip-hop clothing store was gone, banished to a higher floor, and the fabric shops had been shrunk to single counters in shops that primarily sold cheap phones and SIM cards. The hallways bustled with mainland Chinese travelers; the clusters of men who had spent hours in deep conversation were no longer in evidence. In the corridor where there had been books and cats now there were neither. The old man who had once sold me a copy of The Help when I was desperate for something to read now had suitcases on wheels lined up against the wall. “Business is different,” he said.

“Yes, so much change,” the man who sold me a SIM card on a recent visit agreed with a tinge of bitterness to his tone. The guesthouse where I had always stayed had empty chairs in the reception area, chairs that in years past always had held people who were busily packing merchandise into cartons and black garbage bags.

To reach that guesthouse, I stood waiting for the elevator in the company of only one other person, a Nigerian who chatted with me in English accented with French. Suddenly we were joined by two others, men of Subcontinental origin who stepped in front of us, close to the elevator doors.

“What kind of people are you, to step in front of a lady,” the Nigerian snapped at them, “We were here first and you push ahead like that. Who do you think you are?”

“Calm down,” he was told, “there are only four of us here. No one is being pushed out; we’ll all get in the elevator. No problem.”

“But you are so impolite. Do you think you’re better than this lady--or me?”

“It’s okay,” one of the men said quietly, “Be cool. Chungking Mansions is for business, not for fighting.”

As we all stepped into the elevator without bloodshed, I knew the code of this community was still in place and just for a moment, once again I felt at home.~Janet Brown

Asia In America: Seattle

Asia in America—Seattle

Until two years ago, I lived in what was the most overlooked neighborhood in the booming city of Seattle. Although Pioneer Square and the Pike Place Market are where tourists flock to see the original Seattle of the 1800s, the Chinatown-International District is the place where residents still live, shop, and go out to eat in the buildings from that era. Too poor to have excited commercial interest for over a hundred years, now this section of town has become a Mecca for developers and soon hotels and condos will dwarf whatever is allowed to remain.

Many of the old buildings here still sport “ghost signs,” a precursor to billboards, from a time when advertisements were painted directly on their walls. “Dancing, Chow Mein, Chop Suey” continues to invite passersby to a business that few can now remember. The building I used to live in still proclaims “U.S. Hotel, Rooms 50 Cents,” although now the rooms are billed as Mayne Suites and rent for over a thousand dollars a month. These brick buildings have stood solidly in place since the 1900s and some perhaps even before that, through fire, earthquakes, economic depressions, boom times. But they aren’t “retrofitted” soon, threaded with steel girders to conform to contemporary reinforcements against seismic activity, they will come down and with them will go a significant part of Seattle’s history.

In November of 1885 a mob of 500 Tacoma citizens forced the (approximately) 700 Chinese residents of that city to leave by burning their homes and businesses to the ground. A few months later in February of 1886, martial law was declared in Seattle to stop mobs from forcing the Chinese residents, who were at that time ten percent of the population, onto steamships that would remove them from the city. Although officially Seattle’s municipal leaders repudiated the attempted expulsion, the number of Chinese soon dwindled from over 900 people to a handful, “a few dozen, at most” says historylink.org 

But those remaining residents kept Seattle’s Chinatown alive, allowing it to become a place for people from all over the world, as well as a refuge for artists, writers, and musicians. It has flowered into to the creation of Little Saigon with its bounty of Vietnamese businesses, and encompasses a corner that’s still Nihonmachi, Japantown. Elderly Chinese ladies and colorfully dressed women from African countries fill the streets every morning, taking their children to the school bus, buying groceries, meeting to chat with friends and play cards in Hing Hay Park. It’s a community of pedestrians who walk to the library, the post office, the neighborhood health center, and to one of the many restaurants. Lion dancers bring their drums and gongs to announce the Lunar New Year and the sidewalks are carpeted with the scarlet petals of exploded firecrackers for days afterward. Tai Tung has fed the community and visitors Chinese-American food since 1935. A more recent arrival, the Eastern Cafe, serves espresso and crepes in the Eastern Hotel building, a place dating from 1911 that once housed the Atlas movie theater (which closed as the Kokusai Theater forty years ago). Floating through it all is the smell of roast pork from whole pigs cooked in gigantic, ferociously hot ovens at Asia Barbeque, the light sweetness of fortune cookies baked at Tsue Chong’s factory on Eighth Avenue, and the fragrance of elaborately frosted layer cakes that drifts down the street from Yummy House Bakery. 

Chinatown-International District is more than a neighborhood. It’s a triumph of culture and history. It’s an example of what an urban village can be. And it’s possibly doomed, definitely threatened.

We all claim milestones based upon our own personal experience, where we were when Kennedy was shot, what we were doing when the Twin Towers fell on September 11. We measure change with alterations in our own private worlds, so for each one of us, Seattle’s turning point will be an individual opinion. For me, it came in 1985 when Martin Selig’s towering skyscraper, the Columbia Center, overtook the historic Smith Tower as the primary landmark of Chinatown’s city view, its long shadow falling on what is now seen as under-utilized real estate, ripe for development.

