Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Seattle?

Unearthing a time capsule isn’t always delightful. When I was given two fashion tabloids that had been supplements to the Seattle Weekly, one from fall of 1998 and one from spring of 1999, I was eager to pore over them. Two women whom I knew, one of whom has become a close friend, had feature pieces in both and I’m always curious about other people’s writing. This curiosity held more than my average avidity. I didn’t meet the writer who’s now my friend until much later, after she had become one of Seattle’s fashion doyennes, and I was eager to discover another one of her facets. I quickly found that her writing sparkled with the same panache that she brings to everything she does, while the other writer labored under heavy metaphors, linking Nordstrom’s newly-opened flagship store to Moby-Dick. 

After reading these pieces, I leafed through the remaining pages and began to feel the same heaviness that hits me when I listen to a eulogy. These supplements were printed during the time that I bounced between Seattle and Bangkok. When I had returned in 1998 for a year, one of my sons told me that if he dropped me blindfolded into many parts of downtown, when I was finally allowed to see, I wouldn’t know where I was. That was true. In the time I’d been gone, downtown Seattle had woken up.

Although in 1998, Bellevue Square and University Village shopping malls still dominated fashion advertising, the editorial pages showed Prada and Versace from Barney’s New York, a store called Fast Forward, Nordstrom, and Mario’s. Only the last two are still alive. But what struck me hardest were the ads for small shops that could be found on downtown streets: Betty David who sold “hand-painted lamb shearling coats” on South Main Street, Moda Xpress and Dansko in Belltown, FABU in Sodo, Design Products Clothing, “Established in 1973 by Vicki Tsuchida, a woman who wanted you to look good,” in Pioneer Square,  Carroll’s Fine Jewelry, “Seattle’s Oldest Jeweler,” was on 1427 Fourth Avenue, where it would die ten years later and L/T /Denny, ‘Diamond Importers and Fine Jewelers” were open “by appointment only” in the Florentine Building on Occidental Avenue. Nordstrom’s takeover of Frederick & Nelson’s former dominance of Fifth Avenue rated a feature article but of the downtown heavy-hitters, only Westlake Center placed an ad. They didn’t have to. Although both I. Magnin’s and Frederick & Nelson had disappeared, Nordstrom and the Bon Marche were legendary magnets that regularly drew shoppers downtown, and Pacific Place, called Catalog Corners by two contemptuous Pine Street store owners, was ready to open, bringing Barney’s and Tiffany’s close to Nordstrom. 

By 1998, Ardour and Ped competed on First Avenue, selling shoes and accessories in what the Weekly called SOMA (“the retail flurry south of the Pike Place Market.” David Lawrence sold designer clothes on Fourth Avenue, closing in 2010 for a move to Bellevue. San Marco sold Shoes, Clothing & Accessories” on 6th Avenue, “across from Pacific Place,” while StellaBeam offered style on Stewart Street near the market. Pacific Place was doing its best to lure mall shoppers from Bellevue with Barney’s, Max Mara, Bebe, and Helly Hanson, with Sephora down the street. But although its success drew other national retailers--and a sprinkling of international ones too--small shops began to lose their customers.

Who cared? Downtown glittered with names like Gucci at Fifth and Union and more accessible ones like Ann Taylor and The Gap. Local designer Luly Yang and classic boutique Nina McLemore nestled in the shadow of the Olympic Hotel and there were rumors that a Ritz-Carlton was eyeing a location next to the subterranean shopping of Rainier Square. A children’s shop from the Netherlands called Oililly might soon appear in Pacific Place, going up against Flora and Henri on First Avenue where a local designer made French-inspired clothing  for the very young. 

Although it was always under attack from the malls that drew shoppers far from the downtown core, the heart of Seattle was a place of possibility at the end of the 20th Century and into the 21st. Even with the strong hit it took during the financial debacle of 2008, it still had the feel of a real city right up until the dawn of 2020. Office workers, tourists, and local shoppers made the streets vibrant and bustling before Covid shut the city down in March of that year. Now three years later, that scene is almost unimaginable. 

