Escaped The Chamber

You know you're in Hong Kong when you get to work in the morning to find your boss fiddling with a silver can asking, "WHO has been using my OXYGEN? It's empty now." There was a small deadline crisis. Johannes, the editor of Taxi magazine, whispered to me, indignant, "I think it was Tom." Tom is our editor at AsiaCity Publishing. People in Hong Kong like to keep oxygen around--but it's especially wise for people who have as many daily deadlines as Johannes.

Sometimes at HK I do strange work, like the day I had to collect responses from people on the street about what they do when they can't sleep at night, and then take their pictures. He wanted about ten to twelve responses, mixed demographic, preferably funny. I met a Dutch couple who both had blue eyes, and matching blue shirts that were the same blue as their eyes. They wouldn't let me take their picture. A lot of people seem to think masturbating is a good way to pass the time when you can't fall asleep. Except for the Dutch couple, but if they didn't have each other, that's what they'd be doing.

Also, sometimes I have to find people I don't know very much about, and ask them strange questions about their habits. For example, I'll go into my boss' office, and he'll ask me, "How would YOU like to go to a super exclusive, all expenses paid, extra fancy party at the Hong Kong Cricket Club?" and I nod. Yes, yes I would. This is always how assignments get posed "There's one catch. You have to find Shane Warne, then use all your womanly charms to get him to answer a couple questions about business travel. Tonight at 8."

"Who's Shane Warne?" Eeeeeeeerrrr! Wrong answer. He's the most famous cricketer alive. Perhaps ever in the history of the game. We worked out details, and I wikipedia-ed him so that I wouldn't say anything off-color. Turns out, he's got a lot of scandal attached to his name. There's PLENTY off-color things to say.

On Friday, a photographer from the magazine and I went out to busk with my guzheng. I didn't really want to put out a hat for money, so I just took my guzheng and my music, and she took her camera, and we went to a park. It was a lovely morning, and there was an old lady who sat down next to me played human-music-stand and sang along. She knew all the songs in my book, because she had been in a performance troupe when she lived in the mainland.

We tried out a couple more spots--Pedder Street, a very busy pedestrian area near a very busy intersection, a bus stop, another sitting-out area. Then, I got the idea to go to the walkway between the Lippo Centre and the Bank of America Tower, where there's a man who actually busks every day around lunch time with his erhu and his harmonica.

I sat down with him, and we jammed out together a little. He seemed happy to have company, although our instruments weren't entirely working out well together. Mostly, we were being ignored, and in the fifteen minutes I was there we made two Honkies, which is about 25 Cents.
At some point, a man with a megaphone started saying something I couldn't understand in Cantonese, and a team of photographers showed up. The erhu player began to pack up. I continued playing, but only because I didn't know any better.

Our photographer, Debbie, rushed over to me, "That's Anson Chan! We've been trying to get an interview with her for ages, but she's too big. She's too busy." Anson Chan is a pretty well-loved politician in Hong Kong, and she seemed to be campaigning on the Bank of America walkway. She's the one people call 'The Conscience of Hong Kong.'

She ignored me at first. I was playing my heart out, and the erhu player watched on in horror. Debbie was sitting next to me, giggling. I started to serenade Anson.

"Aaaaaansooon Chan! Pay aaaatttention to mmmmmeeeeeee...." ding ding bong bang deeetle deeetle.

I waved, caught her attention, and she cocked her head and walked over to me.

"How long have you been playing?" She asked.

"Five weeks."

"Are you a legal resident?"

"Uh-huh." I'm pretty sure my visa is valid.

"Well then would you please cast a vote in my favor?" She handed me a flyer. Flashes went off. The entire photographer team crowded around the four of us, Debbie, Anson, the erhu player and I.

"Oh, I can't vote here. But I am legal." I was very nervous.

"Well, in that case, have a very nice day. Thank you." And that was it. Anson Chan continued to walk down the Bank of America walkway, handing out flyers.

Debbie started to pack up her camera, "I think we can go home now."

"Yea... I'd better get back to the office and wikipedia this lady."

In the evening, I went to the cricket club, only to find a heap of food, plenty of friendly Australians, and unfortunately no Shane Warne. Poor guy was at a funeral. However, I did meet the chairman of the cricket club and his lovely wife who is an incredibly friendly lady working as a judge, and now I have tickets to see the game today, Saturday. So, I'd better get going so that I can interview Shane. I have some riveting questions I need to ask him about what he likes to do when he gets off the plane.

