An Obnoxiously Schmaltzy Last Post on Jamie

It’s a Friday in February, and I’m standing in Kowloon Park off of Nathan Road, watching Jamie running from play set to play set, whizzing down slides, swinging from swings, twisting dials and knobs and over-sized tic-tac-toe Xs and Os.  No one, when they found out we had three kids, said to us, “Oh, you have to go to Kowloon Park!  It’s a great park!”  This is surprising because Kowloon Park is, indeed, a great park:  set smack dab in the middle of the busiest part of the peninsula, it’s a world unto itself.  You can see the skyscrapers, sure, but they might as well be a thousand miles away for all they impose their presence amidst the tall green trees, the cobbled walkways bordered with flowers, the mazes, the sculpture gardens, the pond full of flamingoes.  There’s an aviary there, with parrots the size of chickens and these crazy double-beaked birds—the second beak inverted on the first—that simultaneously fascinate and horrify me. 

And there’s a huge playground.  Which Jamie is now making the most of, trying out every climbing wall there is, straddling the bouncy animals and cars set up on over-sized springs.  Every 10 minutes or so he’ll circle back to where I am, trying to see if I’ll give him more candy.  It’s the week before the Chinese New Year, you see, and every third stall at the market overflows with bins of candy wrapped in red, yellow, and green foil.  Before leaving Tai Po that morning, Jamie and I had stopped at our favorite dried fruits stall and bought a pound of mixed.  Now we’re working our way through the bag, trying to remember which ones are fruit-flavored, which are salty, which can hardly be called “candy” they’re so much like dried pork. 

I hate playgrounds.  This is one of my many weird, childhood associated quirks:  I hate playgrounds, I hate circuses, and anything vaguely resembling a day camp sends me searching for a noose.  I’m not sure why this is, but I suspect I was the sort of child that didn’t respond well to being pressured.  And playgrounds, with their bright colors and faux castle mini-architecture, seem to scream:  “This is fun!  Have fun!  If you can’t have fun here, you might as well hire a lawyer now, because sooner or later you’re taking a high-powered rifle to work!”  I just can’t take it. 

Today, though, I’m perfectly happy to be at the playground with Jamie.  Earlier that morning, we’d gone to the Hong Kong History Museum and learned about the opium wars and the Japanese occupation.  Now, we’re at the park, ignoring the winter gray sky by pretending we’re pirates or airplane pilots, or gorillas, or whatever image it is racing through Jamie’s head.  In another few hours, we’ll stroll north along Nathan road, into the Jordan area, which will be an absolute blast.   Eventually Jamie will fall asleep in the stroller, and I’ll push him along the moist sidewalks, beneath neon signs fighting the gloam to announce “Man Paradise:  Enjoy Yourself,” and “Cyber-Sauna.”  For the life of me, I have no idea what this last one means, but it sounds like a great way to get electrocuted. 

I will buy some T-shirts, stroll through an old-fashioned Chinese department store searching for a chess set with real stone pieces (no luck; nothing but plastic).  I will buy some pastries for an afternoon snack, and get one of those tea/fruit drinks with the little black jell-O things in the bottom (just as confusing as the cyber-sauna, though hopefully less deadly).  Eventually, the sky will begin to darken and the streets will fill with people hurrying from work to the nearest MTR station.  And Jamie and I will head for home, satisfied with our day.

 

When my host institution asked me to take on some additional duties, I agreed to do so under three circumstances:  I would be appropriately compensated, I would have enough staff, and I could maintain a flexible schedule.   I didn’t need this work, after all:  I already had a job.  And I would be an idiot to pull my family up, drag them half-way around the world, and spend all my time in an office, leaving 10 months later having seen only a tiny bit of Hong Kong.  I had no doubt I could complete my work:  I’m an efficient worker—OCD can be useful that way.  And as long as all my work got done, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t spend some time exploring this particular corner of the world. 

So once or twice a month, Ellen would go off to swim and Jamie and I would head out into the city, armed with a red stroller, a bunch of granola bars, and at least one peanutbutter and jelly sandwich with the crusts cut off. 

We visited Tai Wai and the Hong Kong heritage museum, where we learned about Cantonese opera; we went to Chi Lin Nunnery not once, but twice, drawn by the amazing architecture, the lush green ponds, the low chanting; on the Island, we spent a morning in the Tea Museum, then spent the afternoon in Hong Kong park, where we saw pelicans the size of ponies with flexible beaks that they could turn inside-out over their own heads—a skill, I realized watching them, that I’ve always wanted for myself. 

We spent one very rainy Monday riding the trolley cars as far east as we could before lunch, then as far west as possible in the afternoon.  This last one had long been a fantasy of mine—I love the double-decker trolleys, with their veneered wooden trim, their narrow staircases, their single-paned windows that keep out the cool breeze but not the rain.  And it was fun, though I have to admit that after a while the hard plastic seats got a little old. 

 

That this year has been a real gift is obvious.  That one of the most important ways it’s been a gift was by giving us another son perhaps requires a bit more elaboration. 

Part of what I’m talking about is simply age related.  Jamie was 32-months-old when we arrived in Hong Kong.  He would walk, talk, and—well, that was pretty much it.  Personality wise, he was cute and funny, but essentially an animated loaf of bread.  During our time here, he passed from baby to toddler, shifting from object to subject:  there was a real human being in there, and watching him emerge was a blast. 

So that’s part of what I mean when I say that being in Hong Kong gave us another son.  But there’s this other part, too:

I was 41 when Jamie was born.  Ellen was nearly 40.  In educational terms, he was what could be referred to as an “unintended outcome,” which is to say that he happened, yes, even if we hadn’t necessarily, um, planned for him to happen. 

This is not to say that his outcoming, so to speak, was necessarily a bad thing—on the contrary, unintended outcomes are often the things that instructors most enjoy about their classes.  This is just to point out that we’re neither Catholic nor gluttons for punishment, nor getting any younger or more energetic.    We are, on the contrary, incredibly lazy and incredibly practical when it comes to things like, oh, being able to sleep at night, not having more kids than we can afford to feed, and not attending high school graduations at an age when, as you’re heading out of the house, your wife turns to you and says, “Did you bring the extra batteries for your hearing aid?”

But these things happen.  And of course, within a year or two of Jamie’s being born, we decided we might as well give up pretending he didn’t exist and actually love him. 

Joke.  Seriously.  Sorry, grandma. 

In actuality, of course, we were smitten the minute he emerged from the womb, pink and gooey and looking vaguely miffed.  Nonetheless, it’s worth pointing out that, for some large portion of his first few years, we occasionally forgot he existed.  This isn’t to say we were horrible parents:  we never left him in the car at the end of a long day of running errands; we fed and clothed him, cuddled with him before putting him to bed; he’s the only of our three children to whom we sang lullabies every nights, something for which he will likely never forgive us. 

But the reality of our lives was that we already had two children.  And they kept us very busy.  Particularly as one of them was a Lucy. 

You heard me:  when faced with Will’s math homework, Jamie’s fascination with the bubbles coming out of his nose, and Lucy’s crawling onto the kitchen counter to get the butcher knife so that she could use the handle to knock the matches off the top of the refrigerator, and, it’s not hard to imagine where we put most of our attention. 

As it turns out, ignoring Jamie seems to have been a pretty good parenting technique.  The fact is, he the most independent of our kids, insisting at the age of three that he can brush his own teeth, that he can make his own PBJ sandwiches.  He already knows how to turn on the VCR, where to find the spring water in the refrigerator, and how to make a nice roux for the Thanksgiving gravy.  The day he disassembled our malfunctioning vacuum cleaner and reassembled it perfectly, Ellen and I looked at each other, wondering why we hadn’t been smart enough to ignore the rest of our kids as well. 

