In Tai O, a fishing village on the southern end of Lantau Island, the streets are narrow. They wind along the general side of the water, and divide in places to curve back out to the more developed public housing towers just beyond the older streets. The walls are relatively high for such a village, often two stories tall, and the sense is of being inside a secret complicated urban web where cars and busses never enter. Aside from the piles of dried fish, octopus, squid, mussels, shark fins, etc. that sit in the hot shade of the markets, there are open-front shops and food stalls with small round stools for seating. Bicycles and children mingle in the open areas, groups of people play mah-jongg. But it’s not just the shops that open invitingly onto the streets, but people’s homes, interspersed erratically and without ceremony into the mess of small industry. They have no door, just an accordion-shaped metal divider, adorned with floral cut-outs, that closes for privacy or sleep. Though outside is dirt and the smell of drying fish, hot sun, the view inside these homes gives one an immediate sense of cool peace. The floors are all tiled, the walls mostly bare, the wicker and plastic furniture pushed neatly against the walls, a white ceiling fan at rest. In some cases, a small television sits in the corner, and another room (kitchen? bedroom?) lies darker in the back. In some cases, stairs lead up to a second floor. In other cases, the clean tiled floor of this room is all that’s there, ending with a dusty step into the street. Louis Kahn’s words rang in my head: “The street is a room by agreement…. Its ceiling is the sky.”

(More pictures of the Lantau day trip on Flickr.)

¶ 11:26 AM 0 comments

I have a recent infatuation with red beans, sweet, kidney-looking beans that are used in Chinese desserts. I’ve eaten them all over the city, in many different permutations of style and presentation, although they always deliver their sweet, mealy satisfaction. It began with my ordering a “red bean love” smoothie at a Sichuan restaurant in Kennedy Town, which turned out to be a partially-chunky milkshake consumed with a large straw. Next, I had red beans and steamed milk in Yau Ma Tei. The steamed milk tasted like cold custard, with the same familiar consistency, and the red beans lay liquidly on its white top, warm. Days later, I ate so-called red bean and coconut pudding in Tsim Sha Tsui, which came as a three layer cake of gelatin. The top layer was clear, with little yellow lemony flowers inside, while the middle was red beans packed tightly together, and the bottom was coconut flavored. In Central, at a dedicated dessert place, I ordered the hot red bean soup, which may have had chunks of rice in it and came with ice cream dumplings in a small side dish. The dumplings had a doughy exterior and came in 3 flavors: taro, sesame, and vanilla. I think the sesame, which was colored green, was my favorite. Finally, last night, I ate in a mall food court in Admiralty. I ordered soft-serve green tea ice cream atop cold red bean mixture, with “dumplings,” which were fairly tasteless chewy, smooth rice balls. So delicious, and so Hong Kong.

¶ 2:37 PM 1 comments

In my daily commute, I rarely have the breathing space or inclination to pull a book from my bag, so my mind has nothing to contemplate but its own workings and the activities around me. Though many of the people around me have headphones on, my only soundtrack is the sounds of the KCR and MTR. I hear the digital music of my Octopus (a card for frequent public transit riders) as it beeps into the KCR and out of it again, chimes into the MTR and out of it again. I hear the quiet footsteps of thousands of my companions going up and down the stairs. I hear the Cantonese, Mandarin, and English announcements of the station stops, the door-closings, the mind-the-gaps. (I always think the woman who speaks Mandarin has a funny baby voice, although the intonations of the language probably don't help her cause.) But my favorite commuting noise is a song that they play in the MTR between announcements. I assume it’s piped through some official channel, although it’s far from the soothing classical music that one would expect them to choose for a commute in one of Asia’s most stressed-out cities. No, this tune is a happy, bopping melody that could easily be the background music for a television shot of little kids dancing energetically with their new puppy in a grassy field, or a group of friends whooshing down a water slide with huge smiles. When I hear it, the cameras turn on me and I become a sitcom star: the happy Hong Kong intern, walking happily and confidently towards a day full of adventure in the city above.

¶ 10:17 AM 1 comments

The other day I stopped on Queen Victoria Street (which, like most roads in the area south of Central, is a steep cobblestone hill) to eat lunch. There were people waiting on the sidewalk to get in, although the place, typically of Hong Kong restaurants, has no door but is entirely open on the street side. I waited for a while, enduring being cut in line by several people who were more accustomed to the system and who knew how to yell to the one waiter in Cantonese. He finally motioned me to a table in the corner, with three other women eating alone at a small round table. All around us, people were talking, and I could see through the crowd a small window to the kitchen, where three or so men were cooking. I pointed to the characters above my selection on the menu: “stir noodle with vegetable.” They came with the green stalks of “vegetable,” a brown ladling of sauce on top and a bowl of broth. I took two black plastic chopsticks from the jar on the table, and started my attempt at eating. My chopstick abilities are acceptable, but don’t feel nearly so when exercised on a huge plate of noodles in front of three local women. I avoided looking at my seatmates for several minutes, embarrassed, sure that they were scornful of my foreignness and disgusted by the sight of noodles constantly falling out of my mouth as I ate. Finally I mustered my courage to look around the table, and my eyes settled on the woman across from me, who had ordered the same dish, only with little shrimp dumplings on the side. I watched her for a while, hiding a smile of relief: it was exhilaratingly comforting to see the long strands dangling from her mouth, just as mine had.

¶ 5:53 PM 1 comments

Today I got off the MTR (metro) in Central, to see massive skyscrapers hold hands with rain clouds. On the surface, to a girl fresh off the plane from the mainland, that part of Hong Kong seemed not too different from New York; but then I noticed that everything and everyone in the mall I had exited into was Filipino. There were money wiring enterprises, hawkers with international calling cards, ethnic food. Had I stepped off into little Manila, or was I in the very center of a world city, surrounded by some of the most expensive real estate in the world? Out on the street, my bemusement grew. Armani, Gucci, Prada, and, plopped down on plastic blankets and makeshift lawn chairs, groups of Filipinos. Not only were they sitting on the ground (a no-no in China), but they were laughing, eating, selling, looking at vacation photographs (this is true) on the ground. The distinctive plastic woven totes of third world countries were everywhere, filled with clothing and fruit and belongings. My Western mind had nothing to reference but refugees, and the homeless. Yet there was something off about that assessment. Though it was raining, and they were confined to areas under walkways and shelter, and though sitting in such busy thoroughfares can’t be comfortable, the women and men I saw were plainly joyous. These underpasses held a sense of family. Later, in the air-conditioned fluorescent quiet of my dorm room in the New Territories, I read by coincidence in my guidebook: “This area is a major focus for dense crowds of the territory’s 200,000 Filipina amahs, or maids, who gather here on Sundays, their day off.” Would knowing that beforehand have made the sight less enchanting?

¶ 10:23 AM 0 comments