Our Faith in Hong Kong is Destroyed. Devasted, even. Blatto. Kapoot. Blaphoey.

       It’s Saturday night.  We’re on a train heading down to Kowloon.  And everyone is staring at us.

This isn’t unusual, of course:  we’re white, two of us are shockingly blonde, and one of us is shockingly big.

It’s different tonight, though, because one of the blondies is dressed in black and carrying a skull on a stick.  Thick red dots blotch her otherwise clear face.  The other blondie is dressed in gauzy black robe, the bones of the human anatomy stretching down his back.  We’ve painted circles under his eyes with black grease, so that he looks like he’s suffering from a sleepless night cue to indigestion caused by eating vaguely rotten human flesh.

Then there’s Will.  Will is . . . well, I don’t know—Satan maybe?  He’s wearing a black cape over a black shirt over black shorts over bare legs and sandals.  And his face is hidden behind a glow-in-the-dark skull mask.  With one gold tooth. 

So, to summarize:  white, blonde, big, blotchy, robed, with at least two skulls. 

No wonder they’re staring.

The thing is, we expected the train to be full of people like us.  When we were at Ocean Park the week before, we were surprised to see people pouring in at closing time dressed in every imaginable variation of ghoul and goblin and flesh-eating zombie.  Dang, we thought:  these Hongkongers know how to do Halloween. 

We hadn’t been too sure, you understand.  After all, until the emergence of Harry Potter, Halloween was a distinctly American event.  I mean, what other country would come up with a ritual that involved hazing, begging, children eating candy until they vomited orange and black rainbows, and the unabashed celebration of all things evil? 

Well, okay, the Aussies, but that’s to be expected.

Anyhow, we hadn’t planned on celebrating Halloween at all, but then we saw these huge crowds pouring into Ocean Park for a late-night fete and we figured what the heck.  So Ellen spent the week combing the tiny shops in Old Tai Po for suitably death-related clothing for our sweet children and I made a late-Saturday run to buy grease paint.  After a early dinner we take the taxi that gets us to the train that takes us to the big party advertised down by the harbor:  “Be prepared to be scared to death!” the brochures warn.  “May not be appropriate for small children!” 

Cool.  What more could you ask for? 

Well, to not be the only ones on the train dressed like morons, for one. 

“Don’t worry,” I say to my eight-year-old son, who looks like he wants to crawl into a hole and rot.   “When we get to Kowloon, it’ll be a blast.”

Ellen nods, grinning and leaning down to stroke his bony, glow-in-the-dark forehead.  “We haven’t been disappointed yet,” she says.

I look around for wood to knock on, but we’re on a train, of course, and there isn’t any.  “Oh well,” I think.  “No biggie.” 

But it is kind of big, really.  I’m not one to wax poetic about a place where Confederate history is the thing you trip over on your way to work, but the fact of the matter is, Lexington Virginia does many things right—moonshine being one of them, and Halloween being another.  Come sundown on the 31^st, the streets around Jordan and Jackson are filled with kids in every imaginable costume, homemade, store bought, superheroes, princesses, drag queens, and killer zombie drag queen superheroes (much more common than you might think). 

But that’s nothing compared to the adults.  I swear some Lexington folk start getting ready for Halloween just after Easter.  Yards are filled with creepy looking gravestones and artificial spider webs and monsters crawling out of flowerbeds.  A few homes have speakers hidden in the shrubs playing creepy music, and more than one place has a smoke machine blowing dry ice mist across the grass.  Porches are cluttered with adults dressed like Witchiepoo and Frankenstein’s monster and Spiderman’s slutty sister.  They’re sipping orange-colored daiquiris and making kids show off their costumes and tell what they are before getting their candy.  Compared to the trick-or-treating I remember when I was a kid—3 to 5 on a Sunday afternoon, my cardboard Batman mask making it hard to breath—Lexington kids get to live a fantasy of what Halloween should be like. 

 

When we get to the Tsim Shau Tsui station, it’s filled with ordinary people in ordinary clothes staring at the white people dressed like idiots.  “Don’t worry,” we say to the kids.  “Once we get up to the street, there’ll be others.”

But there aren’t.  There aren’t even policemen or hookers or guys dressed like Chinese chefs because they work in Chinese restaurants wandering around, so that we could at least pretend there are folks in costumes.  Just normal people in blue jeans and sweaters and those frilly frock-thingies women in Hong Kong like so much these days. 

“Don’t worry,” we say to the kids again.  “Once we get down to the harbor  . . . “   But by now we’re throwing each other worried glances. 

On top of everything else is the fact that, frankly, the kids are exhausted.  For the last three weeks we’ve spent Saturdays taking day-trips out and about Hong Kong, riding junks, visiting dolphins, searching for shells on the beach.  Inevitably, we’ve returned from these trips closer to 10 than to the kids’ usual 8 o’clock bedtime.  The lack of sleep, I think, is starting to catch up with them.  Exacerbating this, Will spent the last three days at school camp.  “Don’t worry,” he told us when he came back.  “We went to bed at 10:00 every night.”

“Really?” Ellen said.

“Uh-huh,” he said again, then repeated it carefully, almost as though he’d been coached.  “10:00.  Every night.”

Maybe so, but now, on Saturday, at 7 in the evening, he keeps tripping over his own feet, and seems to have no muscles in the back his neck.  And people are still staring. 

“Don’t worry—“ I start to say, but Lucy cuts in.

“Daddy?  Isn’t it bad to lie?”

I shut up.  We proceed glumly to the harbor, cutting through a mall to use the bathroom.  When we get down by the water, it’s beautiful as usual:  all of the buildings on both sides are lit up with multi-colored neon that flickers and shifts, sending patterns up and down buildings and back and forth across the water.  The harbor is filled with traffic—Star Ferries, glistening white yachts, double-decker cruises lit up like paddle boats, the occasional junk or small fishing pan.  Crowds fill the Avenue of the Stars, standing in line to have their picture taken, holding hands and watching the lights, just sitting on the railing by the water and chatting.  Drunken Australian lads pose in front of the Bruce Lee statue, their shirts off, their bellies hairy.  Here, at least, the stares are multilingual, coming not just from Asians but from white folk of every persuasion.  Oh sure, here and there there’s another little kid wearing a costume, staring dumbly as though abandoned by his parents.  But most people are dressed in jeans, and t-shirts and polos. 

Scared out of my wits?  Nope.

