Hong Kong in October, part 2

Come Back, Suzie Wong

Tuesday Oct. 16

Up at 7:30 again. I scrounged some coffee from the hotel breakfast room, but that wasn’t enough, so I got some more at 7-eleven. We also needed bottled water. I forgot about my Octopus card and paid cash.

Later we took the 91 bus to Aberdeen. Google showed us the bus we needed, but once we were on the street, we couldn’t find where to pick it up. We asked a couple of policemen, but neither of them knew. One of them stepped aside and used his radio to call for directions. We were looking on the wrong street. We needed to go one block up to Queen’s Road.

Aberdeen is where the floating city—well, all that’s left of it—sits in the harbor. That’s where Dolph Lundgren, Jean-Claude Van Damme, maybe Jackie Chan, and lots of other guys used to do the chases from boat to boat. They’d run into people’s laundry, knock over baskets of fish and vegetables, and then somebody would eventually get away on, under, or over the water. I had to see that.

We sat on the upper deck of the bus, and got a great view of the street. We passed at least three shops specializing in selling edible bird’s nests. Other stores had huge bags of incense sticks out front. Then we passed through a stretch of the road where everything seemed to be a college. St. Paul’s College, Hong Kong University, and several others.

This is the harbor seen from the bus.

There was also a cemetery owned by several Protestant churches. I saw the sign on the way out, but on the way back, the cemetery itself. The dead are buried on narrow terraces down a steep mountainside. The island is largely made of mountains except where they have been leveled or there is landfill.

It was after one when we got off the bus at Aberdeen. All I had to eat so far was a half a cup of watermelon and some coffee. So we—that is, Joanna—found a likely spot for lunch. We had suckling pig—strips of pork with the fat and crisp skin—chicken, and roast pork, all served over white rice with a little gai lan on the side. I ordered tea and got it Hong Kong style. It was as dark as coffee. You couldn’t see the bottom of the cup. It puckered the inside of my mouth. But I needed the caffeine.

On the way to the waterfront, we passed through a park where men had hung their caged birds in the shade of a gazebo. Joanna said they do that every day to give the birds fresh air and to sit around and talk. Most of the birds were small gray and yellow finches. One was dark gray. When I came for a closer look the bird became very agitated and started leaping around its cage. Maybe it could sense that I was a stranger, or maybe it didn’t like hats. In any case, I moved off before it could hurt itself.

This is the part of Hong Kong that was populated before the British seized the island during the Opium War in the middle of the 19th century. It was a little fishing village, when the rest of the area was used as a hideout by pirates. As cities go, Hong Kong isn’t very old. Many cities in the New World are much older.

There are still fishermen here. As we walked along the Aberdeen promenade on the water’s edge, we passed a family sitting by the way peeling prawns. Or maybe long, skinny shrimp.

There were some charter boats, a couple of yachts, and several large fishing vessels, along with several dozen boats that look like people may live on them.

But most of the sampans are for sightseeing. One lady kept coming up to us trying to sell us on the idea of taking a boat ride. No, not unless I get to see Van Damme take one of his ballet leaps across the bow.

Then it was time for a nap. I told you I have developed strange sleeping habits.

We got up at five in plenty of time to get ready and be in time to meet Eugenia, Joanna’s daughter-in-law, and her parents at a restaurant called Zen in a tony mall in Wan Chai.

We had char shu, spicy chicken with aged egg, some kind of sliced vegetable (maybe cucumber) with aged egg, short ribs, and XO sauce, a salty, tasty dish made of shredded dried scallops and dried shrimp. There were lots of other things, too, including nuts and vegetables. For dessert there was a cold soup that contained pomelo and mango, a steamed sponge cake, and something similar to chrusciki covered in melted sugar.

We got into the mall through the Conrad Hotel. We got out of the mall the same way, and saw this view of Hong Kong

Wan Chai is one of the richest districts in Hong Kong, according to Wikipedia. It is also home to the Red Light District, which occupies a couple of blocks on Lockhart Road around the corner from Fenwick Pier. As usual, I am dropping all these names because you can find them on Google Maps, if you want to go there.

That’s how I found them. This is where the rest of “The World of Suzie Wong” takes place. The hotel where William Holden’s character lived is still there, although much changed. It is the Luk Kwok around the corner on Gloucester Road.

Despite the lurid descriptions I had read, no hookers were chasing anyone or grabbing anybody’s arm. They were outside some of the “nightclubs,” all right, but they were just advertising. No high-pressure marketing.

I was dressed like a swell in a suit and vest, because I had just come from dinner, but of course Joanna was with me, so they knew we were just touring. I did stop for a Kronenbourg 1664 at a bar called The Devil’s Advocate.

There was a loud clatter at one point and a moment of possible tension outside a couple of bars across the street from us. Some passerby, a staggering drunk or impatient nerd, had toppled a sandwich board sign (hence the clatter) and may have nearly knocked the pint out of a drinker’s hand. There may have been more to it than that, but it ended when someone set the sign back up.

