Lilacs and Desire in the Cruelest Month

It's not even a good line, that old "February is the cruelest month" bilge. In fact he was full of lines that were not even good, that gloomy old fraud--"Do I dare to eat a peach?" But nobody appealed to me the way T.S. Eliot did when I was in my late teens, when I was still a girl and trying things on, studying Camus and Calvin Klein with the same passionate concentration.

I drank coffee by the gallon and smoked almost as much as my father did and abandoned the white gloves that every lady was supposed to wear when she went shopping. I went off to college with my best friend and roommate who shared my belief that there was never any reason to be bored as long as we had functioning imaginations. Shirley made mobiles with our cosmetic and perfume boxes and I scrawled graffiti on our dorm room walls with sidewalk chalk. We shared clothes and after we discovered the joy of speed through diet pills we shared those too. We had our first babies several years later, within months of each other. Our lives diverged and then we lost contact.

I have always, in a deep corner of my heart and mind, missed her.

This month has been weighted. On my windowsill are three flowering jasmine, each in its own little cobalt blue pot, brought to me by a man who no longer lives in Bangkok but whose remembered presence fills my version of this city. One of my sons and his girlfriend will be here in two weeks for a visit that fills me with almost more happiness than I can hold. And the girl I used to be is in some way waking up with a renewed contact with my friend Shirley.

Good things come in threes, it used to be said. It's true that three is a number that holds magic--Macbeth's three witches, the Three Graces, the Trinity. Having these three parts of my life come to me in one month are making me look at the whole of it more closely. Once again, and what does this mean, T.S. Eliot is the one to pinpoint my feelings--We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

About Books

First of all, this stunning little book was in my mailbox yesterday and I can't wait to take it out for its first walk in my world. I've been eating Bangkok's street food since 1995, but the neighborhoods explored in Bangkok's Top 50 aren't ones I've had meals in very often--and Chinatown is one where the sensory overload is so huge that I simply drop in my tracks when I'm there and eat whatever happens to be closest to me. But not now...thanks to Chawadee Nualkhair (who also reveals her favorite street food spots quite regularly at BangkokGlutton.com) I'm already gluttonously dying for a sequel to this--maybe one that concentrates exclusively on Chinatown???

It's already quite clear to me that Chawadee is a better woman than I--she classifies hoy taud as a snack but I have never been able to manage to follow up a mussel pancake with anything else for at least eight hours. But meal or snack, I'm eager to find the stalls that she recommends for one of my favorite street suppers. And her pages on beverages are wonderful--my quest for nam dok anjan (butterfly pea juice) starts today.

But the best part of Bangkok's Top 50 as far as I'm concerned is it gives the hours that these stalls are open--no longer will I wistfully roam around Soi Convent wondering where the Thai-Muslim chicken biryani (khao moke gai) stall disappeared to. In fact that's where I will be today at noon--they are open for lunch.

This book also gives a brief demystification of a Chinese apothecary, complete with address, a spot on a map, and the name in Thai in case I still can't find it. I am in a state of bliss--thank you, Chawadee! (Further feedback to come...for others who want to have this book, it will soon be in Asia Books and B2S--now available through Amazon and www.bangkokglutton.com)

The American Embassy is presided over by a new ambassador, blonde, smiling, charming. Her Excellency Kristie Anne Kenney has been receiving lots of attention in the English-language papers for breaking out of the usual diplomatic insulation and enjoying her new city. It is undoubtedly no coincidence that for the first time since I first arrived in this city, there is information about the U.S. Embassy's Information Resource Center--Open to the Public with a comfortable reading room with books, magazines, ebooks, CDs, DVDs and, the Bangkok Post reports, a few iPads too. It's on the 9th floor of the GPF Building at 93/1 Wireless Road, open from Monday through Friday 7 am to 4 pm. Who knew??? (When I first arrived here I asked the Embassy about any sort of library that they might have and was told to go to AUA.) Thank you, Your Excellency Ms. Kenney!

At the end of my last visit to Hong Kong, I learned that travelers are allowed to use any of the public libraries in that city if they pay a deposit of 130 HK dollars per book that they wish to borrow. Even the small library I visited in Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon, had a good selection of books in English and the much larger library across the water in Central I was told has a stunning collection that can be borrowed from after paying the deposit. How civilized and how I wish every city would adopt this policy.

Happy Reading to all--

"One word for you, my boy--"

It's been a long time since The Graduate and if Benjamin Braddock had listened to the sage gentleman at poolside, he'd be a wealthy man today.

