 So Tom and I leave for Hong Kong two weeks from today and this whole trip back is starting to seem real.
Soon after we booked our flight and hotel, Tom asked if we needed a guidebook.
“Guidebook? This is Hong Kong we’re talking about,” I said. “I know it better than Chicago. I know it in my sleep.”
Plus, I pride myself in packing lightly when I travel. Who needs to carry around bulky books? That’s why I’ll bring my Kindle.
But he had a good point. Would I really remember all the side streets off Nathan Road in Kowloon? And once we disembark the Star Ferry in Central, will I recall the quickest way to reach the escalators up to the Mid-Levels?
I thought about photocopying maps from a guidebook. I could bring the pages I’d need each day and leave the others in the hotel.
Then I started to think more about it. Carrying a guidebook isn’t a bad thing. It doesn’t make me a lesser traveler. After all, when I backpacked around Southeast Asia in 1991, I survived without going broke because of Lonely Planet’s South-East Asia on a Shoestring.
This weekend as I cleaned the house for Passover, Martin, my two year-old, pulled out Exploring Hong Kong (ThingsAsian Press, 2009) and asked me to show him “Hong Hong”. Although the name of the city is difficult for him to pronounce, he can stay “Star Ferry”, “Peak Tram”, and “abacus”.
I love Exploring Hong Kong because it’s my kind of guidebook. It includes maps of most of the areas I want to visit, plus descriptions of the sites I’d like to show Tom. But it doesn’t have hotel or restaurant listings, and that’s okay with me. We’ve already booked a hotel and have plans for every lunch and dinner but two.
This guidebook goes into adequate detail about things unfamiliar to me, like the new airport and transportation to and from our hotel.
I’m glad Tom’s good sense won out over my stubbornness. With all the time we’ll save from being so efficient, I’ll have that much more time to shop!
Do you use a guidebook when you travel? If so, which is your favorite?
Today as millions celebrated Easter around the world, guest blogger Stuart Beaton (http://rastous.podomatic.com/) notes that this holiday is blatantly absent in China. Here’s Stu to discuss why:
While Christmas has become an unofficial holiday on the calendar, Easter will probably never be allowed to catch on – it’s just too dangerous a story to let loose.
Christmas here has been carefully pruned of any religious connotations whatsoever. Ask a Chinese person what Christmas is about, and they’ll probably say it’s something to do with presents, giving and the end of the year. Some kind of Mid-Winter Festival.
I’ve even been told it celebrates the birth of Santa.
In fact, a few years ago, I saw a magnificent Nativity display set up in a department store, almost life size, perfect in nearly every detail – but instead of an infant Christ, there was a baby Santa in the manger.
Religion is an incredibly tightly controlled thing here in China. There are only five “Official” religions recognized (The Peoples’ Catholic Church Of China, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism), and their practice, beliefs and practitioners are pretty closely monitored. The Communist Party even goes so far as to appoint its own Cardinals (which Rome pretty much ignores) and other religious leaders, in an effort to micromanage all aspects of a given “church”.
Christianity is viewed here with great suspicion by the Party, as it is seen as encouraging individuality, and putting God before the State. Free thinking that doesn’t fit inside the CCP box is usually ruthlessly pruned, and “underground” and “home” churches are often raided and broken up under the auspices of National Security. Foreign believers are openly shadowed by the Public Security Bureau, to prevent them mixing with “ordinary” believers and spreading unsanctioned ideas.
But the biggest objection that the Party has to Easter is the whole “back story” to it.
Some bloke rides into town on a donkey, and tells people that they don’t have to listen to the Authorities? Hangs out with a group of people he’s training up to spread this idea of civil disobedience?
And then gets martyred into the bargain? Comes back to spread a message that people should have hope, and continue to resist?
Yeah, that goes down a treat with a Government that expects conformity, control and top down hierarchical command.
