7/7/07 – Saturday: Stanley Market, British Pubs, Trendoid Dining
The day dawned atypically: late. We seem to be adapting to the ridiculous time difference, awakening a little after the sun begins to shade the steel towers and the flashing liquid billboards that paper downtown Hong Kong. In any case, we had an expedition planned: we were going to go around the island and visit Stanley Market, Repulse Bay, and my mother’s old high school somewhere in the equation. We think he might have died.
We stopped off in Stanely, which reminded me of a small Italian town on the water with bizarre Chinese inflections – already crowded with people at 9 in the morning, the heat and humidity just beginning their universal assault. We dodged for the warren of shops and stalls placed under protective and shady awnings, and let the buying begin.
I purchased: mod white sunglasses that make me look like a stylish bug, a red embroidered handbag, a very orange shirt, and some aviator glasses, all for next to nothing in the States and elevated highway robbery costs in mainland China. We tromped around the market a while longer, leafing through tacky Suzie Wong crap and cheaply produced figurines of happy bunnies, babies, and gleefully fucking Chinese people. We even attempted a little stroll around the water, but the humidity wilted us down into the ground. We gave up: hail a damn air conditioned cab.
We managed to communicate to the driver that we wanted to go by mom’s old school : Hong Kong International School. Positioned back on the hill, I was immediately envious – the modernist white highrise with porthole windows and glamorous views looked like an excellent place to attend classes. We drove around slowly, looking in the windows, and Mom proclaimed with contentment that
“It hasn’t really changed."
And then we went back to the hotel. Where things were air conditioned.
We ventured out into Wanchai again to hit the Bull and Bear, which in its original location was one of Mom’s old haunts – I have often considered the bar’s brown plastic swizzle stick she keeps in a jar at our house from her party days. The place was clean and new, run by a fellow named Nigel who seemed to exist primarily to perpetuate the English sterotype: a ruddy skinny blonde with bad teeth and a friendly, awkward manner. Good god.
In any case, my ceaser salad with grilled chicken was good enough, although I was surprised by the pasty and anchovy-licious dressing. My mother had a plougman’s lunch of big chunks of cheese and bread, and my father had fish and chips and a beer. It was all very satisfying, watching the Wanchai people go by and the Filipino nannies wander around on their day off, cellphones adhered permanently to their ears.
We had reservations for an evening dinner at the super-hip Hutong on Kowloon side, so we jumped onto the Star Ferry again. The trip featured another one of those ridiculous South Pacific sun-downs, and we threaded our way through the shopping crowds, techni-colored panda statues and Prada billboards to the 1 Peking Building, where we ascended a giant gilded escalator and elevator to the restaurant.
The elevator doors opened to reveal a very dark and very well-designed space, intended to evoke old China without the dirt and poverty. Women dressed in gypsy chic dresses and pin-heels picked at food, as Chinese executives ordered expensive bottles of champagne and talked at each other. And oh, the view – the sun went down and we could see all of Hong Kong, the fireworks playing off each other in celebration of Peaceful Handover, dancing off the darkened walls.
But the food?
The menu was big, faux-handwritten, and obviously hedging to Chinese authenticity, featuring all sorts of nasty bits and eccentric animal parts. My dad loves eggplant, so we began with the stuffed fried eggplant with shrimp. This was tasty in that super deep fried way, but a little bit too heavy – state fair food with a hell of a markup.
Next we ordered one of my Very Favorite Foods, deep fried soft shell crab. This was brought to the table with considerable flair in a wicker basket filled to the top with crispy roast chilies. The bespectacled waiter instructed us to dig around in there to find the actual crab – huh? We proceeded to do this, but the lightly fried crab was so pepper infused that my mother couldn’t even eat it. I managed fine since I am possessed of Super Asbestos Mouth, but the flavor was off putting and overwhelmed the crab, something that should be infused with a briny, delicate lightness. But it sure did look cool.
The braised pork ribs in capsicum sauce emerged next – meaty, slow cooked, and tasty, though the taste equivalent to a luxe variant on those sticky ribs you get from Chinese take out joints in the states. Tasty all right, but I was expecting more flash.
We tried a very interesting dish, a pot of fried rice with shrimp and fennel. The unusual addition of the fennel elevated what could have been a boring jar of carbs into an interesting, almost Creole dish. Yummy.
The last main was the best: a slab of rich, fatty grilled eel with an unusual lime infused sauce. This took unagi to a wonderful new level, and we fought over the pieces – although total inhalation was stopped by the discovery that unagi is pretty damn bony. No matter. This was delicious.
Dessert was somewhat bizarre – a scoop of tasty and rich coconut ice cream served on a ginormous plate with tapioca, fried coconut flakes, and slimy but inoffensive funghi. It was adventurous all right, but it actually worked pretty well, though I can’t say I’m clamoring for Baskin Robbins to add “edible funghi” to its topping list any time soon.
The last salient detail about Hutong was the bathroom, which blew away mother and I. We stood in the doorway marveling at the rustic interior, the hand-drawn water pump, the multitude of tiny flickering candles. “It’s like peeing in a Kazakh camel camp,” I marveled as I washed up by candlelight. “We’re so redoing our bathroom like this,” my mother said. Excellent.
The ride back on the ferry was beautiful and quiet, and I nearly fell asleep on the boat, sea salt coalescing on my face. I fell into bed.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Friday: 7/6/07 - Lamma Island, Peak Tram, Tropicana
I wake up and hit the gym again, sweat dripping miserably down my back. I wonder, quietly, why I insist on doing this to myself. But there’s no time for analysis: we’re off to Cat Street, the sales district and the location of the Mo Temple.
The Mo Temple is my first experience in a Real Asian Temple, and it is a fascinating one, slammed into the middle of a super-modern Hong Kong street. You step inside the musky confines and you are back in the old mysterious Asia they tell you about, full of statues and (inevitably) elderly praying old ladies and gentleman. Tremendous coils of incense are hung on the ceiling, burning inexorably up to heaven. I loved the baleful looking statues outside, looking out at the tourists and occasional worshippers. China is mysterious, but is it religious?
And then we kept walking.
