Will: A Grandparental Update

            Probably the hardest one of my kids for me to write about is Will. 

I don’t know why this is.  Maybe because he’s more like Ellen, so different from me that he scares me sometimes.  Back when he had just turned four, I remember going to his pre-school Christmas party.  All of the other kids got up and sang silly songs about Santa losing his reindeer and Jolly Old St. Nick.  Will knew these songs, I know he did, because he sang them at home.  But that morning he refused to get up with the rest of the kids, just sat quietly on the floor by himself, in his black turtleneck and brown corduroys.  Watching.  It just about broke my heart. 

“He’s lonely,” I said to Ellen that night after showing her the video I’d taken.  “He doesn’t know how to socialize.”

“He’s fine,” Ellen said, she who’d spent many a moment in her life standing on the sidelines.  “He knows what he wants.  He made a decision and he’ll be okay.”

“But he looked so sad,” I said. 

“That’s just because you don’t like being by yourself,” Ellen responded.  “You’re sort of pathetic that way.”

I am not, and I have 148 Facebook friends who will back me up on that.  Implicit in her comments, though, is the idea that Will is a breed that I don’t quite understand.  And that’s true enough.

Then again, maybe writing about Will is just hard for me because he’s the first of my children, and the one I love the most. 

Oops, just kidding.  What I meant to say is that I love him more than the other two put together.

No, no, that’s not it either.  I mean that I love them all differently, in their own unique ways, and his unique quality is that I’d die for him at the drop of a hat. 

Actually, none of that is really true—except for the hat part.  I do love all three kids immensely.  It’s just that Will was the first one I held in my arms, the first one I held and felt the tiny spurs of his backbone like little peas in a row, the first one I held and thought:  “Oh my god.  He’s alive.  And he’s mine.”  And then I felt my heart bend in a way it’d never bent before.  

Or it could be that I’ve put off writing about Will simply because, of all my children, he’s the one for whom I was most scared as we packed up our lives, said goodbye to our friends, and drove away from the only house he’d ever known. 

It’s not so much that he’s fragile.  More like brittle.  Will likes what he likes, knows what he likes, and doesn’t apologize that he likes what he likes and likes nothing else.  Whereas Lucy has 17 different favorite meals—“Listen,” I’ll tell her.  “Favorite, by definition, means only one.”—Will likes only two meals:  peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chicken fajitas.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  And believe me, if you make him fajitas, you’d better have the right kind of tortilla, or you’ll be getting out the bread knife. 

And it’s not just food:  Will is like this about everything.  He has a highly tuned sense of right and wrong (hmmm . . . I wonder who he got that from) and is keenly aware of any injustice in the universe, particularly—some might even say exclusively—if it’s injustice toward him (I know who he got that from).  In short, he’s an eight-year-old boy.

Ellen and I didn’t help ourselves by declaring, before we left the States, that since there were only three bedrooms in the new flat, he and Lucy would have to share.   Ellen and her brother had shared a room when they were little, and for some reason she thought that that was a keen recipe for a long-lasting sibling relationship.  I wouldn’t know, because Mark and I always had separate rooms and to this day call each other names—particularly at Christmas and birthdays (for some reason, Easter is a real sore spot)—that can’t be printed in a family-blog,

“But I want my own room!” Will said. 

“We know,” I began—

“I need someplace to read!” he urged. This is the boy, after all, who loves to read so much that his grandmother once apologized for not taking more pictures of him, saying, “But there’s only so many snaps you can take of a boy reading a book.”

“I know you like to read,” I said, then Lucy piped in. 

“I want to room with Jamie!”

“You can’t,” Ellen told her. 

“Yeah,” said Will.  “Lucy and Jamie should room together.”

“Jamie wakes up too early,” Ellen said.  “If Lucy doesn’t get her sleep, she’s—“

“I won’t mind!”

“She won’t mind!” Will said.

“—cranky all day,” Ellen finished. 

“I wake up early,” Will said, and in his voice you could just hear his determination to rise at 4 A.M. for the next three weeks running.  And Will?  When he’s determined, you can rest assured he will do it. 

“You do sometimes,” said Ellen.  “But you’re also old enough to know how to be quiet.  We know you won’t wake your sister up, even if you do get up earlier than her.”

Will threw a glance at Lucy, and you could just see the little cartoon thought balloon over his head, with the words “Oh yeah?” inked inside. 

But we stuck to our guns.  And he stuck to his.  The very night we arrived in Hong Kong, grimy and aching from twenty hours on a crappy American airline that charges you for drinks and makes you keep your windows shut even though it might mean you don’t see the sun for 24 hours—that very night, Will strolled into the flat, scoped out the two kids rooms, and tossed his stuff into the room with only one bed. 

