My Post on Buddha's Buns

On a scale of 1-10, 1 being the birth of a child or getting married or being handed an entire Marzipan Cheesecake, 10 being, like, having your leg eaten by a crocodile or receiving multiple blows to the head from Newt Gingrich on an acid trip, for me, Thursday, 20 May, rated roughly as a 1,019. 

Bad enough that the entire campus received an e-mail stating that the only senior management person with a background in general education was stepping down; the same e-mail went on to name the new director of GE (no problem there) and to state that his first task would be to review the GE program.

That the program had been under review for the last two years; that this review had led to the development of a new, very well-thought-out, very well-researched, very sophisticated design; that three committees and a half-dozen full-time GE employees had spent the better part of 10 months implementing the intricacies of this new model; that you can’t really review a model that hasn’t been fully implemented yet—none of that seemed to matter.  There it was in the e-mail:  there was going to be a review.  Again. 

Now, any really good mid-level administrator/consultant will be able to walk away from something like this with his/her/its head held high, knowing that he/she/it had done his/her/its best and that this really isn’t his/her/its battle anyway.

Unfortunately, I’m only a moderate-to-good mid-level administrator/consultant, so what I did when I read this e-mail was scream at the top of my lungs, slam my head on the table, storm out of my office, and treat everyone I spent the rest of the day with like crap. 

Case in point:  we’re on the ferry to Cheung Chau Island to celebrate the Buddha’s birthday by going to the Bun Festival.  My colleague Chris and I are sitting on the back deck of the boat on an incredibly clear, warm May day, watching Hong Kong shrink into the distance as we steam out into the South China Sea.  The kids are lounging with us, finishing their snacks, when I turn to Chris and say, “I’m in kind of a bad mood today.”

“Really?” he said.  “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Seriously?”

“Nah.  You look like you would beat an old lady with a stick.”

“You don’t happen to have one, do you?”

“An old lady?”

“A stick.”

He shakes his head.  We talk a little.  I tell him about my frustration, and about my frustration with my frustration:  how I’m doubly annoyed that I’m annoyed, and letting my annoyance ruin a good day.  He commiserates—he too, he confesses, sometimes has a hard time letting things unfold.  What I should do, he says, is just try and forget it all and enjoy the Bun Festival. 

All of which, of course, leads to the questions, What the heck is a bun festival, and what on earth does it have to do with Buddha’s birthday?

As I’m sure you can well imagine, my mind is swimming with possible answers to both of these questions, any one of which would be sure to get me damned to hell—or even darned to heck (my mother has asked me to swear less in my blog)—though I’m not sure that Buddhists technically believe in either hell or heck.

The truth is, the buns in question are actually bao, steamed bread rolls roughly the size and shape of two-thirds of a softball.  Bao can be unfilled, but more often than not they are stuffed with any number of things:  lotus paste, sesame paste, red bean paste, cabbage and chicken.  Fresh, bao are amazing:  yeasty, warm, like the softest center of the softest loaf of bread you’ve ever had.  Probably my favorite way of having bao is with egg-custard in the middle:  it looks and feels like barely cooked yolk, but it’s sweet and flavorful and so hot you can only take small nibbles of the stuff soaked into a corner of the bun. 

Why a bao festival is part of the celebrations surrounding Buddha’s birthday is something of a mystery.  Valerie, our upstairs neighbor who was born and raised in Hong Kong before moving to New York and becoming a Puerto Rican, says it’s because bao are what Buddhist nuns and priests carry with the when they’re traveling.  Others say it’s because bao are often vegetarian, and it’s inappropriate to eat meat on the Buddha’s birthday.  Still others say that the round shape of the buns is reminiscent of the round, doughy belly of Santa Claus, and is thus a desperate attempt on the part of the Chinese to compete with western holidays.

Stop looking at me like that. 

In the end, it doesn’t matter what bao have to do with anything, because the Bun Festival is about so much more than steamed bread.  Pulling into Cheung Chau harbor, the ferry angles its way between rows of fishing trawlers ranging in size from modern ships with giant cranes to rickety sampans that look like they were anchored specifically so you could take quaint pictures.  I love sampans.  I love the way they seem to rest flat in the water, the straight up-and-down of their backs and the way that contrasts with the bowed fronts, the way their diesel engines thump and throb like the bass guitar in Power Station’s remake of “Bang a Gong.”

Cheung Chau Island is the most distant of the well-populated Hong Kong Islands.   It takes an hour to get there by ferry, but at night you can nevertheless see the lights of Hong Kong Island glowing like a child’s dream of a fairy city against the backdrop of the Peak. 

Cheung Chau is attractive, full of narrow streets and cobble-stone walkways, making it feel not unlike Lisbon, albeit without the Lisbonites and their  various political agendas.  Like Lamma Island, which is only 20 minutes from Central, Cheung Chau has a fair number of touristy shops and overpriced B&B-type hotels.  But unlike Lamma, Cheung Chau has plenty of sustenance shops—grocery and hardware stores, and so on—clearly a necessity for isolated year-round residents.  One small side streets is filled with flower shops and bakeries wedged between electronics stores and shops selling traditional Chinese medicine.  It’s all very sweet and all very charming and all very real.  This is not some Disneyland-style olde shoppe place set up to charm tourists.

Which means, ironically, that I should find it all the more charming.  But I can’t.  Because I’m in a bad mood.  And I can’t shake it, no matter how hard I try.

“Why’s daddy growling?” I hear Lucy ask her mother.

“Too much caffeine,” Ellen says.

But the weird thing is, I haven’t indulged in a coke or coffee or a Toblerone Dark for two or three days.  Nevertheless, I feel as though I’ve swigged six gallons of extra black coffee.  My back is tense, my eyes dry and bugging out of my skull.  Even from inside my head, I can feel my lowered brow, am aware of my constant grimace, can feel my own barf brown aura swirling around me like a slow-moving tornado.

Dinner helps some:  swirl-shelled dam in spicy sauce, deep-fried minced clam, welk in onions and garlic.  Afterwards, we visit the bun towers—more on those later—and the main temple, filled with spirals of incense and people burning fake money for the gods.  Then its back to the hotel for glorious, glorious, forgetful sleep. 

 

The next morning I feel slightly better, but only slightly.  We’re with our friends Chris and Valerie, and after breakfast we head out to meet up with a friend of a friend of Valerie’s—this is how Hong Kong works—who’s in a Lion Dance team.  They’re about to make the rounds of Cheung Chau island, visiting the shops of friends to ward off evil spirits and bring luck in the next year.  Outside it’s maybe 90 degrees with 98% humidity, but we hustle after Valerie and catch the lion dance en route along the harbor.  