Someday perhaps, this will all have been worth it, although I doubt it. But then I have skin in this game. The home where I lived happily for many years is being sacrificed to the gentrification of a pan-Asian community that has survived against all odds until now. Goodbye, Chinatown-Little Saigon-Nihonmachi. Hello, Generic Metropolis.~Janet Brown

Lantern Festival

It was the first day of the Lantern Festival in The Year of the Horse, but I had no intention of seeing the floats.  I’d been in bed most of the day with a bad case of food poisoning, possibly caused by some bad dumplings.  At 4:30, the bleating of my cell phone jarred me out of a sweet afternoon’s delirium.  It was my editor, and she wasn’t interested in dumplings, poisoned or otherwise.  “Today is the first day of the Lantern Festival,” she reminded me. “Get down there and don’t come back until you have 500 words, some photos, and the witty captions I’ve come to expect from you.”  I scraped myself off of my tatami, and hitched a ride down the mountain with a local scooter lunatic.

By the time I got to Chiang Kai-shek Park, the festivities were already in full swing, and the place was packed on all sides and everywhere in between.  I headed down Aigwo West Road, attempting to make a beeline for the food stalls over by Hang Zhou S.  Road, but it was tough going.  The sidewalks on the south side were completely ren shan ren hai, a colloquial term meaning “people mountain people sea,” or crowded as hell.  On the north side, the pavement was packed with people and the year’s lantern floats.  Some of the floats were fairly self explanatory – horses, angels, that sort of thing.  Others were a bit strange, even for a man of my eclectic tastes.  Yulon Motors’ “Marvels of the Ocean” float started off with a fairly straight forward motif of an octopus, a shark, and some fish floating in a translucent ocean.  But what was I supposed to make of the angels with Hello Kitty faces hovering above the whole mess?   Luckily, my mind was distracted from this by the more straightforward “Matching Dragons,” which depicted two wizened old winged lizards engaging in a life or death struggle over a game of Chinese Chess.

I made it to the food court, and got a bag of deathly sweet honeyed yams and an ear of grilled corn.  This was the most I could handle, as I hadn’t eaten in over a day, and the last thing I had eaten damn near killed me.  There seemed to be a lot more booths hawking aboriginal goods at this year’s festival, but, fortunately for me, there were no freshly slaughtered pigs – with my weakened constitution, I don’t think I could have taken it.  I knocked back the food with a few shot glasses of complimentary green tea, and made my way inside the park, where the festivities were officially beginning with a synchronized drum and light show centered on a gigantic horse float.

It was crowded inside the park, and I could barely move.  The only direction I could really get an unobstructed view of was up, allowing me to take notice of the ten or more severed head balloons floating above the festivities.  The heads belonged to cartoon characters mostly, and I know that they were strictly for the kids, but still, in my condition, the sight of gigantic dismembered heads grinning 20 feet above my own didn’t sit well.  I stuck around until nine to watch a few performances, and then headed back to the subway that would take me home.  I’d had enough of festivities and disembodied heads to last me for a while.

~JSB

Expatriate Preserve

The neighborhood south of Shita University is where young, fresh faced students from abroad come to study Chinese, immerse themselves in local culture, and prepare themselves for a life of hair-tearing frustration in the world of East-meets-West business.  It is here that we find in great abundance members of the expatriate species, engaged in the various rites and rituals peculiar to them and their ilk.  An afternoon spent in the Shita Expatriate Preserve is indeed an elucidating experience to those who wish to understand the species.  Taiwanese are advised to follow certain common sense precautions to help ensure that their trip to the preserve is both a pleasurable and educational experience.

If one follows you, do not panic.  The attention span of average expatriates is notoriously short, and they will most likely lose interest when more attractive members of any bipedal species catch their notice.

An expatriate may approach you offering a “language exchange.” Do not, under any circumstances, accept the offer; decline politely, but firmly.  Such arrangements are never without strings.

Should an expatriate follow you outside of the confines of the preserve, duck into one of the many conveniently located McDonald’s, buy a cheeseburger, and leave it unwrapped on a nearby curb.  This will usually distract the expatriate long enough for you to make your escape.

Of course, under no circumstances should you take them home with you, no matter how cute they may seem at the time.  Many are the tales of naïve locals who have taken expatriates home, only to be reduced to flushing them down the toilet once they realize just how much trouble they are.

While these are most likely urban myths, it may account for some of the strange sounds one often hears emanating from deep within the sewers of Taipei.

~JSB

The Night Market Has No Class

Once upon a time Formosa was a poor place, and the majority of the island's inhabitants were farmers, merchants and craftspeople. In those days, a meal out for those lucky enough to afford such an extravagance, was often taken al fresco, and consisted of a bowl of rice with some vegetables, and maybe some pork or seafood.  But nowadays, Taiwan's humble roots are a thing of the distant past, and in the capital of Taipei, restaurants catering to all social and economic classes can be found in great abundance.   But at the night market, meals are still eaten in the open air, and all class distinctions are transcended in the national pursuit of gastronomic pleasure.