 

When, two minutes later I moved his suitcase and the six A-Z mystery books and two Hardy Boy novels we’d allowed him to bring into the other room, he followed, simply too tired to complain.  The next few days, though, he made his dissatisfaction clear.  After Ellen returned to the States for her father’s funeral, I had to take the kids everywhere—grocery shopping, getting household items, stopping at the personnel office to pick up insurance forms.  This would have been rough under any circumstances, but when you’re jet-lagged and in a completely new non-western country—and you’re half-mourning, half-dying inside for your wife—it’s misery.  Absolute, complete, crappy, bugger-all misery. 

In the midst of all this, Will was astoundingly—indeed, almost admirably—effective at being passive aggressive.  He would walk 10 feet behind Lucy and I at all times.  While Lucy and I struggled trying to get the stroller past a heavy glass door—there are very few sliding doors in HK—Will would stand aside, hands in his pockets, looking sullen and distracted. 

Fortunately for him, I’m nothing if not a calm, cool father, particularly when stressed, so when he behaved this way all I did was scream in his face like an idiot.  “Can’t you see,” I would spray, “that Lucy and I are trying to get Jamie through the door?  Did it ever occur to you to help?”

And he would just look at me, face mildly startled, but frankly more bland than anything, as if to say, “Maybe if I had my own room, you and I could work a little something out.” 

Ninety percent of the time for ninety percent of kids, the yelling and screaming and face offs would lead to nothing but a stand off.  And to be honest, Will and I both stayed the course for a while:  Will kept walking slow, hands in his pockets, I kept feeling anger swell in my chest, competing with the exhaustion and the heat and the sense that maybe, just maybe, coming to Hong Kong was the stupidest thing I’d ever done.

But then something changed.  After about a week, I suddenly realized Will was walking beside me when I was pushing the stroller, his hand on one of the handles.  And when Ellen got back, he explicitly asked her if he could push Jamie.  And he did. 

 

And there’ve been other things, many of them having to do with food.  I’ve already written about the Tai Po wet market and Will and his fish ball soup, but to recap:   he loved it.  Fish ball soup.  Soup with fish balls in it.  Fish.  In balls.  In soup.  Mr. Peanut-Butter and Jelly gobbled it up.  Go figure.

I knew, though, that we were making real headway when, a week later, we headed down to Kowloon and ended up at the Spring Deer, a restaurant we later discovered was one of the most famous in Hong Kong.  We ordered almost at random, only ensuring that there was at least one dish with chicken in it to keep the kids happy.  I’m not going to pretend that Will ate the dried, pickled cabbage—he didn’t even look at it—but he drank some tea and ate some chicken and then some broccoli and some rice and then more chicken.  Afterwards, he and I were in the bathroom and I asked him how his dinner was. 

“Great!” he said.  And my son is not one for exclamation points, in speech or otherwise. 

I nearly peed on my shoe.  “Really?” I said.  I mean, this is the boy of a thousand explanations for why he shouldn’t be asked to eat his food:  it’s too soft, too hard, too mushy, too slippery, too salty, too vinegary, too gucky, too murky, too sludgy, to potato-y, too grimy, too slurpy, too smudgy, fudgy, grudgy, or mudgy.  You can put double chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream in front of him, and if for some perverse reason he decides he doesn’t want it, he will assure you it tastes “funny.” 

“Really?” I said that night at the Spring Deer, reminding myself to tell the management they might need to mop the men’s room. 

“Great,” he said again. 

He’s even added a few dishes to his vocabulary of what is good:  he will eat sweet and sour pork anywhere, anytime, under any conditions.  He likes barbequed pork, too, and won’t turn away Peking duck. One night we took a taxi down to Tai Mei Tuk, a little beachfront village two down from campus, and he interrupted us as we began to order some boring chicken-patty dish for him. 

“I want the chicken wings with lemon grass,” he told the waitress.  He’d found them on the menu himself.  And when he got them, he ate them with chopsticks. 

Chicken wings.  With chopsticks.   The boy of one-thousand faces for food he doesn’t like.

Now I really have seen everything. 

 

When cognitive neuroscientists talk about the brain in relation to age, they often discuss its plasticity.  Young brains are have high neuroplasticity, meaning the physical properties of the brain can shift and expand and change and grow relatively easily.  Older brains, on the other hand, have less plasticity—old dogs may like rubber bones, but they don’t like new tricks and they don’t have rubber brains.

That sentence sounded better in my end than it does on paper, by the way.  Thought you’d appreciate knowing that. 

Moving along:  the near complete absence of neuroplasticity is, some argue, one of the reasons for Alzheimer’s.  This is why one thing many doctors encourage as folks get older is that they try new things, learn new languages, pick up new hobbies, leave their wives and start running around with their yoga instructors—that sort of thing. 