You can hear the dance before you see it:  drums are pounding, cymbals are crashing.  The suona, a traditional, double-reed, Chinese instrument with a bell like a trumpet, is weaving its high pitched whine over and above the percussion, sounding for all the world like a snake charmer’s flute, only louder, and shriller, and only charming in the way something like, say, cold pizza or a coffee enema can be. 

We follow the parade for over an hour, strolling behind maybe two dozen men in white t-shirts that say Naper Paint.  Other lion dance teams sport shirts bearing logos from Coca-cola, Blue Girl Beer, and local shops.  Every 100 yards or so, the lion will pause in front of a shop owned by a friend of the Naper company:  a bakery at one point, a shoe store at another.  Then the lion—a gigantic head with huge eyes, a flowing mane, a mirror in the middle of its forehead, and a long flowing silken body—will engage in a an elaborate dance, twisting and turning in rhythm to the chaotic drums and cymbals and suona.  It’ll leap into the air, grab at its own tail, thrust forward and back, swing its massive shoulders from side to side while the music pounds and weaves louder and louder until there’s a natural climax.  At this point, the lion lunges toward the owner of the shop, sometimes cascading fake money from its mouth, sometimes just nodding violently as the crowd cheers and applauds. 

The music never stops.  Even once the lion finishes its dance and moves on down the lane to another store the pipes keep droning, the drums keep pounding, the cymbals keep smashing.  And the sun keeps beating down on your head and shoulders, making you squint against the sweat that’s running into your eyes.  And the people in the parade push and shove and bump against one another in the heat, and drop out to get water or a bao or to sit in the shade and pluck their damp shirts away from their skin.

It’s loud.  It’s overwhelming.  In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway describes the festival surrounding the running of the bulls in Pamplona as a descent into drunken chaos, people everywhere, noise, alcohol, food.  Robert, one of Jake’s party, falls asleep in the back of a shop where he doesn’t know anybody.  It’s pure, unreigned Id, almost savage in its intensity. 

Cheung Chau isn’t quite like that—Hong Kongers aren’t much for drinking, after all, and sexual libertarianism in HK means kissing your girlfriend in public rather than waiting until you get back to your flat.  So relative to the drunken, mattress-hopping orgy that is Hemingway’s novel, Cheung Chau is pretty mild. 

But even so, you find yourself melting into something larger than yourself, your circle of friends, your petty frustrations and desires. Part of it is the heat:  even in May the sun is so intense you can actually feel the skin cells dying on your nose.  Part of it’s the humidity.  Strolling out of the air-conditioned hotel is like stumbling into a wet-heat sauna: 97% by 9 in the morning.  It’s the sort of weather where you can pour a glass of ice-water over your head and by the time the first drops hit the ground, you’re already hot again.  In heat like this, you just have to give up, letting yourself slide into the sort of sticky wetness where when  you bend down to tie your shoe, the bottom of your chin sticks to your neck. 

Part of it is the lion dancing:  it’s crazy, vicious, poetic, powerful, rapid all at once.  That big head is shaking back and forth, fringes of green and red flying through the air, the sun sparkling off the mirrors and sequins that have been woven into the mane.  The lion never stops moving, and as much as it’s beautiful and a little funny, it’s also deeply powerful and a little scary.  You know there’s a man under there making all those leaps and shakes, but some primal part of you still knows—knows—that given half a chance, that lion will bite your body in half. 

And part of it, oddly, are the Chinese.  I love Hong Kongers, truly I do, and I’ve developed a dozen friendships that I know will last for years to come—the kinds of friendships that make you feel blessed.  But generally speaking, when you’re walking down the streets of Tai Po—or even across your own campus—folks you don’t know aren’t going to say hello, or even give a small nod.  Fair enough:  even dumb Americans like me don’t expect the rest of the world to act like dumb Americans like me. 

But Cheung Chau is different, at least during the festival:  after the parade, Valerie’s friend leads us to a small shop front where the lion team is assembled and the air conditioning is blasting.  We’re handed team T-shirts, bottles of water, cold lemon tea.  Later, I’m out front and see six teenagers in a circle, all drinking identical box teas.  I take a step to my right and raise my camera.  Normally this gesture is greeted with averted looks and acute indifference, but this time three of the kids smile and throw peace signs.  The same thing happens a few hours later when I’m trying to get a shot of the tiers of people gathered in a stairwell watching the parade:  as I focus, a kid in cool shades and a basketball T-shirt sticks out two fingers and grins.  Chinese New Year, back in February, was such a family holiday that most of the westerners I knew were complaining of feeling shut off from their Chinese friends:  Bun Festival seems the opposite:  there’s an openness in the air, an intermingling of people and small talk that makes me almost giddy.

 

The afternoon is parade time—big parade time, not this door-to-door stuff:  team after team of lion dancers float through town in a mile-long line.  There are dancers as well—little girls in gold lame costumes and acrobats dressed as monkeys doing flips and cartwheels. 

And then there’s the floating parade. 

How to describe this? 

Bizarre doesn’t quite do it. 

Nor does elegant. 

Surreal maybe?  A little creepy? 

Imagine a small child—say, four-years-old—dressed as an old lady:  she’s wearing a long, embroidered dress, owl-rim glasses, blue eye shadow.  Her hair is powdered gray, and she clasps a small purse that matches her dress. 

Okay, you say.  No problem.  I can picture this.

Now imagine this child floating ram-rod straight, right about level with your head.  Or a little higher.

Um, you say, floating? 

Now imagine thirteen or twenty of these children.  Some of them dressed as mermaids.  Some of them dressed as politicians.  Some of them dressed as historical figures. 

This—this—is the floating parade. 

Granted, the kids aren’t really floating in the air:  they’re suspended on some sort of carefully hidden metal-road/platform gizmo that holds them just above our heads.  Just how it works isn’t clear, though you suspect that it runs up the legs of their trousers or skirt, and that it somehow secures the entire body right up to the neck.  Just where the feet are is a little confusing—yes, you see shoes at the bottom of the trousers, but they look overlarge and oddly angled, like shoes on a scarecrow, maybe, or a badly arranged corpse (you know what I’m talking about, so don’t pretend you don’t). 

Making all of this all the weirder is that the long poles the children are standing on are attached to wheeled carts, which means that if you’re standing back from the parade, watching over the heads of the crowds, these kids seem to glide smoothly through the air. 

