Hong Kong is...

I've been in Hong Kong for nearly 10 days now, and that means I've had time to shake the jetlag and start to look around. My first several days were very quiet, involving mostly relaxing in my tiny, lightless AirBnB (not helpful for jetlag, admittedly) and making tentative explorations into the neighborhood for food or to look for an apartment. There's lots more to come, but here are some beginning descriptors for Hong Kong:

1) Humid. This one has to come first, and it should really be every odd number on this list. Of course, I was expecting heat and humidity. This is southeast Asia in the summer. But to give you an idea of how bad it is, my glasses fogged up within 30 seconds of leaving the airport on my first morning. There have been easier days than that since then-- once I was able to sit in the shade for 25 whole minutes on my lunch break and not sweat!-- but things are rough here. An average day is between 85 and 90 degrees F and between 70 and 90 percent humidity. People waxed poetic about the nature here before I came, but I've never spent more time inside in air conditioning in my life. I think it's just not to be.

2) Dense. This one is another no-brainer, but again the experience is an entirely different animal than the anticipation. The city is actually pretty small in terms of area. The main areas can be crossed by public transit in 30-45 minutes. But in terms of density, Hong Kong seems more intense even than New York. In the same way that my first time traveling in the open spaces of Montana affected my thinking, being surrounded by such towering buildings and constant throngs of people requires mental adjustment. I feel like I could spend the entire summer just trying the various restaurants within a block of my apartment. Having everything piled on top of one another makes the whole city feel overdetermined--that's literature nerd for "brimming with various different meanings"--and ripe for all sorts of storytelling and adventure.

3) International. When I arrived, one of the questions at the forefront of my mind was: will it be ruder to assume that people speak English or that they don't? This hasn't been a problem in other parts of the world where I've traveled. In English-speaking countries like Australia or Ireland, the answer is obvious. In other countries, even northern Europe where people tend to speak flawless English, the answer is still generally to err on the side of "not ugly American." In a place with as complex a history as Hong Kong, it didn't seem so cut and dry, but the answer is obviously. In elevators, grocery stores, little out of the way restaurants and cafes, virtually everyone here speaks functional-level English. Some speak it more fluently than others, but I've only encountered two people with whom I couldn't communicate--and they spoke Mandarin, so we managed okay, just the same.

This is undoubtedly a city still heavily informed by its colonial past, and it's not just about language. Local food shows signs of Western influence, from the custard tarts that originated in Portugal to the toast with condensed milk that is popular for breakfast. Announcements on the MTR (public transit) are in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. Restaurants and people from all over Asia abound, and I'm never the only Western person in a room (although usually the ratio is about 2:100.) This is by far the most ethnically diverse Asian city I've visited.

4) Efficient. I have long believed that you can tell a lot about a culture based on how they wait (or don't) in line. In my experience, Asia is divided culturally in terms of line waiting, with orderly-patient Taiwan and Japan on one side and elbows-out-chaotic India, China, Vietnam on the other. Hong Kong falls squarely in the Taiwan-Japan camp. The MTR is spotless, comes every 1-5 minutes, and includes marked areas for people to queue and chaperones for the morning rush hour to make sure everyone is behaving properly. Even in the heat and humidity, people wait at bus stops in orderly lines for long periods. I've seen no pushing, shoving, yelling, or elbows, literal or metaphorical. The urban planning here is pristine.

There's one exception: the MTR stations are like enormous octopi under the city, reaching their tentacles out for literal miles underground. I can't figure out why that is: a weather consideration? A traffic-management technique? But it is literally possible to walk for 15 minutes from the metro entrance and still not reach the platform. If one is new to the city, say, and not familiar with a particular station, it makes accurately guessing how long it will take to reach a given destination particularly tricky.

5) Intriguing. As I wrote in my last entry, I'm incredibly intrigued by Hong Kong's gray-area-between-the-worlds status. It's a city comfortable with its colonial past that now dramatically mistreats its own migrant workers. It's a place where West and East coexist fluidly, but where an (ahem) particularly klutzy American breaking a coffee cup in a cafe is met with a full 20 seconds of utter silence. It's technically Chinese and defiantly independent, political, passionate. The only city in China that could publicly memorialize the Tiananmen Square protests on June 4-- and did, to the tune of 60,000 attendants. I can't wait to see more.

 A moment of silence in memory of those who lost their lives at Tiananmen in Causeway Bay

Laomudeng Disaster

Ah, the challenges of updating a blog while attempting to maintain one's academic life as a senior in college. Not an easy thing to do, as evidenced by the pace at which I have been posting here. Nonetheless, I think it's about time for a new entry.