Will Seattle’s downtown ever come back to what it was? Considering that far-flung Seattle clings stubbornly to its neighborhoods, I don’t think it will. It was never really a place that the city’s residents thought was essential. They didn’t want New York. They wanted coziness and they found it in shops and restaurants near their homes, turning neighborhoods into little villages. It was the tech business that grew and nourished Seattle’s core and when the city decided to tax it heavily, those businesses created their own company town in South Lake Union. Even before Covid, online shopping and restaurants that catered to people whose salaries soared far above Seattle’s average were draining the life from what used to be the central business district. 

These two fashion supplements provide testimony to that prediction. Almost every downtown store mentioned in their pages have gone, some of them having sunk without even an online trace. Fast Forward? StellaBeam? Gone, baby, gone while the stores that once filled Westlake Center and Pacific Place are distant memories in what amounts to a retail ghost town. 

I wish I’d never stepped back into what used to be. The memories of what was in place thirty years ago are still too close for me to examine them with the perspective of a social historian. What threatens to replace that lush brightness and promise of the past is a tourist mecca, linking the Pike Place Market, the waterfront, and the cruise ship terminal, with everything else existing as a sideshow. When I look at the sadness I feel about this new city, I realize I’m getting old.

“It is Margaret you mourn for.” Damn straight, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Little Boys in the Rain

 

I often wish I could edit my first book, streamlining run-on sentences and reworking some of the stories. But I never wish for a different cover. Nana Chen's photograph makes my heart sing even now, fourteen years after I first held this book in my hands. Perfection.

How My Light Is Spent

I grew up with a father whose vision became severely limited several years after he'd come to Alaska and I myself turned out to be nearsighted to the point of embarrassment at an early age. I wore glasses from the time I was six, just so I could see the blackboard in our one-room schoolhouse. Eyesight was always a topic of prime concern in my family and when I first found Milton's sonnet that began, "When I consider how my light was spent," I immediately thought of my father.

I've only known the sharp clarity with which other people see the world when I've put on a pair of glasses but I've learned that I prefer seeing the world through a myopic veil that conceals imperfections. It was only because of my remaining cataract that I recently had vision tests and it was a good thing that I did. Although I don't have a hole in my retina, I do have macular degeneration in both of my eyes.

I'm not alone. One estimate claims that 11 million people in the U.S. have some form of this condition, which can only be restrained, not cured. I take a special vitamin twice a day and wear sunglasses on bright days in an effort to keep this at bay. I was originally told that a diet of fish and leafy green vegetables was mandatory but, like almost everything I was told by that doctor, this is faulty information, disproven by recent studies. Even so, I've limited meat so severely that I'm almost a vegetarian, but not fanatically so. When I found that a nearby Thai restaurant served khao kha moo, fatty slices of braised pork leg with rice, I was devouring a plate of it on the following afternoon. "May" and "might" aren't words that are going to curtail my enjoyment; they never have.

Few people go blind from macular degeneration, although some are reduced to peripheral vision over time. My definition of it is simple and probably flawed: my eyes are wearing out.

This isn't surprising. I've been a gluttonous reader for the past sixty-six years, racing through a book a day ever since I learned to read at four.  And because of severe motion sickness that's plagued me from childhood, I stare out the window of any vehicle I'm in instead of reading or even turning my head to talk to the person sitting beside me. This trained me to observe everything I pass through and makes me damned poor company on any road trip. It also gave me a prevailing hunger for fresh vistas and turned me into a traveler who lives through my eyes.

But nothing lasts. Although I refuse to acknowledge it in any significant way, I'm growing old. In fact, some people might describe me as an old woman. If that's true, I'm a fortunate old woman whose major failing is a disregard for calendars and a predilection for arriving at an appointment a day ahead of time. (Thank goodness for virtual calendars on phones and tablets, with their annoying reminders.)

My hips, knees, and feet still work. My brain and heart still function creditably well. My memory occasionally falters when I try to remember an author, a book title, or the name of a movie, but that's what Google's for. We've all outsourced our memories, haven't we?

My pace is slower than it was twenty years ago and I have wrinkles. Tant pis, as I learned to say in my introductory French class at a Catholic girls' school. I suppose that fading vision is a reasonable deficiency that comes with age.

But in the time I have left, be it years or decades, I plan to spend my light in the same greedy, pleasurable way that I always have, devouring books and absorbing the world through my retinas, taking pleasure in light, shadow, and color, snapping images that delight me with my phone, loving every second of vision that I'm fortunate enough to have been given.

