Hong Kong in October, 10

Swordplay and Drumbeats

October 25

We saw more people with swords in the park this morning, and Joanna asked a man about them. He gave her tips on buying one, and she got to hold one lady’s sword.

Then the man made a call on his cell phone. His master had arrived at Kung Fu Corner, and we went to meet him.

The master has been practicing tai-chi since he was eight years old, the student told us, and is now about 36. He was instructing a group of people in a move that involved a couple of rapid steps and a high kick so that the hand slaps the ankle. It looks easy enough, which means I’d probably break my ass if I tried it. Maybe sometime when I’m alone.

The master and disciple gave us a sales pitch for tai-chi swords. They told us to buy a good sword, because a cheap one will give you oscillations. Actually, I wanted to buy one for Joanna just so she could take it to the tai-chi class at her brother’s gym. I told her, too, that it’s like the tomahawk I wanted to get for her at Hudson’s Bay: You take that with you and nobody will give you a hard time.

Most of the buildings are new because there has been constant development of Hong Kong and Kowloon for the past 50 years or more. Joanna’s old neighborhood was so much changed by high-rises, apartment construction, and enlarged roads that she had to ask directions to find her old school.

Some of the buildings take unusual shapes. We were standing in a hedge maze in Kowloon Park and part of the skyline consisted of curved buildings that looked like they had been broken.

Nathan Road and the side streets in our hotel neighborhood are colorful and active, but it’s like an Asian Fifth Avenue. There’s a Coach store on the corner of Kimberley Road and Nathan, for instance. So we went back to the area around Temple Street this morning.

It’s still loud and busy, but has a little more down-home Asian flavor that I learned in Chiang Mai. You may be able to see what I mean from today’s photo, Welcome to Kowloon.

We stopped at a little place for lunch, where I had something familiar, sliced beef in black bean sauce over fried egg noodles. The noodles are like a crisp bird’s nest that softens as it absorbs the sauce. It doesn’t matter what’s in the sauce, beef, chicken, mushrooms, whatever. It’s damned good.

Here’s a funny thing about lunch. All the tables were set with spoons and forks. We asked for chopsticks and got only one pair. I offered them to Joanna, but she left them to me. I was halfway through lunch when it hit me that I was the only round-eye in the place, and also the only person using chopsticks. I don’t know what that means. Maybe it’s not good, so I’m not going to analyze it.

I had only one Tsingtao, because they served me a 600 milliliter bottle—about 20 American ounces.

As usual, after the equivalent of two beers, I was ready to go to church. Temple Street may be named for the one near the end of the street dedicated to Tin Hau, the goddess of seafarers. This holy site is more than a hundred years old, not as old as the temple in Macau dedicated to the protector god, but ancient by Hong Kong standards. It is by far the smokiest temple I’ve visited. Joanna, too, maybe, but she didn’t say.

The incense coils were hung over sections of the temple that were marked off so you wouldn’t stray under them unawares. Signs in English said to beware of falling ash.

The temples here are filled with dozens, perhaps hundreds of figures representing various gods, saints, buddhas, and mythical figures. Some are small, some life size.

Joanna had a conversation with one of the ladies who work in the temple about the monkey and the pig. They accompanied the man (Joanna knows his name, but I have forgotten it.) who went to India to receive the teachings of the Buddha. They also represent the follies of life.

The monkey is full of himself and thinks he is very fast and clever, but finds that his freedom is an illusion and that he has always been held in the Buddha’s palm. The pig had seven vices, including a few, like drinking, that seem virtuous enough to me, but he too learns the pointlessness of his ways.

I may be a natural Buddhist, because I am aware of pointlessness, illusion, and vice, but have learned to accept and embrace them. I believe in moderation of all things, including moderation.

When we were placing sticks of incense, I put some of mine in the wrong vessels, which were reserved for candles. It’s a new piece of information for me. I’ll have to remember that.

I made a donation and got to ring the bell and the gong. The temple ladies told me I was being timid and that I should strike again, but louder. So I did.

You remember the huge guys in diapers drumming out that feral rhythm in the Asahi commercial? Maybe you saw it. It was all over the Internet. Well, that wasn’t me.

I think Joanna took photos of me doing the timid strikes.