Hong Kong possesses a truly modern marvel: the Mid-Levels Escalators, a vaguely unholy assemblage of escalators that stretch all the way up the hill. The escalators are many and all vary in distance – they change the direction from up to down in the evening to accommodate people going home from work. They construct a curious culture around them, where one may go up a bit and experience a totally new neighborhood, urban culture as seen from the vantage point of a mall. We stopped briefly at a Chinese Subway for an oatmeal cookie and to escape the heat (but that is impossible.) And then we descended onto a Park N’ Shop clinging to the side of the steep steep hill, where I bought delicious blueberry chewing gum and watched an English child slap a package of meat against the floor (over and over.)
We arrived at the top and the Midlevel condos and my mother’s old home, a big green building with a swimming pool, set among the banyans, the Rolls Royce’s, the streaming jungle. We could hear the invariable sound of Hong Kong all around us up there – the thackata thackata of jackhammers – and caught a cab back to safety, caught a cab to the mall.
Where we preceeded to all get really really pissed at each other.
We were wandering in the food court of the mall. This food court was an incredible assemblage of pretty much every food product on the planet, staffed by smiling and helpful people. My mother bought some delicious fruit tea, and proposed we eat there. I just got overwhelemed. Giant boutique grocery stores tend to do that to me. I wonder how I can eat EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD and freak out. I decided I needed Pad Thai. Mom decided she wasn’t hungry. Dad was irritated by us both.
We finally split up in a huff. And I found a damn Thai restaurant, a shiny, cool looking one.
I sat on a stool between two grunting Asian men eating huge quantities of food, and ordered my noodles, which came very quickly indeed. They were delicious, although the shrimp tasted curiously of shrimp-toast.
At a loss regarding what to do, I made an obvious conclusion: walk around Wanchai and have a gander at some hookers unaccompanied. I considered stopping to have a drink and to regard the (interesting) human scenery, but the lecherous stares of the male population of the neighborhood held me off. I didn’t care to get recruited.
So I went back to the hotel and was whooshed back to crisp white sheets and that mind-blowing view. Where I watched Hong Kong TV. A Chinese cooking show featured a truly putrid looking pudding recipe. A Korean medieval drama blared, subtitled into Arabic. Australian surfing shows appeared, again and again. A couple on the Chinese network teach English in hilariously awkward parlance, cavorting around Historical Attractions and telling each other, “That is very well put!” in slow, slow English. (Where do they FIND these people?)
But enough: we went to the Peak Tram, where we wedged ourselves into the butt-crushing sheets and were sent vertically up the hill, through the buildings and through the steaming primeval jungle, right into…a mall.
A mall that is almost impossible to escape. Mom grew more and more irritated as we wandered the gleaming white corridors of video game shops, gelato parlors, and the inevitable Starbucks, growling, “It’s a PRISON,” looking for a way out to hit the Hong Kong Trail. We finally had to duck out of a service entrance of the Fortress of Commerce, and found ourselves out in the steaming weather again.
Mom remembers doing the Peak Walk for charity back in High School – I just appreciated the view. The little used trail winds right around the side of the mountain and features views even more mind-blowing then those from the hotel room, the super-modern buildings bristling like porcupine spines below the jungle.
I, true to habit, encountered all manner of interesting bugs among the bromelids and oozing jungle plants: a bright silver ant, feathery doodle bugs, a sentient looking yellow jumping spider (which evaded my camera.) No one was out walking – they were all trapped in the Prision of Commerce, I guess – and the hill was our own. We passed by an ornate gate leading up to a driveway – my mom noted, “That’s where the really rich people live.”
The Prision Of Commerce sucked us in again, and we had an entirely-too-sticky Coke at one of the contempo bars, perched on white and very hip Sitting Cubes. I wanted a shower. And so we went down the peak again – it runs backwards, the tram, and it is disconcerting indeed. (And my butt hurt even more.)
We walked back through the park to the hotel, the park built on the site of the old British government complex. They have installed a waterfall and a pond with water lilies, converted the administration building into a Tea Pot Museum and installed tai-chi practiconers and women in tiny clothing around the perimeters. We walked down a long gilded avenue full of proposed Olympic statues, designed in every Chinese motif you can thimk of – I especially loved the horse vaulting Qin warrior, expression eminently serious, flying over his horse.
Dinner: Lamma Island, one of the seafood restaurant islands Hong Kong people proceed to when they want to eat sea creatures and get royally plastered. We took over the ferry, which left from the pier as the sun was going down. The world was a terrible beautiful cliché then, a glowing pink and blue South Pacific sky, the palm trees swaying in the breeze, beautiful people mincing onto the rocking ship in pin-prick high heels.
We went below and sat on chairs and let the wind rip through our hair, as the ferry went by cargo ships and dying junks. The city overwhelmed me from the ocean – for it just went on and on, where I had expected it to stop, the apartment buildings growing grander and more modern, the brand-new edifices becoming only more and more overt. They reminded me of temples, temples that people who were better situated then me could actually live in – full of technological wonders and fully emulsified caviar foam served on intelligent diamond plates. I imagined a Chinese/Nigerian model sipping a pom-tini on the top floor in a shimmering Gucci gown, looking down at the boats, looking down on us. It was intimidating, it was beautiful, and the tropical wind blew through all my clothes and the spray brushed up against my face.
We arrived on Lamma Island and raced to the Rainbow Seafood House – an assemblage of plastic chairs and tables set under a flourscent lit awning, tanks of doomed animals arrayed around, dishes being conveyed back and forth by screaming runners in t-shirts and rainboots. We pursued the menu, inquired about what exactly a “squilla” was (still don’t know) and walked up to order.
Food came fast – it always DOES in China.
The salt and pepper squid was light as air, a seafood potato chip, and served in a tremendous portion. We cleaned this up and proceeded to juicy and plump clams in black bean sauce, combined with onion and green pepper. Then super rich prawn scampi in a perverse Chinese inflicted butter sauce – my heart stops, my heart jumps up.
The Chili Crab was tremendous and prepared dry style, and I attacked it with force, the dry chili’s permeating my fingernails, my sinuses, my eyes. I didn’t care. I entered crab Nirvana, picking and sucking and biting, indulging in that most tactile (seductive?) of crustaceans. I was blind to the world, I was blind to everything.
The Tsingtao combined with the crab and the noise, the heat, the laughter of everyone around me - so many happy people – and I looked out over the dark harbor, heard the sloshing of the wine dark water and the yells of the children playing on the dangerous docks, and thought, “This is just fine.”