Am I the only one who remembers the thrill of having Baggies replace waxed paper? The smell of baloney no longer wafted from my brown-bag lunch and nevermore did I suffer the humiliation of finding that my sandwich had escaped the confines of its wrapping and was in discrete and inedible pieces within the bag. Baggies were clean, modern and required no arcane origami skills--what was there not to love?

Almost half a century later, there's plenty not to love about plastic bags, no matter what size they come in. And I live in a country that is choking in them--http://thefastertimes.com/foodculture/2010/04/01/plastic-attack/

When I first came to Thailand, I went out one morning, asked a vendor at a coffee cart for a cup of hot, black coffee, and was handed a small plastic bag, held tightly shut by a rubber band, and a straw issuing from the rubber band closure. It was filled with hot, black coffee. I was terrified.

But the bag held and I eventually emptied it and threw the receptacle away. It was the first of hundreds of thousands of small sandwich bags that came my way and went into the garbage--as Karen Coates says in the post that is linked above, a meal from a Thai market can easily involve a dozen plastic bags. If it's a group dinner, there might be a hundred.

Just buying a simple meal of grilled chicken and sticky rice involves a bag for the chicken, a bag for the rice, and a bag for the spicy sauce that is the artform that transforms this food. Braised pork leg is even worse--a styrofoam box for the pork, greens and rice, a plastic bag for the broth, a plastic bag for the seasoning sauce, and still another if you add the raw chili and garlic cloves that are eaten with this meal. This is the reason why I rarely bring food home--if I eat it on a plate, no bags are involved.

Penang and Hong Kong, both islands with limited space, are launching a war against plastic. In Hong Kong, if you don't bring your own bag to a store, you pay for a plastic one. In Penang, this is the case for part of the week and there was a strong rumor that it would be an everyday occurrence after the first of the year. Supermarkets sell fabric bags and some of them made it back to Bangkok with me.

I use them when I go to 7/11 or a supermarket or a bookstore. When I go to the markets that I love, I still use it but it's a vessel for plastic bags--one for the oranges, one for the bananas. Fruit vendors weigh the fruit in a plastic bag before figuring the price and even if I dumped the fruit in my cloth bag, the plastic would still be discarded--I don't have a solution for that yet.

Things are changing here--supermarkets have signs that ask customers to bring their own bag. Plastic cups with dome-shaped lids have almost supplanted the bag and rubber band combo. I'm not sure that's an improvement, but Thailand still has "gleaners". People rummage through garbage looking for items that can be sold to recyclers, and factories are turning out items made from recycled plastic. It's an imperfect solution but it's a step away from a plastic-clogged world.

Catching Up

I realize I'm getting old when I return from a long trip, never when I'm on one. It's when I return to Bangkok that I fall into the lassitude I refuse to succumb to when I'm exploring a city that I don't know. In the same way that a bad break-up is supposed to take a month for every year that you were immersed in the relationship--or is the reverse true?-- it takes me a week for every month I've been away to bounce back into my life as I once knew it.

Part of this is a sort of mental digestion process. I take photos and keep a wretched set of notes when I travel but mostly I wander around in silence and look and observe and feel as hard as I can. I try to encode what I experience in my cells, release it all when I begin to remember, and then select what's useful to me as a writer. This process all takes longer than it sounds and makes me a hell of a dull traveling companion--a lot like a python in human form--as well as someone who needs lots of silence and solitude when I get home.

Another factor in my slow reassimilation process is Bangkok does not stand still when I'm gone--and an absence of three months guarantees I'm going to find a lot of changes when I return. People leave, buildings dissolve, foodstalls disappear, new houses emerge like frogs after a rainstorm--and that's just in my neighborhood. It's what makes this city an exciting and vibrant and frequently unsettling place to live--and for me, a woman who thinks of routine in the same way that the devil regards holy water, it's what makes it a place I always am glad to come back to.

A few days ago, I went out into a street that has always bored me senseless and found a one-storey deep purple building with no windows and stylized, twisted trees embellishing its metal exterior, sprawled along the sidewalk. It looked like the sort of rock and roll club where hair metal used to flourish in this city a decade or so before.

I walked in to a cavern, a space that was dark and surprisingly, in this land of perpetually frigid air-conditioning, not cool. Little shops dotted the center like mushrooms on a tree trunk, selling the sort of thing that upscale teenage girls love: ballet slippers, short and skimpy dresses, costume jewelry, slouchy handbags in primary colors, ice cream. Taking up almost as much space as the shops were tables and chairs scattered about, festooned with stylized spiderwebs and overturned wine goblets, as though wedding guests had suddenly realized that Miss Havisham wasn’t going to be married after all.