They tell me it’s autumn here, but I haven’t noticed.We took the tram back, sitting on the upper deck. All the windows were open. I was soaked through the back of my vest by the time I got to the room. Joanna was wearing a sweater part of the time.

Dim Sum and a Bit of Extra Merit

September 17

I feel like I’m getting to know this town. Yesterday we went to a pastry shop and then got coffee at the 7-eleven and topped up my Octopus card. Then two of Joanna’s friends, Ron and May, met us at the hotel and took us to a restaurant in Kowloon for dim sum. We wound up as part of a group of nine people, most of whom were pals from St. Rose of Lima High School.

They get together and do this every Wednesday.

The restaurant, called the Seaview, was somewhere between the 25th and 225th floor of one of those towers that make up the skyline here. There was shumai filled with pork and topped with fish roe, fried rice with dried scallops, beef in black bean sauce over fried noodles (one of my favorite dishes). There were buns and dumplings and shrimp, oh my.

I couldn’t get the shrimp out of the shell with my chopsticks, so someone handed me a fork that came from somewhere to pry the meat out.

Ron was sitting on my left and made sure I had a sample of everything.

Most of the conversation was in Cantonese. Then from time to time Ron or John, who was sitting next to Ron, would translate and then apologize for speaking Cantonese, but as John put it, it was “easier for them to express their feelings.”

I was having a great time. I actually know a few stray words of Cantonese and am able to pick out a familiar word now and then. Or at least imagine that I do. More on that later. 

It’s not exactly the sea, but the harbor, that spreads out behind the Seaview’s glass wall. Ron and May put Joanna and me in seats that took in the view. Suddenly I started to recognize stuff. The tallest building in town is the International Financial Center and just to the right of it is the block with our hotel (which I couldn’t see from the restaurant).

To the left is the China Bank building, which is on the face of some of the ten-dollar bills. It is covered with a huge zig-zag pattern that lights up in different sequences, a stripe at a time, at night.

A little farther to the left is the Conrad Hotel, where we entered the Pacific Place Mall the other night to meet Eugenia, Ken, and Helen. Hey, we took a cab there. From this perspective, it’s only about five feet from our hotel.

We had talked about sights to see. So Ron and John gave us directions to a timber temple called the Chi Lin Nunnery. We take the red subway line to Mong Kok and switch to the blue, which will take us to Diamond Hill. No, this is not leading where this kind of tale usually goes. We got out and back just fine.

One of the first things Joanna noticed when we came up from underground was Lion Head Rock. She had been up there.

They get a lot of visitors at the temple so signs are in English and Chinese. But this is an active church. Much of it is off-limits to secular personnel. Outside there is a lotus garden. 

Inside is a courtyard surrounded by shrines to various incarnations of the Buddha and one to Kuan-Yin, whose name in Cantonese is pronounced something like “Gun-Yum.” She is a lady Buddha, carried over from an earlier pantheon of pre-Buddhist gods. She roughly corresponds to the Virgin Mary in Christian lore. I knelt next to Joanna, bowed three times, and recited a Hail Mary silently. Maybe I’ll spend less time in hell when I die.

The central church has a large bronze Buddha and two smaller, but still large, lesser Buddhas. The original Buddha was a prince, Siddhartha Gautama, who became an ascetic and achieved enlightenment. His teachings showed others the way to become enlightened and therefore Buddhas. Those enlightened beings who choose not to enter Nirvana but to stay in this world—or to return to it from time to time—in order to show others the way are known as bodhisattvas. At least, that is what I recall from my Jack Kerouac-inspired Zen Buddhist days many years ago. Yes, I used to be a Beatnik, when I was thirteen, although I am sure no one could never guess that now.

There was no photography permitted in the church or central courtyard, as I expected, but I was surprised that everyone, including local people at prayer, kept their shoes on. In Thailand, there are racks where you must leave your shoes outside temples.

From the temple we crossed the street to the Nan Lian Garden, which contains pagodas and living things like Buddha pines and orange jasmine trees. The jasmines are clustered in a part of the park named Fragrance Hill. I can only guess what it’s like when the jasmine flowers.

Today’s photo is an illusion, an appropriate thing to say after a visit to a Buddhist temple. The roofs in the foreground are part of Nan Liang Garden. Those up the hill are the temple complex. The entire place is surrounded by residential and commercial towers.

In the garden, we passed a gent listening to a radio, and Joanna stopped to talk to him in Cantonese. Then she called me over to listen. It was an opera. It’s a very unusual style of singing to the Western ear. It is high-pitched and tends to be nasal. But then, consider how unnatural the singing is in European opera.

The man said something to Joanna. We smiled, thanked him, and left.

“Joanna, did that man call me a gwei lo?” “Fan gwei lo” means “white devil man” in Cantonese. That’s me.

No, the phrase was “lo gwai” which apparently means “getting old.” He’s getting old and still likes the old opera. Younger people don’t follow it anymore.

I know what he means. My favorite is Haydn.

[Editor’s note: Harry later learned that the phrase did include “gwei” in the sense of devil, but the man was referring to himself as an “old devil.”]