I nearly fell asleep on the ferry ride back, curled up under myself, watching the Chinese contingent paw each other and giggle as they swayed back and forth on the ferry couches below-ground. They slid around the floor and caught onto things as the waves moved us all around, and my eyes closed, burning with chili powder and salt water.
The Mo Temple is my first experience in a Real Asian Temple, and it is a fascinating one, slammed into the middle of a super-modern Hong Kong street. You step inside the musky confines and you are back in the old mysterious Asia they tell you about, full of statues and (inevitably) elderly praying old ladies and gentleman. Tremendous coils of incense are hung on the ceiling, burning inexorably up to heaven. I loved the baleful looking statues outside, looking out at the tourists and occasional worshippers. China is mysterious, but is it religious?
And then we kept walking.
Hong Kong possesses a truly modern marvel: the Mid-Levels Escalators, a vaguely unholy assemblage of escalators that stretch all the way up the hill. The escalators are many and all vary in distance – they change the direction from up to down in the evening to accommodate people going home from work. They construct a curious culture around them, where one may go up a bit and experience a totally new neighborhood, urban culture as seen from the vantage point of a mall. We stopped briefly at a Chinese Subway for an oatmeal cookie and to escape the heat (but that is impossible.) And then we descended onto a Park N’ Shop clinging to the side of the steep steep hill, where I bought delicious blueberry chewing gum and watched an English child slap a package of meat against the floor (over and over.)
We arrived at the top and the Midlevel condos and my mother’s old home, a big green building with a swimming pool, set among the banyans, the Rolls Royce’s, the streaming jungle. We could hear the invariable sound of Hong Kong all around us up there – the thackata thackata of jackhammers – and caught a cab back to safety, caught a cab to the mall.
Where we preceeded to all get really really pissed at each other.
We were wandering in the food court of the mall. This food court was an incredible assemblage of pretty much every food product on the planet, staffed by smiling and helpful people. My mother bought some delicious fruit tea, and proposed we eat there. I just got overwhelemed. Giant boutique grocery stores tend to do that to me. I wonder how I can eat EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD and freak out. I decided I needed Pad Thai. Mom decided she wasn’t hungry. Dad was irritated by us both.
We finally split up in a huff. And I found a damn Thai restaurant, a shiny, cool looking one.
I sat on a stool between two grunting Asian men eating huge quantities of food, and ordered my noodles, which came very quickly indeed. They were delicious, although the shrimp tasted curiously of shrimp-toast.
At a loss regarding what to do, I made an obvious conclusion: walk around Wanchai and have a gander at some hookers unaccompanied. I considered stopping to have a drink and to regard the (interesting) human scenery, but the lecherous stares of the male population of the neighborhood held me off. I didn’t care to get recruited.
So I went back to the hotel and was whooshed back to crisp white sheets and that mind-blowing view. Where I watched Hong Kong TV. A Chinese cooking show featured a truly putrid looking pudding recipe. A Korean medieval drama blared, subtitled into Arabic. Australian surfing shows appeared, again and again. A couple on the Chinese network teach English in hilariously awkward parlance, cavorting around Historical Attractions and telling each other, “That is very well put!” in slow, slow English. (Where do they FIND these people?)
But enough: we went to the Peak Tram, where we wedged ourselves into the butt-crushing sheets and were sent vertically up the hill, through the buildings and through the steaming primeval jungle, right into…a mall.
A mall that is almost impossible to escape. Mom grew more and more irritated as we wandered the gleaming white corridors of video game shops, gelato parlors, and the inevitable Starbucks, growling, “It’s a PRISON,” looking for a way out to hit the Hong Kong Trail. We finally had to duck out of a service entrance of the Fortress of Commerce, and found ourselves out in the steaming weather again.
Mom remembers doing the Peak Walk for charity back in High School – I just appreciated the view. The little used trail winds right around the side of the mountain and features views even more mind-blowing then those from the hotel room, the super-modern buildings bristling like porcupine spines below the jungle.
I, true to habit, encountered all manner of interesting bugs among the bromelids and oozing jungle plants: a bright silver ant, feathery doodle bugs, a sentient looking yellow jumping spider (which evaded my camera.) No one was out walking – they were all trapped in the Prision of Commerce, I guess – and the hill was our own. We passed by an ornate gate leading up to a driveway – my mom noted, “That’s where the really rich people live.”
The Prision Of Commerce sucked us in again, and we had an entirely-too-sticky Coke at one of the contempo bars, perched on white and very hip Sitting Cubes. I wanted a shower. And so we went down the peak again – it runs backwards, the tram, and it is disconcerting indeed. (And my butt hurt even more.)
We walked back through the park to the hotel, the park built on the site of the old British government complex. They have installed a waterfall and a pond with water lilies, converted the administration building into a Tea Pot Museum and installed tai-chi practiconers and women in tiny clothing around the perimeters. We walked down a long gilded avenue full of proposed Olympic statues, designed in every Chinese motif you can thimk of – I especially loved the horse vaulting Qin warrior, expression eminently serious, flying over his horse.
Dinner: Lamma Island, one of the seafood restaurant islands Hong Kong people proceed to when they want to eat sea creatures and get royally plastered. We took over the ferry, which left from the pier as the sun was going down. The world was a terrible beautiful cliché then, a glowing pink and blue South Pacific sky, the palm trees swaying in the breeze, beautiful people mincing onto the rocking ship in pin-prick high heels.
We went below and sat on chairs and let the wind rip through our hair, as the ferry went by cargo ships and dying junks. The city overwhelmed me from the ocean – for it just went on and on, where I had expected it to stop, the apartment buildings growing grander and more modern, the brand-new edifices becoming only more and more overt. They reminded me of temples, temples that people who were better situated then me could actually live in – full of technological wonders and fully emulsified caviar foam served on intelligent diamond plates. I imagined a Chinese/Nigerian model sipping a pom-tini on the top floor in a shimmering Gucci gown, looking down at the boats, looking down on us. It was intimidating, it was beautiful, and the tropical wind blew through all my clothes and the spray brushed up against my face.
We arrived on Lamma Island and raced to the Rainbow Seafood House – an assemblage of plastic chairs and tables set under a flourscent lit awning, tanks of doomed animals arrayed around, dishes being conveyed back and forth by screaming runners in t-shirts and rainboots. We pursued the menu, inquired about what exactly a “squilla” was (still don’t know) and walked up to order.
Food came fast – it always DOES in China.