It’s a little creepy, I have to say.  And one of the few moments I’ve had in Hong Kong where all of the following are true:  a)  I don’t get it; b) I don’t think I ever will; and c) it’s still kind of cool.

But I mentioned creepy, right?  Because it’s definitely that. 

 

Will, Lucy, Jamie and I make it through three-quarters of the parade.  Finally, though, it’s just too hot and too loud, so we say goodbye to the others and head back to the hotel, stopping along the way to grab a couple cheap swim suits from a shop.

I think I know the way back, but the island is asymmetrical so we find ourselves lost in the narrow streets, a steep hill covered with tiers of buildings and steps on one side, a blue-roofed school on the other.  It’s still hot, and our ears are still wringing, and the sky is growing dark with clouds so for a while there I’m imagining one of those Kowlooned moments (see Sept. 09), similar to our early days in Hong Kong, where everything goes wrong and we end up with three tired, miserable, hungry children under the age of ten. 

But eventually we wind our way back to the hotel, passing the tattered ends of the parade, groups of lion dancers smoking cigarettes outside the local 7-11, a small girl in a maroon-sequined dress still suspended eight feet above them.  We change into our suits, rush down to the beach, and dive in. 

Instantly, we feel better.  The day’s sweat is washed off and our body temperatures drop.  The sky is heavy with clouds, but we don’t care:  the air is still warm and the water is cool.  In the distance, you can see the south side of Hong Kong Island, white skyscrapers shimmering in the heat.  It’s perfect. 

 

We skip the bun race that night:  three men ascending a 40-foot tower covered with bao, grabbing as many as they can on the way down.  It doesn’t start until midnight, and all of us are just too tired.  Instead we’re in bed by 11, the distant echo of cymbals and drums following us into sleep.

The next day something weird happens at breakfast:  the hotel restaurant is crowded so we have to share a table with a family of three.  They ignore us for the most part, except for one moment when the mother gets annoyed with Will for playing with a toy skateboard.  When two steamers of dim-sum come, the family claims them as their own, even though they’ve already got six dishes and the new dishes are exactly what we ordered.  We’re polite and don’t say anything, but after 15 minutes of waiting for our shrimp dim to come, we’re pretty sure we know what happened.  We give up and leave.

The town feels deserted.  Squares that had been thronged with people just 12 hours earlier are now barren, heaps of bamboo poles  and scraps of crepe paper the only reminders of the festivities.  The bun towers stand bereft of bao, their paper shells tattered.  Outside the central temple, giant sticks of incense, once 9 inches wide and 8 feet tall, are now nothing more than piles of gray powder. 

We find a bakery selling coconut buns and raisin bread.  Stuffing my face, I ask Chris if he’s ever read The Sun Also Rises.  He has, and I remind him of the last section of the book, after the festival has ended.  Brett, whom Jake, the hero, loves more than anyone, has ruined and then run off with a sweet young bull fighter; the hotel keeper, with whom Jake was friends for years and who treated Jake with a level respect reserved for only the truest of bullfighting aficionados, is not longer speaking to him.  The morning after the festival is over, the town is hauntingly, nauseatingly empty.  Jake feels empty and emptied out, cleansed of all emotion, good and bad. 

“It’s all about catharsis,” I say.  “Losing yourself in the noise and chaos, just giving yourself over to it.  Then walking out clean the next day.”

Chris nods, thinks for a minute.  “We’ve lost that in the States.  These days, festivals are too commercialized.  So many rules.”

“I love that book,” I say.  “I know I shouldn’t, but I do.”

He nods again and we follow the kids down a side road.  There are still buns everywhere, and here and there we find small lines of people waiting for a fresh batch hot out of the steamer.  Folks will buy six, eight, ten, a dozen bao in white cardboard boxes with a fold-on handle on the top.  I like bao, I’ll admit, but every time I see one of these boxes I find myself thinking they’re filled with Cinnabons.  Bao are good, yes—very good even—but until they mix cinnamon into the batter and cover those suckers with vanilla-almond frosting—well, let’s just say that until then, bao will remain a strictly Asian delicacy. 

Even so, we buy a few, bite into them.  They’re soft and yeasty and light.  At the center is a pearl-gray paste of lotus seed.  It’s sweet, but not too.  Lucy and Will are racing up ahead, and Jamie is running flat-footed after them, hollering for them to wait up, waaaaiiit up!  The sky is still low with clouds, the air thick with moisture.  It’s another sticky day.

In two days, I know, I’ll be back on campus, staring at what could be the collapse of everything the GE office has worked on all year.  Whenever I told someone back in the States why I was coming to Hong Kong—to serve as a resource as the universities there revised their gen ed programs—folks would say, “That’s great:  you can spend the year doing what you can, then walk away from it if everything goes wrong.”

Curricular revision can always go wrong.  Academics can be stubborn people, certain that they’re right, even if their Ph.D.s are in areas entirely un-related to general education.  It’s hard to tell someone who studied cognitive neuroscience or architectural engineering that they don’t necessarily understand general education, even if everything that comes out of their mouths indicates that they haven’t the first idea what they’re talking about. 

And I’m not good at distancing myself.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed that.  I have one gear—on—and one level of interaction—intense.  So walk away from a model that gets torn down for no reason?  Stroll away from colleagues who’ve worked hard all year to implement a model that is based on sound thinking and careful research? 

Not likely.

But even so, I’m calmer now.  I can see things a little more clearly.  None of this is the end of the world.  None of it is even the end.  Say the model gets killed before it even gets started:  in ten years, maybe five, some insightful dean or VP or Provost will notice that what’s happening the GE courses seems kind of useless, and will wonder if perhaps there’s a better way.  And then—who knows?

We’re walking along the harbor now, just wandering really.  Chris and I have found a good place to buy Macau-style pork buns, but it’s not open yet, so on this hollow day in this empty town on this abandoned island, we’re just killing time.  The boats in the harbor are still pretty though, and one of us stops to take a picture. 

When we turn around, there’s an old man there:  maybe five feet high, probably less, with lean, wiry arms sticking out of a khaki vest.  His head is nearly bald, his skin dark brown.  What’s left of his hair is pure white; so, too, are his eyebrows, which are an inch long and hang over his eyes like snowy curtains.  His fingers are narrow and lily-shaped, tipped by long nails.

He’s looking at the children.  And saying something.  In one hand he holds a rolled up plastic bag.  Will and Lucy are looking at him, not so much frowning as just watching, waiting to see what happens. 

He stares at Jamie first, placing a long hand on his head, lightly, just for a second.  And then he gestures towards Will, saying something again, but I’m not sure what.  Valerie is right there, listening, but we don’t ask her to translate.

