Photobombing in Asia

Good night Hong Kong

I'm in a lot of pictures in Asia, but I didn't ask to be in most of them. It reminds me of my home in Washington, DC; there I wind up in a lot of other people's vacation photos, too. Tomorrow morning I'm heading home.

We just got back from our weekend in Bangkok. I didn't expect Thailand to be this different from what I've already seen of Asia, just as I was getting comfortable in Hong Kong. There's a lot I don't know, which should seem obvious when I realize I expected Thailand to be similar to Hong Kong just becaues they share a continent. One of the most uncomfortable parts of travel is not the walking or the jetlag or the long flights. It's the overturning of expectations. The first time you see a place and realize your expecations, however vague, failed to prepare you for the experience of being there, it can be overwhelming. It's like being tasked with translating a live event in a language you only started learning yesterday. But it's not uncomfortable in a bad way.

This is not the same as disappointment. It isn't always worse than what you'd expected; but it is almost always different. The overturning of expectations is proof of how little you know. The best thing I learned this week is that I know almost nothing. I know nothing despite my pre-trip reading, despite everything I picked up on my last trip to Asia, despite my innate assumptions formed from movies and TV and accounts from friends and family. Travel is humbling. Even if I were to spend a year reading every history book on a country, learning its language, and watching its TV shows, I would still be humbled by how little I knew about it the first time I went there and experienced it personally.

After I'm humbled, I have a choice: love everybody, or fear everybody. Mostly I'm willing to love everybody. The woman holding the wiggly baby, who sold me a lotus bun on Cheung Chau. The lanky Asian twentysomething in a Sex Pistols tee shirt and fauxhawk-ponytail who deposited the tea at my table in the cafe in Hong Kong. The Nepalese man who practiced his English on me on the ferry. The woman in the Chatuchak weekend market who was taking a nap in her stall with one of the skirts on display draped over her head. The testy-looking International Finance Douche hunting for a cab in Central. The seven-year-old Indian girl who ran up to the hotel pool in Bangkok and dipped her feet in, hiking up her painfully formal dress and looking over her shoulder to make sure her mother wasn't looking.

I love people even when they're being annoying or ripping me off. It must be why I project all the signals of a pushover to street market vendors worldwide.

I love the people I see, but I still know nothing, and loving them doesn't mean I know anything more about their lives than I did before. Constantly remembering that I know nothing keeps me humble and leaves my mind hungry. A hungry mind keeps foraging. It gets frustrated when it runs up against a barrier, like language, that it can't crack to get to the goodies inside. Signs blink at me in bright colors to the blast of store announcements, all insisting I understand something I can't. It's as if the sign is trying as hard to communicate with me, as I am trying to read it. I have better luck with people because there are other ways around language, but I miss being able to read everything around me. My eyes constantly seek sense in words I don't even know the sounds for, letters that are almost indistinguishable to my eyes.

Slow down; learn what you can where and how you can and take your time untangling the rest. If you work hard enough, you can always go back.

On the Skytrain to Sala Daeng, I wondered what it would be like to do a writing project, if I had the means: put all my stuff into storage and travel for a full year, spending a month or two in each place. I thought if I put all my stuff away, I would cease to have a home, and I would depend on other people to share their homes with me, figuratively. But I am glad to be going back to DC, even as I loved my week here and am already planning my next trip back.

Washington is home for me, and not just because all my stuff's there. It's my home for more than the proximity to my parents, or the friends and coworkers who give me joy, or the cosy apartment and my wonderful roommate, thorough blessings all. It's for the feeling I get taking a walk alone on a Sunday morning that these streets and sidewalks have a personality and we understand each other. Home is the place to which I can take what I've learned and begin to understand it.

 

 

Walking in circles on Cheung Chau Island

Good morning American friends. While you're getting settled into work, it's past 9pm here and Tuesday is almost Wednesday. It's like the sun was pitched to Hong Kong first, and it batted it off to your side. All the days rippling around the globe are an immense home run.

The ferry to Cheung Chau leaves from a pier not far from the Star Ferry pier in Central. Just a few steps away, One International Finance Center thrums with anxiety and money and expensive shoes on polished floors. The outlying islands ferries piers, however, could be in an entirely different city. It's not that they're quieter or even visually removed from the financial district. It's simply that anyone there on a Monday midmorning clearly doesn't give a damn.