I stopped in the men’s room in the park by the temple and found another legacy of SARS. It was poster in which the wise Lo Fu Ji (who has an honored place in the Avenue of Comic Heroes, not far away) teaches proper cough manners.

Dinner tonight was back at the goose restaurant, Yung Kee, in Lan Kwai Fong. We had more goose leg, which was good, but as with all Chinese meats, you have to watch out for the bits of bone. We also had a combination plate that came warm, neither hot nor cold, of pig stomach, pig tongue, and octopus.

The tongue was all right, but I may have put myself off that by thinking while I was eating it: Is this what the pig tastes in his mouth? Stupid, I know, but it’s amazing what your brain can come up with after an indeterminate number of days drinking beer in tropical Asia.

The pig stomach and the octopus were terrific.

We stopped at the Hong Kong Brew House on D’Aguilar road, just outside the actual street called Lan Kwai Fong. They had Fuller’s London Pride, so I took some of that.

We met a guy at the bar named Matthieu, who just like the Coneheads, was from France. He writes software for airlines and was in town to support a new customer.

His wife is about to start an internship with the U.N. in New York. I have almost been to France on a few occasions. So we had a lot in common.

He asked what brought us to Hong Kong, and I tried to explain in the shorthand version. Joanna grew up there, and this was my first trip. We had already told him that we lived in New Jersey, not far from New York. His command of English is excellent, but I think he needed a second or two to catch up, which he did fast.

We went over it again, filling in the details. Joanna grew up in Hong Kong and lives in the States now. She has been back to Hong Kong a few times before, but this is my first time here.

He left me his e-mail address so that, if I ever actually get to France some day and have any questions, I can get in touch with him.

He has my business card so I can buy him a beer if we’re ever in New York at the same time.

The metro is quicker but the ferry is far more scenic. We took the ferry to Hong Kong and back to Kowloon. It’s a very short but amazing ride. The harbor is squeezed between two jam-packed cities.

Some of it’s a pain in the ass, but I think I really like Hong Kong.

Running out of steam at 11:30, gang. Good night. Will send when I can.

Harry

Hong Kong in October, 9

   

Room With a View

                 The view of Kowloon from the room. 




Back to School

October 24

We went a little farther afield today. We took the underground train a few stops north to Mong Kok and Kowloon City, which are sections of the broader area also called Kowloon. There used to be a Walled City of Kowloon, that was inside Kowloon City, which is part of Kowloon.

It's like Manhattan: the County of New York in the City of New York in the State of New York.

The flower market is in Mong Kok. Bonsai is very popular, reckoned by the number of pots on the sidewalk. 

So is Christmas. At the head of Flower Market Road there is a store specializing in Christmas gear. I don’t know if this is one of the world’s Christmas-all-year-long stores or if it is a custom to push the season here.

I think it’s the latter case. We later saw an inflatable Santa by the side of the road near an overpass, and a lighted wall of Seasons Greetings down by the harbor.

The flower market area of Mong Kok is Joanna’s old neighborhood, and she wanted to visit her old school, St. Rose of Lima. We came out of the subway, and I had brought a tiny plastic compass along. We wanted to go east from the station to find Flower Market Road, I said. And so we set off in the wrong direction. I found out later that every time I set the compass down, north was in a different quadrant. Moral of the story: Test your compass before you leave home.

Mong Kok is filled with towers and divided roads now, but it used to be fairly open, with fields and bungalows, so Joanna had to ask for directions to the school.

On the way, we passed the bird market. This is where they sell the pet birds in cages that guys take to the park. But in addition to the little finches and blackbirds, there were full-size parrots, parakeets from Australia, and grasshoppers sold in plastic bags. I don’t know if the grasshoppers were bird food or pets. Maybe both.

Sparrows and a few pigeons come to the market to pick up stray bird seed.

The lacy foliage of several flame of the forest trees gave the place a mildly jungle-like feel.

The school is still there. We spoke to a security guard, who called the headmaster’s office. Joanna explained why we were there, so they gave us an OK to look around the playground.

At one end of the playground is a statue of the Virgin Mary in a little stone grotto. Joanna told me that her sister Monica, playing there one day, kicked a ball that took the head right off the figure. I looked close and couldn’t see a repair line, so this may be a newer one.

Joanna was looking for a spiral staircase that has been removed.