The closest I’ve seen to any sort of Easter display here over the years is in a Godiva Chocolate store, where, under a “Celebrate Spring” poster, there were half a dozen ridiculously expensive eggs, and a few desultory bunnies.
I won’t hold my breath for any improvement in years to come.
Stuart Beaton is back guest blogging about something near and dear to my heart, but I won’t spoil his surprise quite yet. His amazing podcasts (mostly author interviews) can be found at http://rastous.podomatic.com/. Here’s Stuart:
It’s the Tomb Sweeping Holiday week here in Tianjin, and so the Uni decided that it would be an excellent time to shut the power off for seven hours.
 Ching Ming Festival So, what’s a chap to do, when all the lights go dim?
He drags a colleague out for a spot of shopping.
Well, anything’s better than sitting alone in a cold, dark room… and so we set off onto the bustling streets of sunny downtown Tianjin. After a few hours of pounding the pavement between department stores and their supermarket sections, lunch was beginning to beckon. And my dogs were barking – any excuse to get off my feet was going to be welcome.
Having cross the road, we found the footpath blocked, and so took an unexpected turn down a little side street between Walmart and Gome.
Then a window display caught my eye.
A cross between a media installation and a toy collection, a fuzzy black and white TV repeating images from ancient Tom & Jerry cartoons, surrounded by Rubiks Cubes, Doraemons and Marios.
I was hooked – I needed to find out more about this place.
My colleague pointed to the number 80 on a sign, and said that she’d been to a Café 80 the day before, perhaps this was part of the chain? I thought it was a student art gallery, an exhibition space.
But we were both wrong.
Through the door, and behind the curtain, was a hotpot restaurant.
One modeled on Chinese classrooms of the 1980’s.
The furniture consisted of modified school desks, with a hole cut in the centre to accommodate the induction heater and pot, complete with matching chairs. A giant blackboard dominated the front of the room, while a video projector screened Doraemon cartoons against it.
One wall was decorated with posters that were in classrooms thirty years ago, and its opposite with pictures of film stars, cartoon characters and toys from the time.
We took our seats, and were presented with what, to all intents and purposes, looked like an exam paper, but was the menu – with multiple choice options!
Behind us a party of twenty somethings were singing an old school scarf, Young Pioneer scarves around their necks, laughing and snapping photos of each other with their cell phones.
Attention to nostalgic detail extended down to the enamelware cups and bowls, and the retro flasks in which the hotpot broth was poured from. They even sell retro 80’s toys to play with!
The food itself was fresh, preparation done carefully in the small kitchen (marked “School Canteen”), and very tasty.
As we went to leave, the owner and staff came and took some pictures with us for their Weibo site (http://weibo.com/no80syears), explaining that they didn’t get an awful lot of foreigners in… ever.
I’ve been left feeling a nostalgia for something I hadn’t experienced, a place I was never in, and a time that isn’t coming back in a hurry.
At least, though, I can go back there again.
 This week I read Kien Nguyen’s haunting memoir, The Unwanted (Little, Brown, 2001). Instead of offering a summary upfront, I thought I’d share an early scene (page 10):
Finally, my mother burst into the room with enough exuberance to burn out a lightbulb. Her off-white evening gown embraced her, gushing down her body like a stream of silver water. Her hair was bound above her neck in a complicated knot, revealing a diamond necklace and two small diamond earrings. She looked foreign, formidable, elegant as an Egyptian queen. She smiled through her makeup, as she reached for us with bare arms that sparkled with diamonds. We entered her cloud of perfume, and together, hand in hand, we walked into the noisy brightness outside.
This scene takes place at 5 year-old Kien’s birthday party at his mother’s three-storey mansion in Nhatrang, South Vietnam. The year is 1972 and Kien and his younger brother Jimmy are the only children at the evening party. Kien and Jimmy also differ in that they’re both the children of American men (two different ones) with whom their mother had longstanding relationships before the dads returned to the US.
The Unwanted is the story of Kien’s devastating childhood. But it also represents the stories of the 50,000 children in Vietnam left behind by American fathers.
