Hong Kong 2012, Part 3: Swanky Lofts and Simple Food

Here's link to Part 2...

 I guess I never really finished that day we went to visit my grandmother's resting place.  Probably because that evening we went to one of the many eateries owned by Maxim, which is a food and restaurant company based in Hong Kong (not the near-porno magazine), which happens to be run by my cousin.  I forget the exact name, but it was similar to many of the other Maxim-owned eateries, serving the equivalent of Cantonese "fast food." 

The fermented egg was saltier than all the meat combined

Mine was a delicious roast pork and chicken combination with white rice and vegetable (shown above).  While certainly not as good as what you could get in a restaurant, it was fast, cheap, and as close to authentic as you could expect for a dish assembled in under 5 minutes.

The next day, we stuck to our routine (wake up, eat cereal, watch a hundred billion episodes of TBBT, go to lunch), going to a little noodle shop in Happy Valley.  Now this place was a tiny little hole in a wall, literally being built into the hill with an apartment complex on top of it.  The owner was an older lady, whom my aunt told me was famous for being rude to customers.  Evidently, she had mellowed with age, but my aunt claimed she would literally yell at patrons for wasting any bit of food.  

Such a thing, however, was absolutely no problem for me.  I ordered a noodle bowl with beef brisket, and it was delicious.  

If there is a heaven, it serves this nonstop

Now I know I said my first meal in HK was probably the best meal of my life (and it was), but this noodle bowl was so incredibly delicious that I wanted another bowl after I was done, despite being completely full.  The meat was melt-in-your-mouth tender, falling apart whenever I tried to pick up too large a piece.  The noodles were perfectly cooked, not too firm, not too mushy, and the juice from the meat had melted into the soup.  Oh my goodness the soup.  It was an exquisitely rich broth with a slight creamy taste from the beef fat, salty but not overpowering.  Words almost cannot do it justice.

We went shopping for a little while before heading to dinner, eating a Korean BBQ restaurant (yes, in Hong Kong).

 

In case you didn't believe me, proof ^^

The next day was pretty uneventful.  We probably went to the CC Club again, maybe did some random shenanigans around Hong Kong until dinner time when we went to my Uncle Larry's apartment.  Now my Uncle Larry is not related by blood, at all.  He went to college with my mother at the University of Buffalo, and they and a bunch of other friends from UB have stayed in touch now that they're rich and successful and living in Hong Kong.  Uncle Larry is a director and owns a commercial studio, whereby he produces commercials for Hong Kong and mainland China.  So how opulent of a home does such a person possess?  Well you can be the judge.

Living area featuring Mom and Dad

Dining area, seating for 12!

View, in the rain

Crazy hippy artwork.  Yes, that is a mish-mash of DC heroes in pin-up poses.

Keep in mind, this is on top of a 4 story apartment complex overlooking Repulse Bay.  So yeah, expensive.

Now the meal was excellent, but I was so busy eating and trying to appear interested in the conversation (more on this in a bit) that I forgot to snap pictures of the food.  It was good, mostly Filipino cuisine prepared by Uncle Larry's two maids.  However, the highlight of the visit, for me at least was...

OMG SO CUTE

 ...Uncle Larry's dog, Coffee!  Now Coffee was super skittish, much like my beloved Gizmo.  Which is a good excuse to share a picture of him.

Such a silly baby

One thing that Coffee did learn from us was how to beg for food, courtesy of my father's complete and utter inability to resist giving human food to dogs.

"Give it to me!"

My Uncle Larry is also quite the character.  He was very cheerful and upbeat, but he was also quite sick, since he had just landed from a flight back from China filming a commercial.  Thus, as the host, he felt compelled to attempt to prevent the spread of his germs by...

Yes, those are indeed orange pastel slacks.

... sitting 5 feet back from the dinner table and half-heartedly wearing a mask.

As you can see, there is a dining table full of Asian people, all of whom are either a.) eating, b.) conversing in Cantonese, or c.) both.  So I'm sitting at a dinner table, attempting to stay interested in a conversation that I cannot understand.  As a gwai lo, this is something I'm fairly used to.  When my parents go to visit friends in Queens, we always go out to eat, and they always converse in Cantonese.  So I'm used to sitting there, responding when I'm spoken to, and otherwise just twiddling my thumbs and losing myself in my thoughts.  Do I wish I could take part in the conversation?  Maybe not, but I'd like the option.  I've been at enough dinner parties with my parents older friends to know that it doesn't take a foreign language to feel as though you can't or shouldn't contribute to a conversation.  

However, it all comes as a stark reminder that I am still an outsider.  I sat there, mostly in silence, whispering to my mom occasionally, even leaving the table and sitting on the couch after a couple hours.  Maybe it was disrespectful, but feeling un-included has a way of making you not really care whether your decisions are respectful or not.  Not that it was their fault; if anything, it is my own fault for never attempting to learn the language of my ancestors.  Several of them even commented about how it was great for me to spend time with my parents and their friends instead of going out on my own.  This brought a laugh out of my parents, saying that if I could go off by myself, I probably would have.  Indeed, I probably would have.  