 

So beyond getting to know the little human Jamie is becoming, we’re getting to know the little human we’ve been ignoring.  This was particularly true for Ellen, of course, who spent roughly 167.5 out of 168 hours a week in Jamie’s presence:  he came with her to the bus stop with Lucy and Will, to the grocery store to get mango juice, to the temple to, well, see a temple, to the malls in Sha Tin and Kowloon Tong to pick up clothes, or good bread, or cheese.  They went to the playground together almost daily, ate lunch together always, cuddled at night before he went to sleep. 

I, meanwhile, got whole days trolling around Hong Kong, chatting to the little blonde head in the stroller below me, listening to his questions:  “Can we take a taxi, can we?”  “Why can’t we take a taxi, why?”  “Can I have a snack, can I?”  That I never had this kind of opportunity with the other two kids goes without saying:  when I’m in the States, I occasionally avoid my 1-hour commute by working at home, but then I’m forced by a tight teaching schedule to actually work, rather than searching for the best dumpling shop in Lexington Virginia (a search that would, trust me, take a very long time).  The result of all of this was that I got to watch as my little loaf of bread developed a personality.   

And what a personality.  If Will is the kid most likely to marry a fundamentalist Christian who won’t let us see our grandchildren, and Lucy is most likely to get a tattoo before the age of 10, Jamie is most likely to become a professional surfer who accidently invents something that makes him a trillion dollars, which he then blows throwing a big party for all of his friends.   Jamie goes with the flow.  Sure, on occasion he gets a little huffy with his sister (like, for instance, after she pokes him six times with a sharp stick), but even on the rare occasion where his eyes become rimmed with red and he unbuckles those huge lungs of his and bellows until the mortar falls from the bricks, within a minute or two he’s over it and has moved on to the next thing. 

And he’s funny.  On father’s day, I went to the pool with the kids, then worked out for an hour, trying to shake off some of the stuffed duck we’d had for dinner the night before.  Back at the flat, I stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes.  Will curled up by my legs, book in hand, so quiet the only time I knew he was there was when he turned a page.  I was just drifting off, when I felt someone climb onto the couch alongside my torso.  I kept my eyes shut, hoping whoever or whatever it was would go away and let me sink into oblivion.  No such luck, though; whatever presence this was remained beside me. 

I opened my eyes. 

A pair of gigantic blue pupils hovered inches from my face. 

“Heh!” laughed Jamie.  He was grinning. “Heh heh!”

Jamie still doesn’t talk much.  When he does, he’s still a little hard to understand.  And he has this weird linguistic hitch, which sounds vaguely French if you ask me, of repeating his question words.  Most of the time, truth be told, he communicates through clicks and giggles, like an insane R2-D2. 

“Hi,” I say to the gigantic blue pupils.

“Heh!” he says again.  The skin around his eyes is crinkled.

“I’m trying to sleep,” I say. 

“Hee, hee!” he says. 

“You’re cute,” I say. 

“Huh, huh, huh.” 

“But I’m tired.”

A huge, bemused grin.  He’s staring into my eyes intently, as though watching his reflection in my corneas. 

“So maybe you could go away?”

He flat out laughs. 

Other times, he’s funny without even trying.  There was the rainy Monday morning in January, for instance, when he and I took Will and Lucy to school.  Just before leaving, I checked my computer and discovered that the Packers were losing to the Cardinals in the playoffs by something like 27 points at half-time. 

It was not a fun morning.

It got even worse when Jamie and I returned to the flat to discover that Ellen was still swimming and I didn’t have my keys.  It was pouring rain, maybe 40 degrees out, and we had a good 45 minutes to wait. 

Later, Jamie said to Ellen, “Why did Daddy say ‘God damn it,’ why?”

And just last week, he asked her, “Why did Daddy break the umbrella?  Why?”

Then there was the time, maybe a month ago, when Jamie discovered Lucy in the bathroom, attending to private business.  He was, himself, in the midst of a good streak with potty behavior (don’t ask), and had just that day received a lot of praise and a handful of M&Ms and Tic Tacs, in the vain hope that these would induce him toward a repeat performance for the next—well, for the rest of his life.

Discovering Lucy on the toilet, the door opened, he shouted down the hall, “Lucy’s pooing!” 

He glanced at her, making sure he had his facts straight before delivering another update:  “It’s really amazing!”

 

And he’s smart, our little guy.  The other day he and Ellen were on a double-decker bus, riding down to Central.  Halfway there, he turned to his mother and said, “Is this the 307?”

Ellen nodded, impressed.  They’d only been on the bus once before, as opposed to the 26 and the 275, which we take roughly 6,211 times a week. 

Jamie thought for a minute, then said, “Is it yellow?”

Ellen had to pause.  She couldn’t remember.  “We’ll have to wait until we get off,” she said.  “Then we can see.”

They rode for another 20 minutes or so, passing cranes near the harbor and brightly painted apartments and office complexes.  Eventually they came to the eastern tunnel and went under, then rode along the north edge of the island to Wan Chai.  Reaching their stop, they descended the stairs and climbed out into the humid, June air. 

Ellen paused, taking a moment to get her bearings.  But Jamie stepped further along the curb, leaning forward to see the front of the bus. 

“It is yellow,” he said.  “And it’s the 307.”

As good as his memory is, he’s soon to be in for a bit of a shock:  in slightly more than a month, we’ll pull into the driveway of our blue house on Houston St. in Lexington Virginia.  Unlocking the door, we’ll step into a living room hasn’t registered on his 44-month-old brain.  He won’t, to put it another way, remember his own home, his own room, the bathroom where we hang his monkey towel. 

He knows it, too.  We were on a bus the other day, heading down to University Station to catch a train that would take us to another train that would take us to—I don’t even remember where. 

But there we were on the shuttle bus, and Jamie was quizzing Lucy about this fictional “house” thing he’d been hearing so much about lately:

“Do we have horses,” he’d say, “do we?”

“No,” Lucy would say.

“Do we have kitties, do we?”

“No.”

“Do we have birdies, do we?”

“Outside we do.  But not inside.”

“Do we have tape?”

“Yes, we have tape.”

“Do we have scissors there, do we?”

 

So he’s unfolding.  Sometimes his tone of voice is surprisingly grown-up, not unusual for third children, I assume.  The other week Lucy did something that mildly annoyed him, and he marched around for half-an-hour, saying, “Lucy:  I am very angry.  Lucy:  I am very angry with you.”  

A lot of this is just imitation, of course:  these are words his mother would say (as opposed to his dad who, well, you know . . . ).  And a lot of what he does these days is imitation.  He has learned from his brother and sister, for instance, the fine art of bug spotting:  walking down the hill to catch the 26 every morning, he’ll sit in his stroller, pointing to this butterfly or that spider or that creeping, crawling snail. 

He especially loves the snails, especially the tiny ones, loves to hold them on his finger and let them crawl towards his palm.  One day, we walked all the way down the hill, got on the bus, rode it to old Tai Po, got off, strolled to the meeting place for the shuttle bus, waved off Lucy and Will, then turned around, strolling up Kwong Fuk Road to our favorite newsvendor, where we picked up a copy of the South China Morning Post. 

After that, we trundled across the intersection, ducking up the pedestrian walkway to Jamie’s favorite little playground.  I grabbed a custard bao along the way, and stopped at 7-11 to fill up my Octopus card.  Then I came pushed Jamie’s stroller up the ramp to the playground, and urged him out.

He didn’t move.

I waited a moment, wiping the sweat off my brow, and looking around.  As usual, the benches around the play area were filled with old men chatting in the shade.  Two or three of them had their socks off, their feet up by their haunches.

“Jamie,” I said, “time to go play.”

Again, he didn’t move.

“Jamie,” I said—and then stopped.  Leaning over, I tried to get a better angle on his right hand. 

“What is that?”

He gave me a sidelong glance, not guilty, more concerned with not moving too much.  “A nail.”

And sure enough, perched on his finger, was a tiny snail, the size of a bug. 