Anyhow.  Prior to coming on this trip, I was pretty sure Will was about to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest known case of early onset Alzheimer’s ever—he was just that inflexible. 

I no longer fear this.  The reason has nothing to do with food or Hong Kong or yoga instructors (I wish), but rather, with sweat.

You see, above and beyond everything else, my oldest son hates to sweat.  If it’s hot outside, it doesn’t matter what’s going on out there—tree climbing, Frisbee throwing, the resuscitation of a fully-grown, previously-frozen Woolly Mammoth—Will will be inside, lost in a book.   Prior to starting archery this fall, the only sport he liked was swimming, because—duh—you don’t sweat in the water.

But three weeks ago, my son Will did a 3.5 k run for no other reason than that his gym teacher convinced him—convinced the whole school, for that matter—that it would be fun.  Ellen thinks this man is David Koresh, but I think he’s a genius.  Anyone who can get little kids to thrill in using their muscles, in stretching their flexible, pain-free legs out and sprinting across the school field in broad daylight in 90-degree heat and 86% humidity—that person is a genius.  And okay, if they wanted to start a cult, they’d be great at it—but that doesn’t exclude being a genius.

Anyhow, this particular race was at 8:30 on a Sunday morning on Hong Kong Island, a good hour’s drive from where we live.  And that’s assuming we have a car.  Which we don’t.  So getting there required taking a taxi across town and catching a bus, which meant rising at 6 A.M. on a—have I mentioned this?—a Sunday.

So naturally, good parents that we are, Ellen and I spent most of Saturday trying to talk the kids out of it.  I mean, we love the little buggers, but we’re not idiots.  It’ll be hot, we told them.  It’s on a mountain.  You’ll have to get up early.  You’ll sweat.  You’ll probably lose, and people will laugh at you. 

But no, none of it worked.  So we set the alarm for 6—actually, Ellen stayed up all night drinking tequila and listening to reggae, but that’s another story—dragged the kids out of bed—they bounced up instantly, and were dressed before we could remind them how hot it would be—and got a taxi that took us to the bus that drove us to the island that held the mountain that swallowed the cat the ate the rat that chased the spider.

We got there at 8, and were startled to find that it was a city-wide race, with kids of all ages and women too, some of whom actually had fancy running shoes and did weird stretches that made them look like they knew what they were doing. 

“You sure?” we said to the kids.  Lucy nodded eagerly.  Will looked pale, glancing at all the people, the uniforms and the numbers they pinned to your shirt—and nodded.  Quickly.  Just once. 

“You sure?” I said again, a little more gently this time.  He nodded again.

And then he ran the darn thing.  The whole thing.

 

He hated it of course.  I mean, he’s not an idiot:  it was hot out there, and a long run, and some of it was uphill, and what the hell, it’s Sunday and he should’ve been in bed and then gotten up and curled up on the couch and read 60 pages of some novel about magical bats or flying machines that do battle with giant bugs shaped like squids. 

But he did it.  The whole thing. 

Afterwards, when someone mentioned the next race on November 3^rd, Will looked doubtful.  Later, when it was mentioned again and Lucy said she was definitely going to do it, Will said he’d probably pass.  Looking at his face, you could just see him picturing himself lying on the little couch in our living room, the one right under the air conditioner, actively not perspiring. 

In recent weeks, though, he’s started to talk more and more about the November race.  Already, he and two of his friends have signed up for some weird obstacle course thing where you run some, swim some, climb a rope ladder and kill a baby alligator with nothing but a pound of raisins and a copy of Mansfield Park (Jane’s lamest novel—good for little else). 

Sometimes I’m not even sure I’m talking to the same boy.  Running races?  Obstacle courses?  Sweating? 

Then, on some rainy Sunday when I’m buried in work and he’s finished his Putonghua and Jamie’s asleep and Lucy is in the kitchen seeing just how crazy she can make her mother, Will will come over to where I’m sitting on the couch, tapping away at my laptop, and curl up next to me, book in hand, losing himself completely.  I’ll lean into him a little, still typing.  Then he’ll press back and maybe put his head against my arm, all without looking up,  And—sweat or no—I’ll think, “Oh my god.  He’s mine.  My little boy.”      

 

Junk

            When Ellen came home and said she’d bought three tickets to sail on a Junk, I said, “That’s great.  You and the kids should enjoy it.”

“I’m not going,” she responded.  “You are.”

I stared at her.  “Me?  But I’m the one who barfs on a riding lawnmower.  There’s no way I’m getting on some rickety old ship and hurling in front of strangers.”

But apparently there was.  See, Jamie was too little to go on the cruise, and Hong Kong seems to have a rule prohibiting two-year-olds wandering around by themselves.  So someone had to stay on the dock.  And according to Ellen, that someone wouldn’t be me. 