Misled

We all have our definitions of who we are and mine has always been that I'm healthy. That was a good thing, because for many years I had no health insurance. During that time, I developed high blood pressure, which tarnished my self-image a trifle, but when I reached the age of Medicare, I began to control it with a daily pill.

But swallowing a drug every morning wasn't what I wanted to do, so when I turned 70, I began to walk more and eat differently. Within a month of that new regimen, I no longer had high blood pressure and my self-image began to restore itself. My waistline was returning and I walked up to eight miles a day. As a septuagenarian, I I felt better than I had in a very long time, with just a couple of simple changes in the way I lived.  Getting older was easier than it was cracked up to be, I told myself.

Then I went to an ophthalmologist to have my second cataract operation. In the barrage of tests, she told me I had a hole in the macular region of my retina, showing me a spot on a photograph that she said was the hole. Telling me she wouldn't remove my cataract until a retina specialist had determined the size of the hole, she left me with her diagnosis and a lot of uncertainty.

Being a woman of my time, I went home and consulted the internet, going to sites like the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical, and the American Academy of Opthalmology. As my doctor had told me, if the hole was small it might close on its own. However if it were not, it would need a procedure that would result in me keeping my head face down for anywhere from three days to two weeks. This was a horrifying thought and one that preyed on my mind quite a bit for the two weeks between the diagnosis of the hole and the assessment of its size.

There was no macular hole. However after the misdiagnosis, my blood pressure had risen by thirteen points. I was certain that the relief of learning that the only surgery I faced was cataract removal would bring it back down to normal levels.

Two weeks later I went back to my opthalmologist, my faith in her wavering a bit after having her statement of certainty proved wrong. However cataract removal was something Doctors Without Borders do in undeveloped countries under field conditions. Certainly she would be able to handle this without any difficulty; her academic and medical pedigree was high enough that I had no reason to worry and I was in good spirits when I showed up for a few tests.

The technician returned after taking the test results to my doctor, saying "She wants one more." This involved putting numbing drops in both eyes while I was lying down but after the right eye was done, he said he needed to do it again with an assistant. "I need two hands," he said.

While he was getting someone to help him, the right side of my lower face began to go numb and I touched it with my fingertips, assessing how much skin had been affected. A few minutes later, the fingers of my right hand began to tingle and I was getting concerned. "Some of the drops may have run down your face but I'll get the doctor," the technician said.

It took at least ten minutes for him to reappear with the doctor and I got off the table to get my phone, just in case I needed to call 911. Puzzled and beginning to feel alarmed, I was relieved when the doctor
entered the room. When I told her what had happened, she told me my symptoms were that of a stroke, that the drops had nothing to do with what I was feeling, and that this was a neurological issue. She said nothing more as I stared at her, trying to process this information.

After what seemed like a long period of silence, I said "I'm going home." "Let us know if there's anything we can do to help you," she said and I replied "There's nothing you could do for me."

I was shaking by the time I reached the elevator and called my primary care physician. She was busy but I was seen by a nurse practitioner who ran me through the physical tests for a stroke, took my blood pressure, and gave me an EEG. My heart was normal, my body showed no stroke symptoms, but my blood pressure was at 110.

Two weeks later, my blood pressure is at normal levels but during that time, I felt shaken. I still am. I continue to have faith that I'm a healthy woman but I brushed far too close to a belief that I am not, through misinformation given me by a doctor who pronounced these things with certitude.

That woman is no longer my doctor. My customary skepticism about medical professionals has increased. Always a "difficult patient," I'm now a 21st century female Diogenes, carrying a lamp to raise in search of honesty in a profession that seems to have forgotten the oath of "Do no harm."

Roots

I never thought I had any. Wherever I lived was always temporary, and I liked it that way. When my husband bought our first house, the sentence that reconciled me to the purchase was made by our realtor, "The average American buys a new house every five years." Ha. Those were the days, back in the mid-70s.

Within eight years, we moved to the next place and after that my life was a long succession of apartments, with dreams of going farther afield. Eventually I would live in eight different dwelling places in Bangkok and Penang before returning to four different ones in Seattle. In those years I learned how to KonMari my possessions to fit into two suitcases.