The ride is about twenty minutes, through shipping lanes to the west of Hong Kong Island. Cheung Chau is home to a small fishing village, several nice beaches and a hiking trail around natural rock formations.

 

The island is shaped like a dumbell; the village where the ferry lands is on the narrow part, only a few alley blocks wide. One side harbors the village's fishing fleet, the other has the island's two most accesible beaches. Instead of walking straight across to the beaches, I look the 3-hour hike aroud the south perimeter of the island. But to get to the head of the trail, I had to take another boat -- a sampan for hire.

Toodling across the bay in a sampan

The path winds through bamboo and banyan forests that suddenly open on views of the sea. Somehow defying physics, it felt like it went continually uphill while ending at the same place it started at. Along the way are open-air shrines to Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea and protector of sailors. Old men play majong at a card table near one sprawling shrine on an overlook. Rusty Ovaltine cans filled with sand sprout burning incense and the stumps of expired sticks.

Also along the trail were a Caritas retreat, an Anglican Church, and a Salvation Army camp. There were plenty of holidayers when I got off the ferry, but either they mostly headed for the groomed beaches or they dispersed along the trail pretty quickly. I enjoyed the serenity; it was a nice change after a few jam-packed days of Hong Kong chaos. There were pockets of housing developments in the hills, but I didn't see many people out and about except the landscapers sweeping, trimming and weeding here and there.

Open air Tin Hau temple

Bamboo graffittiTraditional Chinese graves face the sea. The urn in front of each one is for incense. The lucky banyan tree

Spending a day in the sun in a suspended moment, without time but just the thrum of insects and the sounds of water makes you never want to leave a place. The ferry was waiting when I finally made it back around, scarfing down a lotus bun I picked up at one of the beachside stalls. I hesitated, wondering if I could wait for the next one; but I took the one that was there because I'd rather leave the village sunny and full of smiling, exhausted beach-goers in the most golden hour of sunlight in the afternoon, rather than leave an hour later when it all started to fade. I think it was the right choice; I took my time coasting up the escalator, showered off a day of grime and unidentifiable substances, and had a sit-down that might qualify as one of my top ten most satisfying.

Bye for now Cheung Chau

paddling the old knew

 Air conditioning is very important

Yesterday was mostly walking and less photographing. I'll post a few pictures later tonight when I get home again; I want to leave for outlying island Cheung Chau while the morning is still cool. Modified: and I'm back now, so pictures!

Yesterday morning I visited the Hong Kong Zoo and Botanical Garden, which was in reality a medium-sized park with some monkeys in the middle. Monkeys always make my heart light, as did the uniformed children (barely past toddlers) who shuffled along in their tours to see them. Though Chinese, many of their mothers and instructors spoke English to them, probably so they'd learn it early.

The rest of the morning was a stroll down Hollywood Road, lined with curiosity shops. There's a surprising number of pornographic ivory statuettes. Still trying to figure that one out. I suppose there must be demand.

After lunch with Joe (who was working from home yesterday) at a Thai restaurant, I headed to Kowloon to visit the Bird and Flower Markets and the Ladies' Market. After the relative serenity of Hollywood Road, which alternates crowded intersections with a few quiet turns, especially in the morning before most shops open, Kowloon was a madhouse. It's impossible to walk anywhere without jostling and being jostled. In the Bird Market, the racket of caged birds is only matched by the racket of bird sellers, including one man who walked up to a parrot and emitted a startlingly realistic dog bark at it. After woofing a few times to no avail, he walked away again without a word. The parrot was stunned into silence.

The Ladies' Market is a street of stalls set in front of discount fasion stores, a combination of hideously knocked-off luxury goods and a few good finds that were probably bound for boutiques but "fell off the truck" somewhere along the way. Haggling is paramount but most of the time I wound up bashfully paying full price; I project the aura of a pushover up to five yards ahead of wherever I go to shop. After a few purchases and a lot of browsing I walked the 3.5 miles down Nathan Road all the way to the Star Ferry pier, where I took the ferry back to Hong Kong Island and Joe dragged my sore butt to the Foreign Correspondents' Club for dinner.

After all that walking, a deep and immense love of the Mid-Levels Escalator broke over me as I coasted back to Joe's place. I decided to write a poem to it.

