Above It All

I've been perplexed by Shatin. There's a gorgeous park that runs along the riverside, one of the best museums I've ever explored, and malls loaded with international brands. The food within the malls ranges from Starbucks to Italian and it is a splurge to eat it.

There had to be more and I felt frustrated that I didn't see it. But when I was on the bus to another town, I saw something that looked like a market and yesterday I headed in that direction.

It is much smaller than the one in Tai Po, but the chickens sold in Shatin are the freshest I've ever seen, as in cages of live poultry, and the fish flopped about on counters. I went up to the last floor, looking for cooked food. Instead I found a network of streets above the almost empty thoroughfares on the ground.

Open-air sky bridges link massive apartment buildings and shopping malls of the humblest kind. The bridges are lined with restaurants that aren't fancy but are probably good--I plan to find out in the next two weeks. The bridges rest above parks with towering trees, schoolyards, and traffic. They catch the breeze and are really delightful to walk on.

It's another facet of a place I'm slowly getting to know. Now if I could only find a clean hotel for business people of moderate means in the town center...The monkey I met on the trail last night is making me rethink the pleasures of a rural residence.

I'd Rather Have a Plague of Locusts

At first I thought it was prickly heat, the series of red bumps on my upper arm and near my stomach. On the next night I saw a gnat flying through my room and decided that was the culprit until I realized it probably couldn't bite through my clothes. But my cold was absorbing most of my attention and it's impossible for me to concentrate on more than one misery at a time. I blamed that, combined with jet lag, for my sudden awakenings in the middle of the night, when I was jolted into complete consciousness.

On the fourth night I sat on my bed in a paroxym of itching. I always check the mattress in any room I happen to be in and this one was clean, but when I climbed up for a view of the top bunk bed, it was covered with dirt. I went to find the newly-anointed managers of Ascension House and they discovered ants. I was given a new room that was much larger and apparently clean.

When I began to move my clothes, I saw a multitude of very small black beetles in the wardrobe of the room I was vacating so I left the garments where they were and put them all in the dryer the next morning. There seemed to be none in my new room and I slept sounder that night than I had in a week.

The managers found a nest of red ants in the room next to my old one, and quite a few in the room I'd formerly used. Spraying them with BioKill, they watched them die and we all felt happier. But I have to be grateful to the little devils--they gave me a bigger room, with much more light and a desk with a view. And their bites are beginning to fade away, so I think I'll stay at Ascension House.

The Bottle Overflows

The population of Hong Kong last year was figured at 7 million "usual residents," as opposed to "mobile residents." In July of this year, the number of visitors from mainland China, according to yesterday's SCMP, was 4.9 million for the month. This number is expected to dwindle to a mere 4 million visitors per month now that China's economy is cooling off a little.

That is, of course, a staggering number to someone who grew up in a state with a population that was far below a million people. It is even more staggering when I consider that more than half of the total population of all of Hong Kong (including Kowloon and the New Territories) floods into this area every month.

It explains a lot, including why I no longer enjoy Hong Kong as I used to. There are just too many people in places I used to love--Nathan Road, the Star Ferry, the core of Hong Kong Island, the train that travels between Kowloon and the Chinese border. Most of them have a wheeled suitcase to transport goods back over the border, which makes the crowding even more problematic.

When I first visited Hong Kong, almost seven years ago, it was far from underpopulated but it was navigable. Now it's a claustrophobe's nightmare and a shopping frenzy the likes of which I have never seen anywhere--and I am a survivor of Bangkok's Chatuchak Market. This is changing parts of the city that used to make me want to come and wander--luggage stores and currency exchanges are crowding out noodle shops near Nathan Road and fabric shops in Chungking Mansions. It makes me think of the disappearing grasslands in Wolf Totem and I realize this may be my last visit to Hong Kong.

Sweating in Shatin

                               
By the time I made it to the top of my hill today, sweat was rolling down my face, along with any cold germs that might think they're settling in, I hoped. I had a bag filled with essentials: bananas, a bottle of laundry detergent, a book, and four rolls of toilet paper, so I blame the moisture on heavy-hands exercise. When I finally leave Ascension House, I will be in fabulous physical condition, or at least better than I was when I came. It's such a pretty walk that I always look forward to it, through glades, past ravines, often in the company of butterflies. And at the top is a house where I can collapse in peace, on a little sofa, staring at small, dramatic almost-mountains. Nice, very nice. In previous trips to Hong Kong, I kept away from where I was staying for as long as I possibly could. Chungking Mansions was interesting in those days but it sure as hell wasn't a place to relax. I'd walk and explore until I could go no further, hoping exhaustion would soften the rather depressing ugliness of my Kowloon home. I went back to that neighborhood today because I wanted noodles from a hole-in-the-wall on Lock Road. It is gone, replaced by a shop that sells suitcases, an item beloved by many mainland Chinese who find they make dandy shopping carts. To ease the pain of its departure, I went to another favorite spot nearby, Swindon's bookstore. It now sells coloring books for adults and all of the Fifty Shades of Grey because that's what people want, a young clerk told me. Goodbye, Tsim Sha Tsui. I may never go back.
                         