The salt and pepper squid was light as air, a seafood potato chip, and served in a tremendous portion. We cleaned this up and proceeded to juicy and plump clams in black bean sauce, combined with onion and green pepper. Then super rich prawn scampi in a perverse Chinese inflicted butter sauce – my heart stops, my heart jumps up.
The Chili Crab was tremendous and prepared dry style, and I attacked it with force, the dry chili’s permeating my fingernails, my sinuses, my eyes. I didn’t care. I entered crab Nirvana, picking and sucking and biting, indulging in that most tactile (seductive?) of crustaceans. I was blind to the world, I was blind to everything.
The Tsingtao combined with the crab and the noise, the heat, the laughter of everyone around me - so many happy people – and I looked out over the dark harbor, heard the sloshing of the wine dark water and the yells of the children playing on the dangerous docks, and thought, “This is just fine.”
I nearly fell asleep on the ferry ride back, curled up under myself, watching the Chinese contingent paw each other and giggle as they swayed back and forth on the ferry couches below-ground. They slid around the floor and caught onto things as the waves moved us all around, and my eyes closed, burning with chili powder and salt water.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
thursday 7/5/07 - the peninsula, the ferry, seafood!
I awoke early, and immediately went to the window. The day was a bit overcast but promised to come out clear, and the city in the daylight was even more impressive: waking up but still frenetic, still drawn clearly. It sort of made my head hurt. So I countered with my usual coping technique: going to breakfast. On the fabulous executive floor, a luxury breakfast was laid out in the lounge, complete with Asian, American, and British specialities in big shiny buffet pans.
I consider myself sort of butch about exotic food. In other words, if a food is weird, perverse, disgusting or just sorta icky to the Western palate, I will show how tough I am by eating it. I expressed this by making myself a big heapin’ bowl of fish congee, complete with red bean paste and onion. It was sort of like cod-flavored oatmeal.
I did pass on the English triffle, boiled beans, and lumpy chunks of fried read.. What the hell is wrong with the English? What the hell is triffle?
I then went to workout, which was one of the sweatier experiences of my short life. Humidity does horrible things to the sweat glands. There are Asian women in sheer bikinis hanging out at the pool even at this unholy hour. The air is stifling. I also find out from the newspaper that the composer of the Benny Hill theme is dead, which depresses me.
We decide to ride the Star Ferry across to Kowloon side and thus the Peninsula, one of the many pre-eminent sights of my mother’s youth. My mother is incensed that they moved the Star Ferry Building, however –“How could they?” she snarls as we wander past construction sealed off gate after gate.
But we finally find it. The creaky old boat lurches into view, and we trundle up the sliding platform to the top floor. “I never rode the bottom floor before in my life,” my mom explains. “My mother always did, though…to save money.” I can see my elegant, gracious, grandmother doing just that.
The ride over is quick and pleasant, although an English woman is calling in a piercing voice to her misbehaving son, James, who apparently will not sit still. I decide I hate small English children more then any kind of child in the world. A man sitting behind me is staring idly into space with his mouth open, a gaping hole. Great. I’m going to have nightmares.
After passing a Starbucks hocking Adzuki Bean lattes (no), we emerge into the shopping wonderland of Kowloon, dusky Prada models glaring at us from the side of every building. But we have a goal: the Peninsula, the swankiest hotel in Hong Kong since the British arrived, populated by the rich, the famous, and the merely aspirant. The view was shot by the new art museum and the seedy YMCA is across the street, but the Peninsula still maintains it’s super-luxe lobby and it’s fleet of shiny, shiny Rolls Royces.
We entered the soaring all white interior to have a drink and listen to mom reminesce in great detail. “That’s the store where Grandmother (my grandmother) bought all her clothes,” she notes, as we order 9 dollar passion fruit iced teas. The tea is tasty and served with orchid pedals, but it is freezing cold in this marble lined lobby and I am beginning to feel markedly queasy.
I go outside to take the air, but this is Hong Kong: that doesn’t help. I grow considerably more nauseous and watch the Rolls Royce’s pick up and dispense people in expensive too-heavy clothing. I want to find a restaurant here, I really do, but I think I might die.
So we ride the ferry back across the bay. I end up barfing picturesquely off the side of the Star Ferry, managing to hit the water instead of the floor. My mom will tease me about this until I die.
We return to the hotel, where I have a nap and recuperate and am ready for lunch. But my mother proceeds to get that go-away glint in her eye. She refuses obliquely to go out for lunch to Jimmy’s Kitchen, another haunt from her ex-pat days. Dad and I push it though, motivated by both hunger and curiosity, and she grumpily accedes, noting the pissed off looking storm clouds in the sky.
The rain starts coming down the moment we leave the cab (umbrella-less). It’s a tropical storm, and we’re drenched within a second, which is astonishing. And damp. And close.
But we run inside Jimmy’s Kitchen anyway, which is a moody clubby space down a flight of stairs, an absolute colonial relic. I can imagine stodgy old British men with beer guts making Important Decisions here, but right now it’s just populated with ladies who lunch, cleavage on full display. My mother is disappointed to find they no longer offer her beloved club sandwich, so she orders her other favorite, the Mulligatawny Soup. I go with the prawn curry, which is reputed to come with the full English curry fixings – tamarind, onion, chutnies, coconut, and other good stuff you don’t get in the states. My dad goes with classic veal stroganoff.
The food takes a long time to arrive and I feel sick again, but I manage to eat a little of the tasty and very English curry, fielding “I TOLD you so” glimpses from my mother. The dampness and the clubby feeling of the restaurant settle comfortably over me, and I zone out for the rest of the meal, and the taxi ride back to the Conrad.
Mom declines adamantly on dinner, so Dad and I make the trek out to the Victoria Seafood House alone. The restaurant is located on a high floor within a super-modern office building right on the water, its face flashing psychedelic colors for the Big Handover. The elevator whooshes us up and we are escorted to a table with a view in the small and very Chinese dining room, brightly lit and sparkling clean. We are not entirely sure what to order, but come to conclusions while nibbling on a snack of fried whitefish and peanuts: beansprouts fried with crab and dried fish, fried softshell crab with five spice sauce and salt, crispy skin pork, garlic broccoli, steamed whole garoupa.
