It's a Helluva Hong Kong by Noemi Lopinto

Flying somewhere over the pacific towards China, I divided into two people. One of me was very culturally sensitive, well-behaved, and open minded; earnest, even. The other was suffering from culture shock, jet lag and homesickness. That one was hard to keep in line, actually. I blame her for the, uh, small scene at the hotel on my last day in Hong Kong. I also blame her for my partial inability to enjoy the place. It has been puzzling me ever since. Maybe my brain has frozen. Maybe I don't adapt. Or maybe Hong Kong is just not the place for me. I have felt pretty conflicted about the last two places I visited--Chicago was the other. But then again that might be self-explanatory. I tend to despise the U.S.A. at the best of times, and Hong Kong's main economic model seems to be the American way of life, Chinese style.

My first view of HK was beautiful, other than the fact that it was from the plane (I am what you would call a bone-white knuckle flyer), so the view was tinged with a taste of fear. The sun was out and the mountains were very green. A few very tall, glass high-rises stood on the mountain. I felt like I was on Mars. My eyes just couldn't adjust. It was then that I got my first inkling of what it means not to have travelled too much. My brain felt stiff, as if walking the same streets for sixteen years has gelled it into an immutable shape.

I was in Hong Kong to write a piece on the housing situation, which, it turns out, is an interesting and ongoing story. Being me, I hadn't proposed a look at the houses of the rich and famous in the green and leafy regions--hell no. I was interested in the poor, the so called "cage people". The cage people are mostly older men who live in unbelievable filth and cramped conditions. (I would come to curse my bleeding liberal heart later).

I stayed at a hotel called the Charterhouse, in a district called Wan Chai. I took a walk around my first night, and got a taste of the noise, the chaos, the smell and wet heat that would be my experience of Hong Kong. It was not exactly love at first sight, but I was excited and ready to go. I see now that my leftist politics are a bit of a pain in my own ass, a definite block to enjoying the finer things in life. Everything becomes politicised. It's like taking your grandmother with you everywhere, and she won't shut up. "Geez, that looks dangerous," she whispers in your ear. "Well, that's just plain unfair." "Is there medicare in this dump?"

I have seen poverty here at home, and been pissed off at how inadequate/incompetent/incomplete (choose your own adjective) Quebec's services are. Once I had my microscope out in Hong Kong, I found a lot to pick on. But it's an unfair first view of a city, really. It's as if I never saw Montreal, but when I did I visited the Old Brewery Mission, the mental hospital, and the drug addicts and homeless shelters. Of course, I wasn't exactly on vacation either.

Part of what influenced me negatively, was the weather. I happened to visit in a week when a smothering blanket of wet smog sat on the city like a heavy ghost, keeping the pollution of more than a million cars and trucks on your skin and in your nose. Breathing outside just wasn't comfortable. And it stank. There were air quality warnings in all the newspapers, with statistics and percentages to scare the pants off you. (Pollution at 140%, seventy million double-deckers buses full of gas, coal burning power plants, 27 thousand trucks passing through a day, garbage dumped from cargo ships into the sea, global warming, air quality warning very high etc etc etc) But nobody on the streets seemed to be reading the paper. They certainly didn't look worried. It was ironic--you weren't supposed to walk around, because the air quality was so bad. But all those people driving with the air conditioner on high were making the problem worse. I was one of them. I practically dove back into the car between appointments, shutting the windows as tight as I could get them.

Air quality aside, the noise pollution would burn the ears off a bat. Everything talks. Elevators, telephones, escalators, traffic lights, buses, trains, cash registers, and electric doors tell you what to do, what to buy and where to go--in multiple dialects. The streets are a cacophony of traffic and electronic sounds. Beepbeepbeep means Don't Walk. Bippity-bip bippity-bip means Walk Now and Hurry, 'Cause There's a Giant Truck Gunning For You. Cell phones ring and ring, chiming in multiple tones in restaurants, movie theatres, malls, on the streets, and in the bathroom. Salesmen & women hawk stuff by microphone on the streets, jabbering to the hordes of folks walking by. So even if you could somehow breathe, you wouldn't be able to think.

There are also markets every other block or so where you can buy everything from clothes to frogs. Depending on which Noemi was in control, they were either lovely, colourful, chaotic and exciting--or a virologist's wet dream , a hygienic disaster, and the embodiment of the perilousness of life. People stand haggling over live chickens, frogs, turtles, crabs, eels, small snakes, swimming fish and wriggling prawns. Red meat--hearts and livers, legs, slabs of stomach and sides hang from hooks in the open air. The merchants chop the heads off the fish, clean and gut them and hand them to customers right there. Chickens are chosen, slaughtered, plucked and taken home. The toads are greyish-greenish brown, enormous and slipping all over one another in wire mesh bags. The markets are astounding in variety and colour, and smell like goddamn hell. They smell like hot car exhaust and raw fish, raw meat, fresh blood, garbage, sweaty bodies and the shit of frightened animals. I liked them because they were crazy, colorful and unfamiliar. You couldn't have paid me to buy anything there. I was afraid of the raw meat, cooking in the chemicals in the air, and afraid of the wriggling sea food from a city that dumps its garbage in the ocean.

Amidst all this, there was Mr Hei; my driver, my knight in shining Mazda. Five feet tall, with a round face and greying hair, Mr Hei was an anxious, protective presence. He came to get me at the hotel in the mornings and drove me home at night. He waited for me outside government building after government building. I would emerge to find him standing outside the car fanning himself lightly with a paper chinese fan. He took everything I said very seriously, considered it, translated it into Chinese in his head, and responded slowly but earnestly in broken English. When I asked him if he had any gum one time, he repeated after me: "Chew-wing Gumb?", over and over, until I fell into a fit of giggles. His relief, when he figured it out, was even funnier. We laughed together. One day he had to take me into the slums of Hong Kong. We parked and I left with three homeless guys and a social worker from the Salvation Army to go see a cage home. He seemed unhappy and worried. He kept telling me he would be "right there," where he was parked. When I came back, I was visibly upset. He opened the door for me without a word and took me to the hotel.

Opening the door for me seemed to be an important part of his duties, which would lead to some accidental slapstick when I would forget, and lock the door. Or forget, and open it myself. I was always asking him questions--where did he come from, did he have kids, had he ever been to Canada and what did he do last night? In the beginning he was formal, but
by the end he would answer my questions and chat. He told another man I met there that I was the only VIP who "talked so much". Also enjoyable were the nice Chinese couple I met, (they called each other "freak" and "ugly") who brought me to a local restaurant next to a garbage processor.

I put away my worries about chemicals, Asian Flu and new strains of Asian Flu, general hygiene and the like, and ate well and happily. I also saw my first cockroaches that night, huge creatures the size of my thumb which can fly--when you chase them.


Later,

N

Readers have left 1 comments

Leave a comment

name
email (if you want to be notified)
<-- Please retype the word you see here:
Notify me when someone replies to this post?