Today’s photo is Joanna Meets the New Mary.

Down the street is St. Teresa’s church, which has been remodeled since Joanna was a parishioner there. The red marble columns have been replaced by white pillars. Pieces of the red marble are used to decorate some of the flowerbeds at the school and the churchyard.

We went to the parish restaurant, the Caritas Cafe, for fried rice with dried fish.

It seems, however, that Caritas only extends so far. A sign on the wall tells patrons that they must spend at least sixteen Hong Kong dollars to sit at one of the tables.

The manager gave us directions to the next stop, the old Walled City of Kowloon. We picked up the No. 1 bus across the street and it took us to the north gate.

Before I made this trip, Joanna gave me a history of Hong Kong. It was published in 1963, so it was a little out of date, but it was still useful. There was one passage that particularly struck me.

The author, Gene Gleason, wrote: “The flavor of disaster became a regular part of Hong Kong history. Its own four horsemen—piracy, typhoons, epidemics and fires—raced through the colony at frequent but unpredictable intervals, filling its hills and harbor with debris and death. There is still no reason to assume that they will not return, either singly or as a team, whenever the whim moves them.”

It was a place I wanted to see. Of course. that was 50 years ago, and one of the landmarks of disaster was the old Walled City of Kowloon.

The walled city was a notorious slum, less than a square mile packed with refugees from Red China, junkies, dope dealers, slavers, pimps, prostitutes, and triad kingpins. You wouldn’t know that by looking at it now, because it was demolished and replaced by a park in the 1990s.

There was effectively no law in the place. In 1948, the British tried to exert some kind of legal authority there, and that sparked riots in Canton that burned down a British consulate.

Joanna knew it as a place to be avoided at all costs. One night, after she and Monica had stayed out very late, their father said he was convinced they had been kidnapped and taken to the slum to be sold.

The walled city was originally a military base, with barracks, cannon, gunpowder factory, and other cool stuff.

Eventually, the military withdrew and then in the 1940s refugees poured in from Mainland China. The place became home to tens of thousands of people.

It was already legendary as a seat of the triads before the influx of refugees.

Speaking of triads, we may have seen a bit of that back near the flower market. A group of cars was parked conspicuously outside a restaurant in a no parking zone. Of course, with a vanity plate like “Boss Li,” maybe you can park your Mercedes anywhere in town. Your escort vehicles come along for the ride.

A wall runs around the park, but it is not the original wall. That was taken down during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and the materials were used to expand the local airport.

A model in the park shows what the slum looked like late in its history. Next to that is a mural showing a cross-section of the apartment buildings, with people going about their typical activities, everything from whoring to playing mah-jongg.

Joanna photographed me (and inadvertently herself, as well) while I was studying the mural.

Now the place is a quiet park with shrubs and trees. Near the old wells is a pond with carp and a pagoda. The walkways are still marked with the old street names. My favorite is Dragon’s Blood Back Street. What couldn’t you find in a place called that? Drunks, junkies, hitmen, and missionaries all together.

Speaking of missionaries, the almshouse, which was originally an administrative center, is still standing in the middle of the site.

We went down to the waterfront after dark to see the light show. We sat outside the Deck n Beer bar in the park and waited. The boats were going by under strings of lights. The Hong Kong skyline was lighted up. I had beer, a couple of Stellas and a Guinness. It was a great time.

The light show consists of white and green lasers from the tops of a couple of the towers on the Hong Kong side of the harbor.  It reminds me a little bit of disco, but it’s not like the spectacle over the lake at Epcot Center.

But then, it doesn’t need to be. This is Hong Kong. They have their own Disneyland on Lantau Island.

For dinner I ordered pork jelly with udon at a Japanese style restaurant. Wow, pork jelly. What the hell is that? I had to try it to find out.

Joanna read the Chinese description, which didn’t have a typo: it was pork belly. Good enough, and so was the Asahi, but I’ll have to look elsewhere for pork jelly.

It was after 10 when we got back to the hotel, and I didn’t have energy to open a beer.

Hong Kong in October, Section 8

A Night at the Opera

October 23

I went back to Sam’s yesterday afternoon to try on my suit. It was perfect, pegged pants, full around the thighs, jacket not too tight. It’s navy blue with stripes, a classic gangster suit. It makes me want to shake somebody down or launder money.