Taipei is filled with night markets, some bigger than others, but even the smallest of these boasts food carts in the dozens.  There’s scant room for parking in the blocks surrounding a night market, so cars, along with class distinctions, are left outside.  On any given evening at the Shita Night Market, named for the nearby Shita University, the casual observer is likely to find harried mid-level salary men bumping elbows with taxi drivers at the metal counter of a stand serving stinky tofu, a national delicacy the flavor of which is both distinctly Taiwanese and definitely an acquired taste.

Further down the street you might see students slurping down bowls of bing sha (sweetened shaved ice with fruit) alongside secretaries from nearby office blocks letting their hair down after hours.

Across the river in Shilin, home of Taipei’s oldest and most well known night market, it isn’t surprising to come across a group of well-dressed CEO types sitting alongside denim clad scooter mechanics at a greasy counter eating greasy oyster pancakes smothered in sweet sauce.  To the outsider it may seem odd, this convergence of dissimilar strata of society, but to a Taiwanese there’s nothing at all strange about seeing the elite rubbing shoulders with the hoi-polloi.  The night market does not discriminate; it is the closest thing to an egalitarian meeting ground to be found on this island of 21 million, an oasis of authenticity in an increasingly materialistic, face-based society.

~JSB

The Fruit Lady of Shita

In the afternoon she opens shop, chopping mangos, papayas, cantaloupe, honeydew melons, strawberries, along with various other esoteric Taiwanese fruits, and laying the chunks out on blocks of ice.  In the hours before sunset, her customer base is comprised mainly of students from the nearby university.  When the sun goes down, the fruit lady sells plastic bags filled with chopped fruit to people from all walks of Taipei life, from taxi drivers to well dressed executives, mid-level salary men to inebriated foreign students out on the town.  She’s perpetually merry and bright, offering free samples to all takers and never batting an eye.

For years, I knew her only as the fruit lady, having never learned her proper name despite the fact that she’s long been among my favorite people in Taipei.  Face to face I address her as Jie-jie, or older sister, which infuriates her as she's only a year older than me.  But I’m not comfortable calling her Mei-mei, or younger sister; it sounds flirtatious, and she’s a married woman.  Her stand occupies a prime chunk of corner real estate in the outdoor food market on the south end of Shita University.

Strangely enough, our first conversation ended in an argument.  I don’t remember the details exactly, a misunderstanding probably, mistaken communication between a native and newly-studied student of Mandarin both having bad days.  But her fruit was some of the best to be found in Taipei, and though I initially returned for the fruit, as my Mandarin improved, I found myself increasingly drawn into lengthy conversations with my fruit lady.  At first our conversations mostly consisted of her questions and my answers.  Queries about salary, over chunks of honeydew.  What about my girlfriend, and did her parents know their daughter had a Westerner, over strawberries.

Perhaps it was because my Mandarin improved, or maybe it was because the relationship had just progressed, but before long my fruit lady was telling me things about herself.  She was from down south, but came to Taipei with her identical twin sister to open up shops.  Her twin had also opened up a fruit stand, in a night market across town.  She had two daughters, and was concerned because they didn’t seem to enjoy studying English.  She wanted to travel, but was too busy making money to think about anything but business.  When the children were a bit older, she thought she and her husband might do some traveling, but that was a long way off yet.  Eventually, she stopped taking money from me altogether, and any time I came by, she would give me a clear plastic bag stuffed full of assorted fruit chunks for which a regular customer might have paid 200 NT. She refused to take my money no matter what I said, and still does to this day.

The one topic my fruit lady had always been reticent to discuss with me was politics, usually a hot button topic among Taiwanese.  Recently, I found myself chatting with her in the early evening hours following a massive rally held in response to Beijing’s anti-secession law.  It had been the largest political rally in years, and I thought that with emotions still running high and the market unusually crowded with marchers filtering from the rally, I might be able to draw her out.

“Surely, you must have some feelings about which party has Taiwan’s best interest in mind,” I ventured. She just laughed.

 “Nationalist party…New Party…Democratic Progressive Party,” she laughed, going down the list of prominent Taiwanese political factions.  “I belong to the ‘Me Party.’  I’m the only member, and my platform is get on with my business.”

A group of bedraggled looking marchers passed by, all wearing green caps bearing the DPP logo.  “Taiwan Independence,” one of them yelled, and my friend smiled and handed him a toothpick with a chunk of melon on the end.  Though it didn’t happen, I believe that had a second group wearing caps with Kuomintang logos passed ten minutes later, shouting, “Long live one China!” my friend the fruit lady would have done the same, never batting an eye.