That sort of dependence, that sort of loneliness isn't something that's necessarily sorrowful.  But it still makes me sad; That even if I wanted to venture out on my own, being a foreigner in a place where I don't appear to be a foreigner, I could feel so alone in a crowd.

Hong Kong 2012, Part 2: Old Memories, Old Feelings

If you wish to read Part 1...

For the next few days, our routine would be pretty much the same; We would wake early in the morning (generally somewhere between 4:30am and 6:30am), eat some low-key breakfast (cereal for me, oatmeal for Mom, nothing for Dad), then wait around for my Auntie Myna to wake up so we could go in to town with her and eat some awesome food, see some sights, eat some more food, and return home.  

Naturally, this meant I had a lot of free time between waking (4:30am!) and leaving for lunch (around 11:30-12).  Now even though my aunt is exorbitantly rich, she really never saw a need to have a TV outside of her bedroom, so my parents were, how shall I say... low on morning entertainment.  My dad probably did one hundred thousand billion Sudoku puzzles, while my mom tried to do the same and also read some books.  I, in my infinite wisdom, brought my laptop along with me for just such times, and thus I had my entire collection of nefariously collected episodes of "How I Met Your Mother," "The Big Bang Theory," and "Game of Thrones" to watch over, and over, and over again.  And I did, over, and over, and over again.  I even got my mom hooked on TBBT, so now she can understand a bit about what my life is like on a daily basis.

When my aunt awoke on the 2nd day, we went into the city, did some crazy electro-therapy acupuncture thingy (yea don't ask), and then went to lunch at the Craigengower Cricket Club.  Yes, that is some crazy alliteration.  Now the CC Club looks something like this...

Yes, those old men are lawn bowling, and as my father told me, they probably play for about $10,000 per ball.  Which made me barf a little in my mouth at first, but considering the membership fees are probably ten times that, most people who are members at this club are not exactly lacking in funds.

The awesome thing about the CC Club is that it is huge part of my old memories of Hong Kong.  When my grandfather was still alive, he was one of the oldest living members of the club, possessing an extraordinarily rare lifetime membership.  Most of my memories of my grandfather as very vague and fleeting, but perhaps my most vivid one is us walking to the CC Club, perhaps because we did it so often.  So every single trip back to Hong Kong was riddled with visits to the CC Club for fun things, like playing tennis, bowling (real bowling, with lanes), and swimming.  As expected, this also included large amounts of eating, and we ate at a luncheon area right next to the lawn bowling... lawn.  

My parents did point out one thing that I did not notice at first, and that is...

... this very humble building right behind the CC Club, that just so happens to be the place my grandfather and grandmother lived before they passed away (more on the apartment later).

From there, we went to pay respects to my grandmother's "resting place."  

Now, I can't really call it a grave, because it's not.  Note, most "graveyards" in Hong Kong tend to look like this...

...a literal mountain of graves.  This means that "real estate" for the dead is in extremely high demand.  When you are recently deceased (my grandmother having died a couple years earlier), you have to wait your turn before you can be buried in the cemetery.  Thus, my grandmother's "resting place" looks like this...

Indeed, that is a literal hole in the wall, in the attic of a crowded building, next to a bunch of other recently deceased persons.  

Now I'm not big on rituals, especially spiritual ones involving the dead.  I believe that when we pass on, we're gone, totally and completely disconnected from this living plane.  But perhaps it didn't really hit me that the reason we perform such rituals isn't necessarily for the person being honored.  In many ways, this was more about my living family and me.  So when my mom handed me the candles, told me to stand in line next to them as they spoke to my grandmother, I made no argument, and bowed my three times when told to do so.  I was filled with a deep sense of regret, mixed with shame;  Here I was, someone expected to honor this woman, someone whom by all accounts I barely knew, and who also barely knew me.  And those facts bring me incredible shame.  

I didn't know her at all.  I knew some stories, some things my mom had told me, but I was never able to connect with her, not on my own, not by myself.  Someone who had profound effects on my mother, who had and still has profound effects on me, was someone that I probably couldn't name three things about.  It makes me incredibly jealous of those of my friends who have deep relationships with their grandfathers, grandmothers, great grandfathers, great grandmothers.  I would give anything to go back and talk to her more, to go back and be a part of her life.  Perhaps it's because I grew up as an Asian in a small town full of white people, but I've never felt like I really "belonged" anywhere.  

I've long since learned to deal with this lack of belonging.  As an ABC (American Born Chinese), you have to deal with it.  Perhaps it's why I'm so willing to embrace anyone as a friend or ally, because I don't have a "group" to belong to, to hold me to any stereotype.  But in that moment, when I was bowing in front of the grave of a grandmother I barely knew, I felt it all again.  Like here's where I could have belonged.  Here's where I could have been.