So, I left off around the middle of my time in Nujiang. I had been suffering from what was in all likelihood dysentary and was prescribed an assortment of pills only identified by their Chinese names. Ultimately, I called the SIT doctor in Kunming to ask if these pills were okay to take, and it was a good thing I did because several of them could have caused major liver and kidney damage. He recommended the right pill in time for me to make a trip to Laomudeng, where Xiao Cui's family lives. Laomudeng is a Nu stronghold high up in the mountains of the valley, about three hours from Fugong. The drive was spectacular and both tortuous and torturous (word play!). I remember writing in my private journal that it would have been easier to drive on if they had just left it as a mountainside instead of trying to civilize it into a road--an hour and a half straight of jolting in potholes, hairpin turns, and general unhappiness. We soldiered on, however, to a small town called Bijiang, which used to be the size of a city but has since been largely abandoned. The peak of the mountain upon which Bijiang perched afforded a remarkable view looking back over the valley toward Fugong from a beautiful little pagoda.

The Bijiang pagoda overlooking the valley


The spectacular view of Nujiang Valley from Bijiang


Found outside the pagoda-- this statue of Mao now salutes the sky, as it has been pulled down. By nature or by human hands, I don't know. But I found it very intriguing.


While we were in Bijiang, I saw a tall man walking down the street-- a man with blonde hair. I asked some of the people around who he was, and they told me he was a doctor with UNICEF, there doing relief work. Would I like to meet him, perhaps give him a hug? I politely declined. But, alas, we were destined to meet.

For as I wrote almost nine months ago, we then drove back to Laomudeng, intending to walk through the village to Younger Sister's natal house. But during the walk I fell off the steep retaining wall along which the path ran, right into some poor Lisu family's yard. It was a very scary moment, as for awhile I wasn't sure how or where I was hurt. Eventually I realized that I wasn't able to put weight on my left foot and that I was feeling dizzy from what was probably a mild concussion. The lovely strangers into whose yard I had fallen invited me in, arranged me in their living room, and went to get the UNICEF doctor from Bijiang. The living room was a sparse, concrete box. I was lying on the only piece of furniture, a couch running along the back wall, and the only other thing in the room was an enormous TV/DVD system, in front of which a little Lisu child sat. I groggily lay back, drinking some hot water and eating a bowl of rice that was brought to me. In my haze, I heard the unmistakable sound of Rufus Wainwright's voice, and I was sure for a minute that I must have more than a mild concussion, as I seemed to be hallucinating. But when I turned my head, I realized that the Lisu child was watching the Chinese version of MTV, and Rufus Wainwright was performing on a music video. It was a truly bizarre moment, both surreal and transcendant. Here I was, 15 hours from a decent hospital, lying on a stranger's couch in a place where people spoke a language I didn't understand, with nearly no one of my ethnicity miles around. And then there was this reminder of the extraordinary power of globalization reminding me that no matter where you go you're never really far from America.

Eventually the UNICEF doctor showed up. He told me he only had EMT training but was able to guess that my foot wasn't broken and put it in an improvised splint. He also referred me to some Canadian friends of his living outside Fugong, who could provide me with crutches and generally help me out during the next week. I would later find out that these friends were illegal missionaries (Fugong is filled with them), but regardless of their reason for living in Nujiang they were incredibly generous with me, even offering to let me live in their house for awhile.

The ride back from Laomudeng was, to be quite frank, awful. It was, of course, just as bumpy going down as it was going up, but this time I felt every tiny vibration in my injured foot. To make things worse, the county had started a construction project on the road in the middle of the day, creating a blockage for almost two hours. This is an example of the sort of thing that happens in China all the time but would never happen in America. I was furious and sore by the time I got back to the hotel, but Older and Younger sister were very good to me, bringing me food and telling me stories. They would care for me similarly for the next couple of weeks, as would Foster Dad and his wife. Although it was a scary ordeal that made my last few weeks in China infinitely more difficult, my fall actually resulted in a much more intimate connection with the Lisu friends I made in Nujiang, an idea that has ultimately played a central role in the thesis I'm writing this year.

The intricate criss-cross pattern of a wall in a traditional Lisu home near Laomudeng

Going Banna-nas

Take that, China's internet censoring system, I have triumphed again? Little buggers think they can up and block blogspot on me (well, the truth is they can and now Emily's, Janie's, Dan's, Annalisas's, and Cedric's blogs are inaccessible to me.) However, after some extended finagling I found a loophole in the system that allowed me to write in my blog. Score.

So, we left off at my adventure in Lunan, which seems silly to write about now since I'm in Xishuangbanna at the moment and, despite an unfortunately timed gan mao (catching of a cold) I am pretty psyched.