~JSB

Betel Nut Ingénue

Binglan xiaojiemen (betel nut girls) are ubiquitous in cities and towns throughout Taiwan.  These scantily clad women sit on the side of the road in transparent glass booths, from which they dispense baggies of betel nut, a mildly narcotic locally grown substance ingested primarily by men, usually taxi drivers, truckers and so forth.  Though every so often some government official looking to score points with the high-minded morality crowd will lead a crusade to get betel nuts banned (or at least to get betel nut girls to dress more modestly), little has come from these efforts.  This story was inspired by a friend of mine who spent time getting to know some of these women.  The first words, meaning ‘tell me’, are in the Taiwanese dialect.

“Ga wu gong-a!” Ah-wei laughed, slapping Ah-nei’s bare white shoulder with her palm.  “Was it romantic? I hear foreigner men are so romantic.  Tell me! Tell me!”

“Hmmmm…let me think.”  Ah-nei ran long fingers through her hair as if trying to conjure up moments past, prolonging her friend’s suspense.  “Yes, definitely.”

“Lucky! I can’t stand you!”

A blue Hyundai announced itself before the glass booth, tires crunching on gravel.  “This one is mine.”  Ah-nei grabbed two baggies of betel nut and walked to the car, flamingo-like on high heels.  Ah-nei bent down at the waist and presented the driver with a full view of the goods offered and those about which he could only dream.

“Two bags leaf-wrapped, right handsome?”

The driver was in his early forties by the looks of him; he’d bought from the stand a few times before, always on Monday mornings.  He was, by the looks of his car, a family man, and Ah-nei assumed he was a businessman.  The small struggles and low-grade disappointments of his life were just beginning to etch their map on the skin of his face.  Ah-nei imagined the man leaving a doting tai-tai at home in a big apartment in Ilan on Monday mornings, leaving her to raise their child in a healthier environment while he drove into Taipei to manage whatever his business was during the week.  She imagined that he had a small, non-descript efficiency apartment somewhere in Taipei not far from the office; he tried to drive back at least once or twice mid-week to spend the night with his wife and child.  He loved his wife, or so he told himself, but couldn’t deny that he felt as if he’d compromised somewhere along the line.  These thoughts he dealt with through drink, and the occasional debauch.  Though she did not know his name, Ah-nei knew that she represented to him just a small taste of the latter.  She smiled inwardly at the realization that in some small way she had a place in the environment of the man’s marriage.

“Ganxie,” said the man, smiling.  “Thank you for remembering me.”

“Not so many handsome men buying from me, mostly pock-marked truckers.”

The driver held a 200 kuai note just inches out of the window.  Ah-nei leaned in closer; strands of long black hair, soft as corn silk, tickled the man’s wrist as he handed her the money.  “Keep the change,” he said, and slowly accelerated back onto the road.  She tucked the note into the purse dangling from her hip as she walked back into the glass booth.

“Why didn’t you just put your tongue in his ear?” Ah-wei was amused.  “You got close enough.”

“You’re such a prude! Besides, I didn’t have to.  It’s all about the implication.”

“So you say! So what did you imply with your handsome ahdogha? Tell me everything.  Where did you meet him?”

“At a pub in Ilan.  I think he is an English teacher.  He speaks good Mandarin, but only a little Taiwanese.”

“Was he nice to you?”

“Mmmm…after we left the pub, he took me dancing, and then to sing karaoke.  He could really sing in Mandarin.”

“And then? What did you do after you left the KTV?”

“Ai-ya, what do you think? And you know what they say about foreign men being bigger? It’s really true.”

“Pervert!” shrieked Ah-wei, blushing. “I knew you were bian-tai!”

“Jealous!” Ah-nei said, and perched herself on one of the booth’s two high, elegant stools and set back to work spreading white paste onto green leaves while her friend occupied herself with the task of wrapping the leaves around whole betel-nuts.  Ah-nei thought about her foreigner.  After they’d made love, she lay in his arms and told him about her life, about being a betel nut girl, having to dress up and smile for strange men all day long.  Such a shameful profession, her mother said, only one step above prostitute.  But the foreign man didn’t find it shameful at all.  She hoped he would come by, hoped she would see him again.

For a few minutes, the two worked together in silence, two beautiful flamingos in a glass booth on the side of a provincial highway.  Another car pulled up.  Ah-wei was the first to look up from her bowl of betel nuts.

“Wassa…a Westerner.”

The driver, a thirty something white man with thinning hair and a pockmarked face was looking through the glass booth, staring at the two women.  His eyes rested momentarily on Ah-nei.  The man said something and laughed.  The woman in the passenger seat, a Taiwanese, laughed and said something.  The man laughed and said something back to her, then rolled down the window.

“Hey, give us four sarsaparillas,” the man shouted in Mandarin at the booth.  When Ah-nei looked up, she saw that the man was now staring straight at her and smirking with a rough familiarity.  For a moment, she stared back, feeling her skin flush before breaking the gaze off.  She spoke tersely to Ah-wei.

“This one is yours.  Go and give them the sodas.”

“But I can’t…I don’t know what to say to foreign…”

“Don’t say anything, just give him four cans of soda and take the money.”  Ah-nei kept her head down, eyes in fixed determination on her long fingers spreading white narcotic jelly onto green leaves.  Ah-wei pulled four cans of sarsaparilla out of the cooler and put them into a transparent plastic bag.