“I can ride the junk another time,” she said, “when my mom’s here.  Or when Jamie turns three and the Junk Nazis lighten up.”

“But—” I began, about to explain again about my propensity to empty my stomach every time our car went over a speed bump. 

“You’ll be okay,” she said, and patted me on the shoulder in that way she does that makes me feel like I’m eight.  “You can wear a raincoat.”  Then she headed down the hall.

“A what?  What’s that have to do with anything?”

“Easier cleaning,” she called over her shoulder. 

When we get down to Kowloon on Saturday, the water looks like a typhoon just came through.  Victoria harbor isn’t actually that big, maybe a quarter mile across, but nevertheless it sees 250 ocean-going ships a day pass through its narrow confines.  All the wake from all those boats bounces back and forth between the banks, and in no time at all the water gets not just choppy, but jagged, with 24- foot swells, six or seven shipwrecks per hour, and men who have been sailing for fifty years clinging to masts and screaming like little girls. 

It doesn’t help that when the junk rounds the bend in the harbor, it’s pitching back and forth so dramatically that not only are there times when I get a top-down view of the cabin roof, there are times when I swear I’m looking straight down the main mast. I am not making this up.  So quit looking at me like that. 

I glance up at Ellen, suddenly wishing I’d taken her advice and worn that rain coat.  She’s just waves and smiles, and strolls off with the one child that—I now realize—she truly loves, as clearly the other two are about to sink to the bottom of the harbor along with their spewing father. 

We climb on board, and Lucy and Will head immediately to the poop deck despite my insistence that this is entirely the wrong scatological reference for this particular venture.  I follow, feeling the tilt and rock of the boat beneath me—this despite the fact that we’re still moored—then crawl past an old couple smiling and holding hands, clearly thrilled that their dream of a double suicide will finally be fulfilled.  The poop deck is layered with a thick pad, not unlike the ones I used to collapse on in the grade school gymnasium every time Jim Lewis threw a dodge ball at my groin for no other reason than the fact that my falls were more dramatic than anyone else’s.  Vaguely remembering something about keeping a low center of gravity on boats, I crawl across the padding and join Will and Lucy at the back railing. 

“Careful,” I croak.  “There are sharks in these waters.”

“Dad,” says Will, turning it into a three-syllable word.  “No there’s not.  All the pollution killed them years ago.”

“Even so,” I say.  I curl up a corner, my back to the water, having heard once that if you pretend the ocean isn’t there, eventually it’ll take the hint and go away.  A bell rings, somebody somewhere throws a rope to the guys on the boat, there’s a grinding and shredding of wood and metal, somewhere someone screams—and then we’re off into the harbor. 

And then a funny thing happens.  I feel the wind.  I mean, I really feel the wind.  Maybe it’s just that I’m covered in a pale sweat.  Or maybe it’s that, for the first time since arriving in Asia, I’m not surrounded by either mountains or buildings—or in the case of Hong Kong Island, mountains and buildings.  Whatever it is, though, I can feel a cool breeze across my forehead, tugging at my shirt and whistle gently past my ears. 

There’s the chatter of Cantonese, and three men in blue shirts climb onto the deck.  Ropes creak, canvas snaps, and three thick red sails sewn around bamboo battens are hoisted into the air.  They crack and buck.  In the cabin beside us, an old man with bare feet and a striped shirt gives a turn to a wooden wheel, and the junk cuts a line into the harbor, past a steaming green and white Star Ferry and through a gap between a police cruiser and a rusted buoy. 

In the distance I can hear the clank of a jackhammer on the Island side where they’re putting in foundations for more buildings.  Closer, Lucy and Will chatter, pointing to a red and yellow painted tour boat floating by.  Behind us is the slap of the wake.  The sun is warm, but not hot, the breeze blowing steadily, cooling everything off. 

It’s wonderful.  I mean, really wonderful.  I’d sailed before, but only once, on a little row-boat sized thing on some lake near my hometown.  We were the guests of one of my dad’s parishoners, and he kept yelling at my brother and me to move this way or that across the rough-hewn bottom of the boat.   Needless to say, the only impression that experience made on me was that:  a)  sailors need to drink less coffee, and b) sailing gives you slivers in your ass. 

Now, though, I find myself leaning against the dark stained railing of a boat that was built in 1955 and used for years by real fisherman as a real fishing boat catching real fish.  I mention this in slightly mocking way, of course, because I’m a butthead, but the fact of the matter is that you can tell it actually is an old boat that really was employed, at one time, in hard and true labor.  The trim of the cabin is coarse beneath dozens of coats of varnish.  The floor of the main deck is untreated wood, scraped raw by years of salt and wind and water, so that all that only the seams and nail holes are dark, with the rest a worn gray like the sides of a barn. 