Worried my kids won’t sleep tonight?  Not hardly.

I’d like to tell you there’s a silver lining here—that eventually we turned a corner and stumbled across the greatest haunted house ever, or met an old lady dressed like Morticia Addams who gave us the best damn red bean buns ever.  Or that that night, as we rode the train back to Tai Po, our blood sugar low but our fiber high, we discovered the true meaning of Halloween. 

But it isn’t to be.  The kids are just tired, we are just bored.  At one point, Lucy and Will look so low, hats off, shoulders slumped as they stumble along the Avenue looking for something, anything, to entertain them, that Ellen and I just burst out laughing.  It’s pathetic, no other way to say it.

There are some nice bits, of course.  Ellen and I buy a couple traditional prints from an water colorist huddled beneath a walkway.  We let the kids talk us into getting them light-up devil horns.  A junk comes in and picks up a bunch of fancy-looking folk in party dress, and we have a good laugh imagining them heaving into their Gucci bags on the rough harbor.  Will discovers it’s kind of cool to wear a mask, which will inevitably come in handy at those family sessions we’re going to need when we return to the States.  Lots of people want to have their pictures taken with our little monsters, but that’s really nothing new.  And a couple kids come up to Will and Lucy, trick-or-treat buckets in their hands, and give them candy.  Neat trick, that:  children actually giving candy away on Halloween.  Hongkongers will never cease to amaze me. 

But as we ride the train back that night (swell the violins), older, tirederer, and more wiserlyish, we know in our hearts of hearts that, when it comes to that holiest of unholy nights celebrating all things semi-decayed and pukey smelling, there really is no place like the place you live when you’re at home in the country that’s really your home as opposed to the home you’re in in the country when you’re not at home, even though you have a home and it’s generally a homey sort of place and you do feel at home.

Or something like that.  

Brain Jeans

       I’m getting Jamie dressed this morning when he looks at me and says, “What’s that?”

Actually, what he says is, “Wazda?” but baby talk on a blog—or anywhere else, for that matter—is punishable by hanging in Hong Kong, as well it should be.  So forgive me for taking the liberty of translating, saving my own neck, and allowing you a gag-free read. 

Anyhow, Jamie points and says, “What’s that?”

I look around.  Ellen’s mom is visiting, so we’ve moved Jamie’s mattress into Will and Lucy’s room.  It’s cramped and looks like a stuff animal factory vomited, spewing cuddly fluffy things with button eyes and oversized ears everywhere.  I pick up a blue bear.  “This?” I say. 

Jamie shakes his head.  “No.  What’s that?”  And he points again.

I hold up a brown dog.  He shakes his head.  A stuffed killer whale.  No.  A panda.  Uh-uh.  “What’s that?” he says again.  And he points. 

I look down.  Then I hold up his trousers.  “These?” I say.

He nods. 

I stare at the pants, then back at Jamie.  Then I get it:  overnight, the temperature dropped below sixty for the first time all year.  The Hong Kong Observatory web-site says it won’t go much over that all day.  So when Ellen went into her mom’s room to get clothes for Jamie, she brought out long pants for the first time since—

And then I have to think.  How long?  May, maybe?  April? 

I look at Jamie again.  He’s not quite two months shy of his third birthday.  Sure, tiny little baby brains are pretty malleable, and don’t hold information long.  And true, cool temperatures come late in Hong Kong, a full two months after Virginia.  But still—six months?  He can’t remember something from six months ago?  And it’s not like I don’t wear long pants every day of the week.

I hold the pants up so that he can see.  “Jamie,” I say.  “What are these?”

He grins.  “Funny,” he replies.  “Those are funny.”

He continues to grin as I help him step into them.  Once they’re on, he laughs, delighted.  He couldn’t have been happier had I strapped rubber snakes to his thighs. 

“Mommy!” he hollers.  Walking down the hall, it’s like he’s dried mud to his skin and is trying his best to make sure it doesn’t fall off.  You can just tell he’s delighted by this new, crazy, sensation.  Grown-ups and their long pants!  What will they think of next? 

“Mommy, look!” I hear him say, and then, “They’re funny!”  And sitting there in the room, waiting for him to return, I wonder, not for the first time, if maybe one of the babysitters dropped him on his head when he was little.  Or perhaps all those horsey and wrestling games he plays with Will and Lucy have left him with shaken baby syndrome?   Or maybe, just maybe, he inherited my brain genes. 

This depresses me a little—I was hoping maybe all three kids would get my family’s stunning blonde good looks and Ellen’s family’s brains and their insistence on loading the dishwasher the right way every time. 

Eventually, Jamie comes back down the hall.  He’s walking funny now, jerking one knee suddenly into the air, then the other, then walking a bit before doing it all over again.  It’s like he can’t quite believe those are his own legs in that blue denim.   

I sigh, and hold up his shirt.  It’s so cold you can see the goose bumps on his chest.   “Jamie,” I say.  “Come here.  It's chilly.”

He marionettes up, a look of glee on his face.  Then he glances at me and his expression freezes.  An arm rises, and he points at the red and yellow sweater I’m holding. “What’s that?”

Vittles II: A play in five parts, starring Bruce Willis as a resilient yet sensitive squid

     Around the corner from the Tai Po market, right next to the shop where we buy almonds and dried papaya, stands a non-descript, almost dingy bakery.  Most of their offerings are on the bread line, flavorless and bland.  If you duck down, though, and look close on the bottom shelf of the glass case beneath the cash register, you’ll see something that can make you very happy. 

Mango Pancakes aren’t pancakes in the American sense of the word, but more a cross of crepes and a breakfast burrito.  The “cake” referred to is a thin layer of golden sponge, maybe twice the size of a pancake but not nearly as thick as something you’d layer and frost.  Around it are stewed slices of mango, maybe from a can, but frankly it doesn’t matter:  they’re sweet and a little green in that way that mangos have.  And around that is fluffy white whipped cream of the cheap, canned variety, the stuff you know you should hate, but don’t, especially when it comes with mangos.  And wrapping it all up is a large, slightly-eggy crepe, folded in a square like the dinner crepes you have in France when you’re in the country and they’re not catering to tourists. 

Just to recap, in case I lost you at “golden sponge”:  crepes, yellow cake, mangos, and whipped cream, all wrapped up in a tidy little package you can gobble as you stroll down the street. 

 

The night of the fireworks celebrating the PRC’s 60^th anniversary, we stumbled out the MTR station and halted just on the brink of our usual path of backstreet Kowloon. 