“Where did you get that?” I said.

Again, that sidelong glance.   And then he turned back to his treasure, gave one of those clicking giggles.  “It’s mine,” he said.  “Mine.” 

Will--The Final Post

Way back in the fall when the school sent home sign-up sheets for afterschool activities, Will decided he wanted to do archery.  We were okay with this, even though it meant tromping all the way across town every Sunday afternoon and sitting in the hot sun for over an hour. 

He loved it.  Which makes sense if you know Will:  it’s a sport that requires a lot of concentration, a fair bit of intelligence, and not a lot of sweating, which has never been Will’s favorite thing to do.  The first few times he went, he came home ecstatic, talking about how many bulls-eyes he got, what his scores were, what he had to do before they’d advance him to another level and move the target back.

Then, maybe three weeks into it, he came over to where I was typing my stupid blog on my laptop, and said, “I don’t feel good.”

I looked up.  His face was pale, dark red circles around his eyes.  I could see sweat forming in his bangs. 

“You’re probably just hot,” I said.  It was October, but still steaming.  “Sit in the shade for a bit.”

So he did.  And then he went back to his bow and arrows, and shot a few more rounds. 

I was lost in my computer again, when he reappeared. 

“I really don’t feel good.”

“You think you’re going to throw up?”

He nodded. 

I took him to a shady spot beside the fence, plopped him down on a stool, and made him put his head between his knees.

“Did you feel okay walking up?” I asked.  It’s a good mile from the bus stop, with not much shade.

He shook his head a little.  Then nodded a little, then shrugged, his face still between his knees. 

We waited for a few minutes until he started to feel a little better.  I got him some water and that seems to help.  Some.

“You want to stay a bit?” I asked 

He didn’t say anything for a bit.  I saw his eyes glance from the bow, to the target, to the arrows.  Then he shook his head. And we went.

 

Which wasn’t really a big deal. 

But then it happened the next time, too.  One minute, he was happily splitting straw as I typed away, the next he was standing beside me, pale as a sheet, forehead dewy with sweat.

“The heat again?” I said. 

He nodded.

The next week, we didn’t even make it out the door. 

“I don’t feel good,” he said, when I strolled into the living room, my lap top satchelled on my shoulder. 

I stopped where I was.  Something below my lungs twisted a little.  I looked at Ellen, who was sitting on the couch downloading pictures onto her computer.  She met my glance.  Ellen and I aren’t on the same page very often (or even in the same book), and we’re arguably the worst parents ever (why else would we eat our kids’ M&Ms when they weren’t looking?), but every once in a while we get it right, and we get it right together. 

So we sat down and talked to Will about archery, about his stomachaches, about what was going on.  We never did figure out exactly what was happening—he said he loved archery, and we believed him.  Who knows:  maybe he was putting a lot of pressure on himself to succeed; maybe, standing there, bow raised, one eye closed, focusing on the target, trying to calm his breath, he just felt the heat swell through is body, felt something huge and unmanageable crushing his lungs.  Who knows?

But he went that day.  And he had fun.  And he went every week after that, except for the ones where we had something else to do, and then he complained voraciously about missing.

 

Of all of my children, Will has come the farthest this year. 

Partly that’s because he had the farthest to go.  When I first wrote about him in the fall, I mentioned my theory that his was the earliest case of early-onset-Alzheimer’s, that his brain just plain lacked neo-plasticity, the ability to take in new information and link it to existing neural networks.  He’s always been this way:  when we brought his sister home six years ago, he spent two whole years refusing to acknowledge her existence.  He just doesn’t take change well. 

And this year has been full of change.  Duh.  Aside from the macro stuff—small-town Virginia replaced by Hong Kong, brats on the grill replaced by steamed chicken, moonshine replaced by tea—there are all the smaller changes, which really aren’t that small in the end:  instead of walking 10 minutes to school, he had to hoof it fifteen minutes down a hill, get on a mini-bus, get dropped off in the middle of a busy intersection, wait 10-15 minutes, then take another bus.  And the school wasn’t the school he’d known, the teachers weren’t the teachers he’d known.  Kids spoke a language—check that:  languages—he didn’t understand. 

And the kids.  They weren’t his friends.  This isn’t to say that they weren’t friendly—they were, mostly.  But you have to understand that Will has known his oldest friend, Lena, since he was a month old.  And his second oldest friend, Maria, since he was three months old.  And his third oldest friend, Charlie, since about that same time.  And these are not kind of friends, people he waves at in the Kroger parking lot:  no, these are close friends.  Charlie and Maria and Will play every day after school.  And Lena once pooped in Will’s bath.  We’re talking really close here.

Which means, of course, that Will hasn’t really had to make friends that much:  he’s just grown up with the same people attending his birthday party every year, seeing the same people at the swimming pool every night during the summer. 

Until his jerk parents decided to move to Hong Kong for a stupid year. 

 

That this transition wasn’t that easy for Will was evidenced in a million small details.  He’s been more short of temper this year that before, particularly as the Spring has stretched on and we still haven’t packed our bags and headed home. 

And he’s been self-medicating even more than usual, which doesn’t seem possible.  Luckily, Will’s drug of choice involves glue, paper, ink, and a table of contents.  And if you think I’m joking about books serving as medication, then you haven’t seen my son come home after a lousy, hot, sticky, sweaty, chaotic day at school, kick his shoes off at the door, drop his backpack by the dining room table, grab a book, and curl up on the couch, his head down.  For the next hour, or so, he literally won’t hear anything that’s going on around him. 

Which is fine with us.  More than one study has shown that reading is like meditation, that it slows the heart rate, deepens the breathing, relaxes the mind.  Even though sometimes it’s a pain in the butt having to tell someone for the sixth time that he needs to wash his hands for supper, I think Ellen and I are both glad Will has this mechanism for recovering from a hard day (writes his father as he takes a sip of wine and reaches for another Chips A’Hoy). 

And luckily for us, my host institution has arguably the best children’s library in all of Southeast Asia.  I’m not making this up.  We’ve spent most of the year heading to a single aisle in the stacks where every series of note from the last 50 years is stored, in its entirety.  Will has worked his way through Mr. Gum, The Magic Treehouse, some trilogy about prehistoric bats, Enid Blyton, and a dumb series about a mouse that pisses me off every time I have to read the damn things.  Just this week he’s started the Percy Jackson series, and is already on book 3. 

 

But even so, there’ve been some hard moments.  Some of these I’ve chronicled already:  earlier in the Spring, for instance, he was in the throes of a bullying situation.  Bullying is always bad (says the writer who hates people who state the obvious) but probably its worst form is when the bully is someone the bullied really really likes, and really really wants to be liked by.  As was the case this spring, when Will was told that he was “annoying,” that he read too much, that he was unpopular, that he should care more about sports—all by the most popular guy in Year Four.

Needless to say, stuff like this absolutely destroys any parent who has to stand by and watch it happen—and we have to watch it happen:  we can only intervene so much.  We can’t be there on the playing field, can’t throw out the retorts that we’re certain will shut up the idiot who thinks our son is an idiot, can’t, finally, control the will of a 10 year-old-boy who is trying to destroy the 10-year-old boy we’d die to save, simply because he (the first 10-year-old boy) wants to see if he can, wants to see if he can exert some force on the universe, can exert pressure on the world around him, can somehow shape a universe that’s intent on shaping him. 

All of which is ground I’ve covered before.  I mention it here simply because it leads to two moments that capture Will this year: 

The first occurred maybe two weeks before Will was supposed to go on a class trip to Beijing.  This is an adventure of course, particularly when you’re only nine.  But it’s also a little scary, particularly when you’re only nine.

And it’s a lot scary when it means you get to spend five days, 24-hours-a-day, with two boys who used to be your friends, but now insist on making you miserable. 

Anyhow, it’s about two weeks before the trip.  Will and his mom are in the kitchen.  She’s just asked him if he’d rather stay home than go.  And after a long moment’s silence, he’s said yes. 