The food arrives quickly and in courses. The bean sprouts are a curiously carb free variant on chow mein, but the crab is fresh and good, and we devour the small portion. The fried soft shell crab is magnificent: the batter is light and grease-free but still indulgent, the sauce smoky and delicious. We roll the pieces in the provided salt and enjoy the interplay of flavors. The pork is chilled but tasty, although I found it unnecessary considering the rest of the meal was from the sea (but my dad LIKES his pork.) The fish is perfect: cooked to tenderness, falling off the bone, sharp garlic and scallion flavors mixing carefully with the dense molasses of the soy.
Satiated, we walk outside the building and through the mall, all alone in the warren of passages that crisscross Hong Kong like pipes. The moon is up and my camera won’t take the night shots at all, but this city at night is magic anyway. A camera could not explain it all.
I consider myself sort of butch about exotic food. In other words, if a food is weird, perverse, disgusting or just sorta icky to the Western palate, I will show how tough I am by eating it. I expressed this by making myself a big heapin’ bowl of fish congee, complete with red bean paste and onion. It was sort of like cod-flavored oatmeal.
I did pass on the English triffle, boiled beans, and lumpy chunks of fried read.. What the hell is wrong with the English? What the hell is triffle?
I then went to workout, which was one of the sweatier experiences of my short life. Humidity does horrible things to the sweat glands. There are Asian women in sheer bikinis hanging out at the pool even at this unholy hour. The air is stifling. I also find out from the newspaper that the composer of the Benny Hill theme is dead, which depresses me.
We decide to ride the Star Ferry across to Kowloon side and thus the Peninsula, one of the many pre-eminent sights of my mother’s youth. My mother is incensed that they moved the Star Ferry Building, however –“How could they?” she snarls as we wander past construction sealed off gate after gate.
But we finally find it. The creaky old boat lurches into view, and we trundle up the sliding platform to the top floor. “I never rode the bottom floor before in my life,” my mom explains. “My mother always did, though…to save money.” I can see my elegant, gracious, grandmother doing just that.
The ride over is quick and pleasant, although an English woman is calling in a piercing voice to her misbehaving son, James, who apparently will not sit still. I decide I hate small English children more then any kind of child in the world. A man sitting behind me is staring idly into space with his mouth open, a gaping hole. Great. I’m going to have nightmares.
After passing a Starbucks hocking Adzuki Bean lattes (no), we emerge into the shopping wonderland of Kowloon, dusky Prada models glaring at us from the side of every building. But we have a goal: the Peninsula, the swankiest hotel in Hong Kong since the British arrived, populated by the rich, the famous, and the merely aspirant. The view was shot by the new art museum and the seedy YMCA is across the street, but the Peninsula still maintains it’s super-luxe lobby and it’s fleet of shiny, shiny Rolls Royces.
We entered the soaring all white interior to have a drink and listen to mom reminesce in great detail. “That’s the store where Grandmother (my grandmother) bought all her clothes,” she notes, as we order 9 dollar passion fruit iced teas. The tea is tasty and served with orchid pedals, but it is freezing cold in this marble lined lobby and I am beginning to feel markedly queasy.
I go outside to take the air, but this is Hong Kong: that doesn’t help. I grow considerably more nauseous and watch the Rolls Royce’s pick up and dispense people in expensive too-heavy clothing. I want to find a restaurant here, I really do, but I think I might die.
So we ride the ferry back across the bay. I end up barfing picturesquely off the side of the Star Ferry, managing to hit the water instead of the floor. My mom will tease me about this until I die.
We return to the hotel, where I have a nap and recuperate and am ready for lunch. But my mother proceeds to get that go-away glint in her eye. She refuses obliquely to go out for lunch to Jimmy’s Kitchen, another haunt from her ex-pat days. Dad and I push it though, motivated by both hunger and curiosity, and she grumpily accedes, noting the pissed off looking storm clouds in the sky.
The rain starts coming down the moment we leave the cab (umbrella-less). It’s a tropical storm, and we’re drenched within a second, which is astonishing. And damp. And close.
But we run inside Jimmy’s Kitchen anyway, which is a moody clubby space down a flight of stairs, an absolute colonial relic. I can imagine stodgy old British men with beer guts making Important Decisions here, but right now it’s just populated with ladies who lunch, cleavage on full display. My mother is disappointed to find they no longer offer her beloved club sandwich, so she orders her other favorite, the Mulligatawny Soup. I go with the prawn curry, which is reputed to come with the full English curry fixings – tamarind, onion, chutnies, coconut, and other good stuff you don’t get in the states. My dad goes with classic veal stroganoff.
The food takes a long time to arrive and I feel sick again, but I manage to eat a little of the tasty and very English curry, fielding “I TOLD you so” glimpses from my mother. The dampness and the clubby feeling of the restaurant settle comfortably over me, and I zone out for the rest of the meal, and the taxi ride back to the Conrad.
Mom declines adamantly on dinner, so Dad and I make the trek out to the Victoria Seafood House alone. The restaurant is located on a high floor within a super-modern office building right on the water, its face flashing psychedelic colors for the Big Handover. The elevator whooshes us up and we are escorted to a table with a view in the small and very Chinese dining room, brightly lit and sparkling clean. We are not entirely sure what to order, but come to conclusions while nibbling on a snack of fried whitefish and peanuts: beansprouts fried with crab and dried fish, fried softshell crab with five spice sauce and salt, crispy skin pork, garlic broccoli, steamed whole garoupa.
The food arrives quickly and in courses. The bean sprouts are a curiously carb free variant on chow mein, but the crab is fresh and good, and we devour the small portion. The fried soft shell crab is magnificent: the batter is light and grease-free but still indulgent, the sauce smoky and delicious. We roll the pieces in the provided salt and enjoy the interplay of flavors. The pork is chilled but tasty, although I found it unnecessary considering the rest of the meal was from the sea (but my dad LIKES his pork.) The fish is perfect: cooked to tenderness, falling off the bone, sharp garlic and scallion flavors mixing carefully with the dense molasses of the soy.
Satiated, we walk outside the building and through the mall, all alone in the warren of passages that crisscross Hong Kong like pipes. The moon is up and my camera won’t take the night shots at all, but this city at night is magic anyway. A camera could not explain it all.
Monday, September 3, 2007
July Fourth: Hong Kong, Wanchai, Humongo Snails
7/4/07
We arrive in Hong Kong on July 4th, and no one cares.
