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.