The ride, too, is relatively smooth. Sure, there’s some bumps up and down, but very little. The steerer guy—he hardly seems a captain—is leaning back in his small cabin, one foot up on a post, a thick strand of what looks like clothesline securing the wheel.  Every so often he lifts the rope, turns the wheel 10 degrees, then reconnects the line one notch further along.  The junk adjusts accordingly, and we shift slightly to the left. 

It’s lame to say, I know, but it’s peaceful out there.  In the middle of one of the busiest deep-water harbors in the middle of one of the busiest biggest cities in the world, I feel perfectly calm.  And so do the kids.  Will was a little worried that he might get green around the gills, but now he’s standing by the rear mast—I’m sure it’s got an official name, but I’m from America’s dairy land for Pete’s sake—looking out over the water and tugging on a rope like somehow he’s controlling this whole venture.  Lucy, of course, is loving every minute of it, taking ten thousand pictures of the junk, the sails, passing ships, the waves, and old shoes bobbing on the water. 

And me?  I’m loving it too.  In recent weeks I’ve been busy with my job, stuck in my office working on powerpoints on learning outcomes or departmental briefings.  When I’m not stuck in the office, I’m stuck in meetings discussing quality assurance, or stuck on the couch in our living room doing this blogging thing-a-ma-bobby.  Too, there was a part of me that was beginning to think I’d discovered pretty much everything there was to know about Hong Kong.  Which is naïve, I know, but seriously, how many neighborhoods can you visit with tall buildings; how many malls can you stroll through filled with shops you’ve heard of glancing through the fashion section of the newspaper but that you can’t possibly afford; how may quaint markets and kitschy souvenir shops and massage parlors can you visit before it all starts to blur together?

Now, though, I’m on a real junk, cutting across the harbor with my blonde-haired girl and my blue-eyed boy and the sun on my closed lids and the wind in what’s left of my hair.  That night, after the tour ends and we get dumplings on the Island and visit an art show that, seriously, is fantastic—after all of that and after we put the kids to bed, I’ll go on-line and Google “Chinese Junks” and learn about how these ships have been around since 220 BC, how their design is considered one of the most efficient and easy to use in the history of sailing, how some ships in the 1400s were as large as 390 feet long, how the sails are red to please the big dragon in the sky so that he won’t make typhoons or hurricanes.

And I’ll read about how, in 1938, some guy named E. Allen Petersen sailed a junk from Shanghai to the States, fleeing the Japanese with his wife and two others.  And about how, in 1955, six young men from Taiwan took a junk and sailed all the way to San Francisco, learning how to handle the old ship along the way , gliding under the golden-gate bridge on a mist-shrouded day,.  And I’ll learn how they did this just because they could.  And because they wanted to. 

And I’ll get it.  I will absolutely get it.   

The Election

             I was coming down the stairs from our flat the other day, on my way to work out, when I was accosted by a male student holding a sandwich and some juice.

“Good morning!” he said.  “Would you like some breakfast?”

I stared at him.  He was nearly as tall as I was, with spiky hair and a bad skin.  Despite this, he was handsome, kind-eyed and confident.  A female student peered out from behind him, dressed in a white shirt similar to his, and wearing glasses.  She, too, was holding what looked like a jelly sandwich wrapped in cellophane. 

“Nutritious breakfast,” she said, which is impressive in any language that early in the morning, but in English from a Cantonese speaker for whom “r” is about as foreign and gagging as the oxygen content of Pluto.   Then I realized that there was a group of them present, all dressed in white shirts, all looking cheerful, all holding sandwiches.

“I’m going to work out,” I said, tugging at my grubby t-shirt, just in case they thought I was lying and was actually on my way to meet the dean.  “But thank you.” 

They nodded politely—actually, no, that’s not accurate:  they nodded eagerly, happily, earnestly, in a way I’d never seen Chinese students behave before—at least not toward me.  With the rare exception, when I passed any of the students around the building that contains our flat—students are housed on the bottom 8 floors; faculty on the top 4—most of them would look at me and glance away.  Or worse, pass me without a glance, as though somehow there weren’t a 6 foot 3, 220 pound bald white guy taking up three-quarters of the hall.  This isn’t exceptional of course:  students everywhere take great joy in ignoring professors at every opportunity, particularly in class.  With Chinese students though, this is even more the case as a casual nod hello to someone you don’t know isn’t a part of Hong Kong street etiquette.  Unless, of course, you work in Mong Kok or Wan Chai at night, wearing very little in the way of clothing. 

So needless to say, never before had a group of Chinese students said good morning to me, much less offered me soggy sandwiches wrapped in plastic.