So, Lunan in brief so that we can get to the good stuff. At least, the beginning of the good stuff because the good stuff is also right now and I should probably get back to letting it happen.

So, the whole program went to the Stone Forest last weekend. I'd been before with my parents but this was still as amazing as I remembered. The Stone Forest (Shilin in Chinese) is this unique geological phenomenon that happened because Yunnan used to be an enormous sea. This tall rock formations, some of them hundreds of feet tall, were under that sea, but when the basin the sea was in rose during a time of a lot of earth quakes the sea disappeared but the rock formations stayed. It's truly something that you need to see to understand. I can't post pictures because blogspot is a loser, but I urge you to google it yourself.

Anyway, I read about a cool market town 10 km away from Shilin and so John, me, Mike, Tania, Diana and some other Duke kids took the early bus down, which was an adventure in itself (Chinese bus stations = pure chaos). I had a wonderful moment on the bus looking down from a mountain into a valley below and seeing two horses galloping playfully on a village path-- I wrote my next Argus column about it, and I'll post that when I'm back in Kunming. From the bus station we took a minibus (shockabsorberless box on wheels) a terrifying 8 km into the Chinese dustbowl, then wandered around town garnering stares until we reached the Sunday market, one of the most foreign feeling places I've ever been. Minority peoples from the whole area come there to do their shopping, the place was teeming with brightly dressed people in silver jewelry, bright headdresses, the works. We took a LOT of pictures.

There's more, but really, let's get to the good stuff. Our 5-day Yunnan Exploration Project is in full effect, and Lee and I caught the overnight sleeper bus to Jinghong, approximately 10 hours south of Kunming, last night at 8 PM. I'm not sure what we were expecting (My tripmate Sophie described her idea of a sleeper bus as "very Harry Potter") but that was not what we got. It was more cattle car than boy wizard. Picture a regular-sized tour bus-- now picture it with three columns of 4-foot by 2.5-foot berths and two aisles, a moving set of bunkbeds gone horribly wrong. There was a whole to-do because they thought I was too wide to be in the top birth (hearing everyone say 'ta ne me pang, ta ne me pang' ("she's too fat") didn't feel so great) but in the end I got a better berth so it wasn't a huge deal. Lee, on the other hand, seemed like he was going to have a coronary. His berth was even smaller than mine, and he's a pretty tall guy. In the end we both got comfortable enough to sleep at least a little bit. I also watched a really terrible horror movie that they showed, with hilarious English subtitles. The bus didn't have a bathroom, but we made a few stops during the night to stumble out and pee. I didn't drink much water.

We got into Jinghong, the capital of Xishuangbanna Autonomous Prefecture, at about 7:30 AM, just as the sun was coming up. Exhausted, I caught a motorcycle taxi to the road where I thought I might find a hostel I saw in the guidebook, but once I got there no one knew what I was talking about. I started walking again, feeling more tired by the minute, and incredibly conspicuous with my big suitcase and complete lack of Asian ethnicity. Just when I realized that I was looking at the wrong part of the guide book, it started to rain (wah wahhhhh.) I pulled out the poncho I brought along and started walking again, finally giving up and getting a taxi whose driver promptly cheated me out of money driving me for about 2 minutes and demanding an exorbitant Y5. I didn't care, though, I found the hostel and, with some trouble, opened the gate, found my room (it's supposed to be a dormitory but there's no one else staying there at the moment), and collapsed for 4 hours.

The hostel seems pretty wonderful. The rooms are in Dai-style bungalows, all bamboo and wood, with banana trees in the courtyard and a solar heated communal shower (I didn't bring a towel though... that might be a problem.) I'm moving on to Ganlanba tomorrow, but I'll probably come back here to stay one more night during my travels around Banna, as the locals call it.

I've done some exploring today, as well. I made friends with two kids about my age at a backpacker cafe, when I realized I hadn't eaten in 18 hours. Over an omelette and coffee (I'll try Dai food tonight) they told me about the various things to do in the area. I ended up giving them an overview of American history while showing them some American change, and gave them both English names, which they were very excited about. Aixin became Alex, Zhuang became Zoe. I'm supposed to come back and hang out with them tonight at 9.

After returning to the hostel to get my poncho (it started raining again, natch) I did some wandering in the neighborhoods around Manting Lu, a very traditional Dai village. It was enchanting. At one point I wandered into a monastery, completely on accident. The monks all bowed to me (there's a better name for that that I'm forgetting) and I got some wonderful pictures. Now: back to exploring. Hopefully this loophole will keep up, and I'll update you all soon.