4/25/12

Dirt, Grease, and Neon Lights


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.
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.
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.

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.

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.
Outdoor markets were easy to find. In the States, or at least where I’m from, an outdoor market sells either expensive artisan crafts (Portland Saturday Market style), or it sells fresh local produce. In Hong Kong we found none of the former and some of the latter. But in addition to the fruit and vegetables (which really can’t be local since Hong Kong imports virtually all of its food), we could buy bras, knockoff designer handbags, broken-English joke bumper stickers, dildos, vibrators, porn, fake antique coins, fake antique communist propaganda, anything with Mao’s face on it, every kind of mobile phone (mostly fakes), lingerie, and neckties with images of farm animals having sex. Posters of President Obama were displayed next to posters of Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Osama bin Ladin, Angry Birds, and Chairman Mao.
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.
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.

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