I Want to Go to the Other Bank

My last night in Hong Kong, I ventured out by myself to do a little shopping and look for adventure, because, really, there's only so much walking you can do with two children along before they revolt.  It was only late afternoon, but the light was dimming and shops were closing, and the buzz of the city was fading just a little.  Walking alone always makes me all kinds of introspective, and I knew I was going to want to tell you about Hong Kong, not just what we did and the things I saw, but how it felt.

Hong Kong feels full of stories.  It feels deliciously full of ghosts, as if even on the emptiest street you are jostled by the force of the desires and rages and joys and tedium of all the lives that have passed the same spot.  It feels like a fire that has burned down to hot blue coals but you've just put a fresh log on and it's about to spark up into a nice fresh flame.  The city smells like that, too, like sulfur and new pine logs in an old stone hearth, but with diesel exhaust and hot pavement and roasted chicken and cinnamon and star anise thrown in for flavor.  I loved it.  If you distilled Hong Kong into an ice cream flavor I would eat the whole thing then lick the napkin and maybe eat that, too.

I don't know why--I kind of thought my "new things" bucket was still uncomfortably full, and so much of Hong Kong definitely fell in the category of new things.  Many of the things I like best about Singapore are the opposite--the safety, the cleanliness, the fresh, green air--and I find myself surprised by the force of my like for the funk of Hong Kong.  We really spent only one day in the city, plus my stolen afternoon, so I know I only saw a teensy smidge of what is there, and I could be completely wrong about what it is.

But I liked, as I do in Singapore, how old and new, West and East, are all smooshed up against each other.  I liked seeing British colonial tenacity carve a path and make it stick, and I liked seeing the implacability of the mountains and the sea, the stone and the trees, the people of Hong Kong who have their own way, no matter where they are from.  I liked that Hong Kong was not what I thought it would be.  I cannot say what it is, or is not, exactly.  I know that I would like to see it and smell it and taste it again.

(Blog title from a poem you should read if you're feeling like reading poetry:
"The Boundary," by Bei Dao)