Deliberately Lost in the Buffalo’s Gut

The village of Hongcun is built in the shape of a water buffalo. The tour guide led us through winding streets, reminding us that it was easy to get lost in the corridors that formed the cow’s intestines. I wandered ahead to talk to the artist sitting on his stoop painting the rooftops. In between brushstrokes he and his friends told me to go to Yunnan. I hung back to watch the tourist lazily holding his camera instead of pointing it at the swans in the pond, deciding whether I could photograph his bored expression unnoticed.

The guide waved me back to the group. When he led us into a temple, I slipped out a back door.

On the other side of the wall, narrow paths led to houses and small shops selling playing cards, cold drinks, Mao’s red book. I stopped at a table with three bamboo waterwheels. The man carving another at a bench farther from the road came over and showed me how to turn the level so the twisting wheel would touch off the tiny hammers. He told me he spent three days carving each one. I didn’t know how to transport one of these to Hong Kong without breaking it. He took me inside his house to offer tea and show me his other pieces. The most elaborate had ladders and gazebos. Spread over the table, they suggested a miniature amusement park.

Mine made it through the flight to Beijing, but only that far, since I accidentally left the contraption, hidden in the bag he gave me to protect it, at the hotel. Was his price of 70 yuan, just over 10 U.S. dollars, a fair cost for three days work? The lesson that hits me at every turn in China returns: I really don’t know. Instead, glimpses from getting lost in bovine entrail-avenues, or in what was taught about equitable wages, collect into impressions that take the place of understanding.

Monkey!

This morning on my way to work I saw a monkey out the window of the company shuttle. It was climbing along a railing on the hillside over the highway. My first thought: “A gibbon!” A few minutes later I realized odds are it was not the primate I vowed never to forget after not remembering the first time what this breed was called the first time I watched the monkeys video when I was four. I recalled nothing about the species but its name and its yellow-brown coat and long arms. Actually, now I think I might be mixing real gibbons up with the monkey I forgot, which might have been the one with a large fleshy nose. Regardless, I just read on Wikipedia that gibbons (which according to Google Images look like the monkey I saw) are found in southern China, so I will consider this unvoiced childhood dream fulfilled.

Unimpressive Trilingual Conversation

A phone call yesterday, when I was trying to ask whether foreigners can be treated at Hong Kong clinics:

Receptionist: (Cantonese, though the Mandarin phone greeting sounds the same) Hello?

Me: (Cantonese) Excuse me, do you speak English?

Receptionist (Mandarin) I can.

Me: (Mandarin) I am an American. I want to know whether…(can’t remember word)

Receptionist: (English) You can speak English.

Waiting

After work I walked through the subway turnstile behind a man carrying a ladder. I was reading Waiting by Ha Jin, just about to finish it. On the train I thought I had only fifteen more pages so I stopped on the stairs but then saw there were ten more I hadn’t noticed, 297 to 307, so I went to the supermarket. The cashier was the same as the one at the check-out I went to yesterday. I go to the grocery store too often here.

The apartment is empty except for…

a suitcase, a brown bag that can be folded in on itself, trashcan where old oranges mix with empty rice milk box to smell like cream-sicle, a square Chinese cell phone, diet apple soda, a newspaper, shoes, toothpaste and toothbrush, unzipped backpack, and me with my parakeet hair.

Going to China tomorrow

We’re going to four or five cites around the mainland in ten days, starting with Shanghai, ending with Beijing.

There is an ad for watches in the subway here, and it’s got models embracinging giant animals. The one with a wolf is okay because wolves are scary on their own and the beautiful woman reigns in its fearsomeness. But the one with the rabbit is terrifying. It’s so convenient that rabbits are small; otherwise, a glance would be too much. We’d be at their mercy.

I’m squeamish about eating flowers.

The Chinese kale (kai-lan) I bought at the Wellcome (ubiquitous chain grocery store currently doing a promotion where shoppers get stickers to redeem for a Paddington Bear stuffed toy) has little yellow buds just beginning to open. So far I chop them off, and that feels indelicate but not as savage as chewing petals.