“I want to say something to him in English! Um, hello is ‘hao du yu du,’ right?”

“Don’t bother. He can speak Mandarin.  Just give him the sodas and take his money.”

Ah-wei slid open the door of the glass booth and walked gingerly towards the car, stiletto heels on gravel shoulder.  In the back seat was an older couple.  They looked like they must be the foreigner’s parents.  The father looked at Ah-wei, powerful Taiwan sunshine shining off her tight black skirt almost blinding him.  The mother stared straight ahead, and was not smiling.  Ah-wei had forgotten how to make the sounds in English for ‘hello.’  She gave the driver the sack of sodas.

“Xie xie nimen,” the man said, handing her exact change. “Thanks to you both.”

The car pulled back onto the road.  Ah-wei watched it, and thought she saw from the corner of her eye the man turn and wink.  She teetered back into the booth.  She understood now.

Ah-nei’s fingers were still working furiously; now she was rolling pasted leaves tightly around the betel nuts.  Ah-wei sat down on the high stool, crossed her long legs, and took up the job of pasting green leaves.  The two women worked in silence as the sun rose higher in the sky.  A few cars stopped, and Ah-wei made deliveries and chatted with customers while her friend continued working, fingers rolling pasted leaves around nuts, squeezing them tightly.

“We have enough now,” Ah-wei said when she saw that the pile of rolled betel nuts threatened to spill from the plastic basket.

“OK.”  Ah-nei wiped her hands, and for the first time since the foreign man had come, she looked up, eyes blinking in the sunshine.  The two women sat listening to the humming of the air conditioner as the sun hovered over the mountains like a ball of jellied fire.

At last, Ah-wei broke the silence.

“Was he at least, you know…more romantic?” she asked quietly.

“No,” answered Ah-nei.  “He was only bigger.”

~JSB

Buddha Box

I acquired the blessed thing on an express train from Hsinchu to Taichung.  A middle aged man with shaven head, orange robes, serene smile and half closed eyes, pulled it from an orange satchel and pressed it into my hands.  I thanked him and smiled for a moment before realizing, newly arrived and still perplexed by the ways of the East, that some contribution was in order.  Pulling a fifty kuai note from my pocket, I smoothed it reverently before placing it into his bowl.  He smiled, bowed his head and continued down the aisle.

Jet black and made of plastic, the box was clearly made to fit the average palm of an average hand.  It looked like an old style transistor radio, one with strange markings all along the front and an image of a charcoal brazier printed in gold ink alongside its single round speaker.  On the top edge of the box was a grooved volume knob, which I switched on.  Melodic feminine voices sprung forth.

Naaaa - ma aaa - mi to-o-o fo, nama ami to fo, nama.

Naaaa - ma aaa - mi to-o-o fo, nama ami to fo, nama.

A woman sitting in the seat across the aisle smiled at me, and though I’d felt at peace before switching the box on, I now felt especially tranquil.  I held the box in my average sized palm as the melodic chant continued its loop eternal (or at least until the battery gave out).  I felt one with Taiwan, at one with the universe.  My only concern was how they’d gotten a choir of nuns into the box in the first place, and what might happen should they suddenly decide it was time to leave.

~JSB

Love Hotel Etiquette

The short stretch of light rail that stretches between the Peitou and Hsin Peitou Stations is an anomaly.  Since it is not even long enough for the train to get up any speed and connects Peitou to a neighborhood that isn't populated enough to really warrant its own station, one tends to wonder just why this strange little appendage exists.  Suspicious souls might suspect that the ugly specter of political pork barreling in the extreme reared its head mightily in its construction, but such cynicism should be quickly dispelled by the realization that this amazingly expensive stretch of rail exists for one purpose alone – to make it that much more convenient for you, personally, to get to Hsin Peitou – Hot Spring Love Hotel Capital of the World.

A few hours at one of these places will set you back between 400 and 800 NT (the “take a rest rate”), and an evening will cost you and a loved one between 1200 and 2300.  A word of advice: go on a weeknight for the discounts, and spend the extra money; while the difference in price between the cheap and the chic may be an hour or two of pay, it'll be worth it just to see the look on your loved one's face upon seeing the 21-inch stereophonic TV and a natural hot-spring fed Jacuzzi big enough to float a small fishing boat.  And nothing says class like his-and-her individually wrapped toothpicks.

The hot spring love hotels of Hsin Peitou are your home away from home, except you won't have to clean up, and, unlike your nosy neighbors, the desk clerk will not judge you as you leave in the morning after a night of loving debauchery with the him, her or combination thereof of your choice.  The facilitation of your enjoyment is all that concerns them, and the strange, crooked smiles on their customers’ faces are the only thanks they require.  This leaves you free to shed your inhibitions to the fullest extent allowed by the law and/or your personal dogma.

