loose ends.

For the past week or so I've been spending most of my time dealing with leaving-related tasks: sitting around at the tax office [the upside: being a block from the Wanchai branch of the Flying Pan, the only place in Hong Kong with grits on the menu, more than ten specials involving hollandaise sauce, and a frying pan with wings hanging on the wall], cancelling my cell phone and gym membership, cleaning out my offices, packing boxes, etc. Gotta love activities that manage to be both dull and stressful. For entertainment I've watched 17 episodes of Freaks and Geeks, which is pure genius, and The Squid and the Whale,which made me want to crawl into a hole and stay there in order to avoid ever becoming remotely like any of the characters in the movie.

What follows is my attempt to do a kind of round-up of the things I've meant to blog about and haven't, since I know that once I get to New York I'll never get around to blogging about this stuff.

1. Macau. Hong Kong's smaller, dirtier, more colonial sister SAR has never held huge appeal for me, but it seemed wrong to leave Hong Kong having spent only one afternoon there (in a torrential rainstorm, too), so Rachel and I spent a day there shortly before she left. We started at Fernando's, the most famous Portuguese restaurant in Macau, which really is as good as everyone says. Rachel and I ate a lot of sardines, drank a lot of sangria, and laughed for a long time at this sign posted in the women's bathroom:

After lunch we went to Hac Sa beach, which is supposedly black sand but looks pretty much like every other beach I've ever seen, except that it's dirty. Really, really dirty. At one point an entire construction site appeared to start washing up on the beach, one 20-foot bamboo pole at a time (in Macau, as in Hong Kong, scaffolding is constructed from bamboo held together by plastic ties in a kind of lattice pattern. It's supposed to be quite safe--since it's more flexible than metal, it supposedly absorbs the impact of wind without breaking--but I've seen enough half-collapsed bamboo scaffolds hanging from buildings and hillsides to make me slightly nervous whenever I'm near one).

After walking around the nearest village for a while (highlights: lovely old colonial architecture,
a really great egg tart, crabs and mudskippers in the sand, beautiful bridges, incredibly low-hanging clouds) we rode the world's most crowded public bus past dozens of enormous construction sites (probably all casinos-to-be) and headed back to the ferry to Hong Kong.

2. A new product has made it onto the HK market: Pimpless acne cream. It joins flavoured condoms in "marvelous drink" flavor on my list of recent favorites. Sadly, the smoothie place at my gym is no longer called the "Jackie Chan fatless energy bar."

3. I finally watched the "bus uncle" video. Not sure how much coverage this got outside of Hong Kong, but it's probably one of the most talked-about things that has happened during my two years here. I can't say it's an accurate or typical window into Hong Kong culture, but it is a very funny one. My favorite part is the fact that the young guy lets "bus uncle" insult him for a full six minutes; in the States this probably would have turned into a fight about twenty seconds in.

Cambodia deserves its own post, but that will have to wait for another day.

two reasons why it's time to leave Hong Kong

(other than having a plane ticket in hand and large amounts of stuff in boxes)

1. According to weather.com, Hong Kong is currently 97 degrees...and feels like 116. No, that's not a typo. Walking outside feels like being inside a really polluted radiator, except that radiators aren't this humid. Blegh.

2. Last weekend, a woman went hiking with her dogs in Sai Kung (one of my favorite areas of Hong Kong--a really lush peninsula with lots of great hiking overlooking the bay, which is dotted with tiny, green islands) and stopped to look at a lizard on the trail. When she looked up, her 22-kg Husky was being squeezed to death by a 4-meter Burmese python.

New York, here I come.

cats!

Apologies for (once again) neglecting my blog. Updates on Cambodia, Hong Kong protests, and good feng shui gone bad coming soon. Really. For now, though, an entry for the reader who reminded me that I never posted the photo of the Kuala Lumpur catmobile. Here it is:

airport insomnia, round two

3:26 am, and I'm sitting in the Hong Kong airport having decided that it would be easier to come here the night before my 7:30am flight to Phnom Penh than to try to get a cab at three in the morning. The last flights arrived at 12:30 or so, and nothing starts arriving or departing again until 5:30, so everything in the airport is closed except the 24-hour Pacific Coffee Company.

I'm amazed--as I often am when I'm out late in Hong Kong--by just how much work gets done at night here: construction on the ceiling, massive wall-polishing jobs, rewiring (although it's not all work: as I wandered around about an hour ago I walked past a group of workers sitting around one of the airports' huge television screens, watching World Cup highlights). Over the past several months CUHK has been renovating the road outside the train station. Late-night walks to the bottom of the campus have taken me down there at two or three in the morning on several occasions, and I've been surprised to see teams of construction workers digging, paving, drilling, throwing off showers of sparks like shooting stars. Perhaps this is a function of the constancy of construction in Hong Kong--the daylight hours are all already booked? Whatever the reason, I like the sense that there's a nocturnal side to this city that has nothing to do with, say, barhopping in Lan Kwai Fong.