Typhoon Warning

I rediscovered curiosity this weekend through questing around on foot and reading a novel about Hong Kong. I’m aware that part of the reason I repeat this idea of reawakening, first in a Freespace that’s going to be in the Lancaster Freestyle page next Saturday (only a few more months to freelance for a teen page and a long conversation with a friend who just turned twenty raise age-awareness today), and now here, partly so I don’t lose it.
I don’t feel pressed to figure Hong Kong out, the way I did with China. In Beijing last summer I just wanted to absorb everything and distill it in my mind to an understanding of what was first a city, then a country, then foreignness, then the universe, as it got progressively harder to corral the observations into conclusions. Facts were undercut with first a language barrier and then an embarrassment over my audacity at trying to understand something so big as China.
Maybe my first time abroad would have been like that regardless, but I think China was particularly incomprehensible. Regardless, I was determined not to repeat this humbling trajectory.
I spent my first two weeks here just living, trying to get into the rhythm but caring less about whether I was really engaging in the place.
Then I went running in the typhoon. At least, it was about to be a typhoon.
There was a typhoon warning a few days ago, which at the low end of the 1-10 scale just means a lot of rain. Saturday morning I ran down to the harbor, and even as it was beginning to rain, the middle-aged men were fishing and there was a class under the bridge practicing something that looked like martial arts with fans. Then I went to a mall–first voluntary entry in the Hong Kong weekend’s main scene–to buy a book by the author I interviewed the night before for a section of the weekend magazine at SCMP called “Long Distance Call” which features someone born in Greater China who now lives somewhere else doing something interesting. I was assigned to find two subjects, so last week I interviewed Harvard math department chair Shing-Tung Yau, who is rock star famous in China for winning the Fields Medal in ’82 (mathematics equivalent of a Nobel). And Friday I talked for 45 minutes to Xu Xi, an author born in Hong Kong who is now the faculty chair for University of Vermont’s MFA in creative writing. She writes mostly about Hong Kong. During the minor typhoon (level 3, which is potentially deceptively low since I’ve heard it skips straight from 4 to 8), I read her book Hong Kong Rose under the ferry pier’s shelter.
This was after finishing Wise Blood in a small Chinese (I think Beijing style) restaurant around the Central subway stop. I chose it because it was cheap, and I was delighted to find they served broccoli, which I’ve been unable to find here. The broccoli I bought at the grocery store had a snail. So I sat in this tiny restaurant trying to make the little plate of broccoli last seventy pages, but one of the women working there caught on to my stalling and persuaded me in Mandarin to order vegetarian dumplings.
In the evening we went to a concert by a touring Harvard a capella group because Vidya’s blockmate was in it.
Sunday I went to Mass in Central. It was packed, and like the service I went to last weekend near my apartment, almost the whole congregation was women. Then I went to run by the piers, and once again it started pouring, but this time the rain was extremely heavy. Amazingly drenched, I bought some gross fresh dragon fruit juice and took the ferry to Kowloon to another mall where Vidya found a deal that if you spent a certain amount you could art jam for free. I made a brightly colored picture I call “No one ever named a bird out of hate,” after my favorite sentence said by one of my creative writing teachers.
I finished Hong Kong Rose last night. I think it was reading a novel set here, seeing all the water, and exploring on foot more than subway, that kindled my interest in knowing this place.

I Live in a Street Market

A trolley runs through Chun Yeung Street. Raw fruits and vegetables, shelves upon shelves of cooking oil, fish (dead and alive), lao po cakes, breads, housewares fill shops lining the road. Lengths of meat dangle from butcher hooks.  On weekends the middle fills up with stalls of vendors selling t-shirts, jelly sandals, watches, tailored prom gowns, pajamas.  Week nights, when I get home from work, all that’s still open is the stall on the corner with piles of cherries in a box, a heap of purple yams, cabbages, and the one next to it which sells patterned purses and wallets.  On the other side a man sweeps pieces of cut up fish into the road.