“Spring Deer?” I said to Ellen.  One of our favorites, famous throughout HK for its Peking Duck.

She gave a little shrug, then a grimace.  Relief flooded me.  So it was okay.  For a week now I’d been walking around feeling guilty, too embarrassed to confess the truth:  I was sick of Chinese food.  And, it appeared, so was Ellen.  Thank God. 

We turned around and walked into the first western restaurant we could find.  Tapas.  Excellent.  We ordered two baskets of fried chicken and French fries to keep the kids happy, then a pair of Hoegardens to keep us happy as we perused the menu.  It was all good in the end, but the two highlights of the evening were the chorizo with figs and the sautéed squid with olives.

I’m beginning to like this hot and sweet thing (boy, there’s a sentence not to be taken out of context):  the chorizo was sliced into half-inch rounds and fried in its own juices (grease, really, but juices sounds better).  Fresh sliced figs were added at the last minute and cooked until they were barely soft.  The combination was unreal:  burning the top and back of your mouth at the same time it lit up the front of your tongue with sweetness.  Unbelievable.

The squid was cooked in just a little bit of olive oil with Mediterranean herbs.  The olives were green, so here again you had contrast, this time between the mild, almost milky taste of the squid and the sharp, edgy taste of the olive.

 

The evening of Mid-Autumn festival, we went out to dinner with our friends Anita and Collin.  The dinner was good, except for the sea cucumber that I ordered (Am I the only person in the universe who didn’t know this isn’t actually a vegetable?).  But the best thing, seriously?  A tiny dish served as a pre-appetizer full of mildly vinegared cucumbers (real ones, grown in the dirt not birthed by sea demon spawn) and pork floss.  You heard me:  pork floss.  Dried pork that’s pulled apart and spun so that it’s fuzzy and chewy.  A little sweet, a little spicy, a little salty. And delicious.

 

Strolling across the walkway between old Tai Po and the new city, I hear the dink dink dink of metal on metal, like someone’s playing a triangle and getting it all wrong.  Sitting on one side of the covered bridge is an old man dressed entirely in white—white sneakers, white pants, a graying-white shirt with an open collar.  Even his baseball cap is white.

Between his legs, resting on a small stand, is a large metal pan, about nine inches deep and thirty inches across.  Wrinkled foil covers the side nearest me, but in the open space of the rest I see uneven, off-white chunks of something coated in something white and powdery.

That’s a terrible description I know, but at this point I have no idea what’s going on.  The old man is sitting on a stool beside this pan, leaning over it with a small chisel in one hand.  In his other he holds a metal instrument I’ve never seen before, about the shape and size of the hand-held scrapers you use to remove ice from your windshield.  The only difference is that the end of his instrument is scooped and the man keeps using it to gather up the vanilla colored chunks of—whatever it is (crystallized human flesh?), tossing them in the white powdery stuff, whatever it is (dandruff?).  Then he gathers and tosses again, and then again, then taps the tip of the chisel on the back of the scoop dink dink dink and a pudgy mom with a little boy in glasses comes over.  She says something in Cantonese, and the man mumbles back.  He pulls out a small plastic bag the size of a handkerchief, scoops the candy in the sugar (I’m making assumptions here, I know,  but the boy hardly looks cannibalistic) and slides it edgewise into the bag.  The woman hands him a five-dollar coin and the old man goes back to scooping and tapping, scooping and tapping. 

The great thing about this candy is not how chewy it is—think stale saltwater taffy—or how sweet it is—(it’s not just sugar, but confectioners sugar) or the way it’s gingery at first and peanut-buttery later on, when the outside has softened and your dental work is starting to shake loose. 

No, the great thing about this candy is the way it burns:  somewhere, deep beneath the sugar and the nougat and the butter, somewhere beneath the nuts and ginger and glucose, somewhere beneath all of that—is cayenne.  You feel it first thing when it hits your mouth, and after you chew for a while (and chew . . . and chew), you feel it at the back of your throat.  And the whole time your lips are still powdered with sugar and your jaw is working and your mouth is salivating over that nutty, earthy flavor, your mouth continues to burn like you just swallowed sweet, candy-covered nettles.

 

This one sounds gross.  It looks gross.  It feels gross.  Hell, it smells gross. 

But here goes:  we’re sitting down by the harbor, stuffing stale peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in our mouths so that we can catch the 12:00 cruise on a real junk.  Lucy hates PBJ.  She reminds us of this every 7 seconds, taking bites that would leave a mouse famished.  It’s 11:51, though, and we still have to find the right dock and we need her to shut up and eat so we can get on this big old boat and I can promptly regurgitate my sandwich into the harbor. 

“Lucy,” I tell her.  “If you eat that sandwich now—right now—then after the cruise we can go get some dumplings on the island.”

Lucy loves dumplings.  She can eat a dozen at a go and not break a sweat.  But even so, I can see her eyeing me carefully.

Finally she says, “And if I don’t eat my sandwich right now?”

“We’ll sell you to that man in the Tai Po market, the guy with one eye.”

“The pig gut man?”

“That’s right,” I say.   “The pig gut man.”

Even so, she takes a moment to consider the options.  Finally, though, the sandwich goes in her mouth, we sprint for the docks, we make our cruise, and we have a grand time.

Once we make it to Hong Kong Island, we go in search of a dim sum restaurant.  And of course we can’t find any.  6,000 restaurants on that island, the main island of Hong Kong, the most famous place in the world for dim sum, and we can’t find a single friggin’ dim sum restaurant to save our lives.  Finally, we circle back to where we started, coming up a narrow, rising street.  And there, 14 feet from where our quest began, is a restaurant called, I kid you not, “The Dumpling House.”

I turn and look at Ellen.   Her face is glistening with sweat, her skin pale.  We’ve just walked 1,489 miles on an island roughly 31 square miles in size.  Had we simply turned in the other direction when we started, we would have eaten three days ago.

We go in.  It’s a pit:  part waffle house, part Flannery O’Connor stage play.  But they have dumplings.  Only one kind, of course, but Lucy doesn’t care:  as long as they have dough wrapped around something dead and ground up, she’s happy.

I don’t quite know how we got the soup.  God knows, if I’m awake, sober, and not suffering brain trauma and I see a soup called “Seaweed and Egg” on the menu, I’m not ordering it.  Ever.  Jennifer Anniston, naked, with “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me” written across her chest in orange marmalade could be serving it, and I still wouldn’t order it.  I mean, are you kidding me? 