I pondered all of this while working out to the rocking tunes of David Soul (Don’t give up on us, baby!) then made my way back to the dorms, determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. 

Rounding the stairs, I was shocked to find that the first group of happy students had been joined by another, equally cheerful gang.  The second group, though, were al wearing red t-shirts and had set up a table on the opposite side of the open-air hall.   They, too, had some sort of juice in paper cups that they were handing out to innocent passersby.  But instead of sandwiches, they had small packets of crackers wrapped in green ribbon.  I bounded toward them, eager to have more of the cross-generational Hongo-American (well, what would you call it?) interaction that had so warmed my heart earlier that day.  Plus, of course, I wanted one of those sandwiches.

“Cho sun!” I exclaimed.  “Nay ho-a?”

To my dismay, all of them, white shirts and red shirts alike, recoiled in horror.

“What?” I said, into the awkward silence.  “Are all the sandwiches gone?  That’s okay.  I like crackers.”

Then one of them—the handsome pock-marked boy, I think—spoke up:  “Were you in a rain shower, perhaps?”

“Huh?” 

He nodded, indicating my clothing.  Glancing down, I felt my face burn.  My shirt was drenched with sweat, belly to neck, shoulder to shoulder.  Rather than shower at the fitness center then walk back to the flat, getting soaked with sweat yet again in the process, I’d decided to conserve water, clean clothing, and time by heading straight to the flat after coming off the treadmill—something the appearance-conscious Hong Kongese would never do.

“Oh,” I said, trying to appear nonplussed.  “I fell in the pool.”  Then I straightened my shoulders, lifted my head, and strolled past their doubtful expressions, trying to pretend I didn’t reek like something from the bottom of a laundry basket buried in a garbage dump next to a sewage-treatment plant that’d just been bombed with sulfur coated in vomit. 

 

They remained there all week, red on the left, white on the right.  The only thing that changed were the types of snacks being passed out:  fruit one day, petites fours the next, small packets of cookies on another.  Sometimes there was no food, just a group of students nodding and smiling cheerfully.  More than once I heard a melodious chorus of “Cho Sun!” as a particularly favorite student or professor passed by.   The two groups were clearly in competition, but it seemed amicable enough—no fisticuffs or graffiti, as far as I could tell, though I kept hoping. 

Nor did they limit their efforts to that particular corner of the dorm—a point through which, needless to say, every student had to pass en-route to classes.  All of the main halls in the dorm were strung with competing flags from the two groups; likewise with the stairwells in the academic sections of campus.  Even the stop for the shuttle bus down to University station flashed blue and pink in the morning sunlight. 

From a colleague I was able to gather that the two sides were competing to win an election.  And election for what, no one—at least none of the professors I spoke to— seemed to know.   As far as I could tell, one group is the Super Mas.  I knew this because I can read, and because every flier in the elevator, every flag strung across the hall, every poster on the table where they hand out grape juice, bore the words “Super Ma.”  Almost always, this legend was accompanied by the same picture of a donkey in a Union Army Uniform, hooves in the air as if shouting “Go Team Go!”, with Xs where the eyes should be.  Whether or not this meant this group favored the zombifying of Yankee barnyard cheerleaders is something I never determined, though I have noticed our kids appear to be having more nightmares lately.

The other group I referred to as the Horse Shoes, because that shape adorned all of their literature.  None of this group’s posters were in English, except for one that stated, “Positive, Active, Never Give Up,” and another that made note, amongst a cluster of Chinese characters, of “Home-made Valentines.”   To be fair in my grammatical mockery (‘cause you know, it’s cool to mock people who are functionally tri-lingual, even if you yourself are so linguistically limited you can’t talk your way out an Alabama PTA meeting), I should mention that one of the Super Ma posters referred to “Hall O’ Camp”—which, like home-made Valentines in October, intrigued me as much as it confused me. 

While I confess I have no idea what the Horse Shoes’ platform was, I’ll admit to having fantasized that they called themselves the Glue Toes.  Even better, I  found myself wishing that the motto they placed beneath that shod donkey hoof was:  “Vote for the Super Ma’s if you want, but eventually, it’s all gone but the glue. “  This is probably why the Obama campaign never returned my calls.  

Anyway, it turned out these weren’t the only two groups competing on campus.  In front of the other dorm on campus, a cluster of student dressed in black stood beside the main door, chanting in sing-song voices at folks walking by.  Further down the road, students in yellow countered in an equally melodious chorus.

I’m not sure why, but this dorm seemed to have a mathematical theme:  one group was called Integration, while the other was Coordinate Geometry.  Of all the social, cultural, racial, political, and culinary differences we’ve encountered since arriving in Hong Kong almost two months ago, this was perhaps the greatest:  no group, of any age, at any university anywhere in the United States, would ever try to win any election by naming themselves “Coordinate Geometry.”