Losing one’s inhibitions is easier said than done (except when drunk, when the opposite is often true).  As I walked out of one after a particularly decadent evening, I found myself wondering, "What will the cleaning lady think of the half eaten chunks of Laughing Cow Cheese scattered around the bed? Will the manager be informed about the quantity of cheap supermarket caviar floating in the Jacuzzi?" In my naiveté, I actually initiated conversation with the cleaning lady on the way to the elevator, to apologize for the extreme untidiness with which she was about to deal.

“Oh, na-li, na-li!” she laughed. “Our only concern is that you had a good time.  Leave the mess to us, and come back again soon.”  A far cry indeed from the words spoken by my parents the morning after my last sleepover party.

Of course, there are other activities available in Hsin Peitou for those disinclined to debauchery.  There are several public hot springs in and around the oddly named Anti-Calamity Park directly across from the station, and nestled as it is in the armpit of beautiful Yaming Mountain, Hsin Peitou is an excellent point from which to start any number of hikes.  Several of the bigger hotels in the neighborhood also offer both public and private hot springs, separated by gender or for the exclusive use of the paying customer and guest.  There is also a long-standing rumor that some of these seedier places will, for a fee, provide a bathing companion for the undiscriminating gentleman, but I'd advise against that.  Love, like advice, is best appreciated when freely given.

~JSB

Stinky Tofu

Cho dofu, or “stinky tofu,” is the Taiwanese snack that separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls, and occasionally, the women from the men. Cho dofu is tofu that's been fermented to a nice degree of pungency, then deep-fried and served with pickled cabbage and hot sauce. Cho dofu is very much a Taiwanese delicacy. Carts selling it can be found at any night market, and in most neighborhoods and towns. Generally speaking, you can find the nearest cho dofu stall with your eyes closed, as the stuff is quite rank. Though tofu is usually thought of as a healthy alternative to meat, those making regular pilgrimages to the local cho dofu stand in the name of health are kidding themselves, since the stuff is as deep fried as deep fried gets, usually in animal fat, but some stalls catering to vegetarians use vegetable oil. Though I resisted it for the longest time, I finally gave in and had some with one of my students. (Taiwanese people enjoy bringing foreigners out for cho dofu, seeing it as a bonding ritual.) Eventually, I developed a taste for the stuff because it was cheap and filling. Though I knew it wasn’t exactly healthy, I justified eating it regularly by telling myself that it was served with pickles, and thus counted as both a vegetable and a protein. Describing the smell is difficult. To those who don’t like it, cho dofu is a cross between limburger cheese and fried sweat socks; to those who do, it's a whiff of pure heaven.

~JSB

Oyayubi

Japan is a culture with many superstitions, especially surrounding death and the funereal ceremony that follows. Japanese funerals are highly stylized rites, conducted by a Buddhist priest according to the traditions of the Buddhist religion. A wake is held for the deceased, during which friends and family come to pay their respects. A special meal is served, and afterwards, the immediate family and close friends accompany the body of the deceased to the crematorium.

Many symbolic rituals are performed during the mourning process. For purification, a small mound of salt is placed on the threshold of the home of the deceased. In some cases, after cremation, family members use chopsticks to pass the charred remains of the deceased from person to person, until they are placed at last in the crematory urn for burial. An offering of food is often placed on the graves of the deceased, with a pair of chopsticks standing upright in it.

One of the strangest superstitions associated with the funeral ceremony is the practice of hiding one’s thumbs by wrapping the other fingers around them whenever a funeral procession passes by. The Japanese word for thumb is oyayubi, which, when literally translated, means “parent finger.” According to Japanese superstition, if you happen to see a funeral procession passing by and you forget to hide your thumbs, you will not be present to comfort your parents when they die.

My father died while I was in Japan. I knew that he was ill, and for that reason I paid a farewell visit to my hometown to see him one more time before I left for Tokyo. I’ll never forget him standing in the doorway of my childhood home, waving goodbye. I didn’t know it then, but that would be the last time I ever saw him.

About three months after my son was born, I was beginning to feel like myself again, and the prospect of making the trip home to see my parents didn’t seem so impossible anymore. One evening, I decided that I was ready to bring my baby home to meet them, so I hopped on my bicycle and headed over to the Hotel Metropolitan to use the international pay telephone. When I called my parents’ house to tell them the good news, my older sister answered the phone, and I immediately asked how my father was doing. After a short but dreadful pause, she said, “Oh no, you don’t know...” She gave the phone to my mother, who tearfully told me that my father had died ten days earlier, and had already been buried. In that instant, all joy was extinguished.

It seems that our nameplate had fallen off the mailbox, and when the Western Union deliveryman came with the telegram, he couldn’t figure out which apartment was ours, so he left without delivering it. I didn’t learn of my father’s death until that fateful evening almost two weeks later. Such a cruel twist of fate. Much of my memory after that is a blur, but somehow I remember thinking on the long ride home, that I must have forgotten to hide my thumbs.

~CH

Hanabi

When translated literally, Hanabi, the Japanese word for fireworks, means flower-fire, and you haven’t lived until you’ve seen fireworks in Japan. On warm evenings throughout the summer season, along the banks of Japan’s rivers, the night sky explodes in bursts of fiery color. In fact, these fireworks displays are named for the riverbanks from which they are launched: Tamagawa Hanabi, Kanagawa Hanabi, Sumidagawa Hanabi.