And this is a soup that does itself no favors.  When it arrives, it’s just as advertised:  more or less scrambled egg, served in a steaming bowl of seaweed and what looks like dishwater.  And we’re not talking that sanitized, formerly dried, neat and tidy seaweed you get in an American sushi restaurant.  Oh now, when this seaweed comes, it’s got attitude.  It’s seaweed that says, “So, you hate seaweed, do ya’?  Well seaweed this, pal.”  And then it grabs its privates and flicks you a rude gesture that only makes sense in Italy. 

I mean, this stuff is fuzzy.  It looks like seaweed, like the crap you avoid stepping in when you’re having a nice time at the beach.  Only here, it’s in a bowl, with a strange boiled version of the scrambled egg.  And a spoon.  Because you’re supposed to eat it.

The next question, of course, is why I put it in my mouth.  I don’t know, to be honest.  But I did.  And boy was I glad. 

You know how coffee smells good, but doesn’t taste nearly as good as it smells?  Or how pipe smoke really makes you feel warm and nostalgic when you catch it drifting on an autumn breeze, but when you put that pipe to your mouth and inhale you feel like someone dragged a rake across your tonsils? 

Well this stuff, this soup, it tastes like coffee smells.  Not like coffee tastes, mind you, but like it smells:  it’s dark, and textured, tickling the back of your throat before going down warm and rich and—and just fulfilling.  It’s satisfying, like taking a bite of warm bread soaked in butter.  How it work, is beyond me, combining two things that generally disgust on their own—dead water plant, and soggy egg—into something that’s salty and hearty and really really tasty.  But it does.  And that’s a good thing.  

The Saddest Little Whorehouse in Wan Chai

         So I’m on the USS George Washington, a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier harbored in Hong Kong.  I’ve just made contact with my Chinese handler and passed him the information about American attempts to undermine Mainland China’s rising economic power by shipping pirated copies of Doogie Howser cleverly disguised as crates of uncut opium.   

That’s not actually true.  I’m on the USS GW because there’s some reception for some guy who did something and who apparently feels the need to talk endlessly  about it before a crowd of people munching rubbery egg tarts and who could care less.  All in all, it was interesting, just because I’ve never been on a ship that big (“Boy howdy!” I told my friend Steve, as our water taxi jolted and bumped its way up to the boarding platform.  “They done landed planes on that there boat!  You ever heard of such a thing?”) and partly because when we were wandering through the crowd, indigestible egg tarts in hand, we met a guy who was one of the first US students to study in Beijing after it reopened in ’78, who never left, and who went on to form an corporate detective agency that found, among other things, Imelda Marcos’s hidden money.  And he wore a cowboy hat.  In China.  How cool is that? 

Anyhow, by eight, Steve and I were tired of standing and grabbed a water taxi back to Wan Chai.  This sounds elegant, I know, but the ship was out quite a ways, and the harbor was rough so the ride was like 30 straight minutes of bumper cars, only you’re on a boat the size of a UPS truck and what’s hitting you is not other little scooters with rubber sids, but the wake from 50-100 other boats in a confined harbor full of huge waves that have been cutting back and forth all day.

So we’re on the boat and we’re getting whiplash, and Steve knows I’m trying hard not to vomit, and we come up with the idea that, because it’s so early and we’re in Wan Chai anyway, we should wander around a bit. 

 Not to put too fine a point on it, but this isn’t quite the same as saying we should wander around, say, Des Moines.  Or Times Square.  Or Las Vegas.  If you get where I’m going here. 

And if you don’t, let me help you: 

Two months ago when I was having coffee with one of the Fulbright ETAs, she asked me if I’d been down to Wan Chai on a Wednesday night.

“Wan who?” I asked.

She laughed.  “Oh my god, you have got to go!”

I laughed too, because I hate looking like I don’t know what’s going on.  “What is it?”

And then she explained what it was:  part red-light district, part club district, filled with bars and massage parlors and neon.  It was crazy, she said.  Insane.

“I’ve been to New Orleans.  Is it like that?”

“Worse.  Everything spills out onto the street.  Everything.”

Ummm . . . wasn’t sure exactly what she was talking about, but figured it didn’t include washing the dishes. 

 “Don’t go alone,” she said.  “The women are all wasted.  They’ll be all over you.  Seriously, you’ll need an escort.”

 

That night, I went back to the flat and told Ellen we had to go to Wan Chai.

“Why?”

I repeated what the ETA had said.  Ellen gave me a funny look.  “And this is good, why?”

“It’s an adventure,” I told her.  “It’s part of Hong Kong.  Besides, I’m a writer.  I need to see this stuff.”

“First,” she said, “you’re not a writer.  You’re a blogger.  There’s a difference.  And second, I’ll pass.  You go without me.”

 “You have to come,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I’ll get mauled.  Sarah said unescorted men are a hot commodity down there.  The women just hurl themselves at you.”

She gave me another look, taking in my cargo shorts, my hairy legs, my too-large Clarks sandals that I refuse to part with even if they don’t fit because they cost me a hundred bucks.  I was wearing my favorite blue shirt, the silk one that’s been dry-cleaned so many times it’s stiff as cardboard—and even despite all that laundering, you can still see the stain where I dropped the fried cheese stick three years ago.

“I’m sure you’ll be okay,” she said. 

 

So we got off our water taxi and strolled toward the flaming neon of Wan Chai.  Keep in mind, we had not interest in sex, mainly because of all those 3-lettered acronyms:  STD, HIV, and MRS.  We were in it purely for the spectacle:  by this point I’d been in Hong Kong for two-and-a-half months, and was beginning to feel like I’d seen it all.   I wanted to be startled, I wanted to be shocked, I wanted to be rattled.  I wanted to be able to write home to friends and say, "Oh my god, you'll never believe what I saw!"  Years ago, a friend told me about turning a corner while walking the streets of Bangkok, and seeing a gang of scantily-clad she-males dancing around a giant elephant lumbering down the street.  “You haven’t lived,” he said, “until you’ve seen something like that.”

Now, I don’t know she-males from flying gophers, but I’ll tell you one thing:  I’d love to see an elephant lumbering through the glass and steel of Hong Kong Island, maybe flattening an ex-patriot trophy wife or two in their three-inch heels and $7,000 blue-jeans with knit-sweater outfits. 