It’s too heavy to wear here because it’s autumn in Hong Kong, which is equivalent to Christmas time in Chiang Mai or an August heat wave in New Jersey. The suit is stored appropriately enough in a black bag.

This morning we explored Kowloon Park. We revisited the Avenue of Comic Stars, passed the swimming pools, and strolled through the Chinese garden.

It is maids’ day off in Hong Kong and the park was filled with small ladies in groups of two, three, or more. Some were picnicking. One group of about a dozen women stood in a circle singing a song, which included clapping their hands very loud in unison at one point of the refrain.

I asked Joanna what they were singing, but she didn’t know. She guessed they were from the Philippines.

Joanna told me that May, the lady we met for dim sum, is retired now but used to interview maids for a living. They would apply from places like Manila, Jakarta, and Bangkok. They live with the families that employ them, and go to the park on their days off.

I started heading for something I had discovered on my own on Monday, the Garden of Life and the tree walk. But on the way, we discovered the aviary.

It was filled with parrots, parakeets, pigeons, and cockatoos in various colors, but the star attraction was the rhinoceros hornbill.

It may be the size of a turkey. Its plumage is black and white. It has a long swordlike curved bill and above that an orange horn that looks almost like an extra upper bill. It is native to Borneo and Java, and other exotic places known for headhunters.

It is also hidden in a corner of its area, so I wasn’t able to get a shot of it.

The aviary is round and sectioned off into about a half dozen wedges for different kinds of birds. Several dozen pigeons of various species mix with some cockatoos, for example. The rhinoceros hornbill had the biggest wedge and had it all to himself.

When we were there we saw a lady across the way practicing tai-chi with a sword. She was too far away and in the shade, so I couldn’t catch that on video.

We went to Kung Fu Corner where there is a sculpture garden. One piece attracted our attention. It is called “Budding” and may represent a seed with the first sprout coming out. But I don’t know. It could have been a fanciful animal head. But why would anyone want to put those things in bronze? I’m pretty sure it’s a naked lady bending over.

Kung Fu Corner had not one, but four people practicing tai-chi with swords. One lady seemed to be instructing the other three people. It was like the movies. The swords had tassels. 

After a few minutes, they put their swords away and went through a coordinated tai-chi routine accompanied by music. We just sat on a bench and watched. It was as relaxing as watching the tide rise at Southampton.

The Garden of Life includes a formal rose garden, where the perfume is terrific. There is a fountain with Chinese and English inscriptions by people who have received donated organs.

The tree walk includes one called flame of the forest, which blooms with a red flower. There’s a photo next to the tree to show how it flowers. It is out of bloom now, but is still spectacular with an exotic double-compound leaf that looks very sexy indeed, like lace in the sky.

Another tree suitably called camel’s foot (genus Bauhinia) has a leaf that is shaped like a camel’s footprint.

There was also an orchid tree. Its flower, which looks very much like an orchid, is on Hong Kong’s money.

The Discovery Center at the park contains artifacts found during archeological excavations in Hong Kong. Some pieces date to the Middle Stone Age. They even had reconstructions of what the people from that time may have looked like. They were based on remains found at Stone Age burial sites around Hong Kong.

One room was floored in glass panels and underneath were thousands of shards of blue and white porcelain from the Ming Dynasty. They were recovered from the site that became Hong Kong Disneyland.

We stopped for more noodle soup at the Yuen Kee restaurant across from the hotel. Shrimp wontons, vermicelli, and preserved vegetable in a fantastic broth. Also Tsingtao.

We came back to the hotel after that to take a long rest and let the sweat dry in our clothes.

All that Joanna had eaten today was a piece of toast and half a bowl of mai fun noodles in broth. She was finally hungry by five o’clock.

We went to back to the Taiwanese restaurant for dinner. It’s not everywhere that you can sit down and order the Taiwan combination platter: chitterlings, roast duck, spicy duck tongues, and some kind of egg dish.

It was all right for a cold platter, but most of it may have tasted better warm.

I thought the eggs were treated yolks returned to the white, like deviled eggs back home. But it wasn’t egg white around the yolk. It was squid. These were pretty good.

I’d heard about chit’lin’s, of course, but had never tried them. They’re pigs’ intestines. I’m not sure that I’d ever seen them before. They taste all right, and they are chewy, the way calamari can get at times.