By mid afternoon on the day of the fireworks, the rivers are already dotted with sailboats, motorboats and rowboats, all vying for the best location from which to view the spectacle. Rooftops are a popular spot for those lucky spectators with access to a place above the crowd. But mostly, the streets are jam-packed with common folk who have come to enjoy the festivities.

Along its length, as it winds its way through rural Japan and the suburbs of Tokyo, the Sumida River is crossed by many bridges, some of which are quite close together. The Sumidagawa Hanabi are launched over two such bridges, creating a doubly dazzling spectacle. On the day that I was fortunate enough to attend this fireworks display, my companion and I headed for the Sumida River after work and arrived with little time to spare. Having been offered no invitation to a private rooftop party, we were clueless as to where to view the display, and therefore had to rely on our intuition. We followed the general migration of the crowd toward what we guessed were the banks of the river. Block by block, as we drew nearer, the crowds became progressively thicker, moving more and more slowly, until we finally reached a standstill, packed like the proverbial sardines, unable to move in any direction.

Ordinarily, I would have worked myself into a state of panic over the closeness of the crowd, but at that moment, there was a deafening boom. The fireworks had begun. The world around me disappeared as I turned my gaze heavenward. It seems that, as we were propelled along by the crowds, we had somehow magically landed in the epicenter of the event. For the next 90 minutes, we were cascaded with shower after shower of brilliantly sparkling bursts of flower-fire on our upturned faces: an experience that defies description with mere words. But imagine, if you will, the biggest, grandest finale of a fireworks show you’ve ever seen. Multiply that by an hour and a half of non-stop pyrotechnics, and you might come close to picturing the explosive grandeur of the Sumidagawa Hanabi.

~CH

Tanabata

Japanese folklore is some of the world’s most delightful literature, and during my stay in Japan, I read quite a bit of it, mostly about foxes and how they can change shapes and bewitch anyone who looks into their eyes. But my favorite Japanese folktale is the story of Tanabata, which has nothing to do with foxes. The Japanese version of the story is based on a romantic Chinese tale about a handsome young cowherd and a beautiful weaver.

As the story goes, each night the celestial maiden and her beautiful sisters weave the starry tapestry of the night sky; and each day the seven sisters come down to earth to bathe in a pond near the cowherd’s pasture. One day, the cowherd spies the celestial maiden, and while she bathes, he steals the magical robe that gives her the power to fly. When the sisters finish bathing, they take to the skies again, and the celestial maiden is left behind. When the young cowherd comes to her rescue, the maiden is sad because she cannot return home, but she stays with the cowherd and soon falls in love with him.

Over time however, they realize that the sun no longer sets, and there is no nighttime for rest and sleep because the maiden is not there to help her sisters weave the tapestry of the night sky. It is then that the cowherd confesses the theft of her robe, and the maiden knows that she must bid her lover goodbye and return to her home in the sky.

But the maiden is so sad that, as she works her shuttle, her tears fall on the tapestry, each one creating a twinkling star.  Over time, she cries so many tears that they become a river of stars. Meanwhile, back on earth the cowherd too is sad. However, a kindly magpie takes pity on him, and once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month, the magpie enlists the aid of his flock to create a bridge of wings across the river of stars so that the two lovers can be together for one special night.

In the night sky, you can see the two lovers, Orihime the weaver, and Hikoboshi the cowherd, as two bright stars, Vega and Altair, separated by the starry river of the Milky Way. And every year, on the seventh of July, the Japanese celebrate Tanabata, which means Seven Evenings, by decorating the streets with pink streamers tied to the ends of long bamboo poles. The whole city turns pink with them, and lovers write special prayers on tiny pieces of paper and tie them to the streamers in hopes that they will be carried up to heaven where their wishes will be granted by the gods.  It’s a tale and a celebration of romance quite unlike any other.

~CH

Mystery Men

The daily route from my apartment in Ikebukuro to the school where I taught in Shinjuku was quite unremarkable. The walk to the station every day was probably a little under a mile, most of it through small neighborhood streets lined with commonplace homes, ordinary shops and generic office buildings. But after a few months of walking the same path from home to the train station to the office and back again, I came to know every streetlamp and manhole cover. The faces of the neighborhood proprietors grew familiar and each day as I passed them, I would say Ohayo to Ohara-san, the lady whose family owned the convenience market, and to the butcher on the corner whose name I never learned, and to Ka-chan, the chef of a little neighborhood restaurant called Ganbe.