Finally the man turns to Lucy, raises his hand.  It’s hard to tell how old he is:  maybe a hundred.  Maybe fifty.  He’s been around, though, you can tell that.  He’s had some battles. 

Eventually he finishes his benedictions, lowers his hand, says something again in Cantonese.  His shoulders are slightly stooped, and his mouth pulls down like the jaw of a marionette.  He seems neither agitated, nor confused.  He’s just looking at these kids in front of him, these specimens of another place and another race and another world that doesn’t, no matter how much he tries, quite makes sense. 

He says a final word or two, raises his hand again, gestures gently—then turns around and shuffles off. 

Wonderful Joy

       We’re in the Wonderful Joy restaurant and everyone is looking at me. 

“What?” I say. 

I’m used to being stared at:  this is Tai Po, after all, and I’m white, bald, and about a head-and-a-half taller than everyone else. 

This time is different, though.  I’m with friends—or at least co-workers—and they’re used to their freak show of a colleague.

“What?” I say again. 

It’s Hui Xuan who speaks.  “We don’t ask these questions here.”

I look at her, then at Nana, who runs our office, then at Dwight.  Dwight is our guest, a scholar on service learning, and the reason we’re all out for dinner—we wanted to show him a good time.  Nice idea. 

I look at Nana again.  “All I did was ask if she was married.”

Hui Xuan nods and blinks slowly, as though to remind herself to be patient.  Hui Xuan is from the mainland, not a native Cantonese speaker, and definitely an old soul.  I sometimes worry that she feels marooned in a field of baboons in our office—she’s the only one who’s studied general education formally, and the only one who seems to take every conversation we have very seriously.

“I know,” she says now.  “But we don’t ask these kinds of questions here.  Not unless you are very old.”

That I am very old—at least compared to Hui Xuan, and Nana, and Iris, the other colleague present—is something I decide not to point out.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Nana. 

She laughs.  “It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s just—“ and here I look at Dwight, who’s from Boston.  Wisely, he’s examining a fingernail, very careful, as though looking for a secret word or code to make the awkwardness go away.  “It’s just that in the States, it’s strange to work with someone and not know if they’re married or single, or if they have kids or not.”

“But Paul,” Nana says, “I’m only eighteen.”

I stare, then everyone bursts out laughing. 

“And she’s looking for a man who’s twenty,” Iris says, and everyone cracks up again.  The moment is broken, the awkwardness fades, and everyone goes back to normal conversation.

The thing is, though, I don’t actually know how old Nana is.  Or Hui Xuan.  I don’t know if Iris has children, or a boyfriend, or is gay or married or the daughter of the last emperor of the Bigfoot kingdom.  All of this is fair enough, of course:  their private lives are none of my damn business.  But still, all of this feels a little peculiar to a guy who comes from a country where people go on national TV and say things like, “Jerry, I once had sex with a goat, and I’ll have you know, it wasn’t half bad.” 

Now, the four Chinese—we’ve been joined by the director of some program that has a lot of initials and whose purpose is unknown to me—go back to speaking Cantonese, which is a pity, since between us, Dwight and I know exactly two phrases of Cantonese, one of which means, “I’m so sorry, but I believe the state of Massachusetts just elected an idiot,” and other of which involves ensuring your masseuse keeps her clothes on for the duration of your massage. 

Since neither of these seem useful in this particular setting, Dwight and I chitchat across the table, carefully avoiding any questions about each other’s spouses, children, politics, incomes, or religion. 

Fortunately for us, the hot pot arrives soon. 

"But what," you say, "is hot pot?"

Good question.  An even better question, though, is how the heck have the Chinese kept hot pot a secret for so long? 

Because, and I fear exaggerating here but bear with me—because hot pot is the best damn thing ever. 

Ever. 

Seriously. 

Jesus liked hot pot.

So did Ghandi. 

Abe Lincoln?  Hot pot addict.

Joan D’Arc?  Requested it for her last meal. 

Even Michelle Obama, who, frankly, currently surpasses all of these people in my mind, my lady Michelle LOVES hot pot. 

The best way to describe hot pot is to harken back to the late ‘70s and the Fondue craze.  For those of you for whom shag carpet is just a rumor, Fondue consisted of a bunch of people in tacky pants suits boiling a pot of hot oil in the middle of the table and sticking stuff—shrimp, mini-hotdogs, squares of cheese, what’s left of their marijuana joints—in it to cook. 

If this sounds bizarre and even a little dangerous, that’s because it is.  And the cool thing about Chinese hot pot is that it’s even more bizarre and even more dangerous. 

Essentially, hot pot consists of a pot—stick with me here—that you put in the middle of the table and—wait for it—make hot.  The means for achieving the latter are various.  Most restaurants have special tables with a burner laid into the center.  Other places, though, need to improvise:  I was at a fast food place, once, where keeping the hot pot boiling involved lighting a can of sterno, something I’d love to see Ronald McDonald try. 

But what you ask, is in the pot? 

A good, hearty broth.  Exactly what’s in the broth depends upon your tastes.  The first time we had it, our hosts ordered a pot divided in half:  one side had lots of spices to keep the adults happy; the other had a milder broth that wouldn’t offend the children. 

When we have hot pot at Wonderful Joy, Iris and Nana do the ordering.  Iris is a little like Abe Lincoln in that she too wears a tall black hat, once freed a nation from slavery, and is addicted to hot pot.  She’ll deny this if you ask her, but one visit to her Face Book wall and you realize that an intervention is in order: 

10 January. Hot pot!  The fifth time this week!

2 January.  Hot pot tonight.  Friends got mad at me because I wouldn’t share.  Don’t care. 

28 December.  Hot pot again tonight, alone, in a sleazy hotel.  Not very good, but enough to keep me going.

21 December.  Held myself to just one hot pot this week.  Want more, though.  Much much more. 

15 December.  Had to sell mother’s pearls to get hot pot.  Feel bad.  But not too bad.

5 December.  Killed an old lady because she got in the way of my hot pot.  Hope she was homeless, so no one will notice. 

 

Anyhow, Iris and Nana do all the ordering, so when the pot comes, all of us ask what’s in it. 

“Chicken feet,” says Iris. 

Dwight and I stare.   “Really?” I ask. 

Iris picks up her chopsticks, fishes around in the broth for a few seconds, and pulls out a very large, very gnarled chicken foot.

“Oh,” I say.  I try to sound nonplussed, but I’m sure my face is pale. 

“Is it for flavor?” Dwight asks.

