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.