That said, I have to admit that I quite liked this group for no other reason than that they all wore black suits for their campaign posters.  

This was just flat-out cool, particularly for the women in that it invoked a sort of Gillian Anderson/Dana Scully science-nerd hotness with an Asian twist.  

Integration also wore black suits, but let’s face it:  a thumbs up sign will always undermine whatever other message you have.  And some of those kids don’t even look eleven. 

That said, if you look closely at the next picture you’ll notice that the Coordinate Geometry group:  A)  also had their thumbs up; and B) had a little abbreviation problem with “association.”  Note to CG:  always end on the "C." 

In the end, I have to admit that I enjoyed the election.  I liked the cheery morning greetings, the camaraderie of the students who spend hours sitting outside the dorm waiting for someone to come by so that they bribe them with cookies and fruit punch.  I liked being bribed with cookies and fruit punch.  I liked how active and engaged and energetic the students seemed to be—so different from when I see them walking the central corridor of campus on their way to classes, looking as though they just buried their favorite pet. 

Yes, all said and done, I was thrilled by this election.  It might just have been the best election I’ve ever had the opportunity to witness.

I just with I knew what it was about.  

My slutty American sister

I’ve never been much of a patriot.

Okay, now that I’ve said that and my chances of ever becoming president of the United Sates have been blown to smithereens, let me go a bit further and be really honest:

I’ve often felt that patriotism is the playground of mindless idiots.

I don’t mean the kind of patriotism that leads someone to join the armed forces and go overseas—I actually find that quite admirable, truly brave, actually, and I’m not the sort of person to use words like “bravery,” “courage,” or “vitamin supplements” lightly.

No, I’m talking about the sort of patriotic idiocy that causes a person to stand up at a 4^th of July celebration and march in place, waving a little flag on a wooden stick, feeling your chest swell with pride as somewhere a band plays “Stars and Stripes” (I hate that song) or “America the Beautiful” (love that one). I’m talking about the sort of patriotic fervor that causes a person to assume that US healthcare is the best in the world, when in fact it’s not. Or the sort of patriotism that causes a person to get enraged anytime someone questions their country, or suggests that maybe, just maybe, the US might have made a mistake in the past—or is perhaps making one now.

That kind of patriotism really bugs me. More accurately, it insults me, the same way I’m insulted by Big Broadway musicals full of major chords and predictably melancholy ballads; the same way I’m insulted by the very existence of boy bands singing shallow songs that rhyme, or by novels by the guy that wrote “The Notebook” and that other guy who wrote “The Bridges of Madison County.” These things, like shallow, hollow, superficial patriotism, ask you to sacrifice nothing and think not even a single thought while filling you with emotions that can often sway you away from the sorts of complex thinking that are necessary in a—duh—complex world.

Now before you go calling me Godless and anti-American, let me make two points and make them very clear: first, I got my politics at bible camp. You want to talk about Jesus? Fine. My vision of Jesus is less that of a guy who makes me all warm and fuzzy and superior, than that of a guy who walks into a room and goes straight to the outsiders, making them—and not the rich or beautiful or connected or mindlessly spiritual—feel loved and valued.

You want to talk about God? Dandy. My vision of God is of a guy (or girl, or hermaphrodite—wow, did I really just call God a hermaphrodite?) who cares less about ideology and more about a woman weeping over a baby whose aorta has been sliced with shrapnel because some idiot somewhere decided they were sick of Saddam Hussein’s ugly mug and (unquestionably) annoying habit of thumbing his nose at us.

Hmmm. What matters more to God? Ideology? Or a parent’s love for a child?

Second, I want to make the point that the sort of patriotism I’m deriding here is the same sort of crapola I saw in the 1980s when I visited the (then) Soviet Union to receive my training to be a spy and a traitor to my country –wait, did I just say that out loud?

Seriously, though, if you’ve never been to a totalitarian state where every billboard features a picture of the glorious leader or the glorious founder or the glorious leader’s/founder’s glorious shiatsu, then honey, you’ve never seen patriotism at it’s glorious best. Or worst. Most mindless. Or—whatever. Because seriously? That kind of patriotism? That kind of manipulation of the emotions to make you feel good and full and like you’re part of something grand? That’s what manipulative people (say, ad men and women) do to make you forget how hollow and meaningless your life actualy is—and how unwilling they are to make it better.

So I hate patriotism. Get it? Good, because here’s a story.

Back in the 1850s when I was just a teenager, I had a friend named Mike Bushnell (not his real name) who, somewhat bowed legs aside, was nothing exceptional. His older sister, though? Mandy? Mandy was—how shall we say this?—very very “popular.” Very.

