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Crowds pack Hong Kong sidewalks and streets late into the
night.
If you wanted to, at ten at night you could go shoe
shopping, buy a camera, or
pick out designer jewelry. Photo by Maia.
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Note: It's me, Maia, writing. I visited Ian and Tryg in China from March 20 through April 6. There's so much to write about from the time I was there that I can't contain it in one post--so this one covers our few days in Hong Kong, and my next post will cover our time in Dali, a town in Yunnan Province. I've noted in the captions which photos are mine and which Tryg took.
An HSBC advertisement in the Hong Kong airport hallway
pictured Eiffel Tower souvenir keychains labeled with Made in China stickers. Captions
in English and Chinese explained how this image—which looked to me like a
photographic political cartoon—represented exciting business opportunities;
HSBC didn’t have a sense of irony. That was my first indication that I was in a
foreign country.
As I searched for the nearest restroom, I wondered if I was
sick—my head throbbed, my stomach twisted, and my mouth was dry—but I
remembered all the times the flight attendants had woken me up with their
prowls down the aisles asking who wanted a drink…and how almost every time
during the thirteen-hour flight I’d fallen back asleep instead of accepting a
ginger ale or a cranberry juice. I was dehydrated.
From a quick glance in the restroom mirror, I was also
disheveled, sweaty, messy-haired, and groggy. As soon as I spotted Ian and Tryg
in the arrivals hall, I realized I was in good company. Even from afar I could
tell that like me they’d slept in their clothes. Tryg was the first to give me
a smelly but enthusiastic hug—followed by Ian, a bit bug-eyed, as if part of
him couldn’t believe we were actually hugging after so many months communicating
only via the occasional email.
“The airport seems so clean,” I said. “Everything is so
white and polished.”
“It’s the only thing in China that is clean,” Ian said.
“Oh man, I wish you could’ve seen Chongqing!” Tryg laughed.
I rushed to the airport 7-11, where Tryg bought me a giant
bottle of water—because I hadn’t gotten any Hong Kong cash before I left
America—and then Ian explained my options for getting a Chinese visa—because
that was another very important thing I had left home without.
I could get a Chinese visa in Hong Kong the cheap way: for
about thirty bucks (US dollars), we would get up at six the next morning and
get on buses and trains to get to the bureaucratic office where they issue
visas, where we would stand in line for several hours, until we got to the
front of the line, where I would fill out a bunch of paperwork…and the visa
would be ready four-ish days later. Or, for two hundred bucks, I could go to
the kiosk at the airport, where they’d get me my visa twenty-four hours later,
and deliver it to our hostel. That was worth two hundred dollars to me. The
women in the kiosk snapped photos of me that are still stapled in the back of
my passport: greasy hair, pasty-white skin, bra straps poking from an off-kilter
tank top, glassy red-veined eyes that look more gray than blue between the
fluorescent lights and the camera flash.
“The red double-decker buses remind me of London,” I said.
We were waiting outside the airport for the bus that would get us to our
hostel. Massive hills loomed behind the high-rises in the distance, craggy
patchworks of rock and vegetation. I hadn’t expected any part of Hong Kong to
be that green. The air was sticky, heavy, and hot enough I wished I was wearing
shorts; I had come from slushy late-March sleet in Portland the day before I
left home. “Nothing else reminds me of London though,” I added. “Or of anywhere
else I’ve been.” When the bus came, we sat on the upper floor at the front of
the double-decker, chatting and gulping from our water bottles, resting our feet
on the window in front of us—Tryg and I accidentally matching in Chacos and
rolled-up khaki-colored jeans.
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A wild tropical plant clings to a wall with roots gnarled
and twisted like
something from a fairy tale. The walls it climbs belong to
an expensive
Western designer jewelry shop. Photo by Maia.
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We got to our hostel by cramming into an elevator that
brought us up the seventh floor of a high-rise that was made up mostly of other
hostels, each located on a different floor.
“There’s no shower!” I said, peeking into the bathroom in
our hostel room. While on that thirteen-hour plane ride, the only thing I was
looking forward to as much as seeing my friends was taking a shower.
“Yeah there is,” Ian said. “Look again.”
“No there isn’t—I’m telling you—it’s…oh…” This explained the
mist of water droplets all over the toilet seat and the toilet paper dispenser,
and the puddles on the floor. The shower spigot resided a few feet above the
toilet tank. Ian assured me that this was normal. “Wait till you use your first
squatter toilet,” Ian said. “At least at this hostel they have Western
toilets.” I was put off enough by the idea of showering with a toilet that I
left a shower for later—washed my face and hands, twisted my hair up to
disguise the grease, and, after changing into shorts, was ready to explore the
city.
When I’d gotten my bearings enough to be fully aware of my
surroundings, the first thing I noticed about Hong Kong was the smells: bloody
meat, hot deep-frying oil, car exhaust, dust, sewage, spices I couldn’t name, body
odor, expensive cologne, chemicals harsh enough to make me cough, and fruit so
ripe as to be almost spoiled. Delicious intertwined with revolting in such a
tight knot that I couldn’t separate one from the other.
In the street immediately outside our high-rise hostel,
people crowded around an open-air stall that impaled various meats, seafood,
tofu chunks, and vegetables on sticks and then dunked into bubbling oil and
doused them in handfuls of spices. Ordinarily, no food gets me more excited
than spicy things on sticks deep-fried (except maybe spicy things on sticks
grilled over charcoal or over a campfire). But my stomach was still turning as
it recovered from dehydration and a long flight. When Tryg told me to try the skewered
squid, I hesitated, but said no. “Where can we get some fruit?” I asked.