That part is easy. What isn't is leaving the people I care about.

Now that I'm looking for another place to live, a friend recently asked me "Why not Bangkok?" It's a logical question, since that's been my alternate universe for over twenty years. But she is the reason why, along with some other close friends and my family. I can do it. I know how to do it, but the older I get, the higher the price becomes.

Time is infinite right up until we reach our sixties. Then we begin to assess and budget how we spend it. When I was a mere slip of a girl at 45, leaving was as easy as getting a passport. Now I know that no matter how much I love my life overseas and how many friends I may make in another part of the world, the ache of not being able to share it with the people I care about most grows stronger every year. When one of my sons came to visit me twice in Thailand, after each visit was over I cried for two days, and when my longest standing Bangkok friend returned to the States after years of being my mainstay in that city, I was unable to go downstairs to wave goodbye as he walked out the front door of our house. Expat living, when you do it on your own, is damned hard, even though it's materially more comfortable than existing in the Old Country.

Today when I went to Craigslist and examined my three different staple sites, I found several possibilities in this area. Only one was for Seattle and I'm pretty sure it was either a scam or someone else has already grabbed it. But it made me wonder. Are rents coming down in the Puget Sound market? And would I pay the top end of what I can in order to stay here, even though Tucson offers more comfort and Queens is the pinnacle of my desires? When I think of the pleasure of conversations with my friends and the joy of spontaneous visits with my sons, I say yes. I claim roots.

Where Would You Go?

A year ago I saw realtors clustering in the hallways of the building I'd lived in for years and I knew I was in trouble. When my landlord confirmed that yes indeed, the place was up for sale, I began to think of what to pack and what to jettison.

This wasn't an unfamiliar mental exercise. I'd left that building and returned to it twice over the past ten years but it had always been there for me. If I had a Seattle home, it was the International Apartments, and foolishly I'd thought it would always be there, as it had been for many others over the past hundred and four years. But boom town Seattle, flush with tech money, had other plans.

The workers in previous high times of this city had been gold prospectors, fishermen, loggers, shipbuilders, and factory workers. This current crop worked with intangibles, the Internet, the Cloud,  fostering dreams and satisfying desires on the world's computer screens. They were paid beyond any laborer's wildest dreams and they were filling up the city, paying astronomical rents and keeping the restaurants alive. They were crowding the rest of us out.

For the past year, I've shared a house with two friends and looked religiously on Craigslist for apartments. Craigslist is a lot like the mail order catalogs of my childhood. With a flick of my fingers, I can look at apartments all over the world, and I have. Mexico, Bangkok, Dublin, Marseilles, and almost every city in this country with a major league baseball team--I've peered at photos and assessed rents in them all.

A friend says I'm fantasizing but I'm really not. I've moved often enough in the past seventy years to become an expert on relocation, and some of those moves have involved a passport. So far only one was a disaster, a short-lived tenancy in Malaysia that was a financial disaster, a foretaste of hell, and a wake-up call. But Penang taught me to do my research and spend a lot of time in thought before leaping into a new life in another place.

When this all began, I said I'd give it a year, living in someone else's house, hoping that an opening in a low-income building would come my way, and continuing to scour online ads for possible dwelling places. That year will be up in three more months and I'm facing the reality that I may not have the luxury of living near my family and my friends much longer. My new deadline is this coming autumn.

Like Amazon, I've found two possibilities: Tucson and Queens.

Tucson has heat (oh god does it ever) and beautiful light, along with seasonal thunderstorms. Its sky is right up there with Cambodia's and Northeastern Thailand's. There are apartments that are only slightly higher than what I pay for living in this house, and according to food reviews, it has Chinese restaurants that use Sichuan pepper and chili oil. The library system is good, and there are bookstores.

It also looks quellingly suburban. But there are Ubers.

Queens. What can I say? It has everything I want and a winter that I don't. For the same price as a very nice apartment in Tucson or a 420-friendly travel trailer in this past of the world, I could share an apartment in South Richmond Hill, a couple of blocks away from sari shops, East Indian groceries, and a diner that knows how to make egg creams and ice cream sodas. It's close to two subway lines and the Atlantic Ocean is an hour away.