Subsistence Living

              

My room at Ascension House isn't much larger than ones I've had at Chungking Mansions, but there's at least one crucial difference. I don't have to make my morning coffee two inches away from my bed. Here there's a kitchen, which I share with five pairs of shoes and an occasional sleepy Indonesian face passing through to use the bathroom. I don't drink that first cup of coffee on my bed either. I go out on the porch, sit on a white plastic chair, and listen to birds and crickets and the distant sound of a train that passes below the hill every once in a while.

When I'm alone in the house, I write at the kitchen table but now that I have company, I go to my room, turn on the air conditioner, and finish the last of my coffee. When I look up at my windows, all that I see are green leaves, and last night I came home to a baby gecko, frozen above my light switch. I'm glad to have this as my base for a few weeks, even though the smell of mildew is disconcerting. But when I open the windows, the same smell drifts in from outdoors, along with a strange hint of sour milk. The air conditioner is the only source of air without an odor.

Yesterday I roamed around Shatin for a while, discovering that its most commonly used thoroughfares are shopping malls, linked by skybridges. The mall that is connected to the subway and train system was as crowded as the Puyallup Fair, and possibly noisier. On the streets outside I've yet to find food that isn't franchised, so when my blood sugar went to absolute zero, I got on a train and went back to the area around Nathan Road. Sitting in a small congee joint, I ate comfort food and regained a decent world view again. This weekend, my goal is to find congee in Shatin that isn't in a shopping mall, and perhaps noodles too.

                    

Ascension House Part 4

                                   
I was in bed by seven last night and up by five today. The silence is absolute and the cleanliness of my surroundings is thorough. No insects appeared last night and I am grateful. My entire body is wrapped in humid warmth and when I opened the windows this morning, the temperature outside was exactly the same as what I had slept in.

But the windows open, the hotpot works, and the Vietnamese  metal coffee filter that I bought at Modern Trading before I left Seattle makes a very espresso-like cup of coffee. The dining room table is just the right height for typing and the chairs have supportive backs. I am a happy and fortunate woman; this is all lightyears away from my usual Hong Kong experience.

Mist is coming in threads down the hills that I can see from the kitchen window and the weather forecast promises a morning of heavy rainfall. However one of the cleaning ladies yesterday had brought out an umbrella early on in our encounter and left it by the door, looking at me in a way that told me I was a complete fool not to have brought one with me. This is indisputably true,

But I am a very fortunate fool who is cherishing every minute of privacy and the run of the house before five men from Indonesia join me tonight around eight. Given this morning's pre-dawn wake-up call, I will be sound asleep when they arrive.

Ascension House Part Three

                        
The thought of dragging my suitcases back up the stairs and through the mud to eventually end up at Chungking Mansions was a dismal one that must have shown on my face, because Eugenia smiled. "We will honor your reservation," she said, "Don't worry."

We agreed to work on a week-by-week basis and I paid her for a week. Pang led me back through the rain to Ascension House and took me to a room that was in a private wing, with its own bathroom down the hall. He gave me sheets, a towel, an adaptor plug, and the wifi password, showing me the faucet at the kitchen sink that dispensed drinking water. Then he left me in complete silence, except for the sound of dripping rain.

I killed a spider when I made my bed and hoped desperately that there would be no reprisals. I unpacked my belongings and found that even the copies of the New York Review of Books that I'd brought with me because of the review of Ma Thanegi that they contained were very, very wet. Fortunately the books I brought as presents for two little girls I'd put in a plastic bag so they were still perfect. I hung up my damp garments in the bathrooms and prayed they would dry. The pervasive smell of incipient mildew did little to reassure me that they would.

But the wifi worked and the kitchen was fully equipped, right down to instant noodles, for sale at ten HK dollars a pack. I put my bag of Seattle coffee on the counter and felt hopeful.

Ascension House Part Two

"The cleaning ladies sent me," he explained, "they were very surprised that you carried two heavy suitcases all the way down the hill."

I told him about my reservation and where I had come from and he said, "Come with me and have lunch. I"ll discuss this with the staff." Back up the muddy hill we went and into a huge hall filled with tables. A mammoth lunch appeared before me and I was told to sit. Be quiet was implict in the surroundings.

