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.
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