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Live frogs are easy to find in China, sold on the street
alongside tanks of fish or heaps of raw meat.
We saw images like this in Hong Kong and in Yunnan.
Photo by Tryg. |
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Ian, Tryg and I wander through one of many outdoor markets.
I never could take
a photo that captured anywhere near the color, vibrancy,
diversity, and chaos of
these markets. Here it looks pretty mellow, but
believe me it’s not. Photo by Maia. |
It was in one of the outdoor markets that I tried my first
mangosteen—a fruit the size of a small orange and the color of an eggplant.
Peel it and it reveals slimy white flesh divided into segments like a head of
garlic. But don’t judge mangosteens by their looks. Those cloves of slimy white
flesh taste like the juiciest fresh peach.
Next I tried a dragonfruit. I have encountered no fruit more
awesome-looking: a pear-ish-shaped fruit with bright red scaly skin streaked
with green, a little bigger than a grapefruit. Sliced open, the flesh is
bright-white and the texture of a kiwi, but studded with so many tiny black
seeds that it looks like the fruit gods added poppy seeds to their recipe when
they created dragonfruit. Sadly, its taste didn’t live up to its looks—nicely
popping seeds, but not much flavor. Ian told me they’d had way better in
Bangkok.
That night, Tryg fell asleep clutching his bottle of Hop
Stoopid to his chest like a teddy bear. I’d brought Ian and Tryg two bottles of
Pacific Northwest beer, some Tillamook cheddar, dill Havarti, olives, Olympic
Provisions chorizo salami, and a loaf of seeded New Seasons whole wheat bread
as tastes of home. In bed, right before he turned off the light, Tryg asked me
if I’d give him his beer. I dug around my backpack till I found it, wrapped in
plastic grocery bags in case it leaked on the flight. “I don’t want to drink
it,” Tryg said. “I just want to hold it.” We ended up not breaking into any of
the food or drinks I’d brought until a few days later on the train, but the Hop
Stoopid rested on Tryg’s bed both of our nights in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong held two of the best meals either of us have ever
tasted—at two different Japanese restaurants, both at a mall. When we went out
to eat the next day, Ian explained that in China only the wealthy could shop in
malls, so that’s where we’d find some super nice restaurants. He couldn’t have
been more right.
At the Japanese place at lunch, each table was equipped with
its own gas grill. Of the six or so dishes we got there to grill over the flames,
all were jaw-droppingly good, but one stood out so much I salivate when I think
about it: thin slices of beef so intricately marbled with fat that as they
cooked they coated themselves in their own fatty juices without any marinade to
help them along. The only sensible thing to call it is “butter beef.” No butter
was involved (dairy is pretty rare in China), but there’s nothing in the world
that melts on your tongue like that beef did. Ian and Tryg swooned over the
daydream of a steak made out of that beef.
After a long day of treks exploring the city’s alleyways and
outdoor markets, we returned to the same mall, but a different Japanese
restaurant, for dinner. This one perched on the top floor of the mall,
overlooking Hong Kong’s harbor. Tryg had to convince Ian and me. We balked and
backed away after one glance at the menu’s prices. None of us had ever ordered
any meal approaching that expense. Yet once Tryg had us convinced, we figured
we’d go all the way—as a group, we chose the three-person multi-course meal,
and we sat on stools at the grill so we could watch every step of the process
like theatre.
They started us with a green salad in a forgettable dressing
but topped with smoked salmon so tender it might have been gravlax or lox. Next,
sashimi slices. While eating every new course, we ogled the chef in front of
us, wondering if the next dish he sent sizzling onto the griddle would be
something else for us. I don’t remember the order of things after that, but at
some point there were fried oysters topped with chunks of sautéed onion and
bacon. Tempura was perfectly crispy on the outside, with shrimp so succulent on
the inside that to be was almost custardy. The butter beef from earlier that
day got competition from thin slices of grilled beef that were wrapped around a
filling of green onions and bacon.
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I savor every bit of those perfect sushi rolls. Tryg was
laughing while he took this picture.
Ian’s in the background. Photo by Tryg. |
Oh, but nothing compared to the sushi rolls! Salmon, salmon
skin, avocado, big popping fish eggs in the middle, sprinkled with toasted
sesame seeds and a green powder that at first we thought was seaweed, but its
taste was too subtle for that—maybe a type of green tea? I let every flavor
seep all over my mouth until it all melted into a wasabi-tinged puddle of
salmon and ocean. Later they served us ordinary fried rice and miso soup, but
we were in too much of a sushi-roll-induced blissful stupor to be disappointed.
Wandering around the harbor after dinner, Ian and Tryg
complained light-heartedly about the cold just as they had the night before. “I
swear it’s like this close to snowing!” Tryg said. As usual, I couldn’t tell if
he was joking. My understanding of sarcasm is that of a second-grade child. “No
it’s not,” I said. I still wore my tank top and shorts while Tryg and
Ian—recovering from the hundred-degree intensity of Bangkok—dressed in jeans
and jackets. “It is, it is,” Tryg insisted, “I bet it’s like thirty-five
degrees Fahrenheit.” “No, it’s more like sixty-five,” I said. “If the wind
picks up I might put on my flannel shirt.”
Buildings across the water winked their changing patterns of
colored neon—geometric shapes of glass and electricity that belonged more to a
Star Wars prequel than to a city in this world. Smog and lights teamed up to
ensure that this city saw neither true darkness nor stars. Too soon, we’d be
leaving this place for two full days eating instant noodles on narrow sleeper
trains and pissing in squatter toilets.