The thing is, as much as Ellen and I don’t really want him to go, don’t really want him to be in that situation (without, say, brass knuckles and a book of really witty comebacks), we also know that—like the archery thing—he probably needs to do it.  I hate clichés, but there’s one about a horse and falling off and—well, you know the rest (and if you don’t, then you need to stop surfing porn on the internet and read some real books). 

So Ellen basically tells him we think he needs to do it.  There’s a long silence.  I’m lying on the couch in the living room, reading, or napping, or trying to pretend I should be answering work e-mails.  Even from that distance, I can feel the resignation in the air, the utter loss, a hopelessness so hopeless it can’t even get up the energy to protest or argue.

After a few minutes, Ellen comes out of the kitchen and starts doing something on the computer.  Will comes out too, and sits at the table, pencil in hand, not so much doing his homework, as just sitting, head down, staring at the paper he’s supposed to be covering with words. 

“Hey Will?” I say from my spot on the couch.

He looks up. 

“Come here,” I say. 

When he stretches on top of me, he’s reaches all the way from my chin to just above my ankles.  He’s heavy too, but not enough that I can’t breath. 

He doesn’t say anything.   And I don’t either.

And he doesn’t cry.  And I don’t either, though maybe I’d understand if either of us did.  Instead, I stroke his hair, his chestnut brown hair, slightly greasy, with my thumb.

We stay there for fifteen minutes:  Me on the couch, stroking his hair, him on top of me, face down, melting into me.

 

The second story has to do with the day he comes back.  The flight is late, so I’m standing at the airport at 9:50 on a Friday night, with a lot of people from the school I should know and should talk to if I weren’t so stupid and shy in situations like this. 

Anyways, eventually the kids start to trickle out of the gate:  there’s George and Mark, strolling together and laughing; there’s Sonja, the Norwegian-English-Argentine-ish girl that Will insists he doesn’t have a thing for, even though he’ll drop whatever he’s doing whenever her car pulls up to the bus stop; and there’s Will, wearing exactly the same shirt he had on five days ago, looking tired and disheveled, but walking with a loose and confident gait.

“How was it?” I say, as we stroll with Sonja and her mom to their car for a shared ride back to the hinterlands of Tai Po. 

“Good,” he says.

“Are you glad you went?” I ask.

“Uh-huh,” he says.

“Really?” I say, because I read somewhere that one key to good parenting is to use every opportunity available to show your children that:  a)  you don’t trust their self-knowledge; or b) you think they’re liars.

“Yep,” he nods.  “It was fun.”

Then he says, “Hang on.”  And kneels down by his backpack. 

“Here,” he says.  He’s pulled out a small, decorated box, the kind you get in China whenever you buy a souvenir:  the outside is green or red, with an old-fashioned pattern like your grandmother’s curtains, the inside is lined with a red, velvety material, into which is laid the bowl or spoon or miniature vase or whatever it is that you purchased.

He hands the box to me. 

“What’s this?” I say.  We’d given him a little bit of money for souvenirs, encouraging him to buy something for his sister, since she was certain the fact that he got to go to Beijing and she did not was part of a plot on behalf of God and the Universe to ruin her life 

“It’s a present,” he said.

“For Lucy?”

“For you.”

I look at him.  He’s zipped up his bag, has stood now.  Glancing down, I realize he’s probably wearing the same sock and shorts as five days ago, as well. 

“Will,” I say.  “You didn’t have to do that.”

He nods. 

“But you got something for Lucy, too, right?” I say, determined as always to do everything I can to ruin a good moment. 

“Uh-huh,” he says, in a tone that implies, rightly, that I’m an idiot.

I open the box.  Inside is small, cloisonné owl, red and blue and white and yellow, trimmed in intricate lines of gold. 

“Will,” I say. 

He looks at me. 

“Did you know I love owls?”  I ask.  It’s true:  I hate birds—too fluttery, with feathers, and beaks and claws and white-green poo—but owls are a different matter altogether. 

He shakes his head.  He’s not smiling, but his lips are pressed together, and I can see from the way his cheeks puff that he’s about to.  

 

Now, were I a better writer, or more sympathetic to my weary, I’d stop right there.  This is, though, the last post I’ll write of Will here in Hong Kong, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to suck it up for another 300 words, more or less.

For Mother’s Day, Will made a pop-up card:  the outside is plain brown, maybe with a little picture or something.  The inside, though, is a row of cut-out palm trees that stand straight up when you open the card.  Below them is a little treasure chest, with a sliding bolt and a key.  Open it, and you find the word “Mother” spelled out vertically, so that the student can provide a phrase that describes his mother for each letter.  Here is what Will wrote: 

M—Made of molecules

O—One of a kind

T—Takes me to school

H—Happy and Kind

E—Editor

R—Reassuring

 

Thinking about writing this post, I’d planned on focusing on “Made of molecules.”  I mean, who doesn’t love a kid who comes up with a line like that?  Especially when you know the he and his friend Eldon laughed like—well—9-year-old boys when he wrote that.

Typing this now, though, what I find myself focusing on is “Reassuring.”  I know this word should scare me:  “reassuring” implies the need for assurance, the existence of fear and anxiety and chaos in his world—things caused by situations at school, yes, but also by his mom and dad deciding the best thing they could do when he was eight was rip him out of his quiet peaceful life in Virginia, and drag him half-way around the world to a place where the food smells funny and the caterpillars are so poisonous you’re not supposed to touch them. 

So I know this word should scare me.  But it doesn’t.  What it tells me is that I have a smart boy, a boy who knows what’s good for him, and who’s good for him, and where to go when it all gets to be too much. 

This might have been a skill he had before we left.  I don’t know.  I don’t care.  All I know—and all I care about—is that he has it now. 

Things I Will Miss

We’re on the 26, taking the kids to school, when a man waves from the curb.  It’s not a stop, but the driver pulls over anyway, inadvertently blocking in an SUV just about to pull into the road. 

No one honks. 

 

Spring is amazing fruit time:  first came the lychees and the mangosteen.  Now, it’s longon—dragon eyes—season:  they come in bunches hanging from twigs, about the size of a cherry, wrapped in a rough, papery skin.  Peel back half of it, and you can pop the white fruit in your mouth.  It tastes like a grape, only milder.  And in the middle is a small, perfectly smooth, perfectly black seed. 

 

Getting on the bus, Jamie heads for the seat while I prop the stroller up front.  The driver must not be paying attention, because he starts before we’re able to sit.   Jamie jerks back, takes a step.  Three hands, from three different people, reach out to catch him. 

 

Sitting on the couch every night, writing like a fiend, with the delusion that if I try hard enough, someday Oprah might want to meet me. 

 

To cross the river from Old Tai Po to new Tai Po, you climb two flights of stairs to a covered walkway that stretches between two shopping malls.  On most days, if you’re there late in the afternoon, you’ll hear the Ting-Ting man.  He sells hard, chewy, slightly spicy white candy out of a bit silver tub he sets on a stool.  To make sure you know he’s there, he taps a small spatula with the spike he uses to break free the toffee. 

 

Every morning, after we see Will and Lucy off on the shuttle bus up to the primary school, Jamie and I will stroll up Kwong Fuk Road before heading back to campus.  Half-way up, we’ll buy a South China Morning Post from a small, lean man, who moves quickly as he stuff fliers into today’s edition of six or seven different newspapers.  He’s handsome in an ordinary way, not the less so because he very clearly takes himself so seriously. 

When he sees us, he’ll flash me a quick, dry smile, then reach for an SCMP, folding it in half as he uses his other hand to snag a packet of tissues that come with the paper as a promotion.  Once I’ve given him my money and he’s handed me the change, he’ll smile at Jamie and say, in practiced English, “Good morning!”  Jamie will do his usual shuffle and jive, turning away, but looking from beneath his lids.  “Good morning!” the man will say.  “Good morning!”  Then he’ll laugh.    