It is almost dark outside – coming onto six PM, a tropical Trader Vic sunset spreading across the horizon. The Hong Kong airport is absolutely tremendous and I feel tepid and short, going through customs behind many many relaxed looking Swedes. My shoes are giving me big oozing blisters.
Thankfully, the line is fairly quick, and I am waved through and stamped and fully authorized to enter. I find that the customs agents in Hong Kong also give out delicious candy!
We collect our bags and roll clickety-clack through many many tunnels, and then we are out the doors and into Asia. The humidity hits me like an all enveloping fist, a memory hearkening back to Florida and July afternoons – it feels like home. The taxi we hail features a ridiculous assortment of clicking little toys on the dashboard.
Lantau Island is a heck of a lot larger then I thought it was, but I love the drive down, the sun going down over the big lush scenery, the tremendous apartment buildings – and as my mother informs me, we’re nowhere near the actual city. Even these characterless buildings outside the airport are bigger and more industrial then any I’ve seen in the states. (Is this our future?)
The highway goes on and we pass over suspension bridges, see resort hotels built out over the crystal blue water complete with fake and serviceable beaches. And finally, we cross over to Kowloon and the city comes into view, the future speckled with Chinese characters and flashing lights and tremendous cruise ships. I can hear my mom saying over and over, “Well, they’ve changed that and that and that,” going through the usual ritual one must perform when returning to a long-abandoned home.
This place is going to be odd.
We arrive at the super-luxe Conrad Hilton, a big fin of a hotel set upon the hill, with a luxurious gold and bronze plated lobby, Audis and BMWs and other luxurious cars pulling up and leaving. (There’s even a Chinese lounge singer! Swank!) Service is naturally quick and efficient, and the pneumatic elevator shoots us up at heart-racing speeds to our floor.
Our room is like everything else will prove to be in Hong Kong: compact, beautiful, efficient and luxurious at the same time, which is definitely one hell of a feat. But oh, the view – a city view like none I’ve ever seen and can ever hope to see. New York City is impressive, strapping, but also big and ugly and traced with smoke. San Francisco is pure charm, but it’s too small to really impress upon you deep human achievement. Rome is classic, all right, but nothing goes up high, nothing dazzles you, makes your eyes hurt a little.
Hong Kong defeats them all. The buildings are tremendous, rising in fluorescent pillars all around you. Hong Kong side (our side) is tremendous enough, but the eye is drawn across the water to the equal bigness of Kowloon, traced with 50,000 person apartment buildings and shopping malls, a new office that resembles a blue plated samurai. You look out over the harbor and see the cruise ships and the junks nimbly evading each other, and see the giant jets coming in over the horizon, the neon lights winking on and off, and you think: So this is what they said the big city would be like.
And we shut the door and took out our clothes and the fireworks began – we came in the last bit of the week that celebrated the 10 year anniversary of Hong Kong being handed over to the Dirty Reds. But we didn’t care: it was beautiful.
I was dying to leave the hotel and walk around. I wanted rum. I wanted to be able to order a rum legally. “Let’s go to the American Restaurant!”, I asked – that restaurant in Wanchai my mom had told me about roughly a zillion times, the one where the hookers hung out and the cat curled up in the kitchen.
And so we did, crossing the causeways that run over the streets in the warm, warm city. Wanchai was everything I wanted it to be, full of drunken English people and Chinese hucksters and Filipino hookers – all the hookers wear the same outfit, by the way, black fishnets, a leotard and thigh high boots. They wear this outfit and sit on stools and peer at you. One distinctive hooker stood in the middle of the street in a pink Cinderella dress and smiled charitably.
But screw it: I was hungry. (And not in the hooker target market.) We found the restaurant beneath the requisite neon sign.
“Aww!”, my mother exclaimed. “They made it classy! It used to be way tackier then this!”
Yeah, the place was embarrassingly tasteful. But we sat down quickly all the same and began ordering with even more speed and deftness. Corn and crab soup, chili shrimp, strange-flavored Szcheuan chicken, onion cake, greens – the food came almost instantly (the Chinese way!) and was incredibly delicious, all of it, as we got high off the humid air and the Tsingtao beer and the general electrical excitement of it all. The chili shrimp were crispy and glazed and exploded on the tounge, while the mouth-numbing peppercorns in the chicken gave it a totally exotic appeal. The onion cake was also wonderful: sort of a flaky oniony doughnut, perfect for scarfing down and dipping. I screwed up my drink order though: I asked for a rum-and-coke and I just got a Coke. Oh well.
We wandered back through Wanchai as Mom pointed out all her old haunts: the Pussycat Club with the pornoriffic sign, the bar where she used to work, the Bull And Bear. I walked ahead and enjoyed being checked out by the seedy bar owners – maybe I’d be employable after all. As we walked up the hill to the hotel, dripping in tropical sweat, I found a conical snail as large as my hand.
I lay in bed that night for a long while – a combination of jet lag and amped up excitement – but one thought came through: I like Hong Kong.
I like Hong Kong a lot.
We arrive in Hong Kong on July 4th, and no one cares.
It is almost dark outside – coming onto six PM, a tropical Trader Vic sunset spreading across the horizon. The Hong Kong airport is absolutely tremendous and I feel tepid and short, going through customs behind many many relaxed looking Swedes. My shoes are giving me big oozing blisters.
Thankfully, the line is fairly quick, and I am waved through and stamped and fully authorized to enter. I find that the customs agents in Hong Kong also give out delicious candy!
We collect our bags and roll clickety-clack through many many tunnels, and then we are out the doors and into Asia. The humidity hits me like an all enveloping fist, a memory hearkening back to Florida and July afternoons – it feels like home. The taxi we hail features a ridiculous assortment of clicking little toys on the dashboard.
Lantau Island is a heck of a lot larger then I thought it was, but I love the drive down, the sun going down over the big lush scenery, the tremendous apartment buildings – and as my mother informs me, we’re nowhere near the actual city. Even these characterless buildings outside the airport are bigger and more industrial then any I’ve seen in the states. (Is this our future?)
The highway goes on and we pass over suspension bridges, see resort hotels built out over the crystal blue water complete with fake and serviceable beaches. And finally, we cross over to Kowloon and the city comes into view, the future speckled with Chinese characters and flashing lights and tremendous cruise ships. I can hear my mom saying over and over, “Well, they’ve changed that and that and that,” going through the usual ritual one must perform when returning to a long-abandoned home.
