Susan Blumberg-Kason

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A walk through old Wanchai

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There are some neighborhoods in Hong Kong that look nothing like they did 20 years ago. And there are some that do, more or less. In August I had the honor to take a walk through Old Wanchai and it was filled with lovely architecture. I remember the Blue House from when I lived in Hong Kong and one memorable day (the kind of day you’ll remember for decades) when my friend Annie and I were invited inside to take a look. This time I was given a tour by my friend Terence.

There used to be a Chinese medicine clinic on the ground floor of the Blue House and now a new one is going to come back into that same spot.

A better look at the clinic’s entrance.

And the balconies!

The Blue House has a courtyard in back.

And a space for outdoor film screenings.

Hong Kong mailboxes are known to be iconic, but these are on another level!

Out on the street behind the Blue House, there are a couple of old school bars, complete with neon signs (this says big dragon wind) and traditional lanterns. You don’t see either in Hong Kong much anymore, but they’re here in Wanchai. Can you also see the accordion door to the left?

The bar next door with the same neon characters.

And here’s a look at both on this little side street.

I love the different doors on this street.

Old buildings in Hong Kong are multilayered, even on the facade of the structures.

And some are smooth and elegant.

The old post office (the white colonial building) was a landmark for me when I lived in Hong Kong in the 90s. It opened as a post office in 1915 and is now used by the Environmental Protection Department. I remember taking the bus past here or waiting for a bus to the little island where I lived when I moved back in the mid-90s.

One of my favorite aspects of Hong Kong architecture is round corners.

This old round building used to the Wanchai wet market, but it’s been restored and now houses a design store.

It’s so nice to see Old Wanchai. I hope more areas in Hong Kong will follow suit before it’s too late.

Remembering a friend

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I learned this weekend that a social media friend passed away in Scotland at a young age from cancer. Although I’d never met Nick, he regaled many with stories of growing up in Hong Kong and balls at the Peace Hotel in Shanghai, where he wore a kilt.

When I traveled to Shanghai a couple years ago and stayed at the Peace Hotel, I thought about the balls he went to there–especially when I went to one. Here are a couple of photos from that ball. Nick’s mom wrote on Facebook that he guessed people wouldn’t miss him when he was gone, but she knows that he grossly underestimated how many people around the world miss his presence, even it’s online.

When I posted photos from Hong Kong in September, Nick commented on some and asked if I’d just flown there on a whim. I wrote that I’d been planning it for 3-4 months. He said he was jealous and at first I was going to write back that he should make a trip back. But I didn’t. I didn’t know he was so sick and had been battling cancer for two years already. But something stopped me from writing what first came to mind. Instead, I commented that I was jealous, too, and I was there. That was the last correspondence we had.

 

Photo Friday

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The leaves are finally turning in Chicago. Last week they were all still green and still on the trees, but now they’re yellow and red and on the sidewalk. I’ve been dog-sitting my mom’s Shitzu most of this month and have noticed the changing of the leaves since I’m out walking her several times a day.

The summer now feels so far away, but it wasn’t that long when I was in the throes of it in Hong Kong. It doesn’t seem like the temperatures there have changed at all since mid-August. I took this photo at Kowloon Park, a place I used to visit in my 20s. It’s a huge space, but you wouldn’t know that from the street, as there’s nothing but shops, hotels, and restaurants surrounding that area. And a beautiful mosque.

The parks in Hong Kong often have traditional Chinese features like the tiles on this wall and the geometric windows and round doorway. Kowloon Park also has a sculpture garden, a heritage museum, a couple pools, an aviary, and a tai chi area. I’ll blog more about the park in the days or weeks to come. I was only there for an hour or so last month because I had to get back across the harbor to meet a friend. I hadn’t been here since maybe 1998, but probably 1997.

The sterilization of Nathan Road

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Back in the early 90s, it was common to hear in Hong Kong that travelers either loved it or hated it. I never understood the hating part. Hong Kong was still pretty much at its peak with Kai Tak Airport, old double-decker buses, and neon. Neon was everywhere and one of the most iconic places for these signs was Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. What’s not to love?

To the far left of this photo is a sign for the Kowloon Hotel. My husband and I stayed there five years ago on my first return to Hong Kong after leaving in 1998. There was still some neon in 2012, but not as much as in the 90s when the photo above was taken.

But I was startled when I was there last month. I’m standing about half a block behind where I stood when I took the 90s photo.

The neon is gone, as are most of the signs.

Book of the week–Shenzhen

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I studied French for 8 years in junior high, high school, and college, and honestly haven’t had much chance to use to it apart from clearing customs in 1991 Phnom Penh and on the streets of Saigon that same summer. I’ve been to France a few times in recent times, but could barely communicate.

Even so, one evening in Paris this summer I spotted this bookstore near our apartment. My kids wanted ice cream, so we went to a cafe and were waiting outside for their orders when my eye caught this:

The Librarie Opera is a bookstore and suddenly I felt drawn to go inside and see if there was anything I could read. I haven’t studied French in 28 years, but figured there must be a children’s book I could partially understand.

My family headed back to the apartment and I stayed behind to browse the shelves in the bookstore. When I stepped inside, I quickly figured out it only sold graphic novels and comics. It was perfect for this substandard French speaker!

I found some graphic travelogues by French Canadian Guy DeLisle (my friend Christine later told me he was French Canadian; I didn’t know that at the time) and started flipping through one about Pyongyang and another about Jerusalem. But when I found one about Shenzhen, I knew I’d found my book!

I thought it would take days, if not weeks, to read it, so I picked it up last week and thought I’d get a start on it. Well, by the end of the day, I had read the whole thing.

Not only that, I understood at least 75% of the story!

It resonated so much. Guy DeLisle spent three months in Shenzhen at the end of 1997/beginning of 1998. That’s exactly when I last went there. I was living in Hong Kong and returned to the US in late February 1998. So the Shenzhen he wrote about is the one I knew.

I got the jokes, and understanding them in French made them seem funnier than American jokes. I laughed when he described the hotels in China in the late 90s and how hotel rooms all looked alike back then. And the console between the beds had all these buttons and it took forever to figure out which one turned off the lights. The others? Lord only knew what they did.

We had so many similar experiences. He ate dog for the first time in Shenzhen; so did I. He thought it tasted like mutton; I thought it tasted like beef.

When he went to Guangzhou for the weekend, I totally got that, too. The one and only time I visited Guangzhou was in December 1996 and the city he described was the one I knew back then, too.

My heart raced when he spent a weekend in Hong Kong. The feeling he described walking in no-man’s-land from Shenzhen to Hong Kong was exactly what I felt when I did that so many times in the 90s. It’s so hard to describe in words, but he did so beautifully in French and with his illustrations. He felt so at ease in Hong Kong that he wrote he would have spent every weekend there if it hadn’t been so troublesome to go back and forth. Hear, hear!

He writes about his isolation in Shenzhen and the animation field in China back then. For him, going to the gym was a way to beat the loneliness. For me, swimming in Hong Kong combatted that.

The last time I went to Shenzhen, my then-husband had sent me–all of five months pregnant–over the border from Hong Kong to take his money out of the Bank of China. I went to Shenzhen with one of his mainland friends and we both walked back across the border with my then-husband’s life savings. DeLisle didn’t seem to have that kind of stress, but from his story he left Shenzhen a different person.

This book is available in an English translation and I’m curious to read it now to see what I missed in the French original. I’m also eager to read his other graphic travelogues now. Maybe next time I’m in Paris, I’ll pick up the French originals of those, too.

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