Small enclosed restaurants of the bistro variety lined the inner perimeter of the building and running the full length of the back wall was a Goreyesque exterior of a Victorian mansion, complete with baroque and mythical history on a bilingual sign. For around six dollars, mall visitors were invited to enter and be terrified. “Do not harm the actors in any way,” the sign cautioned, making me feel terrified without even paying an entrance fee.

Walking back towards my apartment, I began to notice all of the brand new apartment and condos that are so lavishly advertised on walls of the Skytrain and Metro, and suddenly there was a market that filled the edges of boring old Ratchadapisek Road with food and clothes and the newspapers in English that have disappeared from my soi. Trees sprouted in dusty optimism at the sides of the street and to my surprise I realized this thoroughfare had been filling in the blanks during the two years that I had ignored it. Bangkok’s irrepressible life and spirit is taking hold, moving from the sois nearby where it has always been to a larger staging ground. In this most unlikely neighborhood, one that had never held interest for me, Bangkok's surprises welcomed me home one more time.

One Foot at a Time

Lantau is Hong Kong's largest island and houses the airport, Disneyland, and more than a few shopping malls. The ferry that took me there on the early morning of New Year's Day embarked at a pier that looked quite a bit like a beach community in southern California, complete with lattes. But my friend Jennifer had promised me a hike with light and silence, so I suspended my disbelief and followed in her wake.

In a surprisingly short time we were on a coastline that was filled with fishermen's cottages and small well-tended vegetable gardens. This, Jennifer explained, was where the Filipina maids who worked for island families lived, and as we passed open doorways, we saw young women cooking, chatting, primping, as cd players blared music onto an ocean view. I thought of the Hong Kong Filipinas who take to the streets in search of their own space on Sundays and holidays, giving each other manicures while sitting on cardboard-covered pavement and began to understand the advantages of island living.

As we left the houses behind, Jennifer stopped still and whispered, "Listen." An echoing whisper was the only sound as waves washed onto rocks and then whooshed away.

A road led us past a Trappist monastery and then into a forest dappled with light. A narrow path took us along the edge of a towering hill and the cool, clean, sharp odor of berries and dew-moistened leaves hit my nostrils like a drug. The whisper of waves had been replaced by a soft rush of wind moving the surrounding trees and for a minute I greedily longed to stand in this place during a storm.

A steep staircase with concrete steps and a well-anchored railing led straight down the hillside to the water, a small town that had once been a silver-mining community, and ferries and buses back to the city. A Turkish restaurant there was the spot where Jennifer took me for lunch and I tore into the fresh bread that was brought to our table with the sort of appetite that only comes after lungs tarnished with urban grime have been thoroughly bathed in fresh air.

Chungking Year's End

I took sushi up to the Holiday early on New Year’s Eve, enough to share and be festive. It became a potluck picnic, with bite-size pieces of Hari’s supermarket pizza, and chunks of guava and oranges. A Polish sushi restaurant owner emerged from his room to evaluate and identify what I had bought, then went off into the night early with his bottle of champagne, goblets and a pretty girl, all brought with him from his native land. “You should leave now if you want to see the fireworks at the waterfront,” he warned me, but it was only eight o’clock.

I’d seen fireworks before. What interested me more than pyrotechnics was how CKM and its neighborhood celebrated the turning of the year. “More people than on Christmas Eve,” Hari told me, “because on Christmas the Muslims don’t come out but for the New Year there is everybody on the street.”

I was the only one from our little impromptu feast who was curious about what was going on outside of our walls. “Too many people,’ my companions shuddered and turned to their computers to be with friends in other countries.

Lines of young Chinese dressed in party clothes waited at the elevators and the halls of CKM were already almost empty at nine p.m. The streets outside were possessed by pedestrians once more but the shops were all open. It was business as usual in lower Kowloon but with an extravaganza of customers.

Christmas Eve had been a moment when all real life was suspended in favor of magic, with people out to see the lights and decorations in a long and delighted parade. What filled the area now was an ocean of shoppers participating in what looked like the world’s hugest midnight madness sale.

“It’s too early,” I said when I returned to the Holiday. “There are two things to do out there, shop or go to a bar and drink and I’m not in the mood to do either one.” But an hour later, I put on my coat and my ugly, newly purchased market gloves and went out in the world once more.

The street to the waterfront felt as though it was full of one massive, pushing, crawling organism, rather than a crowd of people. It was packed solid with bodies that moved a sixteenth of an inch at a time and it seemed obvious that even if we reached the waterfront, all we would be able to see would be backs and heads. There was a grim quality about the collective determination that surrounded me that made me think of how little I wanted to be trampled to death.