Dear Mid-Levels Escalator
At first you creeped me out
Like that slightly odd guy in a polyester plaid shirt
But then you snuck up on me
(like that guy)
And when I got to know your personality
And started to understand your offbeat style
I realized you weren't tacky
But beautiful and smart and funny and kind
But why were you closed above Staunton Street you bitch

 

The bookstore, the nunnery, the temple

A peek inside. The selection was eclectic.

Imagine a suburb in tone and commercial complexion, but as densely populated as the nearby metropolis, maybe even moreso. This is Kowloon. Go to the center of it and find a Buddhist nunnery as quiet, perfectly manicured and enbubbled as a snow globe with monsoon rain instead of glitter. This is Chi Lin Nunnery, today.

 

Find the nunnery after winding through a thriving serene garden with a wide brick path that curves and doubles back so much it's easy to believe the park could be twice or three times its actual size. I don't know what to make of the piped-in music through hidden outdoor speakers, though; it made it feel a little too much like a snow globe. But real supplicants do pray at the shrines, in silence with many bows.

Wong Tai Sin Temple is the opposite of devotional silence. It's a carnival of luck-mongering. Its soothsayer god attracts rowdy crowds that grab for baskets of foretune-telling sticks and shake them with a furious racket until a single number falls out that they can take to a reader to hear their future. Housewives with business-like nonchalance ash incense on absolutely everything and everyone as they punt their way to the urns at the front of the shrine. The water beading from the airborne roots of the banyan trees must taste like incense smoke.

A walk with Jack

Quick flashback: The Hong Kong International Art Fair yesterday was amazing. There was a huge variety of styles and mediums, and the place was saturated with creativity. It featured a few European galleries (at least, on the floors we visited; there might have been more elsewhere) and a scattered few masters, mostly modern -- we stumbled across a Dali and some Picasso -- but the artists I enjoyed the most, and was most impressed by, were the contemporary ones from all over Asia.

We walked through an installation by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. He's persecuted by the Chinese government for his protest art calling out the shoddy construction of schools that led to the deaths of hundreds of children in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008. This installation was a simple presentation, in a round room, of the names of all the children who died; like another work of protest art from a Korean artist that we saw at the fair, the voice of the installation was loud and clear: try and ignore us if you can.

Some of my favorites were works from Japan and the Philippines. One Japanese artist I particularly enjoyed, Ujino, creates sound machines with a combination of guitars, kitchen appliances, table lamps and power tools that actually make some fun (and visually stimulating) music. There was something joyful and spontaneous about watching his creation light up, whirr and spin. The work from Philippine gallery Silverlens was also inspiring. I loved one sculpture made from acrylic and crochet blankets, called "The Dreaming Place." It looked ordinary at first, until you noticed that there was no bed underneath; the blankets were cast in acrylic to stand on their own, in the shapes created by draping them over a matress and pillows.

This morning, Joe was feeling better (he's been trying to get over a cold) but since he'd been under the weather last night, he went to the doctor to see if he could get something to clear him up. While he was gone, his friend Jack and I took a walk around the neighborhood.

I don't want to try unnatural wine.Booklets and incense sold on the honor system.The shops open pretty late in HK, especially on Sundays; Jack said everyone's recovering pretty hard from Saturday night. So even at 9:30am, most places were still shuttered, but it was a beautiful morning to stroll around. We wandered into the Man Mo Temple, where I spent my first money: HK$10 (US$1.25) for a booklet.

There were a few worshippers; some lit incense, and one woman my age was kneeling and bowing to some of the statues. There were about half a dozen other tourists up and about taking pictures, too. We saw two rooms of the temple, where the ceiling is hung with spirals of thick incense that burn for several weeks. The walls were lined with shrines to statues of the gods, and plaques with Chinese characters. In front of each, urns of sand and ashes were studded with sticks of burning incense. Three of four maintenance workers seemed to be in perpetual, slow-moving occupation sweeping up the dust and ashes, hanging new spirals from the ceiling, and shining plaques.

 

We wanted to also visit a used book store down the hill from Joe's place, but it was closed until noon. We're about to head back to check it out, now that's Joe's with us again and all medicated up, and then we're heading to Kowloon to see the Chi Lin Nunnery and Wong Tai Sin Temple.

Though the book store wasn't open yet, there were stacks of a free English-language HK art zine sitting outside, so I snatched one. More on this, and other adventures, later this evening -- now we're out to explore more!