(just to explain the photo I uploaded there ...three hours and a few bus rides later, I did get to meet Shane Warne, but he wasn't allowed to answer any of my questions. He was incredibly gracious about letting me take a picture with him. I just went to buy water at Chungking Mansions on my way back, and all the guys at the store were crowded around the television, watching the game I had just left, cheering wildly. That was a pretty strange feeling.)

All the Kitties in my Building Love Sunar

Soon, I will be moving from a this fifteen-story tower of cats I live in, to a jungle island crawling with dogs.

In this building, Star Mansions on Mody Road, just behind Chungking Mansions and across the street from Fat Angelo's, there are three door men: a Chinese guy who alternates the day shift with a Pakistani guy, and Sunar. Sunar, he's Nepalese and every day, he takes the 12 hour night shift from 7PM to 7AM. I think he has asthma or something because he's always wheezing, but despite that he has a wonderful voice that sounds a little like Kermit the Frog. He's also the care-taker of the stray cats that live in Star Mansions.

There are easily over fifty cats Sunar has adopted, even he doesn't know how many, I've asked. There are all kinds of different cats, long hair, short hair, big ones, little ones. If the cats are like all the other people who live in this building, then I imagine they are either Bengali or Pakistani cats, or maybe Nepalese like Sunar. They live in the stairwells and basement, mainly, which are unfortunately very poorly ventilated areas. The stairwells smell of cat puke and cat poo, and cat pee, and sometimes the stench can make you dizzy while you're climbing the stairs. On the landing on the very, very bottom floor, where they keep all cleaning supplies and stuff, there is a home-made kitty litter bin the size of a playground sandbox, and kitty-cat jungle gym sort of thing made out of boxes, broken furniture and string (a small example in photo on left). There are little boxes of food out all over the place, too. So it's a big tall tower filled with cats, and all the stuff they cough up or shit out.

I don't particularly like cats, but that's not at all why I want to move. I kind of feel embarrassed that I don't like cats--the other day I was talking to a friend who was saying how he wishes he would go out to eat more because he's always cooking at home, and then asked me if I go out a lot. I do go out to eat for every meal, actually, except for one time when I ate a can of tuna. My friend looked really surprised and asked me why on earth I did that. "I think it has something to do with the fact that I don't have a kitchen..." and I heard myself saying that, and I got really depressed.

Also the back windows of Chungking Mansions are about twenty feet from my window, at most. I do technically live alone, but all the Ghanans in Block B from the 8th floor and up are basically my roommates. At the beginning I was very careful to keep the curtains drawn, but after a few weeks I thought I'd figured out that the window etiquette around here was that partial nudity was ok sometimes, because oftentimes I'd see naked butts, and topless women bathing babies through my window.
So I started leaving the curtains open to get some natural light in the apartment, and sometimes if the window's open, and the curtains are open just a crack to let light in I hear whistling and stuff.
Then came the fateful day I realized I really just had to move. I was walking out of my apartment on my way to work, and one of the Pakistani guys standing next to a van full of illegal cell phones or something sort of mutters under his breath, "O, she is the naked," as I walk by. It's time to move when your life sounds like a plot from Seinfeld.

Hong Kong's suburbs are all on outlying islands. Some of them don't allow cars or tall buildings, and you have to get to them by ferry. My friend is playing Captain Hook in the Asia production of Peter Pan the Musical, and needs to go to Kuala Lumpur with the show for a month, and I will be moving to his place and taking care of his dog. This is funny because Scott lives in a village on the island called Pak Kok, which used to be a pirate hideout, and also because he has been playing this role for so long, that he's grown out his hair long, dyed it black, and grown fairly unforgivably hideous facial hair. He looks like Captain Hook all the time, unfortunately. Which just goes to show that you should never judge a book by its cover, because it may just be playing a really awkward role in a musical.

Gu Who?

Recently I've been taking guzheng lessons. A guzheng is a Chinese zither. If you're curious about classical Chinese instruments, there's a great comprehensive wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_instruments

I take lessons at the 中国古筝学院 (Chinese Guzheng Academy) in Causeway Bay. My teacher is from Hong Kong, and so we're both speaking Mandarin as a second language to one another, which means that there's a lot of grunting and misunderstanding. My favorite weird thing about the guzheng, is that despite the fact that an "octave" has only five notes on this instrument, it's still called a 八度音, which means "eight incremented tone" or something like that. My teacher, Kwok Wai-Sze, is not familiar with Eric Clapton; however, she thinks that my rendition of ‘今天晚上特别好’ or, 'Tonight Especially Good' (which is the best translation I can do for 'Wonderful Tonight') is lovely.