Iris shakes her head. 

“Not,” I say, feeling just a little bit white, a little bit western, and, well, sort of a little bit scared to death.  “Not for eating?”

Iris grimaces and shakes her head again. 

“Well then,” I say, “what’s it for?”

Iris considers for a moment, then says, “I don’t know.”  She drops the foot back in the pot, and returns to her conversation with Nana. 

Besides the broth, everyone at the table receives a small bowl with soy sauce in it.  To this you can add a variety of chopped delicacies:  roasted garlic, green onions, peanuts, sliced chilies.  I take most of the chilies and when everyone complains, give them each one peanut. 

Once the stew is at a rolling boil, the waiters and waitresses descend on the table with plate after plate of goodies to be cooked.   The great thing about hot pot is that you can do it with anything.  On this particular night, we can choose from sliced beef, butterflied scallops, prawns still twitching on the plate, three or four kinds of dumplings, a melon-like vegetable that have to be cooked forever before you could eat it, razor-thin slices of eel, and four or five different kinds of fish.

And mushrooms.  The mushrooms are unbelievable:  some of them are just plain old stem and caps like your mother used to put on pizza or your college roommate used to eat before watching reruns of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.  Others, though, are more exotic:  my favorite are the enoki, long, reedy mushrooms joined at the bottom and with caps so narrow that they look like bean sprouts when cooked.

Once the food comes, it takes a while to get things going.  Everyone reaches for stuff and passes plates around the table.  Each person has a small wire basket with a wooden handle.  You put your food in this, then place it in the broth, trying your best to avoid the chicken foot floating near the surface.  Then you wait.  It seems pokey, at first, especially since you’re hungry and you’ve just been informed that all of the things you’d normally talk about over dinner are forbidden.  But eventually you draw your scallops or shrimp dumpling or pork meatball out of the pot and put it in your bowl.   Once it’s cooled a bit, you roll it in the soy-sauce mixture, then pop it in your mouth. 

And then you chew and go, “Oh my god, that tastes good.”   And then, for maybe the fifteenth time that evening, you wonder why the heck the rest of the world doesn’t know about Chinese hot pot.

At one point, I gesture toward my little basket where something pink and limp is waiting to be boiled.  “What’s this?” I say to Iris.

She uses her chopsticks to nudge it.  She looked at Nana, who shrugs.  Then she looks back at me. “I don’t know.”

“But you ordered it,” I say.

Again that shrug. 

“And you’re the hot pot expert,” I say.

Iris makes a small, gleeful smile and throws another prawn in the pot.  She is in her element.  She’s not about to be thrown off by some white guy who’s afraid of eating chicken foot.  “We ordered a lot of things.”

I lower my basket into the pot.  Within seconds, the heat curls the pink thing into a ball, revealing ruffles and ridges resembling an octopus tentacle. 

“Oh!” says Iris, “it’s—“ and then names something in Cantonese. 

I drop it into my soy mix and pop it into my mouth.  It definitely has that rubbery, squiddy texture and that mild, pleasant flavor I’ve come to associate with cephalopods.

“So what is it in English?”

Iris squints, then shakes her head.  “No idea.”

This happens two or three times, enough that Dwight and I start to wonder if we’re not being fed every form of internal organ known to man.  At one point, Dwight points to a plate near me and says, “Can I try some of that?” 

“Sure.”  I hand it to him.  I’ve had four or five of these things, and found them really tasty. 

He takes one in his chopsticks, holds it up to his face and examines it.  “What is it?”

“Jellyfish,” I say, at the exact same moment the man next to me—the director of the initial place—says, “Noodles.”

I stare at him.  “That?”  I point to the small nearly translucent white bundles.  There are probably fifteen of them, each about the size and shape of a small thumb.  Thin strands curve along the back—tentacles, I have no doubt.

The man nods.  “Noodles.”

“That,” I say, “is most certainly jellyfish.”

We eye each other for a moment, then turn to Iris.  She bends over the plate.   When she straightens, she says, “Squid.”

Nana snorts.  “Noodles.”

Iris looks at her.  “Is not.  It’s—“ and then she tosses out another Cantonese term.

“It’s noodles,” Hui Xuan says from the other side of the table. 

But by now Nana is taking another look, holding whatever it is up for closer examination.  “Paul’s right.”  The regret is diamond hard in her voice.  “Jellyfish.”

“Oh please,” Iris says, then bursts into machine-gun Cantonese.  In seconds the table has erupted, everyone throwing words back and forth across the pot.  Even Hui Xuan is animated.

Eventually the waitress comes.  Iris gestures at Nana, using a little basket to fish one of the whatever-it-ises out of the hot pot.  En masse, the four Chinese grill the waitress.  She listens for a minute, hands in her pockets, then throws back a staccato question or two.  Iris responds, and eventually the waitress marches off. 

“What’d she say?” Dwight asks. 

Nana bites her lip.  “She doesn’t know.”

A few minutes later another woman comes to the table, this one in a suit with a white shirt, looking like the hostess maybe, or even the owner.  Again the rapid-fire words and phrases, everyone at the table giving suggestions.  The hostess listens for a while, nodding at each person in turn.  Dwight and I, meanwhile, are working our way through the little white things.  Whatever they are, they taste good.

Eventually the hostess lets loose a stream of words.  Iris responds in kind, then the man next to me tosses out a phrase or two.  The woman ignores him, gesturing toward the back of the restaurant.  And then, in what sounds like mid-sentence, she turns and walks off.

“Where’s she going?” I say.

“To the kitchen.”

“She doesn’t know either?”

Iris shakes her head.  “She’s asking the cook.”

To the best of my knowledge, we never did get the answer.  It didn’t matter:  we ate every one of those little white things, then cleared every other plate on the table, and a few from a table nearby.

It’s hard to say just what makes hot pot so wonderful.  Certainly, the broth helps (god bless them chicken feet) and the ground spices in soy sauce don’t suck either.  And there’s a lot to be said for food that’s so freshly-cooked you actually scald your lips eating it.   There’s no oil that I can tell, and no grease, so everything you put in your mouth you really taste.  I like shrimp under any circumstances, but coming out of a hot pot, you get the sense that you’re experiencing shrimp in its purest form. 

It’s also possible that part of the joy of hot pot comes with having to wait.  That sounds very Victorian, I know, and rather ironic coming from a guy my “friend” Gordon once referred to as “the king of instant gratification.”   But there you have it.  As we hover over the steaming pot, eyes on our spoons, we start to talk about the impending birth of Hui Xuan’s first child .  She tells us the story of a friend who got pregnant and posted 24 names on a website, asking acquaintances to vote. 