 

That spark of energy I feel every time—every time—I step out of the Central MTR station and into the busy streets of Hong Kong Island. 

 

They are asleep on the train to Hung Hom, side-by-side in their first-class seats, her head on his, his on a yellow pillow resting on her shoulder.  Both of them are wearing black suits; he’s in blue with a tie, and she’s in a white blouse, the collar open.

They’re holding hands.  As the train draws toward Kowloon Tong, she lifts her head, rubs her eyes, looks at her watch.  Another moment and she pulls crimson nails, very lightly, over the back of his hand.  He wakes, blinking.  She kisses his head, then begins to gather their stuff—her handbag, a water bottle, what looks like the wrapper from a power bar.  Picking up the yellow pillow, he rubs it, then stuffs it into a backpack. 

The train slows.  I watch as they press the wrinkles from their jackets, exchange a word or two.  Then they rise, squeeze through the bodies toward the door, and disappear into the crowded platform. 

Lok Say

I’m walking across campus with Will and Lucy when they point to a long black poster set up between two buildings and say something. 

“Huh?”  I’m tired, and hot, and tired, and really hot.  And tired.  All I want to do is get back to the flat, crank up the AC, and lie on the couch with a remote control and something slippery and cold. 

“It’s a six,” Lucy says.  She points to a Chinese character in large white paint.  Then she moves her finger.  “And a four.”

“Yeah,” says Will.  “A six and four.  But just them.  It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Maybe it’s 64,” I say, leaning my body in the direction of home, hoping they’ll get the hint.  But they’re standing their ground. 

“No,” says Will.  “Then it’d be a six-ten-four.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Lucy says, repeating her brother. 

 

But it does, of course. 

A month ago the members of the Gen Ed office were planning a meeting of three sub-working groups.  In total, 15 people would be invited, and it was hard finding a day and a time that worked for everyone. 

“What about the second week of June?” KS, the acting director said. 

“I have a two-day workshop,” I said.  “How about the first week?”

Everyone looked down at their planners.  “The 1^st?” said William. 

“I have practicum,” KS said.

“The 2^nd?”

I shook my head.  “A conference at Poly.  What about the fourth?  My book is blank on that day.”

William’s head shot up.  He stared at me.  KS actually laughed.  “You can come that day,” he said, “but I won’t be here.”

 

21 years ago I was in England, winding down the second year of my stint as a rock star in the nearly-almost-but-not-quite-ever-even-semi-famous alternative rock quartet Don’t Kick the Baby.  My friend Steve was visiting that spring, and he and I were having a grand old time, going up to St. Aidan’s college and drinking beer, getting a wee bit tipsy, stumbling down to Dunelm where the kebab van was, stuffing our faces with greasy meat and raw onions, then strolling across the bridge and back to my flat, where we crashed out and stayed up talking about deep things like would we ever find a woman who would love us, and whatever happened to that band Big Country?

Evenings, we’d sit in front of the TV watching the news and eating takeout Chinese.  The Ayatollah Khomeini died at the end of May, and I remember Steve and I leaping up when we heard that and actually slapping a high five, sort of a bizarre move for two would-be hippie-pacifist freaks. 

And there was this thing in China, these students protesting in this square we’d never heard of before, in Beijing.  They’d been there for more than a month already, and every night the crowds were getting bigger, the speeches more fiery.  And the government wasn’t doing anything about it. 

It was, I have to say, magical to watch.  There was this sense, very tangible, that something big was going to happen, that the government was about to cave, that everything in China would change.  This was the period of Glasnost, after all, when Gorbachev was rewriting the rules in Russia.  And there was Lech Walesa in Poland, and the Solidarity movement.  Quietly but steadily, the world was changing—the oppressive regimes were coming down.  The world was becoming a better place.

 

Way back in October, our friends Anita and Collin took us to Victoria Park on the Island for the mid-autumn festival.  Glowing red lanterns were strung everywhere and crowds of families wandered from one stage to another, taking in the Peking Opera, the shadow puppets, the traditional dance shows.  There was popcorn, the first I’d had since coming to Asia, slightly burned and sticky with sugar. 

“We do this in the fall,” Anita said.  “And then in June we bring you back.”

We grinned.  “Bring us back?  Why?  What’s in June?”

Anita, who usually smiles, stopped.  She looked at us closely.  “For June 4^th.”  She didn’t actually say the words, but her voice implied Of course.

We must have stared a moment too long. 

Her voice dropped in pitch but not in volume.  “Tiananmen Square,” she said.  “Tiananmen Square.”

 

So on June 4^th, 2010, we pile into Anita and Collins’ car and head down to Victoria Park again.  We’d told the kids over dinner about the massacre, explaining that the students were unarmed, that they were protesting for more open communication with the government, for freedoms that we don’t even think about in the United States—like for instance, the right to sit around the dinner table and talk about the government.  We tell them that this is a somber event, that they should take it very seriously, that we won’t tolerate any acting up. 

On the drive down, Anita talks about the original vigil, 21 years ago, how nearly 20% of Hong Kong’s population showed up, spontaneously the night after the massacre to protest the slaughter of unarmed students by the soldiers of their own country.  Anita is not one to get choked up, and she does not get choked up telling this story.  Rather, you can tell that she’s very proud of Hong Kong, of the way this tiny region that, not 8 years after Tiananmen, would be ceded to China, refused to ignore this blatant act of unjustified violence.

Indeed, defiance seems to be the mood du jour.  When we get to the park, there’s Canto rock blasting from a huge tower sound system set up on scaffolding.  We’re escorted into a fenced off area about a hundred meters square, between two other fenced off areas about a hundred meters square.  Anita pulls out a long roll of plastic sheeting, and we spread it on the muddy ground, making just enough room for all of us. 

It takes me a minute to figure out what’s going on. Why the fenced in area?  Why are we just staring at a scaffolding in the middle of a muddy field?  Where’s the stage?  Who’ll be speaking?  Why the loud music?

The first question is answered almost instantly.  Crowds pour through the open gates of the fenced in area:  college kids in tight jeans and Converse tennis shoes; families like us with kids in strollers; elderly couples, him in gray pleated trousers, her in a flowered dress.  Within seconds, it seems, our corral is filled up, and a pair of attendants pull a strip across the entrance, making sure we don’t get too packed in, directing traffic to the next area.  This is Hong Kong, after all:  we will protest, yes, but it will be orderly.  For once, this sense of over-control doesn’t bother me. 

“Where are we?” I say to Anita.  “Is this the main area?”

She shakes her head.  Overflow, she says.  The main area is off to the right, in front of us, nearer a stadium.  There, she tells me, there’s a stage, and microphones and huge video screens. 

I’m about to ask her another question when there’s a shift in the music blaring from the loudspeakers.  The pounding bass and grinding guitars pull back a little, and over them, digitally mixed, we hear the rapid fire of machine guns, the grind of tank engines, the roar of sirens.  It’s a sampling, of course, and the song is a protest song, of course.  Once that tune finishes, another starts, less bass and drums heavy, but its to-hell-with-you tone is evident even for people like me who can’t understand the words.  

And then the speakers begin.  Its all in Cantonese and Putonghua, which seems funny to me—why use the language of the oppressors?—but Anita tells me that mainlanders come down to Hong Kong for the commemoration each year, that remembering the massacre isn’t so much illegal in the PRC as just not done.  This matches something one of my colleagues from the mainland told me earlier in the day, as we were strolling past those black banners on campus.

“Does anyone talk about what happened?” I asked her.

The words weren’t even out of my mouth before she was saying, “We do not talk about this.  No one talks about this.”  She paused, her eyes ahead of her as we walked.  Then she said:  “At Peking University, every year people show up on campus around this time to see who’s talking about it.  No one does.”