But living with someone else is a crap shoot that's easier played when you're in your twenties. At seventy, not so much. But it's New York.

So--I have all summer to ponder this and perhaps a reconnaissance trip or two for reality therapy. Meanwhile, I'm haunted by Tucson or Queens, the Lady or the Tiger.

Where would you go? Which would you choose? (This question is not rhetorical.)

Jenny Made Her Mind Up...

I have a confession to make. That snowstorm and its aftershocks--my fault, all mine. Back in the earliest days of February, I decided to increase my walking from 2-3 miles to 5. And then it snowed.

Snow on its own is a lovely thing to walk through, both when it falls and when it's fresh on the ground. Happy to have a chance to wear my fur jacket which I paired in true Pacific Northwest fashion with red rubber boots, I trudged through the transformed streets, taking pictures and smiling at the happy dogs whose morning walks had become a trip to canine Disneyland.

Even when I stayed inside, my world was different. The white landscape changed the quality of the light. Even with a heavy cloud cover, the days were bright and once when I woke up at 3 am, I was certain it was time to get up. "White-out" they call it in Alaska and in this part of the country it was almost hallucinogenic and definitely surreal.

The beauty of it almost made up for the truth that it closed Seattle down. Buses were scanty, children stayed home from school, flights were cancelled, library doors were locked. That began to feel oddly familiar. It was like living in Bangkok when political strife took to the streets, or like Fairbanks, Alaska during a siege of heavy ice fog.

And then the ice took over. The University of Washington swears that a student who died after slipping on campus ice and hitting her head perished from natural causes. I began to salt my porch steps, knowing it was an environmental sin but finding that I couldn't break through the packed and icy snow with a shovel. Walking to buy groceries took forever because the idea of a broken hip made me cautious. The world shrunk and it stayed that way for days.

There are still patches of dirty snow in my front yard while the back has lost its beauty and is fifty shades of grey-green. The cold prevails but the sidewalks are mostly clear and dry. My cat continues to stare balefully out the window and becomes worried when he sees me put on my boots. He's eight years old and has never seen anything like this before. For the first few days of winter he burrowed under my comforter, only emerging when it was absolutely necessary. There were a few late afternoons when I followed his example, with a book and a cup of tea.

When I was small, my mother would tease me at times with a song about Jenny, who persistently made her mind up, with disastrous results. I thought of those lyrics often in the past three weeks, when my walks were perfunctory, careful, and much shorter than five miles..

Sorry, Seattle.

The Price We Can Pay, and the One We Can't

The minute I read about a book that interests me, usually in reviews that focus on works soon to be published, I order it. Right now I have eight forthcoming titles on order, and I've recently read four novels that just arrived on the shelves. No, I'm not wealthy, nor am I starving myself in order to buy books. I have a library card.

Unfortunately I live in a city of avid readers who know the same secret. When I reserve a book not yet published, I'm often #300 in line. Fortunately our library system has adopted the wonderful idea of first-come, first-serve with Peak Picks, a section of books that can't be reserved or renewed. Recently I looked at the Peak Pick shelf in my branch library; there was a book I had reserved months ago and wouldn't receive until after 338 other people had finished with it. Gleefully I snatched up Tayari Jones' An American Marriage and raced my way through it in a single evening. Today I'll take it back and hope for another surprise.

This is what the current President wants to weaken, by reducing federal funding for public libraries. He must know that Fire and Fury is currently on the Peak Pick shelves, and has 1400 people on the reserved list, waiting for one of the 452 copies that can be renewed. Or perhaps he's chafed by the number of readers who have checked out the 191 copies of Hillary's What Happened, which appeared on the Peak Pick shelves the same day that it showed up in bookstores. Of course this is a man who regularly rails against the free press and invented the epithet "fake news" for anything that puts him in an unfavorable light. Why would he be in favor of free libraries, those places where people go to read, among other things, newspapers?

We all provide financial support for our libraries, through taxes which are then reflected in the price of our rent, the cost of our groceries. It's a price that the city I live in has agreed is worth paying and because of that our libraries are open every single day, offering books that many of us otherwise could never afford to read. I am confident that even without federal support, my city would still have libraries. But the question is unavoidable: Can we afford a president who doesn't see the value of an electorate who reads, regardless of its income level?