At some point, the plan is to busk around town, although there isn't much of a busking culture here at all, and I think it might actually be really illegal. In fact, it's illegal to sing or dance in MTR stations, and illegal to play music or play frisbee on beaches here. Gosh Hong Kong, what a bummer.

Queen of Chungking

I live in the ghetto of Hong Kong, or rather, right behind it. Although it is the ghetto, it's still Hong Kong--so there's a Max Mara near by, and the Louis Vuitton down the street.

In the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood of Kowloon, there is a very famous building called Chungking Mansions, and my window looks right into the back windows of it. It's a mixed use building with five towers, and the bottom two floors are filled with commercial space and restaurants. The rest of it is guest houses, and there are a lot of people living there. When you walk in the front entrance from Nathan Road, the first thing you see are these really foxy Chinese ladies with rhinestones on their fingernails in money changing booths. Those are pretty much the only Chinese people you'll see there--everyone else is either African, or Pakistani, or Indian, or Nepalese. To give you an idea of the type of commercial activity going on there, supposedly over 80% of the cellular telephones being used in the whole continent of Africa today came through Chungking Mansions at one point. Walking around on the ground floor, there are crowds of Indian and Pakistani guys, "Ma'am, copy watch, copy handbag?" People come up to you and hustle you to come to their restaurants on the upper levels, "Ma'am, Taj Mahal Club? VIP member card, please follow me." You can buy phone cards, suitcases, super glue, drugs, hardware, lentils... Stores selling Bollywood films blast little musical celebrations into the hallways, some of the electronics stores have sound systems blasting Muslim prayers--and in the midst of this you can get the best curry kebab pizza in town.

I decided I was going to write a restaurant review for Chungking, and have slowly been making my way through all these eateries. Wakas Mess Pakistani Food is a favorite so far. It's been a really fun project, and I'm not sure if an article is actually going to come of it--but nevertheless, I've been talking to lots of people about their experiences with this place, and it really is an institution. A couple weeks ago I met a flight attendant from San Diego who was walking around there. He said when he first came to Hong Kong, he'd lived in Chungking for over seven months. As far as staying at Chungking goes, that's half an eternity. "You should have seen it then," he said to me, "that was the real Chungking, when there was electrical wiring hanging out near the leaky pipes everywhere. This was, oh, ten years ago back before SARS when all those restaurants on the upper levels used to be able to slaughter their chickens in the stairwells. The elevators would always break, and you'd have to take the stairs. You'd step over pools of blood and feathers." I probably shouldn't put that in quotes, since I'm paraphrasing.

I generally buy my water and bananas at Chungking Mansions because it's cheaper. Whenever I walk around there, I see Houssain. The first time I met him, he tried to sell me something, give me his phone number, which I refused, and then he proceeded to follow me home. I was getting close to my gate, so I turned around and asked him to please stop following me.

Turns out, he lives in my building on the fifth floor.

Houssain is everywhere, and he always sees me first, and then plays a trick on me to get my attention. He's a very sly guy. Once when I was buying water, he came up behind me, and reached over my head to buy some pan. I thought pan was just some sort of minty digestive candy. Houssain put some in my hand, "here, trrry it!" He saw the look on my face when I put it in my mouth, I frowned because it tasted awful, and spit it out.

"Don't worry, a smile is coming!" He said. It's my new motto.

It turns out pan is basically spiced betel nuts, which are a mild amphetamine, that many Indian men eat as a digestive. A smile, indeed!

So last week after dinner with my friend Jason in Chungking, we were walking down the maze-like stairwell to Wakas Mess talking about pan, because there were endless empty packets strewn all over the floor. We heard people coming up the stairs, three American girls who were tourists following one of the other restaurant's customer hustlers. Following one of those hustlers to the restaurants really gives you a heightened sense of adventure--you're totally depending on someone who doesn't really speak your language to take you through a very confused and confusing, dirty, dark place, all in the name of a delicious curry.

I saw my chance, and I took it. I knew this was my moment to own Chungking Mansions.

"Watch out for the dead chickens," I called out to them, after we'd passed them on the stairs.

"WHAT did she say?" One of them shrieked. I didn't repeat myself. As if to say, by saying nothing, that's right, you heard me. The DEAD chickens.

"Dead... chickens?" One of the other girls repeated. Gasps followed all around.

Jason and I kept walking down the stairs, the frenzy of shrill voices disappearing behind us. We emerged as bondafide royalty from the stairwells of Chungking--where a smile is always coming.