This morning’s paper carried a story about witnesses to the massacre who’ve struggled over the years, trying to cope with what they saw, and having no outlet or way to express their anger.  Many protest quietly:  wearing a white shirt, for instance, the traditional Chinese color of mourning, or pulling on the same black shirt they wore that night, still stained with the blood of protestors. 

Now, tonight, sitting on our strip of narrow plastic, we listen to the mother of one of those killed as she tells her story.  Her voice is elastic, not quite lively, but gentle and rounded, restrained but full of emotion.  Her pitch never changes.  Behind her plays a single erhu, the traditional Chinese stringed instrument that can sound like an Appalachian fiddle or a mournful ghost, calling from the salt marshes.  Over the year I’ve come to appreciate the erhu, but listening to it now, bending its way behind this woman’s voice, I can feel moisture gathering beneath my lids, and I realize I love this instrument, and will probably never hear it again without thinking of this place, this murmuring crowd, the glowing skyscrapers around the park, windows 40 stories up flickering with the blue-gray light of televisions.

The woman finishes, and then there’s another protest song, more mainstream pop this time, with a rousing chorus that, each time it comes, seems to swell the chest of the crowd.  There’s a photographer in front of us, a lanky kid with long hair and an oversized t-shirt, and as he focuses his massive lens on the flickering candle glow, I can see his mouth stretching with rounded “O’s” and pulling wide with “E” sounds.  All around us, you can hear people singing, heartily, lustily, almost joyfully. 

They’ve passed out candles now, and the kids are fascinated, dripping wax onto their fingers, into the grass, trying to build wrinkled castles out of the melt.  The next speaker is the wife of a dissident who was jailed for speaking out against the government after a recent round of earthquakes in China.  After him is someone younger, who speaks eloquently and earnestly for a while, then breaks into a call and response, shouting phrases to the crowd, who holler them back, 100,000-fold.  Each time, in the bare second between the shouts of the crowd and the next chant of the young man, you can hear a booming echo off the buildings around the park, all those voices rolling off of glass and steel, sounding not quite human but unquestionably holy. 

 

It has to be hard to be a Hong Konger when it comes to the subject of China.  On the one hand, being linked to the PRC is like being the prom date of the coolest guy on campus.  Everyone knows China is rising.  Everyone knows what’s coming will almost undoubtedly be China’s century.  It has the resources, it has the labor, it has a strong centralized government that can keep businesses in line and keep the economy under control.  Its economy has grown between 6 and 10 percent every year for the last decade.  It was unscathed, mostly, by the recent banking crisis, and it only knows the idea of trade imbalance from the grip end of the pistol. 

Who wouldn’t want to dance with that guy? 

At the same time, of course, there is Tiananmen Square.  Li Peng, the premier during what the PRC refers to as (if they refer to it at all) “the 1989 incident,” recently released his diaries for publication.  In them, he says, repeatedly, that he was prepared to die in order to stop the protesters.

Almost immediately after the death of Mao, the Cultural Revolution was declared an unconditional failure, and Mao’s wife and her cronies were prosecuted for its execution.  Twenty-one years after Tiananmen, there’s no move to revise history, no attempt on the part of the government to redeem itself by admitting overzealousness in attacking unarmed students with tanks, crushing their legs into the pavement as they attempted to flee on their bicycles. 

Numbers like this are hard to read, but from 1990 to 1994, the emigration numbers from Hong Kong never dropped below 50,000 per annum, almost ten times the “normal” rate.  Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that there are those here who are unapologetic about the big brother to the north.  In a recent attempt to embarrass the PRC into allowing Hong Kong full democracy, a number of liberal politicians resigned from their posts, forcing midterm elections as a de facto referendum on one-person, one-vote.  Turnout was so low the maneuver was declared a fiasco, even by those who supported it. 

 

There’s more music.  The organizers have passed out programs with words to all the songs and translations of everything that’s in Putonghua.  A beloved dissident, dying now of cancer, speaks, and the crowd roars (albeit in a Hong Kong kind of way) its approval.  Then a student from Chinese University gets up to speak. 

CUHK, founded in 1949 by scholars and thinkers kicked out of the mainland by the red army, is one of the top three universities in Hong Kong, ranked 80^th, more or less, internationally.  It’s a beautiful place, nestled on and around a range of mountains near Sha Tin.  The students there are smart and engaged, and strolling across campus on a Friday night you’ll see clusters of them walking arm in arm and laughing in the dark.

And the students there are—like the founding fathers of the University—politically active.  Earlier in the week they had asked the university council to place The Goddess of Democracy—a twenty-foot statue commemorating the sacrifice of the Tiananmen students—on campus following the peace vigil.  The council, led by the university’s president, who is largely seen as pro-Beijing, declined, arguing that, “The university should not align itself with actions or activities which project a political position that would compromise the university’s principle of political neutrality.”

Besides being one butt-ugly sentence, this is also patently absurd—disallowing political activity is a form of political activity itself—and the crowd knew it.  When the young man from the university repeats these words on Friday night, more than 100,000 voices roar with laughter. 

Between speeches and songs, the announcers keep telling everyone how big the crowd has grown:  80,000 people, 90,0000 people, 100,000 people.  The police have now closed down streets to allow the overflow.  The police started to turn people away, but changed their minds.  The police now estimate 150,000 people!

It is a night of numbers.  I finally realize, for instance, that the protesters who were killed, were, of course, my age, that had they lived they’d now be handsome women or fathers of small children.  How this could have alluded me at the time is bizarre:  perhaps because China was so remote from Northern England.  Perhaps because what they were doing was so much braver than anything I would have considered, have considered, or likely will ever consider. 

Amidst all the Cantonese, I recognize a few words, but only a few:  “Lok say,” for instance, both low, the second sharp and short.  Six.  Four.  Of course.  The numbers Lucy and Will saw and couldn’t decipher:  June 4^th, the sixth month, the fourth day.

And there’s this:  yi sup yut li.  Twenty-one years.  Twenty-one years ago.

And there’s this:  2047, the year China takes over Hong Kong for good.  It’s a number I don’t hear mentioned, but one I don’t doubt is one everyone’s mind, even if at the back, lingering like a ill-trained guest.  Sure, too, I’m certain there’s a quiet calculus that’s occurred in the minds of the parents in the crowd, the people who, like us, have children in their laps playing with the softened wax of their candles.  This calculus begins with the child’s age, then adds, 37, the number of years until the hand-over, so that Enya, on Anita’s lap, will be 43 when it happens, exactly Ellen’s age now.  And Angus, her brother, will not even be forty.

Then the math continues, adding 37 to the age of the parents.  Thus, I would be 81, likely not around, and Anita, younger than me, would be in her late 70s.  And of course this second calculus has nothing to do with self-preservation.  Rather, it's all about the desire, projected 40 years out, to protect the wee ones sitting in their laps now, holding their fingers above the flames, trying not to get burned, trying to keep safe, as a nation remembers the night its own leaders sent tanks to crush the lives of students whose only fault was to ask for a better life.  

Massageseses. And Janeane Garafalo

It’s mostly dark, and I’m mostly naked, and there’s a Chinese woman on top of me, spreading oil on my body. 

This is, I know, pretty much every man’s fantasy (having oil spread on them, I mean, not spreading oil on me) bearing all the elements of one of those fakey stories we used to read in Todd Holscrum’s dad’s Playboys:  a dark room.  A woman.  Lots of naked-ish flesh.  Oil.  Throw in a Bruce Willis movie and a box of Krispy Kremes, and we’re talking nirvana here.

Faced with this near paradisal, um, paradise, this confluence of all things exotic, physical, emotional, medical, and sensory, I find myself in the rare situation of being at a loss for words.  I mean, how does one describe the experience of spending two hours being pampered and indulged and rubbed from tip to toe and back to tip again? 

Then, maybe five minutes into the experience, I find a word: 

Ow. 