I don't think we can.

Without a Tree

No childhood is idyllic and mine was not an exception, but there were times with no dark corners, and one of them was when we went out to find a Christmas tree. We all went with our father, except for our mother who stayed home to untangle the Christmas lights. Our father carried an axe; we tried our best to keep from getting snow in our boots.

There were no drifts in the woods but we were in search of small trees, ones that we could carry, and those bordered the meadows where snow was blown into deep rippling dunes. Soon the smallest children whose feet were closest to the ground yelled "I have snow in my boots."  The rest of us remained stoic, not wanting to break the good mood that our father was always in when we hunted down our Christmas tree.

There was a lot of amiable argument about which tree was perfect. We had to examine the best ones from every angle, looking for unevenly spaced boughs or bends in the trunk. Our standards dropped as our socks grew wet from melted snow and at last even our father was willing to compromise. We all cheered when the tree began to topple and each of us reached between its branches to grab the trunk and carry it home, bellowing out "Oh Christmas Tree" every step of the way.

Our mother had cleared a place for it while we were gone, and we tore into boxes of ornaments, looking for the five little Swiss elves, one for each of us. The big room that was our downstairs living space soon was filled with the scent of fresh spruce boughs, and the tree, not yet full of lights and baubles, was so majestic that for a minute, I wished we could leave it untrimmed.

We all lost interest by the time that the finishing touches of tinsel needed to be added. Our father always suggested we stand back and hurl the silver strips at the branches and our mother was the one who carefully draped the strands in judicious clusters to resemble the icicles they were designed to replicate.

Finally it was time to place the star on the top, which meant our father had to climb a stepladder as we clung to the bottom, ensuring his safety. At last the lights were turned on and Christmas began.

I loved to get up before anyone else, go downstairs, and turn on the tree. Sitting in the silence and darkness of early morning, I stared at the gleam and radiance of the tree we had found together and was certain there was no way to celebrate the end of the year except with an axe in hand, snow-filled boots, and carols that filled the snow-filled meadows, floating into still and frozen air.

Chungking City

I was feeling frazzled when I stumbled off an evening flight from Bangkok to Hong Kong. I had come to spend a month in Chungking Mansions, a plan that had me apprehensive. People had told me it was a center for all sorts of risky business and my curiosity had prevailed over caution. But now I wondered how I would find my way through the labyrinthine hallways that I’d seen in the movie Chungking Express,and whether I would end up sharing my bed with hungry insects. I tried not to think of advice given to a friend before she stayed in that notorious spot: “Bring a gun.” She had moved to a hotel farther up Nathan Road only a few days after she had checked into a Chungking Mansion guesthouse.

  Deciding I needed a little pampering before I faced my destination, I swerved away from the Airport Express signs and headed off in search of a taxi queue. I’d changed a substantial sum of money to Hong Kong dollars before I’d boarded the plane; it would be an expensive indulgence but I would be living the Spartan life soon enough. I deserved that taxi, I told myself.

  I wasn’t a neophyte traveler. I’d gone alone to cities in Southeast Asia and China, and had always been successful in finding my way from airports to my destination. So it was with no trepidation that I joined a crowd of travelers heading down an exit hallway that I was certain would lead me to a taxi stand. When a shabbily dressed man approached me and asked me if I wanted a taxi, I was more than happy to hand over my suitcase and follow in his wake. Just like Bangkok, I thought,  taxi queues are for chumps.

  The man led me across a parking lot to a large van. In Thailand this is a common form of public transit and although I’d looked forward to the privacy of a taxi, at least the additional passengers who would ride with me would help defray the cost of the fare. I climbed in, the man tossed my suitcase on the floor beside me, and then slid the door shut. I was the only person in the vehicle aside from the man in the driver’s seat. As the door clicked into place, he started the engine.

  “How much?” That this was a question I should have asked several minutes earlier was a fact that struck me with full force. There was no reply, and the driver pulled onto the open road without picking up any other fares.

  I began to feel incredibly stupid, How many times had I read about naïve tourists being taken for a ride in New York City, one that ended in a demand that approximated a small fortune? But I was in Asia, I consoled myself, not Manhattan. The most I’d ever been overcharged in Bangkok was twenty dollars—Hong Kong, of course, would be more expensive, but certainly not up to New York standards.