This place is going to be odd.
We arrive at the super-luxe Conrad Hilton, a big fin of a hotel set upon the hill, with a luxurious gold and bronze plated lobby, Audis and BMWs and other luxurious cars pulling up and leaving. (There’s even a Chinese lounge singer! Swank!) Service is naturally quick and efficient, and the pneumatic elevator shoots us up at heart-racing speeds to our floor.
Our room is like everything else will prove to be in Hong Kong: compact, beautiful, efficient and luxurious at the same time, which is definitely one hell of a feat. But oh, the view – a city view like none I’ve ever seen and can ever hope to see. New York City is impressive, strapping, but also big and ugly and traced with smoke. San Francisco is pure charm, but it’s too small to really impress upon you deep human achievement. Rome is classic, all right, but nothing goes up high, nothing dazzles you, makes your eyes hurt a little.
Hong Kong defeats them all. The buildings are tremendous, rising in fluorescent pillars all around you. Hong Kong side (our side) is tremendous enough, but the eye is drawn across the water to the equal bigness of Kowloon, traced with 50,000 person apartment buildings and shopping malls, a new office that resembles a blue plated samurai. You look out over the harbor and see the cruise ships and the junks nimbly evading each other, and see the giant jets coming in over the horizon, the neon lights winking on and off, and you think: So this is what they said the big city would be like.
And we shut the door and took out our clothes and the fireworks began – we came in the last bit of the week that celebrated the 10 year anniversary of Hong Kong being handed over to the Dirty Reds. But we didn’t care: it was beautiful.
I was dying to leave the hotel and walk around. I wanted rum. I wanted to be able to order a rum legally. “Let’s go to the American Restaurant!”, I asked – that restaurant in Wanchai my mom had told me about roughly a zillion times, the one where the hookers hung out and the cat curled up in the kitchen.
And so we did, crossing the causeways that run over the streets in the warm, warm city. Wanchai was everything I wanted it to be, full of drunken English people and Chinese hucksters and Filipino hookers – all the hookers wear the same outfit, by the way, black fishnets, a leotard and thigh high boots. They wear this outfit and sit on stools and peer at you. One distinctive hooker stood in the middle of the street in a pink Cinderella dress and smiled charitably.
But screw it: I was hungry. (And not in the hooker target market.) We found the restaurant beneath the requisite neon sign.
“Aww!”, my mother exclaimed. “They made it classy! It used to be way tackier then this!”
Yeah, the place was embarrassingly tasteful. But we sat down quickly all the same and began ordering with even more speed and deftness. Corn and crab soup, chili shrimp, strange-flavored Szcheuan chicken, onion cake, greens – the food came almost instantly (the Chinese way!) and was incredibly delicious, all of it, as we got high off the humid air and the Tsingtao beer and the general electrical excitement of it all. The chili shrimp were crispy and glazed and exploded on the tounge, while the mouth-numbing peppercorns in the chicken gave it a totally exotic appeal. The onion cake was also wonderful: sort of a flaky oniony doughnut, perfect for scarfing down and dipping. I screwed up my drink order though: I asked for a rum-and-coke and I just got a Coke. Oh well.
We wandered back through Wanchai as Mom pointed out all her old haunts: the Pussycat Club with the pornoriffic sign, the bar where she used to work, the Bull And Bear. I walked ahead and enjoyed being checked out by the seedy bar owners – maybe I’d be employable after all. As we walked up the hill to the hotel, dripping in tropical sweat, I found a conical snail as large as my hand.
I lay in bed that night for a long while – a combination of jet lag and amped up excitement – but one thought came through: I like Hong Kong.
I like Hong Kong a lot.
7/3/07 – 7/4/07
7/3/07 – 7/4/07
Tuesday Fading Into Wednesday (Date Line!)
I am sitting in the back of the plane. This is because, apparently, I am an inferior human specimen and thus ineligible for better treatment, such as being hand-fed canapés by sultry Asian women up front. At least that is how I am imagining it.
Thankfully, my fire-code violating cell at Simon’s Rock College has inurred me to any lingering sensations of claustrophobia. Bring it on, 16 hour flight from hell across the Pacific. I can take it. I am going somewhere special.
There are Guys in font of me. I capitalize this because they are the essence of the testosterone laden American male traveling to Asia, whose primary impression of what Hong Kong is involves prostitutes shilling noodles underneath tremendous neon signs. They are, unbelieivably, all high school athletics coaches.
I hear snippets of their conversation drifting from over the musty seats.
“Hey, that pilot sounds just like Mister Sulu!”
“You know, the stewardesses here are ugly. And old. Singapore Airlines fires stewardesses when they turn 23. They just take em’ back and say, ‘Honey, you gotta go into accounting now.’”
Between these, I hear them honking loudly. One yells, “Whoo! Suzie Wong!” across the aisle, and as everyone stares, his neighbor breathes, “Drop and give me 20!” They do not notice that they are being disapproved of. One says, his voice dropping to a pitch saturated with awe, “Everyone loves Americans. The Chinese love Americans. We’re ambassadors, man. Everyone loves us.”
I guess he has not attached a Canada patch to his duffel bag. I guess he is still proud.
I walk up to the front of the plane to find my parents, more out of boredom then out of sheer, cattle car induced loneliness. The first class passengers sleep in their tiny space age pods, making artifical night noises in the blissful, blissful darkness. They are mostly white and amply padded, their carry-on laptop bags stowed in and around their beds. The stewardess in the corner glares at me, and I say, respectfully, “Oh, I’m just trying to find my parents.”
She narrows her eyes. “Well, they’re not HERE.” I consider nicking some snacks from the cart on my way out, but decide a stale biscotti is not worth the altercation. My parents tell me later that they were on the second floor of the plane, a floor I was not aware of.
And so I return to the back of the bus, return to the part of the plane composed mostly of San Francisco Chinese returning home. This includes my seatmate, a pleasant woman from the suburbs of the city, seeing her ailing mother in Guangzhou. We share a moment of feminine sympathy – they had confiscated her makeup in security as foundation presents a deep and grave security risk. She had barely made it to her seat. We talked for a long time about her life in California, about her 7 year old son who reads constantly and writes rambling stories about sinister penguin armies. (I want to meet this kid.) She shares with me that her husband doesn’t always understand her, that her son isn’t athletic and she wonders why he has to be, that her best friend is in line to become the new Queen of Nepal.