 

The first time I went to the XinMeizi Spa in Shenzhen, I found myself wondering if the entire experience wasn’t designed with the specific goal of making pasty fat white men uncomfortable. 

Take for example, the locker room attendants. 

When you first arrive at the XinMeizi, you’re escorted into a lovely dressing room done up in oak with brass trim.  An attendant leads you over a locker and, using a numbered bracelet you received at a desk and his own master key, opens it for you.  Then he steps aside. 

And stays there. 

You look at him.  He looks at you.  You nod.  He nods back.  You smile.  He nods again.  You look at him again.  And he looks at you again. 

Is he waiting for a tip? you wonder.  His hand isn’t out, but he’s clearly not leaving any time soon.  So you reach for your wallet, pull out a 10 RMB note, and hand it to him.  He nods, smiles this time, and takes it. 

And stays right where he is. 

Eventually, of course, you get it:  he’s not leaving.  Not for nothing.  You’re still not quite sure why he’s there, but you realize that, if indeed you’re going to get to that promised land of the two-hour oil massage that’s waiting for you somewhere upstairs, you’re just going to have to ignore the guy and get on with your business. 

So you unbutton your shirt, pull it off your shoulders and—

hand into the outstretched fingers of the man who’s standing by your locker.  He takes it, pulls out an incongruous plastic hanger, buttons your shirt to it, and hangs it up.  Then he returns to his previous position, feet shoulder-width apart, hands folded in front of him, eyes on you but not invasively so.

And he stays there.  Again. 

Well okay, then.  So you slip off your sandals, which he accepts, and slides into a slot at the bottom of the locker.  And then you slip off your jeans . . .

All of which sounds kind of nice, I know, except for the part about how it’s embarrassing and uncomfortable.  Nevermind the part about someone standing there watching you undress:  I have three kids after all.  I get people wathing me undress all the time, usually with a running commentary:  “Gee dad, how much popcorn did you have last night?” or “You look like a snowman, only hairier.”   

No, more to the point, it’s just embarrassing being sort of waited on like that, like you’re a king and he’s a footman or a butler or whatever.   Let’s face it:  most Americans aren’t too comfortable with the whole servant thing—or even things vaguely resembling servants, like, say, caddies, or those old ladies at the Safeway handing out samples.  This is  particularly true of Midwesterners, I suspect, who:  a) don’t have a history of hiring servants unless it involves shoveling their driveways, and b) don’t think they’re worthy of being waited on, not by anyone, anywhere, anyhow, no matter how much they’re paying for the experience. 

And, of course, all of this is embarrassing because, well, let’s face it:  sooner or later all of your over-wear will be gone, and then all that will be left is your, um, well . . .

underwear

Which, of course, you’re going to have to remove and hand to the nice guy who’s getting paid roughly 12 cents an hour to fold and stack clothing that doesn’t belong to him. 

Including your underwear. 

During my several visits to the spa, I’ve experimented with several different ways of responding to this situation.  I have, of course, tried removing my skivvies and simply placing them in the locker myself.  When I did this, though, my guy looked vaguely—perhaps even strongly—offended.  What? his expression seemed to say:  Your precious underwear are too good for me?  You don’t trust your half-day-old Fruit-of-the-Looms to my working class hands? 

Other times, I’ve attempted more devious methods, waiting, for instance, until just the moment when I’m about to drop my drawers, then suddenly pointing behind the attendant and shouting, “Look!  It’s Janeane Garafalo!” 

This worked, to an extent:  He looked.  I dropped trou.  But then there was a problem with the retrieval process, something involving swollen ankles and an oddly angled foot, so that when I bent over to snatch this particularly awkward piece of 70%cotton/30%rayon, I lost my balance and toppled into my guy, who still had his back to me, staring around the locker room, trying to figure out what the hell a garafalo was. 

My most recent attempt involved trying to make a game of the whole thing, balling up my underwear, dropping into basketball stance, faking a dribble or two as I feign first left, then right, before shouting, “From the top of the paint—he shoots!  He scores!” and arching the aforementioned ball of elastic-bound apparel over the guy’s head and into my locker. 

Hopefully.   Because if I miss, not only does this poor kid have to handle my skivvies, he has to stoop down and pick them up off the floor.  Assuming I haven’t undershot, rocketing the dang things into his face.

Once you’ve disrobed, you’re handed a large towel and a pair of sanitized rubber sandals that cover your big toe and little else.  Then you pad into a large room that looks like someone crossed the transporter pads from the Starship Enterprise with a Roman bath house:  in the middle of the room is a large fountain filled with black water.  On both sides of it are curving rows of cylindrical shower stalls, each floor-to-ceiling and made of glass, with an open side meaning that as you’re showering the rest of the room gets a charming view of your nice, big, deep-fried cheese-curd loving butt. 

And as if this isn’t bad enough, you’re taking a shower in your sandals. Which, let’s face it folks, just looks weird.  The male body is not really so hot to begin with, particularly when naked and over the age of say, 19.  But put this froggy-looking mass of buttocks and hairy shoulders and stumpy legs on top of a pair of undersized plastic sandals, and what you have is less fodder for comedic calendar, than proof that God hates women.  Because otherwise, why would he/she/it make women have to look at that?

Of course, by the second or third time I went to the spa, I was sort of over the silliness of everything and could just go and enjoy the sheer wonder of it all:  the showerheads are wide and the spray is strong and even.  I soap up, rinse down, and towel off before going into the steam bath, where I sit for a good twenty minutes in the white clouds, meditating on the nature of the universe, my sense of my own self-hood, and how my lungs actually burn whenever I draw a breath.  I also chuckle about the sign just outside of the glass doors that reads: Warning—Persons should not mulberry in stem room who have: 

·      Had wine

·      Heart problem

·      Shin disease

Hong Kong is filled with “Chinglish,” signs whose meanings have clearly been translated from Chinese characters directly into English.  Usually I don’t make fun of these things, recognizing that it’s rude to mock someone who can speak two or three languages at even a minimal level while I can’t even order off the menu at Taco Bell.  That said, “mulberry” intrigues and delights me.  The only explanation I can find for its use here—and in verb form, no less—is that someone mixed up “linger” and “lingonberry,” and then somehow took it a step further and confused “lingonberry” with “mulberry.”

It’s just a theory, of course.  If you have a better one, let me know.

After another shower to rinse off the steam bath (I mean, how cool is that?  Two showers in twenty minutes!), it’s back to emotional pain land.  You hand the attendant your wet towel in exchange for a pair of baggy shorts and a loose-fitting shirt.  Both of these are made of a reddish-batiky stripe that makes you look like a walking futon cover.  As if that weren’t bad enough, you get to wear this costume out of the locker room door and into public, strolling into a small lobby where a young woman in a business suit takes one look at you and decides you’re clearly incapable of pushing the elevator button yourself.  So she does it for you.  You then go up a floor, into another small lobby where you register for your massage.  Then it’s back into the elevator, where you’re joined by three very attractive young Chinese women who are also here for a massage, who are also wearing Pier-1 fashions, who look at you as though you are some sort of bizarre animal they’ve never seen before, or alternatively, a 44-year-old gweilo dressed like an idiot—and who, making all of this all the worse, somehow manage to make their baggy shorts and loose tops look runway trendy.

Up two more floors, and you’re escorted into a small room with two massage beds, each with that peculiar hole at the top for your face, making it—the table, not your face—look like an oversized Do Not Disturb sign.  Here they instruct you to take off your shirt.  Which you do.  Then you sit there, half of you covered in your stunningly ugly batiky shorts, the other half flabby and cold and wishing it were covered, even in stunningly ugly sofa upholstery batik.

And which point, your masseuse shows up.

And the pain begins. 

 

Let me ask you this:  when someone says massage, what do you imagine?  Okay, okay:  besides that. Seriously, what comes to mind?  I’m guessing that 99 out of a 100 people would mention something nice, say, pleasure, or sensuality, or relaxation.  Even the word massage, I would argue, has a soft, gracious sound to it:  maaaaah-saaahg, with those long “A” sounds, that softest of “G”s. 