  I made myself relax and began to enjoy the lights of the approaching city that gleamed on the dark water. The driver broke into polite, pleasant taxi conversation and I responded with a sense of relief.

  He proudly identified the neon extravaganza that was Nathan Road and waved at a building that we passed, “That’s Chungking Mansions,” he told me. “Stop here, please,” I said. He kept going.

  We pulled into a dimly lit, empty street and parked near an ATM. The driver pulled out a laminated card with rates printed on it; this much for a passenger, so much for a bag, another sum for the privilege of using a highway tunnel, and the final amount being the fare to Kowloon. When the numbers were added up, the sum was substantial and I tried a feeble attempt at bargaining. He laughed.

  “That is the rate. If you don’t have enough, we can use the ATM.”

  He was no longer smiling and neither was I. The phone I had played with at the beginning of our journey, hoping he thought I was texting a local contact, was useless. I hadn’t yet bought a SIM card for Hong Kong. I opened my bag and pulled out my Hong Kong dollars.

  The fare he demanded wasn’t quite as much as the money I had with me, but it was about $200 US dollars. As pleasantly as I could, I asked, “May I have one of your business cards?”

  “Why? You want to use me again?” He smiled as he handed me a card with a name and number that I was certain would be useless.

  And of course it was. When the Nepalese tout who greeted me at the entrance of Chungking Mansions looked horrified at the amount of money I had lost and tried to call the printed phone number, it didn’t exist. “What did the man look like?” When I gave him a description, he said, “He’s done that before to many people; they paid him more money than you did because they didn’t know. Here, give me your phone.”

  He led me to a place where I could buy a Hong Kong SIM card and then put his number into my contact list. “Call me if anybody gives you any more trouble,” he said. He took me to a guesthouse where I was given a clean bed in a quiet room and suddenly Chungking Mansions felt like a place where I would be comfortable and safe—just so long as I took public transportation to get there from now on.

  For years after that, I stayed in Chungking Mansions when I was in Hong Kong, always for a month at a time, and the only thing that ever made me frightened during my visits was the possibility of a fire. The wiring was often visible, tangled in terrifying clumps above the entrances to guesthouses, and kitchen carts filled with cooked food came from the upper floors to the ground floor food stalls every morning. Although I loved the smell of curry and freshly baked naan that drifted into my room at night, the thought of propane tanks and open flame being used somewhere close to my bed did nothing to make my sleep tranquil. I never stayed higher than the ninth floor and had my escape route down the staircase timed to the second.

  It was the ugliest spot I had ever spent time in. The windows I insisted on having gave me a view of grey, mildewed concrete walls, windowsills strewn with garbage that was eaten by pigeons, and clothing suspended from air conditioners, drying in air that smelled like wet mops. The stairway was blotched with the red stains of spit from betel chewers and the windows on the landings often sported tiny holes that looked as though they had been made by bullets. The food gave me Delhi Belly if I ate it for more than two days in a row. My rooms were always clean with walls of immaculate white tile, but were so small that I took my morning shower only after putting towels under the bathroom threshold to keep rivulets of bathwater from trickling under my bed.

But there was an honest sense of community in Chungking Mansions that appealed to me. Many of the people who worked there lived in the place and at that time, most of the people who stayed there were repeat visitors from third-world countries who had come as traders, business people. They left pushing carts stacked high with bags and boxes that had been swaddled in duct tape, on their way home to Africa and the Subcontinent. When they returned to Chungking Mansions, they were greeted as friends and surrounded by colleagues as soon as they came in from the street. They would stay in the same guesthouses they had used for years, chatting in the reception area with people from other countries, all of them using English as their common language. The long lines standing in wait for the building’s elevators were convivial spots and at night the hallways on the ground floor were boulevards where passing men clasped hands in greeting and stopped to form small clusters of conversation.