But I’m getting off track.  There we were, about to enter Wan Chai, Hong Kong’s hot bed of iniquity, its home of hedonism, its playground of pleasure, the answer to every fantasy you’ve ever had, even the one involving your high school geometry teacher, a 3-inch bit of rope, Ann Coulter, and that republican senator from Idaho who claims to have a wide stance. 

And I must say, it started out great:  Steve and I rounded the corner and almost tripped over a skinny woman in a bikini, straddling a stool outside a neon-bedecked nightclub.  You heard me right:  a bikini!   At night!  In public!  And not a swimming pool in sight! 

My god, people, where will it end?

Actually, though, she did grab me.  Pressing a hand to my chest as I blundered past, she leaned in so close I could smell the marmalade on her breath and whispered huskily, “Watch where the hell you’re going.  Jesus, are you blind?”

I threw a glance over my shoulder at Steve.  He grinned.  I did too.  It was going to be a crazy night! 

We strolled up one side of Lockhart Road.  Sure enough, every other door has a sign saying “Dancers!” or “Massage!”  or “Topless!” or “7-Eleven!”   In front of most of these places sit older ladies with plucked eyebrows and ratty perms.  They gestured and hollered to passing men, “Nice girls!  We got nice girls!”  Beside them, sometimes, were younger women—anywhere between 18 and 38, I’m guessing, but it was hard to tell—in short shorts and tube tops.  There were sailors, too, lots of them, in stiff blue-jeans and bad hair cuts.  Half of them looked like crazed baby wolves, or spoiled rich kids at Christmas.  The other half looked dazed, unsure whether they should grin or blush.  Many of the latter seemed to spend most of their time walking into lamp poles. 

Between the clubs stood wine bars, wide doors thrown open and tables and ferns and stools spilling out into the sidewalk.  These were filled with all variations of young people:  the usual crew-cut sailors, young women that looking dumpy in empress-waist dresses, Caucasians, Asians, wanna-be I-bankers, and working girls.  It was rowdy, but really no worse than your usual Friday night down at the Southern Inn in good-ol’ Lexington, Virginia.  I remember seeing one sailor in particular, a big blonde guy sitting on a stool, struggling to keep his lids up and his head erect, as he stretched out a long arm into the lap of a woman I’m guessing his mother wouldn’t have approved, but who, I hope, got monthly check-ups from that special doctor only women get to visit. 

When we reached the end of Lockhart Rd., we turned around and went down the other side, those same expectant grins still pasted to our faces.  Adventure!  Spectacle!  Bizarreness!  We were ready for it!  Bring on the dancing girls, the champagne bottles, the juggling clowns with giant blue codpieces!  Let it come!  We were two married guys who’d just spent three hours on a ship with a bunch of diplomats and Republicans!  Sure we were married, but for the next twenty minutes we were foot-loose and fancy free! Bring it on! 

At one point, Steve actually stopped and grabbed my arm.  “Look at that!”

“What?”  I leaned forward, trying to follow his gaze. 

“There,” he said. 

I looked.  “Who?” I said.  “What?”

“There,” he said.  “That neon pussy cat. Pretty cool, huh?”

Then I saw what he was talking about:  a giant neon figure of a nude woman with a feline head reclining on an elbow, beneath the words, “The Pussy Cat Club.”

“Crazy,” I said. 

“I know.  You know how hard it is to make neon that big?  And look, it’s all one piece.”

“Geeze.”  A 1/3^rd naked Filipino woman in a striped tank top brushed past us.  She was working it in her denim shorts and cowboy boots but the fact is, I’ve actually seen less clothes on the faculty at my school. 

We continued on.  More wine bars, more night clubs, more signs for foot massages (I have to say, that was tempting), more old women on three-legged stools, more sailors, more bored looking girls half-heartedly trying to flirt young men into their club.  At one point, one of them touched my arm, and put her fingers in the pocket of my jacket, but then her eyes traveled up to my face, catching sight of my gray hair, and then burst out laughing—not a mean laugh, really, just a, “Well, we both know that was stupid, don’t we?” kind of laugh that made me laugh too. 

Soon we’d completed our loop, and were standing at the intersection near the MTR stop. I looked at Steve.  “What do you think?”

He’s a big guy, and he swiveled his head from side to side, jaw out, trying to crack his neck.  “Interesting,” he said. 

I nodded.  My jaw isn’t quite as good as his, but I stuck it out anyway.  “Yeah,” I said.  “Interesting.”  Then I looked at him, an idea popping into my head.  “You know what I’m thinking?”

He looked at me, eyes gleaming.  Then he said, “I suspect I do.”

“Good,” I said.  “Because I’m starving.”

He jerked his head down a side street.  “There’s a pizza place that-a-way.”

“Nah.  Messes with my stomach.”

“Gas?”

“Something with the cheese.  Won’t be able to go for weeks.”

We looked around for a bit, considering our options.  A thin woman in a gray cotton sweater dress and spiked heels sauntered by, gold chain clinking on her wrist. 

Steve pointed.  “There’s a tea place over there.  Maybe they’ll have cakes or something.”

We went in.  It was a bright place, with patterned tile floors, cherry-colored mahogany trim, and straight-backed chairs with red cushions.  A woman in her mid-forties came over and handed us laminated menus, in English.  Jasmine tea, green tea, the usual.  I watched her move away, admiring that beautiful, perfectly smooth, black black hair that all Hong Kong women seem to have. 

“She’s pretty,” I said to Steve. 

“It’s Hong Kong,” he said, not even looking up from the menu.  “They’re all pretty.”

 “I think I’ll have one of those green cakes.”

“I’m going to pass.”  He patted his stomach.  “Gotta get control of the monster.”

“Probably right.” 

“You going to have some tea?” he asked.

I glanced at my watch.  9:15.  “Better not.  I’ll be up all night.”

“Caffeine?”

“Yeah.  You too?”

He shook his head.  “Diverticulosis.”

“From tea?”

He gave a big shrug.  “I know.  Crazy, man, huh?”

“Wow.”

The hostess came over.  “Water,” I said.  “With lemon.”

“Me too,” said Steve.

Her eyes hardened.  She considered us both.  “That it?  No tea?”

I felt heat rise in my face.  Steve stepped in.  “How about we split one of those cakes?”  I nodded and the waitress went away.  We both watched her.  Even from the back we could see her eyes were rolling.

“You know who she reminds me of?” I said. 