I carried this idea with me into the spa the first time I went, and held onto it for a good 11 seconds into the actual massage, at which point the sturdy young bricklayer on my back dug her thumb into the ridge of muscles running up the side of my neck and pushed as hard as she could.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!” I said.

Or tried to say.  Because when someone is grinding a digit into the side of your neck so hard that you’re seeing stars and you can’t draw a breath, you can’t really say much.

“You okay over there?” Chris said.  He was on the other table, getting, I assumed, a similar treatment, though his voice sounded neither distressed nor breathless.

“Urgh,” I said. 

“Just checking.”

“Mmgrtz.”

“Excellent,” he said.  “Enjoy.”

Very shortly, Attila the bricklaying SS officer moved off my windpipe and onto the rise of tendon and muscle that climbs off the shoulders toward the neck.  I’m not exactly sure what she did here, but it felt as though it involved fingernails, wooden nails, and a twelve-inch needle filled with Icy-Hot.    After that, it’s onto the knobs of my spine, my shoulder blades, and my rib-cage, where she engages something weird that makes it feel like she’s moving the damn things back and forth like a xylophone on very small, very rusty wheels. 

Before I have a chance to recover from that, she moves onto my all of my joints, spending maybe thirty minutes finding all the places in my body where ligaments connect to bone and rubbing them with her finger until I can actually hear my white-blood cells screaming “What the hell?!” and rushing around like firemen in search of their pants. 

Meanwhile, Chris and the woman who’s working on him are on the other side of the room chatting about text-messaging and MSN.  Bad enough that Chris isn’t feeling any pain—it appears his masseuse speaks English, which means that even if he were in need of tendon re-attachment surgery, he could at least mention this to her and get her to lighten up a little.  Attila, on the other hand, doesn’t speak any English.  And what’s more, she’s Chinese.  And not that fakey, Hong Kong kind of Chinese, but real Chinese, from the People’s Republic, wearing a Mao suit with a star on her breast pocket and the little red book in her hand.  She speaks Putonghua, you understand, the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, a language I don’t understand, though I do know enough Guongdonghua,  Cantonese, to count to twelve and to tell the nice policeman I didn’t know there was opium in my sock. 

So I’m helpless, unable to tell her to stop, incapable of getting up and walking away due to my newly aligned joints and hemorrhaging esophagus.

Eventually the pain dies down.  That or my nerves just give up and fall into a coma.  Either way, at this point, Attila gets out the oil and—well, really really really makes up for everything she’s done to me so far.

Now before I go into this next part of the narrative, I want to make the point that Chris and I are at this particular spa because this is where he and his wife come all the time.  And they come here all the time because it’s safe.  And by safe, I mean safe.  And if you need a further explanation than that, then I’d suggest that you stop reading.  Now. 

Yes, mom, this means you.

Seriously, this is a kind of important point to make.  Prostitution is legal in Hong Kong, and there are “massage” parlors everywhere.  Prostitution is not legal in the People’s Republic, but Shenzhen is sort of a cowboy town where everyone’s on the make and the law is about as flimsy as the 100 RMB notes shop keepers slip to the local police to make sure they don’t get bothered.

The Xinmeizi, though, is legit:  though the rooms are dimly lit, the doors have clear glass so that anyone strolling by can see in.  Similarly, there are glass-filled windows between the rooms.  With this kind of set-up, kinkiness would be pretty hard to get away with.  But just in case there’s any doubt in the average customer’s mind, the masseuses are dressed in black pants and clinical white tunics, about as sexy as your local dental hygienist.  

All of which is important, for fairly obvious reasons:  when you’re laying in the dark, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, with a woman you don’t know straddling your body and rubbing oil into every square inch of your skin (baring a few—a very few—unmentionable bits), it’s good to know that there are boundaries. 

I have a good friend and former colleague—a sociologist—who used her last sabbatical to enroll in massage school as part of an anthropological project.  She was interested in learning more about this particular population—what motivated them to do this kind of work, the effects of working so close with the bodies of others, their sense of their own selves. 

At the time, I thought this was a pretty weird way to spend a sabbatical—where were the nights laying on the couch eating poptarts and watching bad movies?—but now I think I get it.  I mean, being a masseuse has to be a pretty intense job:  physically exhausting, for one thing.  Physically intimate for another:  seriously, there are a finite number of inches—very literally—that the masseuse or masseur doesn’t touch.  When a woman gets a massage in Shenzhen, for instance, her breasts get rubbed.  This isn’t an erotic move in any way:  it’s just another part of the body that it’s the masseuse’s job to attend to.  Men’s chests receive the treatment. so why shouldn’t a woman’s? 

The point, of course, is that it’s physical intimacy, not emotional intimacy that’s at work here.  One friend made the point that it must be tricky for someone giving a massage to be sensual without being sexual.  The recipient of the massage, after all, is looking for more than a medical rub-down: the entire experience—the dim lights, the scented oil, the warm room—is meant to be indulge the senses.   The client wants to lose themselves in the pleasure of the experience, not feel like a another chore on someone’s to-do list.  The person giving the massage, then, has to be engaged with what they are doing—but not too engaged. 

In the end, of this line between sensuality and sexuality probably isn’t so hard for the masseuse to maintain:  for them, finally, I’m guessing we’re all just flab, hair, and bone.  Nothing sexy about that.

The real difficulty, of course, is for the general public, folks for whom physical contact occurs only seldom, only in a sexual context, or both. 

 

All of which is very interesting in a clinical, philosophical kind of way (leave it to a Midwesterner to make a post about massages boring) but doesn’t really describe the unbelievable pleasure it is to have someone push, pull, kneed, and walk on every square inch of your body (yes, yes, barring the naughty bits) for a really long time. 

Seriously.  45 minutes into my relationship with Attila, I’m fantasizing about finding out where she lives and blasting Barry Manilow outside her window for the next seven years.  Round about the time the oil came out, though, I start to think, “Well, maybe this isn’t so bad.”  Then she starts doing this thing that involves rubbing her knuckles back and forth, back and forth, generating a heat that goes way down into the deep tissue of my muscles, and I think, “I wonder if she’s married?”

It’s another two hours before Chris and I stroll out of the Xinmeizi, having topped off our massageseses with foot rubs, head rubs, and another round of shower-steam bath-showers.  Chris also got a manicure, but I promised him I wouldn’t mention that, so I won’t.

Anyhow, we’re strolling out of the Xinmeizi, thinking about lunch, when I reach up and rub my forehead. 

“Holy crap,” I say.

“What?”

I stop, lean forward.  “Touch my face.”

Chris looks at me for a moment.  Then he says, “No.”

“Seriously,” I say, “touch my face.”

“Uh-uh.”

I rub my forehead again, slide my fingers over my temples.  It’s like I’m made of marble covered in warm cloth—so smooth, so soft, like I’ve never had a pore in my life. 

“Quit being a wimp,” I say.  “Touch it.  You won’t regret it.”

Chris takes a step back.  He’s a big guy, Chris is, even if he did just get a manicure, the one I won’t mention.

“Dude,” he says, “I’m not touching your head.”

“Come on,” I say. 

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“It’s soft,” I say.  “You won’t believe how soft it is.”

“Oh,” he says, “trust me:  I believe your head is plenty soft.”

“Come on.” 

He’s turned now, is heading down the walkway toward the escalator.  I follow, tugging at his sleeve.

“It’s like a baby’s bottom,” I say, “only it’s a head.”

He nods at me out of the corner of his eye, keeps walking.  I follow, running my fingers over my forehead, feeling that soft soft skin, that skin that’s been rubbed and steamed and scrubbed and steamed again.  It feels good.  Really good.  Indeed, my whole body feels good.  Really good.  Life is good.