There was one place in particular, however, that remained a mystery. It was a building in the middle of the block, the entrance of which was always secured by a heavy gray roll-down door. In all the times I’d passed by, it was never open and there was never a soul to be seen. So imagine my surprise one Saturday evening when I rounded the corner to find that the mystery door had been lifted and there was a party going on inside. Not just an ordinary party, mind you, but a decidedly Japanese, male-only, sake-drinking party. The interior of the building was one big, empty tatami room that had been decorated for the occasion with floral wreaths, and colorful paper lanterns and streamers. About two dozen old men, dressed in traditional Japanese robes, were sitting around on cushions talking and singing and drinking; and although it was raining buckets outside, I couldn’t help but stop to stare at them. As I stood there under my umbrella, feet soaking in puddles of rain, wondering what the cause for celebration was, one of the old men gestured for me to come inside and join them. I was overcome with curiosity, and it certainly looked like a lot more fun than trudging back home to an empty apartment, so I did.

I closed my umbrella, took off my shoes and sat down on the tatami floor. The old man who had invited me in grinned at me and filled my cup with hot sake. I soon discovered that nobody in the entire group spoke a word of English, so I fished my pocket dictionary out of my bag and made an attempt to communicate with them in Japanese. By this time, I’d been in Japan long enough to have mastered the basics of the language and could carry on simple conversations, although I never did become fluent enough to say anything intelligent or profound.

For the next couple of hours, I enjoyed the revelry and hospitality of those old men, and managed to convey to them that I was an English teacher from California. They all seemed rather impressed with that, and I became the subject of much head nodding and many an, “Asoka.” and a “Honto ni?” But try as I might, I never learned who those old men were and what they were celebrating. I still wonder to this day.

~CH

Geisha with a Mohawk

On any given day, you never know who you’re going to see when you’re out and about in Tokyo. On a rainy weekday, it might be a group of Japanese kindergarten children on their way to an educational event, all wearing bright yellow rain slickers. On a Sunday afternoon in the off season, it might be a couple of gargantuan Sumo wrestlers dressed in their blue and white yukata, and wooden geta, heading back to the stable after a day in downtown Shinjuku. You might catch a glimpse of a Buddhist monk, head bowed under his straw lampshade of a hat, or a company baseball team in matching uniforms on their way to engage in the harmony of spirit known as wa.

The traditional Japanese lifestyle is a serene and conservative one, in which conformity and group mentality is key. At opposite ends of the contemporary spectrum, some individuals still live within the bounds of the strictest of classical tradition and dress accordingly, while many members of the younger generation strive to declare their independence with a bold fashion statement. Most of the population falls somewhere in between, dressing stylishly yet conservatively in western-style clothing. Still, the extremes are there to be observed on occasion.

One day, while riding the Yamanote, I was struck by the beauty of a Japanese woman in full kimono, one of deep blue floral silk, bound at the midriff by a bright orange obi. Her hair was meticulously coifed, her face was powdered to perfection with pure white rice dust, and her lips were painted with brilliant red precision. She was stunning and although I tried not to stare, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was like a rare and exotic flower, and I could only wonder who she was and where she was going dressed like that.

The seat next to her was empty, and at the next station, a young man boarded the train and sat down beside her. In all my life, I have never seen such a contrast in humanity. The young man was dressed in what the Japanese call panku stairu, an expression literally borrowed from the English term “punk style.” He was all black leather and chains from his knee-high boots to his skin-tight pants and open vest, and he wore the requisite studded bands around his neck and wrists. His costume was unoriginal, and certainly nothing that I hadn’t seen dozens of times in San Francisco’s Castro District, except that this young man’s crowning glory was a bright orange Mohawk, varnished with hair gel until it stood straight up from his scalp to an altitude of at least a foot. He was magnificent.

So there they sat, the Geisha and the Punk, side by side on the Yamanote, neither taking any particular notice of each other, but creating a snapshot that will live forever in my mind’s eye.

~CH

English a la Carte

To say that the Japanese are naïve in their use of English would be a kindly euphemism, when in fact, what I mean to say is that there were days when I wanted to go out and edit the entire city of Tokyo. In Japan, English in any form is trendy and hip, whether speaking it with foreigners, singing it in karaoke bars, or sporting it on some personal accessory. A word or two of it emblazoned on a handbag or a piece of clothing is tres chic. Which would be fine, except that its use in Japanese fashion, advertising, and product packaging is often either woefully out of context, or it’s a bunch of incomprehensible gibberish.

Some days I was able to enjoy the humor of it, other days it drove me crazy. I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself when I saw something like, “This is boy. Pretty wow guy!” printed on a teenager’s knapsack. But there were times when it seemed that everywhere I looked, there was a shopping bag, a product label, a bus placard or a billboard that had shamelessly butchered my mothertongue.

One day the cosmos sent me a little gift that would allow me to transcend the issue once and for all, and never let it bother me again.

It was a workday, and I was on my way out of the building to take my lunch break.  The school where I worked was located directly across from the east entrance of Shinjuku Station, above which there are several large department stores, including one called My City, which I could see from the entrance of the building. On this particular afternoon, parked in the loading zone of My City, was a small, white delivery truck, which I guessed must belong to some kind of clothing or accessory designer. The name of the company was printed in stylish lettering on the side of the truck, with the year in which it had been established proudly displayed beneath it. It said: INFINITY…Since 1987.

~CH