 “Who?”

“Your wife.”   

Steve squinted, struggling against a yawn.  Watching him, I felt my own jaw start to stretch.  I put my hand over my mouth. 

“Nah,” he said.  “My wife’s prettier.”

 

 

Living in a CHC, Prt. I

Allow me to begin with two vignettes:

I.  I’m at a local university, doing a workshop on how to engage students in large lecture classes (100 or more).  I analyze the problems associated with large classes (but arguably, all classes):  habituation, a lack of student preparedness, and a lack of deep learning.  I offer three solutions:  one very simple, one more complicated, and the other something that can reshape the entire course.  We’re in the question/answer portion of the afternoon, when one very agreeable participant, someone who took careful notes and nodded vigorously throughout the workshop, raised her hand and said, “But what about the 2Bs?”

   I stared at her blankly. 

   “The 2Bs?” she said again, more slowly, as though talking to a child who’d been born with out a frontal lobe.  Or a rear lobe.  And no middle whatsoever.

   Brilliant scholar that I am, I said, “The huh?”

   One of her colleagues explained:  “The guidelines that direct the course.  Everyone who teaches a particular course has to abide by the same guidelines.”

 

II.  I’m up at the crack of 11, and strolling to my office when I hear a Thump, Thump, Thump, Thump, dada-dada-dada-dada Thump Thump Thump.  Coming around the corner of the library, I glance down into the plaza at the center of campus.  There, in the center of the square, are 16 students in black jeans, bright pink high tops, and orange and black plaid flannel shirts, dancing in sync to a hip-hop soundtrack.  You’ve never seen Chinese kids move like this before:  hips are swaying, pelvises thrusting.  But it’s elegant as well, the twist and flow of the bodies, figures rising and falling in orange and black waves as the music grinds and colors cross and swirl.  I watch for ten minutes, then scurry away, late to a meeting that I actually called.

 

 So what do these things have in common, besides one slightly soft-in-the-middle white guy? 

They are both, I’d argue, the product of living in a CHC:  Confucian Heritage Culture. 

Now I’ve already written about this before, but as many of you spent way too much time during the eighties pretending it was the, ahem, sixties (you know what I’m talking about), allow me to recap:

Confucianism in a nutshell seeks harmony in all things.  In practical, day-to-day terms what this means is harmony of the self (I’m fine with the fact that I’m pale and bald; really I am), harmony with others (I’m fine with the fact that you’re not also pale and bald; really I am), and harmony within structure (I’m your boss; therefore if I tell you that you need to gain some weight, stop going to tanning booths, and lose your hair so that you too are fat, pale, and bald, you and I both know you’ll do it).

Needless to say, Confucius probably didn’t have these particular examples in mind, but then, for all his inner and outer harmony, Confucius just wasn’t as funny as I am.

And all of this has what to do with 2Bs and orange and black-clad gyrating 20-year olds? 

Everything.

Consider, for instance, the ways in which the 2Bs relate to CHC.  On the one hand, they are clearly the product of intense structural harmony:  after all, something like the 2B is a set of guidelines handed down to the faculty by the administration—or at the very least a subcommittee of a large committee of men in gray suits appointed by the assistant to the associate vice-provost of curricular affairs and burnt toast.  As such, disobeying the 2B is akin to treason, and could lead to execution.  Okay, so not really, but god, don’t you just wish academics worked that way? 

On the other hand, the 2B was likely put in place in an attempt to ensure social harmony.  Essentially what a document like this does is guarantee that two sections of the same course taught by two different instructors will apply more or less the same standards of fairness.   As a result, Billy in Bio 101 A with Professor Burnstudents won’t have to write 17 papers and get nothing but a lousy C+, while Louisa in Bio 101 B Professor Weedhugger spends all semester smoking pot and doing Jell-O shots while playing Wii, and taking multiple choice tests with questions like:  “Beavers are:  A) rodent-like creatures that cut down trees and make dams; B) really poor dinner companions; C)  a good source of protein; or D) slang for my buck-toothed in-laws.  Consequently, Louisa skips away (or stumbles, because let’s face it:  Louisa has a—ahem—problem) with an A and a great recipe for cannabis brownies Professor Weedhugger mistakenly attached to the final exam.  Which just isn’t fair to poor Billy, who also enjoys the occasional brownie.

Which, of course, is how things generally operate in the States (I’m talking about the lack of course consistency here, folks, not the recipe; try and keep up, will you?).  For while there certainly exist schools and programs where the desire for continuity and fairness lead to strict guidelines that cannot be violate—at most institutions I’ve been at, the assumption is that we’re all professionals and we all know our strengths and weaknesses as teachers, and we’re capable of designing courses that utilize the latter, to the benefit of the students.

This isn’t to say that I necessarily favor the American system over the Hong Kong one, although certainly my last sentence sounds biased as all get-out.  On the contrary, I like the idea of continuity and fairness.  Who doesn’t?  What Westerners in the Hong Kong system may find frustrating, though, is the way that “guidelines” often calcify into “rules.” 

Let me explain:  immediately after the conversation in vignette #1, the director of the university center for learning and teaching—a wonderful woman, who clearly knows her stuff—turned to the professor who’d raised the issue of the 2Bs and said, “The thing is, those guidelines were never designed to inhibit good teaching.”

And that, alas, is the rub.  What to do when good rules go bad? 

Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem uncommon in Hong Kong.  One university I’ve visited has a rule that says that 1-credit courses must require 1,000 words worth of writing, 2-credit courses 2,000 words, and 3-credit courses 3,000.  This seems peculiar to me.  What if a course—say, in mathematics—doesn’t really need that much writing?  Or, more to the point for this particular writing instructor and composition and rhetoric enthusiast, what if a course needs more than that?  What if, for instance, you have a lot of students who are second language, and therefore require lots and lots of informal practice writing—say,  single-space, typewritten reading response every day-before they do their formal paper?  The informal writing will help these students get more comfortable with language and writing and help them generate lots of ideas (and get lots of feedback) before they have to do their big, hugely weighed, graded paper.  But one single-space page is 500 words.  So by day six?  Class over.

Another time, I was at a meeting and heard one professor explain to another professor that when she’d arrived at their university some years back, she’d been told not to return graded papers to their students before the students had completed the course evaluations.

“Wait a minute,” I said.  “Are you saying that students never get any feedback from you during the semester?”

This professor, who was obviously a little shocked to have this large white man nearly leap over the table at her, nodded as best she could, what with her back being up against a wall.

