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.