I ask her something I had always wondered: “How do I say ‘Excuse me?’ in Chinese?”
She looks at me, confused. “You can’t say that in Chinese.”
Uh oh.
Snacks: A cup of noodle, eaten at dangerous heat in the tiny cramping seats. An almond cookie with many, many chemicals. A distressing chicken and pasta looking entrée. I do not eat any of it. I am waiting for skanky Cantonese food. I am waiting for legally procured rum.
300 is playing on the overhead screen. Even I am made uncomfortable by jiggling, tremendous boobies being reflected onto the darkened, silver faces of the entire airplane.
It is morning now and I am descending over China for the first time, and my excitement and anticipation are lodged deep in my throat, exploding out of the top of my head. I plaster my nose to the super-chilled window. The monitor says that we are passing over Japan, that we are within spitting distance, but the grey and clumping clouds prevent me from spotting it.
The plane goes on and on, and I see my first glimpse of Chinese land: an island in a sparkling blue sea.
The only sign of habitation is a tremendous golf course.
The sun is coming up for real now, coloring the water pink and gold and beautiful, a South China postcard from cruising altitude. We are descending now, and I refuse to lower the shade, I refuse I refuse.
The man ahead of me, who has been silent in response to the two coaches he has had to sit next to, comes to life, pointing out the window as the ridges and rocks of the Hong Kong coast floats into glorious view. “I’m moving here,” he says. “I’m working for the Bellagio out of Vegas – they’re building in Macau, you know. My wife is coming over soon, and we’re going to raise our kid here, in the Hong Kong schools – I hear they’re good.”
I half listen to him as the landmarks appear, as I can discern Repulse Bay and Kowloon and the tiny angular sampans and cargo ships spread out beneath me. He ticks off the place names and locations but I do not need them. I have been hearing them forever and now I see them all.
Tuesday Fading Into Wednesday (Date Line!)
I am sitting in the back of the plane. This is because, apparently, I am an inferior human specimen and thus ineligible for better treatment, such as being hand-fed canapés by sultry Asian women up front. At least that is how I am imagining it.
Thankfully, my fire-code violating cell at Simon’s Rock College has inurred me to any lingering sensations of claustrophobia. Bring it on, 16 hour flight from hell across the Pacific. I can take it. I am going somewhere special.
There are Guys in font of me. I capitalize this because they are the essence of the testosterone laden American male traveling to Asia, whose primary impression of what Hong Kong is involves prostitutes shilling noodles underneath tremendous neon signs. They are, unbelieivably, all high school athletics coaches.
I hear snippets of their conversation drifting from over the musty seats.
“Hey, that pilot sounds just like Mister Sulu!”
“You know, the stewardesses here are ugly. And old. Singapore Airlines fires stewardesses when they turn 23. They just take em’ back and say, ‘Honey, you gotta go into accounting now.’”
Between these, I hear them honking loudly. One yells, “Whoo! Suzie Wong!” across the aisle, and as everyone stares, his neighbor breathes, “Drop and give me 20!” They do not notice that they are being disapproved of. One says, his voice dropping to a pitch saturated with awe, “Everyone loves Americans. The Chinese love Americans. We’re ambassadors, man. Everyone loves us.”
I guess he has not attached a Canada patch to his duffel bag. I guess he is still proud.
I walk up to the front of the plane to find my parents, more out of boredom then out of sheer, cattle car induced loneliness. The first class passengers sleep in their tiny space age pods, making artifical night noises in the blissful, blissful darkness. They are mostly white and amply padded, their carry-on laptop bags stowed in and around their beds. The stewardess in the corner glares at me, and I say, respectfully, “Oh, I’m just trying to find my parents.”
She narrows her eyes. “Well, they’re not HERE.” I consider nicking some snacks from the cart on my way out, but decide a stale biscotti is not worth the altercation. My parents tell me later that they were on the second floor of the plane, a floor I was not aware of.
And so I return to the back of the bus, return to the part of the plane composed mostly of San Francisco Chinese returning home. This includes my seatmate, a pleasant woman from the suburbs of the city, seeing her ailing mother in Guangzhou. We share a moment of feminine sympathy – they had confiscated her makeup in security as foundation presents a deep and grave security risk. She had barely made it to her seat. We talked for a long time about her life in California, about her 7 year old son who reads constantly and writes rambling stories about sinister penguin armies. (I want to meet this kid.) She shares with me that her husband doesn’t always understand her, that her son isn’t athletic and she wonders why he has to be, that her best friend is in line to become the new Queen of Nepal.
I ask her something I had always wondered: “How do I say ‘Excuse me?’ in Chinese?”
She looks at me, confused. “You can’t say that in Chinese.”
Uh oh.
Snacks: A cup of noodle, eaten at dangerous heat in the tiny cramping seats. An almond cookie with many, many chemicals. A distressing chicken and pasta looking entrée. I do not eat any of it. I am waiting for skanky Cantonese food. I am waiting for legally procured rum.
300 is playing on the overhead screen. Even I am made uncomfortable by jiggling, tremendous boobies being reflected onto the darkened, silver faces of the entire airplane.
It is morning now and I am descending over China for the first time, and my excitement and anticipation are lodged deep in my throat, exploding out of the top of my head. I plaster my nose to the super-chilled window. The monitor says that we are passing over Japan, that we are within spitting distance, but the grey and clumping clouds prevent me from spotting it.
The plane goes on and on, and I see my first glimpse of Chinese land: an island in a sparkling blue sea.
The only sign of habitation is a tremendous golf course.
The sun is coming up for real now, coloring the water pink and gold and beautiful, a South China postcard from cruising altitude. We are descending now, and I refuse to lower the shade, I refuse I refuse.
The man ahead of me, who has been silent in response to the two coaches he has had to sit next to, comes to life, pointing out the window as the ridges and rocks of the Hong Kong coast floats into glorious view. “I’m moving here,” he says. “I’m working for the Bellagio out of Vegas – they’re building in Macau, you know. My wife is coming over soon, and we’re going to raise our kid here, in the Hong Kong schools – I hear they’re good.”
I half listen to him as the landmarks appear, as I can discern Repulse Bay and Kowloon and the tiny angular sampans and cargo ships spread out beneath me. He ticks off the place names and locations but I do not need them. I have been hearing them forever and now I see them all.
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