“Did she go with the winning name?” Dwight asks. 

Hui Xuan shakes her head.  “No.  Right before the baby came, she thought of another one.  That’s what they chose.”

Someone asks if Hui Xuan and her husband have picked a name for their baby.  Hui Xuan shakes her head.  Apparently there’s a tradition in her husband’s family where everyone has the same character as their second name. 

“You mean the same middle name?”

No Hui Xuan says, and then explains that Chinese names aren’t really names, at all, but combinations of words.  In English, of course, most names are meaningless sounds separate from everyday speech—Paul, Ellen, Dolores.  There are some exceptions, of course:  Will, Heather, Angus. 

In China, though, names are made up of one, two, or three actual words that express the parents’ hopes for the personality and fortunes of the child:  Hui, for instance, means “intelligent” and “Xuan” means gem.  My colleague William is named Wai Lam, which means “Strong Forest.” 

“So what’s the name your husband’s family uses?” one of the other women asks. 

Hui Xuan responds in Mandarin.  The other Chinese look confused.  Hui Xuan thinks for a moment, then shakes her head.  She can’t remember the Cantonese word. 

“What’s the character?” Iris asks.  Mandarin and Cantonese use the same characters, just pronounce them differently. 

Hui Xuan looks around, trying to see if there’s a piece of paper handy.   There isn’t.  Finally, she holds up her hand, flat, so we can see.  With her index finger, she makes a slash across the palm, then a dot.  She hesitates, then, using her nail, makes a pair of squiggles just below the line.

I’ve known Hui Xuan for five months now, seen her on an almost daily basis.  I respect her about as much as any scholar I’ve ever worked with.  In that time, we’ve talked about assessment, about curricular development, about service-learning and cognition and writing and course assessment.  We’ve discussed coming from the north and living in the south and being far away from our families.  I’ve met her husband and seen her present at a conference and talked with her afterwards about how she thought she did.  When she confessed her pregnancy to me, long after I’d figured it out for myself, she neither blushed nor looked away. 

This, though—this flight of the finger over the curve of the thumb—this is the most intimate thing I’ve ever seen her do.  This is evident to everyone at the table, maybe everyone in the restaurant.  As she gestures, it’s like the whole room falls silent:  there’s just her one hand, palm to us, finger dancing over the skin, her eyes on us, each of us, as she writes, trying to see, trying to know, hoping we understand. 

 

A Day at the Bitch Bitch Bitch

             We’re in the taxi on the way to the beach when Will pinches Lucy on the arm.

“Oww!” she howls.

“Will!” I say.  “What are you doing?”

“She pinched me first!”

I turn to Lucy, which isn’t easy in the back of a tiny green taxi with an almost-three-year-old on your lap.  “Lucy, did you pinch him?”

“But he hit me!”

“Will!  What on earth?”

“She had her hand under my bottom!”

“Lucy!”  At this point Ellen kicks in from the front seat, where she’s been frantically looking up the word for “beach” in the English-Cantonese dictionary so that she can explain to the driver exactly where we want to go.  “What have we told you about touching people there?”

“But you and dad—“ she begins and I interrupt.

“If you guys are going to behave like this, we’re going to turn this car around and go straight back home.  Then you can both sit in your rooms all day while your mom and I go do fun things.”

“What about Jamie?” Lucy asks. 

“He can do fun things too.”

“But he pinches.”

“And touches bottoms,” says Will.

“You guys!” I almost roar but not quite.  The taxi driver gives me a look—opaque, yet judgmental—in the rearview mirror.   “If I have to say this one more time . . . “

And then I leave it at that.  Which is a joke, of course.  Because in the 50 minutes we’ve already been en route to Sai Kung—15 on a bus, 30 on a train, and now in a taxi—I’ve already said this 6 times.  On the bus it was about their fighting over the front seat; on the train it was about their using the support poles like a stripper, swinging their legs around and around.  In fact, we’ve been doing a lot of threatening lately.  It’s like suddenly the perfect children we knew in the States—we actually attend church with them fairly often, and have gotten to the point where we can leave the duct tape and staple guns at home—the perfect little darlings that all their teachers write us notes about, are disappearing.  Just a week earlier we’d Skyped with ours and our kids’ best friends back in the States, and been struck by the contrast between their side of the camera and ours:  their kids sat quietly in front of the computer, asking questions and listening to the answers, replying thoughtfully when we asked about school or swim team.  Our kids squirmed and pinched and made rabbit ears and talked over each other and didn’t listen to anything anyone else said.  Eventually we had to pull two of them out at a time, and rotate them in so that everyone could have a decent conversation. 

And that’s just the beginning, really.  The other day Ellen and Lucy came home from Lucy’s After School Activity (baking), and Lucy was sent straight to her room for the rest of the day.  This is not something we do often—in fact, in the nine years we’ve had munchkins in the house, I can only remember it happening three times, and two of them were for me.  But apparently Lucy had spent most of the journey home doing exactly the opposite of what her mother had asked her to do.  In Lexington, where we live in the States, this isn’t such a big deal:  the biggest threat there is being nudged by a lazy dog laying down.  In Hong Kong, though—and even Tai Po—the consequences for not paying attention to Mom or Dad could be devastating:  two weeks ago, in the middle of a busy MTR station in the Central district, Lucy hauled out her Octopus card and went through the turnstiles herself while we were busy getting Jamie out of his stroller.  Five more feet and she would have been down the escalator, and I don’t know how we would have found her again.  And she did this despite the approximately 2,478,592 times we’ve told her, “When we’re in a crowd, stick with us.”  We’ve even said please.

 

For the rest of the taxi ride, the kids are pretty good, less because they want to be than because I’ve sandwiched myself between them, making a point of throwing an elbow or two as I did so, because yes, I did learn my parenting skills from Charles Barkley. 

When we finally get to Sai Kung, it’s a delight.  There’s a huge harbor filled with boats of all shapes and sizes, from massive blindingly white yachts to a scull maybe twenty yards long with nine pairs of rowers, each with a paddle, stroking in synch.  My favorite were these relatively new looking house boats that’d been designed to look like Chinese junks:  dark wood, high prows, cabins with narrow windows.  If I were a billionaire and didn’t spew my lunch every time I stepped on water, these are exactly the kind of boats I would buy.  I still might, only with a double-sized toilet for easier aim. 