Before claustrophobia could gain the upper hand, I made my way to the sidewalk, which was almost empty in comparison to the maelstrom of people I had just left. Other cowards had placed themselves next to buildings and a group of Sikhs were quite industriously applying themselves to bottles of Chivas Regal, with a remarkable lack of celebratory spirit, almost as though they were getting ready to go to work.

They moved off toward CKM and then suddenly I heard drumming. By the time I reached the spot where the sound came from, it had taken on an insistent and wild rhythm and I wasn’t surprised to find the men who surrounded it were the scotch-drinking Sikhs.

It was a double-sided drum, hung around a neck by a strap, which must have been irksome because the drum wasn’t small. Men took turns playing, passing it around, dancing with abandon that Zorba the Greek would have envied, some still holding bottles of Scotch.

They were all men, until a short, plump Western woman who was far from glamorous broke into their circle and joined them. The dancing became wilder in response and downright lewd as one man stood beside her with energetic pelvic thrusts. I couldn’t see her face to gauge her response; the circle of dancers grew so tight that I was afraid she’d be trampled but she emerged in one piece, with an incredible New Year’s Eve story for the folks back home.

The crowd around the dancers was now so thick that I could only see hands moving to the drumbeat over the heads and upheld cameras of people around me. The drumming was loud and compelling and when the distant boom of fireworks began to echo through the buildings around us, none of us turned to see, although the glass walls of hotels and shopping malls took on an eerie, apocalyptic glow.

And then all of us were swept up in a push that began to carry us down the street toward the subway station entrances. I broke free from the surge and managed to get to the steps of CKM, where a group of young African women smiled and made room for me. In the street was a mass of moving darkness, pressed so closely together that it looked like a carpet of heads. And in the middle of it all, moving steadily away, was the sound of drums, swimming down a river that only comes to life to mark the passage of time.

As I went back to my room, I knew somewhere the party continued but I was too old to care. “I came back at five this morning,” Jun told me on the first day of the year and I knew I had missed the real story but it was no longer mine to tell.

New Territory, New Year

Hong Kong is the most compressed big city I've ever seen, filled with layer upon layer of buildings and a spiderweb of crazily intersecting streets. Kowloon has more space, which I love, but both places are crammed with more opportunities for conspicuous consumption than I feel comfortable with over the long haul. My antidote for this has been street markets that sell fresh food and utilitarian clothing to local residents, until the day I got on a bus near one of those markets, that took me into the hills and beyond.

The area beyond Kowloon stretches into mainland China and is still called the New Territories. Satellite communities to house the overflow from the cities are sprouting up here, in the middle of dazzling natural beauty that still gives the impression of wilderness. There are hills behind the highrises that are dramatically shaped and gloriously green. There are islands within spitting distance of small coastal towns that are vacant--some of which are just slightly bigger than a postage stamp. And in front of the Hong Kong Heritage Museum on the banks of a sparkling river, there are trees full of white egrets, watching the nearby fisherman reel rather unimpressive catches up onto a bridge.

In Sha Tin park near the river, old ladies ballroom danced to outdoor karaoke while old men watched from a vantage point on the hill above the dancers. Suddenly I was in Beijing again, until I found a foodcourt on a busy street where all of the food was Japanese. In Sai Kung I scrambled onto a bobbing sampan from a steep staircase with the help of people I'd never met before and was carried to a silent island with rocky beaches that took me back to my Alaskan childhood. I needed this kind of time.

This beauty is a quick ride on the MRT or in the case of Sai Kung, an MRT ride and then a spectacular bus trip that winds across the hills. The journey is so brief that it's hard to believe it transports me to another universe, where a child's lost festively pink balloon floats along a grass-green river as egrets watch it speculatively, or to a pier that will take me to an island that I can almost believe once sheltered Robinson Crusoe.

I've learned in the past few months that places like this and I aren't meant for longterm relationships but are quick restorative flings to sustain me when I go back to my crazy crowded kinetic city that I love and leave and always return to. They stay with me as small places of quiet and beauty, to be remembered when I most need them, gifts of light and silence.

From Shanghai Street Art Space

Christmas Was Really Here

Starbucks was open this morning in the only spot in the world where I enjoy going to Starbucks--Isquare across from Chungking Mansions--and the very nice older couple who sat near me spoke Thai, so I was able to misuse the language I love for a little while. There were mangos and pomelo from Thailand in the supermarket so I took them back to the Holiday for a taste of Bangkok along with a little bottle of Bailey's for a taste of Christmas. Two of the people who tasted with me were from Chiang Mai but originally from NYC and Seattle--and since they had been to Nepal, which is where Hari and Jun come from, there were no degrees of separation on Christmas morning.