High stacks of brightly printed fabric from African countries gave welcome splashes of color to shops that sold bolts of cheap Chinese cloth, glass cases filled with Indian pastries gleamed like displays at Tiffany’s, and on the floor above, shops sold Bollywood videos, packaged temple offerings, sticks of kohl, and wizened vegetables. Bob Marley’s face stared into the stream of passersby from a stall that sold hip-hop clothes and at the end of a corridor that led from the building to Nathan Road, an old man had racks of paperback books attached to the wall, along with postcards and an impressive collection of skin magazines. At the end of the corridor was a newsstand where the proprietor usually was in the company of a cat. Behind him were stacked cages, each holding a feline; I never found out why.

It was a self-sufficient urban village where I could find laundries, meals that had flavor, drinking water, newspapers, phone cards, toilet paper, and a stunning collection of cosmetics and shampoo in the adjoining building that paid homage to Wong Kar-Wai’s classic film by calling itself Chungking Express. If I had been able to wait until eleven o’clock, I could have had tiny cups of dark, lethally strong coffee at a Turkish food stall.  And I could do all of this in English. I could have spent my entire Hong Kong visit without ever leaving this place if it hadn’t been so dark and crowded. As it was, I had to go out all day, every day to keep from going stir-crazy and even then my claustrophobia set in after the first month.

Hong Kong is a city where every need can be filled, but this is difficult for people like me who come with a small supply of cash and don’t know the territory or the language. Local friends would lead me to a small counter in a busy shopping mall where they conducted  a transaction in Chinese for whatever I happened to need at the moment. I soon learned that I could do that on my own at a small counter, but in English, in Chungking Mansions.

No matter where I stayed, whether it was halfway up a hillside in the New Territories, in a Shenzhen hotel room, or an Airbnb apartment in North Point, I ended up on the ground floor of my first home in Hong Kong. It was where I bought my SIM cards, exchanged currency, had luggage repaired, and in a pinch, could always find a place to sleep. But each time I returned, I found a different place.

Nathan Road had been discovered by tourists from the mainland, who came with their wheeled suitcases that they filled with everything from instant noodles to finery from Chanel. They clogged the aisles of the international supermarket that was across the street from Chungking Mansions, heaping their grocery carts with cans of baby formula, boxes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates, and packages of disposable diapers. They stood in line at Cartier and filled the seats of every Starbucks for miles around. And because, like me, they saw no reason to spend a fortune for a place to sleep, their headquarters became Chungking Mansions.

Although the rooms were still cheap by Hong Kong standards, guesthouse prices were soon jacked up to meet the growing demand. Rumor had it that one place had rooms that commanded a nightly rate of 200 U.S dollars. One night, on a weekend, when I came looking for a room after ten o’clock, I ended up paying 100 U.S. for a room that in the past would have topped out at under 50, even during Chinese New Year when prices reached the stratosphere.

Food stalls began to disappear on the ground floor, replaced by rows upon rows of currency exchanges, all proclaiming their rate for RMB, and shops that sold luggage on wheels. The hip-hop clothing store was gone, relegated to a higher floor, and the fabric shops had been condensed to single counters in shops that sold cheap phones and SIM cards. The hallways were thronged with Chinese travelers; the clusters of men who had spent hours in deep conversation were no longer in evidence. In the corridor where there had been books and cats now there were neither. The old man who had once sold me a copy of The Help when I was desperate for something to read now had wheeled suitcases lined up against the wall. “Business is different,” he said.

“Yes, so much change,” the man who sold me a SIM card on a recent visit agreed with a tinge of bitterness to his tone. The guesthouse where I had always stayed had empty chairs in the reception area, chairs that in years past always had held people who were busily packing merchandise into cartons and black garbage bags.

To reach the guesthouse, I stood waiting for the elevator in the company of only one other person, a Nigerian who chatted with me in English accented with French. Suddenly we were joined by two others, men with Subcontinental origins who stepped in front of us, close to the elevator doors.

“What kind of people are you, to step in front of a lady,” the Nigerian snapped at them, “We were here first and you push ahead like that. Who do you think you are?”

“Calm down,” he was told, “there are only four of us here. No one is being pushed out; we’ll all get in the elevator. No problem.”

“But you are so impolite. Do you think you’re better than this lady--or me?”

“It’s okay,” one of the men said quietly, “Be cool. Chungking Mansions is for business, not for fighting.”

As we all stepped into the elevator without bloodshed, I knew the code of this community was still in place and just for a moment, once again I felt at home.