Dispatch from Hong Kong #2

Just thought I’d share some more experiences. My time in HK is quickly drawing to a close, and I’m going to miss this place. In the last few weeks, Nik and I have seen a fair bit of the S.A.R. Her first weekend here we took the train up to Tai Po, halfway between HK island and the Chinese border. From there, we rented bikes and rode to a county park centered around an immense dammed reservoir and surrounded by mountains. The terrain is jagged, and isolation comes remarkably easy here. Last week I hiked the ridges of some of the mountains on HK island–on part of a trail that bisects the island north to south. Although I was never more than 5 km from the city center, I didn’t meet another soul for 2 1/2 hours.

some journal entries…

17 july
When it rains here, just get wet. This saves a lot of anxiety. It isn’t that horrible, to be rained on, especially if you’re from New England, where downpours feel metallic. Here, the rain is soft and warm like rice. In any case, consider Wet a state of being in HK, because even when it isn’t raining or threatening to rain, you have the sun to deal with, which arguably is a few million miles closer to earth here than any place I’ve visited and can coax immeasurable amounts of water from your body.

I got up before first light this morning–not as impressive as it sounds, since i went to sleep at 4 p.m. the previous day, under threat of a typhoon level 8 (10 being the highest). The markets-both fruit and financial-had closed early, and the city elders even thought it necessary to pull the plug on the escalator that runs up the slope from Central to the Mid-levels, leaving countless yuppies with no where to shop. In the end though, the typhoon was a dud, having caused no damage or flooding, except maybe annoying the thousands of street cats that couldn’t find dry spots from the wind-driven rain. The heart of the storm moved north, but isolated downpours still hit us in warm windy bursts that from my apartment sound like sand poured onto banana leaves. Still a few hours to go before the Wan Chai markets open. The stalls are swaddled in colorful tarps that bulge and snap in the wind.

I walk to the MTR (subway) station, where a group of old homeless men I see every night on my way back from work are squatting against the building on their thick, flat feet, eating noodles out of Styrofoam containers. In short time, they will disperse and find ways to put together a day. They’ll return after sunset, usually followed by stray dogs that will bed down with them. When I walk past after work, around 2 a.m., there they are, always in good spirits–playing cards, cigarettes dangle from their mouths, singing and arguing in Cantonese. Most are shirtless. Usually they sleep on sheets of cardboard or on nothing at all. Many are severely underweight, and their skin stretches pale around the bones of their hips when they lie down. Quite a few have similar blue tattoo work on their back and shoulders.

a few hours later…

In Mong Kok now, a neighborhood north of central HK, across the harbor. The rain is so heavy it makes the streets boil. I keep close to the building walls in order to stay under the eaves. Shoppers, strollers, and tourists like me compete for the narrow, imperfect shelter they provide. Even in this downpour, the flower markets and cloth stalls and goldfish stores conduct a brisk business. Women pass, their arms straightened by the weight of their purchases- flowers, chicken feet, underwear. Mothers and daughters linked at the elbow point to rack items on sale. Old men in Party uniforms. Diesel smoke. Mong Kok is one of the densest neighborhoods in HK. Twenty-story tenements define the landscape, narrowing the sky until it is just a slash of gray. Mong Kok, where balconies are considered spare rooms and everything, from potted plants to bicycles to televisions and car tires get stacked there under makeshift awnings. Air conditioners jut out like noses from almost every apartment, and drip condensation on my head.

A man carries a glass tank containing black turtles toward the curb. The water in it is putrefied, and he empties it onto the sidewalk. The turtles claw at the glass, trying to regain their indelicate balance. He repeats this, tank after tank. The rain pulls the green water off the sidewalk down into the torrent at the curb.

Others have by now given up trying to walk in this rain, and so they’ve joined me under the awning of a closed store. If only I could understand the conversations around me. I hear Thai and Japanese, and the Filipinas speak their Tagalog as if it were set to music, and of course Cantonese, which is easiest to pick out, its inflections and pace like slam poetry. Besides napolitano, it’d be my language of choice for cussing out someone.

A few stores down, five or six middle-aged men stand in front of a pet store, watching a group of Persian kittens lazing about in a large glass pen. In the center of the cage is some sort of toy meant to stimulate the cats by flicking a yarn ball on a string randomly about. The cats are either completely desensitized to it or drugged, because they barely notice the ball, even when it hits them on the head. The men are smiling and laughing and utterly satisfied just standing there watching for what these cats are going to do next, which is absolutely nothing.

• No related posts.