Open Writing

I had travelled through both space and time, alighting in Hong Kong from a flight from Canada. Departing Vancouver the night before, we hurtled over the North Pacific for 12 hours, losing a whole day merely crossing the International Date Line. As the mysteries of time and space suddenly became all the more mystifying and perplexing, I decided to concentrate on shopping instead.

Through the dawn mists I made out the vague shapes of hills around me. Riding my transfer coach to the Metropark Hotel in Kowloon on the Chinese mainland, across from Hong Kong Island, my hazy vision prompted me that the mist was an unending blanket of smog.

My wife, Anna, and I eased our hunger pangs, by visiting an authentic Chinese restaurant across the road from our hotel. Kowloon is a famous shoppers' paradise. Neither my love of the Australian versions of Chinese food, nor my sense of gastronomic adventure had prepared me for the bewildering array of food I was to encounter here in Hong Kong.

On arriving for our first meal in Hong Kong, we were greeted warmly and shown to a table. Hot porcelain pots of green tea and cups appeared immediately. This custom turned out to be an automatic purchase, when dining out in Hong Kong. We scanned through the menu that was delivered to us, excising eel, river snake, pigs’ stomachs, pig bowels, pigs’ feet, hearts, tongues, liver, tripe, fish heads, assorted offal, and so on in varied combinations from the list of foods we intended to sample, leaving a narrower choice, focused on crab meat, prawns and chicken, in a variety of sauces, served with rice, noodles or in dumplings. For us, these dishes were tastier and more palatable fare indeed. The recognition that my get-up-and-go as well as my adventurous culinary streak had got up and left, probably indicated a graduation to a more dubious epicurean stage in my dining life.

Our appetites sated, we hit the street markets hunting for bargains, trinkets and gifts for the folks back home who reasoned that if I could spend enough money to travel, I could always spend a little more to bring something back for those who were left behind. The blueprint of this ritual had already been truly cemented, although the list of beneficiaries who expected a dividend had been whittled down over time.

After mid afternoon the sun glowed like an eerie orange orb through the translucent and dusty haze, casting a tawny hue over streets and congested high rising apartment buildings that from any perspective almost touched the perpetually grey sky. The thick smog obscured the towering buildings which themselves dwarfed and veiled the background hills. Gone were the heady days of the beautiful countryside that would have been the norm half a century earlier. That is the presumed price that must be paid for accommodating wall-to-wall carpets of humanity living under long shadows thrown by the immense edifices.

Huge curved tusks of exquisitely carved exhibits of mammoth ivory stand in stark contrast to the Starbucks chain of coffee shops, where the old and new, the sophisticated and the simple all come together in a plethora of incongruence. The filthy-rich living cheek by jowl with the filthy-poor, the latter being an invisible glitch in the new socialist order.

The setting sun brought darkness and an explosion of artificial lighting that cheered up the streets and buildings, hiding the cracks and exposing a beauty that could only be conjured by a magician, playing tricks with the eyes of the observer. Assorted displays of colours and patterns danced in front of me, inviting me to buy, look and enjoy, titillating my senses and hypnotising me. In this trance, I saw happy faces of the locals mingling with those of the tourists, as life proceeded as it always does. A smiling group of young locals, recognising me as a visitor, called out: 'Have a nice time in Hong Kong!'

I saw warmth and friendliness radiating from the huddled masses with no alternative, but to live in clusters where isolation or seclusion is never an option. I vaguely glimpsed an understanding of the interrelationship between the masses, the smog, the pollution, the rationale behind the bustling humanity and absence of other animals except when their various body parts are served up as food. Then distracted by the glittering bursts of lights and activity, I busied myself in hunting for yet another bargain.

© Gehan Wijesinha

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Gehan writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au