Pillars decorated at the top in Chinese style supported a Scandinavian buttressed roof. The fish in lemon sauce was delectable and I felt my clothes begin to dry. A serious lady with kind eyes came into the hallway, with an equally serious young man. Eugenia and Pang both spoke my native tongue fluently, as did Barry, my rescuer, and between the three of them, they presented the facts.

Steffen, the erstwhile manager, had left no discernible record of my reservation and a group of five young indonesian men were scheduled to arrive at Ascension House the following day. At the moment, nobody lived there, since the new managers were scheduled to arrive next month.

Ascenscion House Part 1

The taxi driver had pulled up under a covered gate to give me my bags but his kindness was futile. By the time I made it to the path that went through the woods and down the hill, I was saturated, hair dripping under my fake pashmina, feet beginnning to wrinkle from the damp. When I finally dragged my two suitcases to the porch of Ascension House, I was delighted to see that someone was inside.

The lady who let me in was more puzzled than delighted, and so was her coworker. The only word they understood from me was the name of the manager who had given me my reservation for the coming month and the only words I understood from them were "gone" and "no." But I was soaking wet and they were kind. They let me in and handed me a cloth bag labeled "hairdryer."

We tried to make ourselves comprehensible in English and Chinese, failed miserably, and one of the ladies made a phone call. A man who spoke English was easily as confused as the three of us were; the only clear fact was I had a reservation and nobody knew about it. "I'll call you back," he said but then the two ladies smiled, said goodbye, and left me in an empty house, taking the phone with them.

I used the hairdryer, wondering what else I could do. After about half an hour, I heard a knock on the door, and there was a man smiling and saying, "I think you are not where you are meant to be."

Name Calling

Yesterday I finally viewed the photos of Caitlyn Jenner—a 65-year-old bionic what? We have no word for her in our country except transgender. She claims she is a woman and her outer features are female and beyond the dreams of almost any other 65-year-old woman in the world. She sports the best body that money could buy and a life of pure athleticism could have developed. Everything has been transformed into the most beautiful appurtenances available, bought with a physical and psychological pain that perhaps rivals the growing pains of the typical adolescence. Anatomy isn’t destiny, nor is it physical identity. Caitlyn is, she says, a woman with a penis.

In Thailand she wouldn’t call herself a woman. She’d be one of the third gender, and culturally acknowledged to be that. In the West she has to choose one of two or use “trans” to define herself. In Thailand she would be katoey. How narrow and how revealing our English vocabulary is.

The same criticisms that Nora Ephron laid against James/Jan Morris are cropping up against Bruce/Caitlyn, who seems to look at the state of being female as a perpetual slumber party with the girls and the life-long right to wear nail polish. Morris became a gushing, twee version of Miss Marple in her early interviews but snapped out of it to become a respected writer once again. Maybe it’s the barrage of hormones that turns newly-minted femmes into teenage girls, blithering about hair, make-up, guys? God knows we all go through that stage, even if some of us are smart enough to keep it to ourselves.

And exactly what does Caitlyn mean when she claims her brain is much more female than male? As one of the world’s leading athletic competitors, does she believe that urge to compete and excel is part of her female brain or is that a compensating physical trait developed because she was denied the joys of shopping? I hope she explains because a lot of her fellow-females would like to know about that brain concept, as Elinor Burkett trenchantly inquired in last week’s Sunday NYT.

Burkett seems most annoyed that men are now co-opting the reality of being a woman. “Their truth is not my truth. Their female identities are not my female identity.” Well, no, it isn’t and they aren’t. But they are another sort of female, who in our narrow culture have endured the indignities of being scorned as “effeminate,” “faggot,” and “sick” if they let their female identities slip into the open. That’s a rough road to travel by yourself, as katoey in the West do.

Why can’t we acknowledge that there are more than two forms of gender? And that if brains are shaped by environmental experience, that the experiences of a katoey sculpt a brain that is different, separate but equal, to that of a female and male who grew up in the same culture?

“I was born in the wrong body” isn’t a cop-out, as Birkett suggests. Amy Bloom’s small and insightful book on gender, Normal, proves that. For some, being “born female or male” is the result of a rapid decision made by a doctor who, faced with an infant’s ambiguous genitals, wasn’t really sure. Where are hormones produced and when do they first begin to manifest themselves in a growing body? Children in Thai villages often announce their gender when they are far too young to know about Nong Toom, the katoey boxer, or other social influences. How do they come to that knowledge?

The rage Birkett displays against the vocabulary—of transgenders rejecting the term vagina or even woman—is absurd. “Binary views of male and female” haven’t been smashed at all by Birkett and others as long as society continues to define people solely as male and female. “Gender neutrality” isn’t what’s needed here—gender expansion is. Two is obviously not enough.