Now, a variety of unrelated snippets.

1. Requisite "yes, I am a dork" snippet: while browsing the MLA website (yeah, yeah...), I spent some time playing around with this AMAZING map they have of language use in the U.S. It is interactive and kind of the coolest thing ever.

2. When I move back to the states, I will miss double-decker buses. A lot.

3. Last night I went to a recital at the University; one of my students from this past semester (an English major hoping to pursue a career as a singer) was singing a few arias and invited me. She's had a fair amount of success as a singer in Hong Kong, so I expected her to be decent--but she was absolutely phenomenal, one of those singers who opens her mouth and gives you goosebumps, who makes you wonder what freakish, fortunate biological accident has given a small number of people the ability to produce that kind of sound. Watching Etta, who seemed at once completely natural and herself onstage and at the same time like some new, more luminous version of herself, made me feel realize how little of my students I really see--although I feel like I got to know my students this year much better than I did my first set of students in Hong Kong, I still have no idea what most of them do outside of their academic lives. Perhaps this isn't a problem--professional distance, impossibility of forging real relationships with everyone you encounter, etc. etc. At the same time, I feel like it's easier to be a good teacher to students one understands, and it saddens me slightly that I have no idea what many of my students are passionate about, or really good at, or disappointed by, or anything.

4. Some shameless blog thievery: I read on Jenn Yee's blog, which is a must-read, about photographer Michael Wolf's 100x100 series--100 photos, one of each flat in Hong Kong's oldest housing estate. Each flat measures 10 feet x 10 feet, and Wolf photographed each flat with its resident and all of his or her possessions. Many are really lovely, and they're quite an interesting window into a part of Hong Kong I've never seen.

5. The torrential rain has continued pretty much unabated since my last entry, which means I've spent a lot of time in my apartment doing inside-my-apartment things. For instance, reading Ethan Canin's Carry Me Across the Water, which I loved so much that I read it in one sitting and came very close to starting it again as soon as I finished. Watching very good, very disturbing movies, namely Happiness and Ju Dou, which is now my favorite Zhang Yimou movie. It features a frighteningly creepy child, a paralyzed sadist in a wooden bucket, and a lot of really gorgeous colors--need I say more?

6. Just started reading Wendy Brown's new book, in which she talks about two seemingly antagonistic groups "eating from the same mythohistorical muffin." This makes me more excited about Berkeley than almost anything else has in the last three months. Also, some day I too hope to incorporate breakfast-food metaphors into academic writing.

waterlogged.

There is a mountain maybe 200 feet from my office window. Right now I can’t see it.

For the past two years I’ve been under the impression that Hong Kong summers were awful: relentlessly hot and humid, the pollution at its most noticeable. In 2004 I arrived in Hong Kong in late August, and spending last summer studying Chinese at Middlebury was in part an excuse not to be in Hong Kong during the summer months, so although I’ve been here for almost two years I have yet to experience the summer weather first-hand. It’s only the beginning of June, so perhaps the worst is yet to come, and I’m sure the worst is very bad.

But in the last three weeks I have fallen in love with the rainy season, if that’s what this is. I love that it rains without stopping for 36 hours at a time, that if it doesn’t rain during the day I know that the humidity will build and build until the sun goes down, and then it will rain all night. I love how quickly the mist rolls in, obscuring mountaintops—entire mountains, even—in the course of a minute or two. Turn away from the Mercedes-filled parking lots, or the campus maintenance workers zooming around on their motorbikes, and it feels like you are standing inside a scroll painting.

Last night I lay awake listening to the thunder bouncing like a pinball from one campus building to another, and watching the rain make the red-brick quad glow outside my window. Most of the students have moved out of the hostels by now, so the quad is empty now: no more late night games of tug-of-war to watch, no more 2 a.m. dorm bonding activities involving drum-banging and flag-waving. I don’t miss them, much.

I had hoped to spend much of May and June exploring the parts of Hong Kong that I haven’t yet visited: the Western New Territories, more of Lantau Island, Plover Cove Reservoir, the [diseased] wishing tree. Perhaps the rain will subside in time for me to visit these and more, but for now I’m enjoying the slow, solitary time this kind of weather always makes me crave: reading a book a day [recently: Hotel du Lac, The Year of Magical Thinking, Remains of the Day, and now Oracle Bones, which is fantastic—the kind of China book that I suspect will be interesting even to people who aren’t remotely interested in or familiar with China], drinking huge cups of chai, sleeping at strange hours, baking in the middle of the night.