For HK$10 each, (about a buck thirty), we take an old ferry to the beach.  One of the many things I love about Hong Kong is that they’ve managed to keep so many of the old forms of transportation.  Sure, they’ve torn down whole blocks of old buildings and replaced them with stunningly ugly high-rise flats that look exactly like the stunningly ugly high-rise flats right across the street.  But on the way from your stunningly ugly high-rise flat in Hung Hom to your stunningly ugly high-rise office in Wan Chai, you can take a classic, coal powered Star Ferry, just like the ones your grandfather and his mistress used to take all those years ago. These are wide and airy, with a huge 10-foot circumference chimney in the middle, making you feel like fiddlers and Irish dancers will show up any minute.  Even when the harbor is rough, these ferries make you feel somehow warm and safe. 

And when you get off the ferry, you can get on a classic, double-decker, trolley car just like the one your grandmother and her lover/gardner took after she dumped your grandpa’s sorry ass and took up painting, gourmet wines, and men 20 years younger than her, not necessarily in that order.  The trolleys are skinny—only three seats wide—and cozy, with low ceilings and narrow staircases.  If you’re lucky enough to get the front seats on the top floor, you get a view of the city that is, I’m sorry, but there’s no other word:  delightful.  Almost dizzyingly so.  You’re one floor up, lifted above the onrush of passersby and trucks and taxis.  As a result, the pace of Hong Kong seems to slow down and you can actually take things in, the lines of tall glass and steel, the rich and stylish in their cashmere and diamonds, the expensive cars sliding inches from each other in the narrow streets.

The Star Ferries and the trolleys are all wonderfully clean and well-maintained, and all of them are kept in vintage condition.  The seats are smooth and wooden, the sashes varnished pine, the ceilings also pine, also varnished, sometime in a herringbone pattern, sometimes not. 

Similarly, the ferry we’re on now is ringed with wooden benches and trimmed with shiny old pine.  The air is thick with the smell of diesel—which, in this context, is more nostalgic than gagging.  There are blue ferries and yellow ferries, and you have to be sure to remember your color so you can take the same company back. At the front of each ferry hangs a tire so thick that it must come from a dragster:  when the ferryman reaches the dock, he nudges it gently, then throttles the boat forward, holding it flush against the concrete, so that passengers can step from the boat, onto the tire, then onto the wharf.

We cruise past the yachts in the harbor and around a bend, and then come up to Trio beach. Ever seen one of those commercials where thick palm trees lean over white sand, with waves crashing beneath an impossibly blue sky?  Well, this was just like that.  Except for the waves.  And the palm trees.  And the sky is sort of hazy, more in a humid way than a polluted way, but it definitely isn’t blue, much less impossible.

The sand, though, is white and fine.  And geez, it’s a nice beach:  isolated, almost empty.  The water’s cool and relatively clear by Hong Kong standards, dropping off quickly so you can swim to two anchored rafts.  Which we do.  And we collect sea glass.  And shells.  I spend as much time as I can underwater, completely submerged and not feeling sweaty for the first time in 2 months.  Will has his goggles with him and he spends all day face down in the water, collecting cool shells.  When we finally leave five hours later, he’s actually paler than when he’d come. 

But we’re not there yet.  First we have to eat lunch, then we have to lather each other in sun screen.  Lucy fusses over lunch, taking longer to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich than humanly possible.  Seriously, a quadriplegic sloth would have been faster than she was—and  still had enough time leftover to write me a letter about insulting the handicapped, not to mention sloths. 

Other than that, though, the day is splendid.  There’s a breeze, the other people on the beach are nice, the water feels good.  We even go upstairs to the snack bar to get some ice cream.

Which, of course, is where the spaghetti hits the fan. 

I don’t know what I was thinking, buying them a Fanta.  There is so much wrong in that simple phrase, “a Fanta.”  The “a” for one:  why would I buy one soda for two kids?  Then there’s the bigger question:  why would I buy soda for our kids?  I mean seriously, these are kids who were raised in such a Little Home on the Prairie dork-fest way (A dad who teaches Dickens, and a mom who edits semi-colons?   Did they ever have a chance?)—these kids were raised in such a dorky way that they still believe that the worst possible punishment you can receive is to not be allowed to read stories before bed.  Really:  they get to keep their allowances, we let them have their supper, none of their stuffed toys are banished to the closet.  But no stories!

The horror.

So soda?  Not in our home.  Not until last spring, when some idiot at some party somewhere gave them a root beer.  From then on, every time we went to the grocery store, the gas station, a restaurant, anyplace where there’s a vending machine—even the health-food store where the only sodas are made from tree roots and the yellowish, pulpy berries imported from Bolivia—anytime, in short, that we went anywhere, it was all about the root beer.   

And of course we gave in.  Because we’re good parents.  With no spines.   Who like large dental bills and children with brown teeth. 

Anyhow, there we are at the refreshment kiosk on Trio beach.  All of the ice cream has run out.  It’s the end of the season, so no point in ordering refills.  Besides, most of the people on the beach are flabby gwilos and gwipos who don’t need any help from frozen dairy products.  So I buy two bags of chips and an orange Fanta for Will and Lucy to share.

And then it begins.

“Will!  I didn’t get any!”

“You had it for 10 seconds.”

“No I didn’t!”

“Well eight then.   It’s my turn now.”  Will has just touched his mouth to the straw when Lucy jerks the can away.  “Hey!”

“That was ten. I counted.”

“You can’t count!”

To which Lucy responds only by planting her lips around the end of the straw and attempting to inhale an entire can of orange soda in one gulp.

“Lucy!”  Will shouts.

“Will!”  Lucy screams back.

Aaaaaaaaaaaagh!  In an instant, the can is out of their hands and arching through the air.  Whump!  It hits the back inside wall of the trashcan and falls bottom up, leaking sugary neon orange liquid all over a discarded copy of the South China Morning Post. 

They both look at me.  So do the two Chinese couples at the tables near the balcony, their assortment of small children sitting beside them, quietly sipping some sort of sugarless fluid that actually makes teeth grow stronger (I think it starts with an “M,” but I wouldn’t know). 

“What’d you do that for?” Will asks.

I hiss, “Because murder is illegal!”

They look at me, not quite sure how to respond.  I give them each a tap on the shoulder, and we head down the stairs, back to the sand.  Ellen gives me a questioning look and I just shake my head.  I’m angry of course, but also embarrassed—for my kids, for myself.  I think again about that taxi driver, and his face in the rear view mirror.  And then I think about the driver of the bus, who glanced back when Lucy started to weep because Will could see the whole TV screen showing the view behind the bus, and she could only see 9 and 98/100ths of it.  And I think about the people on the train who didn’t so much stare at Will and Lucy doing their pole dances as gaze disinterestedly in a constant, silently judgmental way. 