“So people only assign one paper?”

Again, a nod. 

I turned off my spotlight, and took her out of the handcuffs.  Then I asked:  “And this is official policy?”

“Um,” she said, glancing nervously at her colleague.  “Not really.  No.  Sort of.   Yes.”

Follow that?  I have a friend at one of the HK universities who tells the story of how bicycling was banned on campus.  Everyone knew it:  the administrators, the faculty, the students, the campus cops.  Then one day a colleague of my friend was late androde his bike onto campus and straight to the building where his class was about to meet.  Of course the campus police accosted him almost immediately, nightsticks drawn, pistols cocked.

“You want me?” he snarled, chambering a round in his Glock.  “Come and get me, you dirty rats.”

Okay, so not really.  But they did break one of his legs by clocking him with their nightsticks.

Okay, so not really.  But they did . . . um . . . tell him it was against school policy to ride bikes on campus.  And then they shoved a walnut muffin in his hand and told him to . . . oh never mind. 

But he did say this:  “Oh really?  Show me the policy.”

“Excuse me?” said the cops.

“The policy.  I want to see it.”

So the cops went to their superior, who went to his superior, who told his secretary to search through the books and find the policy.  Which she did.  Except for that last part, about finding the policy. 

Because there wasn’t one.

 

In “Rigid Rule, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language,” the incomparable Mike Rose cites a bunch of people I never heard of to make the point that there are two kinds of rules:  algorithms and heuristics.  Algorithms, Rose tells us, are “precise rules that will always result in a specific answer if applied to an appropriate situation.”  How sexy is that?  Seriously, most mathematical rules are algorithmic in nature. 

In contrast, heuristics are fairly general “rules of thumb” that we use to operate in daily life—guidelines that have some give to them, allowing flexibility when necessary.  Though they lack the precision of algorithms, they are often less frustrating because they never lead us to square-peg-in-round-hole situations, where we’re trying to apply a strategy to a situation it just doesn’t fit. 

Rose, who’s discussing student writers, then goes on to make the point that often the students who are most frustrated when writing (he calls them “blockers”) are strong believers in algorithms, while those who take a more heuristic approach are often more satisfied with their writing process. 

Rose also points out—and if you’re skimming through this (fair enough, given that I never actually visit your blog) here’s the money shot—Rose also points out that many of the algorithms the “blocked” students are applying might actually have begun as heuristics.  In other words, somewhere in this student’s past, some well-meaning teacher might have said, “Sometimes it helps to begin your paper with a joke, just to get the audience’s attention.”  And from then on the student tacks a joke onto every paper she ever writes, regardless if the essay is about Robin Williams, abortion, her grandmother’s funeral, or some bizarre combination of the three (Note to Robin:  stay away from my grandmother.  And please don’t sue me). 

My point:  sometimes I think what happens at institutions of all sorts is that heuristics come to be seen as algorithms.  What was a more-or-less loose set of guidelines becomes set in concrete, and damn the man or woman or semi-potty trained ape who chooses to ignore it. 

Certainly, this happens in the States—as evidenced by Rose’s blockers and every postal worker I’ve ever met.  But my hypothesis here—after a whole 2.5 months in-country, mind you—is that it happens more in a CHC place like Hong Kong, because of that third component:  structural harmony.  No one wants to be out of step with expectations; to be out of step with expectations is to break with harmony, to turn your back on community.  And who wants that?  

Living in a CHC, Prt. II

          Okay, now let’s talk about the writhing hotties in the orange and black flannel shirts. 

To be honest, there were boys dancing as well, and they too were hot.  I’ve never really understood why there aren’t more male dancers in the States—I mean, it’s athletic, you’re acquiring a skill that a lot of women really appreciate, you end up incredibly fit, and you spend most of your time with equally incredibly fit women.  And this is bad because . . . ?

But I have to be honest with you here.  I’ve always been a sucker for dance.  I mean, I think of myself as a generally graceful guy—I lettered twice in diving when I was in high school, which isn’t easy for a 6-foot-3 guy diving into an 8 foot pool—but the fact of the matter is, pretty much every dish that’s been broken in our house—check that:  every thing period—was broken by me.  It just happened again this evening.  Supper was almost ready, so I pulled a couple of cups from the cupboard for the kids’ milk, then reached for the chocolate powder—and promptly hurled it across the room.  I’m not sure why I did this.  I don’t have any memory, actually, of throwing anything.  I only needed to lift the jar maybe two feet from the shelf to the counter.  But next thing you know, there’s glass all over the tile floor and chocolate dust drifting through the air like a mini cocoa-tornado.  All because of yours truly.

In contrast, of course, dancers are in control.  Absolute, total, powerful, beautiful, poetic, majestic control.

Especially these dancers.  There were more than a dozen of them, but they moved in perfect coordination—a twitch of the leg, a turn of the wrist.  One of my favorite steps was when they all spun from one side to the other, arms straight and locked against their torsos, so that the only thing moving were their legs in wide, high-motion arches.  And it wasn’t just the big gestures that were tight:  a flick of the hair, or a slight hitch as they pulled one arm across their chests.  This wasn’t beginners dance set to the 2/4 rhythm of the bass and foot pedal.  Whoever’d choreographed this thing was thinking about every tap on the high-hat, every grace note on the keyboard.

And there was more than that.  There were waves, where first one dancer would rise and fall, then the next, then another, and so on back through the group until you had this undulating (sorry, I tried to avoid that word as long as I could) three-dimensional flow of bodies rising and falling.  Remember when you were in third grade and would go to gym and Miss Brown brought out the parachute and your entire class would raise and lower it at the edges, causing the silk to rise and fall in waves of color?  Now imagine that with 16 people not just moving up and down but side-to-side and forward and backward, all to the beat of a hip-hop soundtrack. 

And the most glorious thing about it?  Seriously?  How sensuous it was.  And I mean that in the truest sense of the word.  Not sexuality or erotic pleasure, but an physicality that communicated itself into the bones of every one of the two- to three-hundred people standing there watching.  There was tactility to their dance, a tension between flowing gestures and straining muscles.  The moves were so subtle, so light, but the control was so absolute that it made your muscles pulse just looking at it.

I was impressed.  Can you tell?