I went off to find a religious observance of the birthday, since I knew there was often spirited hymn-singing accompanied by drums on the fourth floor. But the Christian Center was closed for Christmas, which I thought was rather delightful, so I went to the Turkish kebab place instead, where the second course of my holiday brunch was mint goat's milk ice cream and Turkish coffee, both of which are definitely drugs and definitely delicious.

Riding my sugar/caffeine high, I left CKM and went off in search of a baby tuxedo at H&M, where I discovered a cast of thousands all shopping the sale racks at the only H&M in Hong Kong that carries no baby clothes. So the infant girl whom I just met will probably not sport the Annie Hall look this season, latida, latida.

Shanghai Street is my favorite Kowloon thoroughfare so I escaped the aerobic shopping of the malls near Nathan Road and headed down past cooking supply shops that have really lovely wooden molds for I don't know what and gorgeous little wooden spoons and mesh things with handles that would look really pretty hanging on a wall.

I was stopped in my tracks by a sign hanging on the door of the Shanghai Street Artspace that said essentially Kids, don't bring your peanuts in here anymore. We've had to sweep up shells everywhere. This isn't something I've ever seen posted on a door of an art gallery, so I had to go in, saying as I entered, "I didn't bring any peanuts with me."

A young man came over and began to tell me why the sign was there--the space is to encourage neighborhood children to come in and make art, which they do but the peanut shells they left behind were becoming a nuisance. The space had once been an art gallery, but is now a place that encourages creativity--and as it turned out, much more.

Flowers made of bright, iridescent paper that are attached to bamboo frames covered the upper wall. These once covered the walls of businesses in Kowloon in geometric and intricate traditional patterns, handmade by artists, when the enterprise first opened and would remain in place for a year. A black and white photo of a building on Shanghai Street shows what this looked like, much like the ceramic flowers on a Thai temple, with the walls covered with designs made of handmade flowers, which must have been dazzling.

The art space has an artist in residence, a man who spent his life making art on buildings with these designs. When the young men who run the space found out the artist no longer had work, they asked him to be with them. He creates his designs and teaches children who want to learn how to do what he does.

But that's not all that goes on here. The director of this amazing community resource is an activist and uses art to make his points. Today is the one-year anniversary of the imprisonment of this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner and the windows of the art space are emblazoned with the face of Liu Xiaobao wearing a Santa Claus hat and a smile. His face is also attached to an empty stool that stands on the sidewalk near the open door.

Yau Ma Tei is not a wealthy area and gentrification is not yet its hallmark. The Shanghai Street Art Space is near the Kowloon Asthma Center and the neighborhood Immigration Office. The Yau Ma Tei Public Library is close by, and it looks as though it still exists in the 1950s. A large fresh market fills an area only blocks away and it is for the community, not for tourists. It's a neighborhood that needs the creativity and energy of the people who run this space--and Hong Kong needs their irreverence and imagination and freedom of thought. Please stop in and chat with Lee Chun Fung at 404 Shanghai Street. He's a man who can make December 25th feel like Christmas.

Chungking Christmas Eve

Before I went to dinner tonight, Hari told me, "Tonight the streets will be full of people. There will be no cars, only walk, walk, walk." There were "No loitering" signs in the subway that hadn't been there earlier in the day and notices said, "After 6 pm waiting for friends in this area will not be allowed."

When I came home at 9 pm, I came up to a neighborhood that was engulfed with pedestrians. A river of people coursed down Nathan Road and along the waterfront, admiring the Christmas lights, taking pictures, shopping. There were families with their children dressed in festive red outfits, teenagers dressed to the teeth, people wearing Santa Claus hats and reindeer horns and cardboard top hats with glitter script that said Merry Christmas. There were Indians and Africans and Westerners and Chinese, all torrenting along streets that usually belong to vehicles, all punctiliously following police crowd control instructions, all having fun. Carolers stood in the middle of the road and a brass band swept by, playing a jazzy version of Hark the Herald.

"This happens three times a year," a security guard told me, "On Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, and Chinese New Year." He and his colleagues were pulling gates over the entrance to Chungking Mansions at 11 pm, leaving one small open doorway that was just big enough to allow one person to enter the building at a time. The halls were almost empty and most of the lights were already turned out.

Families were headed toward the subways, a pop concert was in full swing on Canton Road, and the holiday spirit showed no signs of ending. "After midnight there is singing and dancing," Hari told me, but sensory overload claimed me well before then. Merry Christmas, everyone.