Now it’s entirely possible that some of you might be thinking, “Oh puh-lease!  Surely you care more about your kids than you do about the opinions of strangers?”

No, not really.

Actually, that’s not true.  Of course we do:  this is why we never stopped Lucy from going to pre-school dressed in seven different shades of pink, plaids with stripes, and shorts over tights—all on the same day.  And this is why, when Jamie sometimes insists that we give him a little Pebbles pony-tail using a pink hair band on the top of his head, we do it. 

But honestly?  We do care what the Chinese think.  Ellen and I have both lived abroad before and we’re both aware of the way Americans are perceived—sometimes justly, sometimes not—as loud and clueless and pushy and socially inept—and that’s just talking about Brittany Spears.  Neither of us wants to reinforce that model and we don’t want our kids to either.  More to the point, I think we both take pleasure in behaving in such a way that we’re able to stuff that stereotype in people’s faces.  Talk about passive aggressive.

And too, remember where we live:  in Tai Po we are usually the only white folk walking around.  Talk about pressure.  True, we’re not the only Anglos the Tai Puddlians will likely see that day (Yes, I did just make up that term), but at any given moment we’re the only Anglos at the market or in the park or waiting for the bus or sitting on the bus or eating in the restaurant or riding the train.  And when the only Anglos riding the train include two kids acting like Demi Moore in that really bad movie where she flashes her silicon-stuffed chest, then we’ve got a problem. 

That said, as someone gently reminded me the other day when I was whining about one or another of the little buggers, it’s all about how you frame it:  is your daughter hyper, or just full of love and excitement?  Is your son rigid, or just very comfortable with who he is and what his limits are?   Is your wife unloving and cold, or just sick of you eating an entire chocolate cheesecake and then crawling into bed and murmuring, “My burps taste like marzipan.  Wanna smell one?”

And when you reconsider this particular moment, this particular day, from another angle, what you get is two kids who like each other and trust each other and are excited about going to the beach and express all of this by—how else?—smacking each other on the arm. 

But I have to tell you something:  that sort of re-angling is good and easy when you’ve had a nice cup of coffee and you’re sitting in your nice comfy home with your favorite books on the shelves and your cat Barfy the Dog and your plants and everything else you’ve accumulated in the last nine years snug and safe around you.

And it’s entirely something else when you’re 8,000 miles from that home and sometimes just going to the grocery store and buying pork chops requires more psychic energy than you can muster. 

Fortunately for us, there are moments like the following:

At 4:00 we start to pack up our stuff.  It’s cooling off and the skin of our faces feels tight from all that saltwater and sun.  After showers and changes of clothes, we call the blue ferry and take it back to the pier in Sai Kung.  We walk around for a bit, checking out the restaurant options, then settle on Thai, as it’s something everyone likes.  Sure enough, Will finds a chicken dish that sounds interesting and orders it.  Lucy gets her usual Pad Thai.  We order something simple for Jamie, I can’t remember what, something with squid and basil pepper sauce I think.

Anyhow, we’re munching away, everyone quietly dazed from a day in the sun, when a family of five walks into the restaurant.  They’re Chinese, at least ethnically, but the two older kids—who could be twins, around 6 or 7—both speak fluent American English.  They take the table behind us, and almost immediately the ruckus starts.

BAM!

“Nathan!”

“It didn’t break,” a small, bold voice says. 

My back is to their table, but I manage to catch a glimpse of a dinner plate laying on the tile of the patio. 

“How many times,” his mother says, “do I have to tell you not to play with your dishes?”

“You never told me that.”

“Yes I—You know I—you know you shouldn’t play with stuff like that.  Leave it on the table.”

“But mom,” he says, and I can hear his twin sister snigger, “you never told me that.”

“Nathan,” his mom begins, and then her voice fade, and we lose track of the conversation for a while. 

I’m happily munching on Jamie’s spicy squid salad—after his eyes started to water and flames shot from his nose, he decided he didn’t like it—when I hear:  “Get down from there!”

Will is staring over my shoulder, eyes wide, so I start to sneak another look, just as the father says, “Sit down in your seat!  You know you’re not supposed to—“ and I turn  around and think Holy crap.  That kid is standing on the table.

“—stand on the table!” his father finishes.

Which isn’t entirely accurate.  Actually the toddler is walking.  On the table.  With his feet.  On the table.  Past the butter dish.  Toward the salt shaker. He couldn’t have been more than two—but even so.  On the table.

“Thomas,” says his mother, “get down from there this minute!”

I glance at Ellen and she raises her eyebrows.  I’m feeling a little smug inside, I have to admit.  After all, my little angels are sitting quietly in their plates munching on their noodles and chicken and watching the drama unfold.  True, they just spent 7 hours in the hot sun, running, swimming, diving, swimming, running.  They couldn’t have been more lethargic if I’d dunked their little heads in Nyquil.  But even so.  They’re not walking on the table!

We finish our dinner, get the bill, and begin shuttling the kids to and from the bathroom, one at a time, before the long taxi ride to the long train ride to the short taxi ride that will take us home.  I’m just squeezing the leftovers into my backpack, when I hear a loud POP! followed by the tinkle of glass over pavement.  Behind me, there erupts a tumble of shouting, swearing, and crying. 

“What happened?” I say to Ellen, who’s just strolled up and must have seen the whole thing. 

She grips my arm, just above the elbow and shoves the backpack into my hands.  “He threw a glass over the balcony,” she hisses in my ear.

“Who—?  I—”  I start to turn to get a better look, but she shooshes me and Jamie out of our chairs and in a moment all five of us are on the street.  Behind us we hear scolding and arguing and a baby crying and two smaller voices pointing blame.

Ellen’s grinning.  And I am too, I realize.   Broadly.  Almost painfully.  We hail a cab and pretty soon we’re buzzing off toward Ma On Shan and the train station.  I’m in the backseat again, and Lucy and Will are sitting dazed and exhausted beside me.  On my lap, Jamie’s already almost asleep.  The harbor is folding off into the distance on our right as the taxi picks up speed and a cool breeze drifts through the window. 

“Hey,” I say to the kids.  I want them to notice the deep violet sky, the crescent moon rising over the water.  I want them to feel what I’m feeling right now—a sort of calm, buzzed satisfaction.   “Hey,” I say again.  But neither of them notices, their lids drooping, their bodies slack. 

“You guys,” I say for the third time.  Then I reach over and grab a bit of Lucy’s arm.  And give it a pinch.