And there was more:  turns out this single performance was part of a larger show, a contest to which every university in Hong Kong sent a team to compete.  The orange and black folks were from my host school, but other teams were equally impressive, both in dance and in style.  One team wore matching gold lame tailcoats, with blue and black checks underneath.  Another team wore black pants with multicolored tops—though in the case of the men, this meant going shirtless with red, orange, blue, green and yellow body paint.  I loved the fact that all of this—the costumes, the choreography, the hours of rehearsal, the mixing of the beats—all of it was student lead and student organized.  What better example, I thought, of social harmony?  A bunch of random students getting together and pulling something like this together on their own. 

I know we have things like this in the States, just as I know that we have stupid rules that inhibit rather than enhance good teaching.  But there was a qualitative difference to these dance groups that was is hard to put a finger on.  The choreography was the same, perhaps a little better.  The costuming was the same, with maybe a little more funk (Pink tennis shoes with orange shirts?  Really?).  Basically, all the bits and pieces were the same.  But nonetheless it was a different. 

CHC I finally concluded.  Social harmony.  Not a limelighter in the group, no one throwing themselves out front and center and taking it all in as though it—whatever it is—was all for them.  My first year of college there was an unusually brutal review of a dance piece choreographed to “Feeling Groovy” by Paul Simon and that other guy with no talent.  The number had three dancers:  the choreographer/lead, and a pair of back-ups.  Well, the lead woman must have pissed off the wrong folks, because the next Friday the review in the student paper made a point to single out this work, talking about the choreographer “showing off with egotistical regularity, while the back-up dancers flopped around like a couple of rag dolls.”

Ouch. 

But on some level, I gotta say, I get the point.  I’ve seen some brilliant dance performances over the years—Twyla Tharp’s classic “Little Deuce Coupe” comes to mind—and very often there was a sense that, somehow, the performance was all about the dancers, the choreographer, the arts, the elite—and not about the audience.  At the end of these pieces, when we applauded, we were applauding for the performers, for them and not for us, the collective us, everyone, humanity, the human spirit, the body, the soul, a shared sense of what we’re capable of. 

But not here.  Not that blue-skyed Thursday morning in October, in Hong Kong.  That morning, speakers thumping, sneakers squeaking, arms graceful and askew, legs bound to the ground or flying through the air, hips moving, hair flying, it was all about—

Ah geeze, I can’t believe I’m going to say this.  I’m a bitter, cynical old man, after all, from a profession full of bitter, cynical people who don’t take lightly to nostalgia, sentimentality, or anything else related to puppy dogs, cute little kittens, and sunsets.  But it’s true, so here goes:

That dance contest was all about joy. 

 

And now, a confession. 

Later that day I had to run up to my flat and put on a suit and tie so that I could go spend the evening with a bunch of sailors (long story, fodder for another post—in the meantime, feel free to let your imaginations roam).  By the time I got back, the contest was pretty much over, the plaza filled with crowds of people, the various dance groups mingling with one another.  Just in front of the banner backing the stage area was a crowd of my favorite orange and black plaid folks huddling together for pictures, holding their fingers in V-for-victory signs.  I had my camera with me—for the sailors, of course—and I knew that if I didn’t include a photo with this post, my Face Book page would haul out some nasty old irrelevant image from something I wrote back when I was in eighth grade and pretty sure I was the second coming of Jim Jones.

So long story short, I headed down the stairs to the plaza and flagged the first group of dancers I could find. 

“Can I take your picture?” I said, tapping two boys on the shoulder and holding up my camera. 

They grinned.  Not to stereotype, but I’ve yet to meet the Hong Konger who pulls that western thing where you fake a blush and say, “Me?  In this old thing?  But I’m so ugly!  Why-ever would you want a picture of lil’ ‘ol me?” all the while checking your makeup in the mirror.

Anyhow, after I snapped their photo, I stepped closer so we could talk over the din of the crowd. 

“That was great,” I said.  “I really enjoyed it.”

They nodded, and one of them said, “Thank you.”

“So did you make up those dances yourself?”

They laughed.  “Oh no,” the same guy said.  “We couldn’t.  It’s much too hard.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling a little twitch in my chest.

“We have a—a—” the other one stuttered.  Then he looked at his companion and said something in Cantonese. 

“A coach,” his friend told me. 

“Right,” said the second guy.  “It wouldn’t be possible without.”

“Really,” I said, and now whatever it was in my chest was beginning to slide.  Down.  Quickly.  “But you’re all just students, right?” I said, maybe a little desperately.  “No training, right?  Just regular kids dancing?  Together?”  I held off adding “in harmony,” but only with great effort. 

“Oh no,” said the first one. 

“We all have some training,” said the other. 

“It wouldn’t be possible without,” finished the first, putting the last nail in the tiny coffin that held what was left of my shriveled heart.  So much for a collective effort, an abstract sense of the common good drawing together a bunch of flatfooted, rhythm-less, uncoordinated miscreants so they could make beautiful art that connected with the audience.  So much for my insightful essay and my Pulitzer Prize, and my dream of finally getting to date whoever the actress was who played Marsha on the Brady Bunch. 

So much, in short, for joy. 

I turned and walked away, scuffing the soles of my shoes so they would match the sole of my soul.  Then another question came to me.  I turned back to the dancers.  “Who won?” I called. 

They looked at me, quizzically.  “Won?” one of them said. 

“The contest.  Who won?”

They glanced at each other, frowning.  And then one of them figured it out and looked back at me. 

“It was no competition,” he said.  “It was just—you know—“ he gestured.  “To get together and share.”

“Not a contest?” I repeated.

They nodded.

“Just to share?” I was grinning when I said it. 

They nodded again. 

Ahhhhhhhhh.   Come to me, Marsha.  

Note:  This is a personal blog full of outrageous statements and incorrect

spellings that the Fulbright people don't agree with, or even understand.  

Near a station of the MTR

I notice her first, because she’s pretty.  Maybe in her early thirties, she’s sitting next to a man who at first I think must be her father.  Her hair is long and dark, and she’s leaning forward over crossed legs.  One wrist is draped over his knee, unusual in Hong Kong:  I’ve only ever seen one couple kissing in public the whole time I’ve been here—even holding hands is rare. 

But there she is, fingers on his crossed legs.  He’s maybe forty, maybe older, with a handsome, angled face and sparse hair.  He also bends forward, smiling, his foot tapping the brick-paved concourse.

Then I see the iPod in her hand.  A cord leads to his ear, another to hers.  Her foot moves as well, and their heads bob, ever so slightly, in perfect sync.