J.S. Mill at Tsinghua U.

Please excuse the blatant nerdiness of this post. Just came across an interesting article in Dissent-- "Teaching Political Theory in Beijing." Daniel Bell, the author, is one of the very few academics working on comparative Chinese and Western political thought, the field I'm planning to study when I start graduate school in the fall. Although Bell's particular academic interests and mine are quite different, this article might be somewhat useful for those of you who've asked me questions along the lines of "so, what is it you're going to do for the next 7-8 years of your life and probably beyond?" and have been frustrated by my vague and incoherent answers.

Even if the words "China" and "political theory" in close proximity to each other don't get your pulse racing the way they do mine, this article is worth reading: an interesting portrait of academic culture in China and of the experience of being a Western academic there.

TGIF

Before I came to Hong Kong, I imagined that every moment of my existence here would be suffused with the Hong Kong-ness of the place, some as-yet-undiscovered quality that would be present as I taught, as I shopped for groceries, even as I slept. I imagined that Hong Kong would infect me like some kind of benign tropical fever, changing my very thoughts in ways I could not predict but would surely come to realize.

This was, of course, ridiculous. As transformative as living abroad can be, it doesn't take long to discover that the person you were at home is largely the same person you are as you bargain over knockoffs at a night-market, or clamber up the uneven steps of the Great Wall, or wonder whether the street food you couldn't stop yourself from consuming will soon make you violently ill. Shopping for dragonfruit in the local supermarket is not so different from shopping for apples at Fairway, once the surprise of a food actually looking like that wears off. I may enjoy random conversations with strangers in Chinese more than similar conversations in English, but in Hong Kong as in America I'm fundamentally an introvert. I listen to the same music I always listened to, and cook the same foods, and am still better about cleaning my kitchen than washing my floor. Sometimes this frustrates me—I wonder whether I've missed some valuable instruction on getting the most out of my time here, whether in fact there are countless things I could be doing, countless personalities I could be trying on, if only I knew how to go about it.

This past weekend—my first weekend of complete freedom in a long time due to the end of the semester—served as a reminder, though, of just how much I do here that is unique to Hong Kong. And while it's nice to realize that I'm not just leading a New York existence twelve hours ahead of that city, I also find it slightly devastating to take stock of all the things that will be difficult or impossible to do after I return to the States in August. Some of the things the past few days have held:

Friday Night: After Cantonese class #4 (still haven't moved past “ngoh haih meigwokyahn,” unfortunately), went to the supermarket to buy durian. For some strange reason, this has recently turned into a comfort food of sorts, and I crave it on roughly a weekly basis—enough to endure the glares of my fellow KCR-riders on my ride back to the university (the grocery bagger always double-bags the durian, which is already wrapped in several layers of plastic wrap, but somehow that rotting garbage odor finds its way out). In my apartment I ate what was probably an unhealthy amount of durian while watching A Beautiful New World, a decent if slightly saccharine Chinese film.

Saturday: Went to “Nike Rockstar Workout” at my gym, found aimless dance-ish hopping with a roomful of tai-tais and an overly enthusiastic, pink-clad instructor too ridiculous to handle, and so departed for the charms of a late brunch at the Peak Cafe, which faces Hong Kong's famous Mid-Levels Escalator: perhaps the best non-dim sum brunch in the city, and just about the perfect people-watching location for a voyeur like me (consistent themes: fashion models, map-toting tourists, kids in beige scouting uniforms, badges and neckerchiefs and all).

Sunday: China for lunch. I haven't made a Shenzhen trip in a couple of months, and was pleased to find that the Sportful Garden Restaurant is as phenomenal as ever. New discovery: jinwang [golden net] dumplings, which come attached to each other by a crispy (and, indeed, net-like) piece of fried dough. After lunch, walked to Lao Jie, one of Shenzhen's overwhelmingly crowded shopping streets. Got lost around Lao Jie as usual; got found by asking the location of the “hen da de maidanglao” [very big MacDonald's], as Shenzhen is apparently home to China's (the world's?) biggest. After hitting saturation point--too many people, too many sugarcane juice vendors, too many fake Lakers jerseys--we finished the afternoon with the requisite movie run. Apparently the police are cracking down on DVD stores, so this involved following a man through the Lo Wu Commercial Center—a vast maze of narrow passages, crowded pedicure shops, tailors and fake watch stalls—to a locked storage room, then locking ourselves into the storage room with our guide. After we found and paid for the DVDs we wanted, our guide knocked on the pull-down security gate and his friend unlocked it from the outside and let us out.