When I went to Vietnam in 1991, I imagined running into Amerasian children, who would be teenagers at the very youngest, and talking to them in my native English tongue. Because if they had American fathers, their mothers could surely speak English and would teach it to their children, right?
Wrong.
As Kien tells it, Amerasians were shunned by the Vietnamese, even in their own families, and weren’t raised knowing any English unless they learned it at school. What was more troubling was that even though these Vietnamese-American relationships were much more than a one-night stand, they may as well have been just that. Oftentimes the men didn’t even know the names of their girlfriends. In Kien’s case, his father called his mother Nancy Kwan, after the popular Eurasian actress.
The Nguyen family’s story is a rags to riches one, as they lived an opulent life in the capitalistic South Vietnam. But once Saigon fell, things were never the same. Kien Nguyen writes of a horrible scene at the US Embassy just before the fall. He was there, as were his family and close friends. It’s a scene I’ll never forget. In fact, this is a book I’ll never forget.
There’s so much to Kien’s story that I can’t write it all here–and wouldn’t want to spoil the story. I love how he describes Nhatrang and Saigon. The smells, the flowers, the heat, and the food are all so vivid to the reader. His characters, no matter how seemingly minor, end up being important to his story.
His mother’s story is also a powerful one. Although she may seem to be selfish and mean-spirited, I grew to love his mother and found her to be a very strong and complicated woman who never gave up or pitied herself for all that she lost (in love and in material possessions) when the political and economic conditions fell apart. The women in this story are smart and resilient. Besides Kien’s lovely grandfather, most of the men in the story are scum.
During my trip to the southern part of Vietnam 21 years ago, I did meet a couple of Amerasians on the beach in Danang. And as Kien Nguyen explains in his book, they were very poor and spoke no English. I hope the ones I saw were able to find better lives.
Since writing this book, Nguyen has published two novels, one based on his grandfather’s story. I’m now anxious to read them and hope he’ll continue to write for decades to come.
When I was a new mother of a baby boy 14 years ago, I vowed to raise him to treat women as equals. And years later when I had a baby girl I promised myself I’d teach her to feel good about herself no matter what.
 On the streets of San Francisco with Jake, 1999 So yesterday at the salon, as I leaned back in a chair while a stylist held a hose over my sudsy hair, a mother and a pre-teen girl stood nearby, the daughter in tears.
Another stylist tried to soothe the girl with soft words, saying she’ll be okay, but the girl continued to dab her eyes with a weathered tissue. Once mother and daughter left, the woman in the chair next to me asked her stylist how old that girl was.
“Too young,” I said, butting into their conversation.
“It’s hard for girls these days,” my neighbor’s stylist said. “Kids can be so cruel to girls unless they look perfect.”
Really? But before I could protest, I stopped and realized this is true and is even more pronounced since way back when I was a pre-teen. In fact, I’ve felt pressure over the years to straighten my hair, shape my eyebrows, stay slim, sculpt my arms, and flatten my stomach.
In Hong Kong and China people told me I was fat, whereas in the US I’m considered thin. When I was young, my own relatives said I had a rat’s nest for hair. And because of these things, I turned inward as a teenager and young adult.
 Lok Ma Chau, 1990 As I write in my memoir, Good Chinese Wife, I felt incredibly fortunate to gain the attention of an accomplished academic when I was in graduate school and thus rushed into marriage with him six short months after we met.
Fast forward 8-10 years. I was a divorced single mother and realized there was more to life than what’s on the outside. I found inner strength from the time I spent living abroad and at last could walk with confidence into a room of strangers.
When I think of the preteen girl at the salon, I wished I’d given her a hug. I hope she’ll be able to find confidence for who she is, not what she looks like. I’m probably old fashioned about this, and perhaps out of touch with today’s reality, but correct me if I’m wrong about wanting to teach our daughters–and sons–to love themselves for who they are, both on the inside and out.
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