The roast duck would have been better hot. There was a vinegar dipping sauce that gave it a nice tang.

The duck tongues have a cartilage that runs down the middle and you scrape the meat off that with your teeth. I think there’s a Western vegetable (an endive?) that gets eaten much the same way. They’re a lot of work for the meat, like Buffalo wings.

This was a great meal, though. I don’t know that I’d order any of this stuff again, but hell, now I’ve had chitterlings, duck tongues, and egg yolk wrapped in squid. Also more Tsingtao.

For dessert, we walked up the hill to Bahama Mama’s, but there was a different guy behind the bar, so I didn’t get to deliver my apology. I did speak to this guy and asked for a Stella Artois, a rare tap in Hong Kong, by the way, although not unique to this bar.

While I was working on that, a lady in a Heineken suit (I am reporting faithfully, I swear) came up and tried to persuade me to try Heineken. I didn’t go into details—like how well it goes with space cake, for instance—but told her I was familiar with Heineken and liked it. She mentioned one that was new to me, called Edelweiss. For all I know, Larry, I had that in Amsterdam and was so blasted I forgot it.

I didn’t order it then because we were headed for the Temple Street Night Market, and I had some walking left to do.

Temple Street is like the Jersey boardwalk crossed with a flea market. The vendors set up under tents and sell clothes, leather goods, electronics, and weird stuff. You can buy a refrigerator magnet, for example, that reads “Queen of Farts.” I’ve not seen that anywhere else in the world.

But what we really came to see, was outside Temple Street, past the fortune tellers. There is a group set up right by Nathan Road (I think it’s Nathan Road) that perform Chinese opera.

Like all music, it is much better live than recorded. I had expected to hear a couple of minutes of it and have enough. We arrived during a duet by a man and a woman accompanied by a percussionist who could make crashing gong sounds, cricket chirps, and other special effects, and by two Chinese violins. Joanna told me the name of those instruments, but I have forgotten.

The duet continued for a while, and it was fascinating. I had expected a piercing, high, nasal falsetto, but it was subtler than that. It was downright beautiful.

A lady passed a bowl for contributions, and I was glad to kick in. There was no photography allowed, and I’m not sure why. They were serious about that though. A man walked up and pulled out his camera. The lady singer, without missing a note, pointed at the “no photos” sign. The guy agreed.

When the duet was over, the lady who had passed the bowl stepped up to sing. She did a duet, too, dropping her voice an octave to sing the man’s part.

I don’t know enough Cantonese to know this. Joanna told me: The duet was an exchange between a wife and a husband who is about to leave on an extended trip. She is concerned that he will forget her and take up another woman while he is away. He promises that he will not. She gives him a jade hairpin as a token of faith.

The video is of other people, a pop duet around the corner from the opera singers.

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Bahama Mama’s is on a stretch of bars and restaurants known as the Lan Kwai Fong of Kowloon. I don’t know the real name of the street.

It’s a steep walk up from Kimberley Road, and that’s OK because there is beer at the top. There is also an easier way to get up there. You walk into a shopping mall at the corner of Nathan and Kimberley, go up the escalator, out the exit, up a short flight of stairs and down another flight.

Then people behaving like hawkers for real estate, tailor shops, handbags, and counterfeit watches get in your face, trying to foist menus on you. I clearly had the upper hand this time. “I want a beer. At the bar.”

Most places don’t have seating at the bar, so they struck out. We wound up back at Bahama Mama’s where I tried the Edelweiss. This was strictly a research beer. First off, if you hear “weiss” in the name, it’s a white beer made from wheat. So I knew what was coming.

This one wasn’t really bad. It was made with a lot of citrus, which most white beers need to have much flavor at all. I had to buy a half liter because the bar didn’t have anything smaller. It was 73 Hong Kong dollars, or little more than nine dollars American. I don’t pay that for beer in New York, and some of that is the best beer there is. Remember that when I was there earlier, I had a pint of Stella, a pretty damned good lager, that was only 48 H.K. dollars, or about six bucks.

Edelweiss, like the rest of the Sound of Music, was a disappointment.

I’m back at the Kimberley Hotel now, drinking Tsingtao and about to wrap things up.

Love to all and to all a good night.

Harry