Everyone knew it. The high school principal knew it, the teachers knew it, my mother’s bridge group knew it, the news anchors up in Green Bay knew it. Mike Bushnell knew it. I mean, geez, it was all but plastered on the sides of buses.

Anyhow, it wasn’t uncommon for Mike to talk trash about his sister, calling her a slut, a sleazebag, a walking, talking, breathing—well, I can’t really go any further than that, because this is a family site and as it is the Fulbright people are meeting tomorrow to discuss relocating me (Trzkystan is supposed to be nice, right?). Let’s just say that Mike was an imaginative guy with a vivid vocabulary.

And he used it often. “What a sleazebag!” he said one day when we were eating saltine crackers on his back porch and his sister just happened to wander by carrying a book (something by Nabokov, I think).

“Yeah,” I said, trying not to wheeze crumbs all over my favorite Sean Cassidy t-shirt “What a slut.”

In an instant I was on my back, my skull throbbing and a pair of fists poised inches from my already bleeding nose. “Take it back!” Mike hollered, spit flying from the gap where they’d pulled two teeth to make his braces fit.

“What?” I wailed. “Take what back?”

Pop! Pop! My skull slammed into the wooden deck again, twice in rapid succession.

“Take it back,” he said again, quieter this time.

“Okay,” I muttered, trying to breath through the flow of blood and snot. “Okay, I take it back.” Even though I wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about.

When we were both up again, he handed me an old rag from the garage and took a look at his handy work. “Wow. You thought your nose was big before.”

I nodded, tried to laugh. More than anything, though, I was confused. “What the hell?” I said after a minute or two of trying to clean my face.

“Huh?” He was already thinking about something else, I could tell.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Everyone knows your sister is a—“ he gave me a quick look, and I stuttered. “A—you know. That guys like her.”

“Yeah?” he said. His eyes had narrowed.

I took a step back, dropped the rag in case I had to make a quick exit. Then finally I spit out: “You call her a slut all the time!”

“I know,” he said, then turned back to his copy of Spiderman. “But she’s my sister.”

All of which has what to do with patriotism? Consider this:

In the run-up to the 60^th Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Hong Kong papers were full of the pride Hong Kong people felt over their Chinese heritage. Many of these stories eventually revealed a typical HK ambivalence about the massive dictatorship that would eventually strip Hong Kong citizens of their right to voice dissent or surf for porn on the internet, but many of them did not, trumpeting the accomplishments of the PRC, particularly relative to other superpowers, past and present.

Say, for example, the US.

Some of these stories were just plain stupid. One idiot from some think tank trumpeted the fact that, yes, socialism might have been a really bad idea, but a centralized government that stripped individuals and industries of the right to make their own decisions about what to produce, and where, and when, and for how much? Sheer genius, according to this guy. “While the west wallows in the worst recession in 60 years, and Obama and congress can’t even pass health care reform, China is producing more goods, and better goods, every day.”

Then, too, there were the stories about all the missiles and weaponry the People’s Liberation Army had accumulated. “Much of which,” said more than one story in the press, “can reach the United States.” And this is news? Like, can’t most eight-year-olds these days make a missile that can do that?

But some of the stories were less idiotic and just plain, flat out sobering in a depressing, gosh, maybe I really am going bald, kind of way. Like the one about how the International Monetary Fund had said that China would be the nation to lead the world out of this latest recession. Or the other one about how China’s GDP had grown by a healthy 8% the last thirty years, was currently growing at 10% a year, and, if it maintained a mere 7% per year, would surpass the US by the year 2030.

Stuff like that just depressed me. And frankly, ticked me off just a little bit. I mean, man, the US government is tripping over its own feet on healthcare, despite the fact that it’s common knowledge that exorbitant costs are holding back corporations and causing industries to move overseas. And meanwhile the guys in the insurance business are using Benjamins to line the bird cage.

This isn't the first time I’ve experienced emotions like this while living overseas. Back in the eighties, when I was living in England and Reagan was running up the national debt and walking tough like a cowboy, there were times I would sitting around the college bar having a pint and someone would say, “Crikey,”—because you know, all English people say ‘crikey’—“that Reagan bloke is a right royal wanker, in’nt he?” And almost immediately I’d find myself defending a man I’d voted against once and called an idiot a million times.

Now, living in China for all practical purposes, I find myself occasionally feeling equally defensive about the US, much to my horror. After all, I pride myself on being able to criticize my country, on my ability to look objectively at her flaws and to seek ways to solve her problems. I’ve often said that the greatest sign of respect I can offer my students is to hold them to high standards. Isn’t the same true of my country?

Maybe so, but that didn’t keep me from getting really snotty on the 60^th Anniversary, especially when they showed this tank or that soldier or these troops marching past the review stands in Beijing.

“Oh sure,” I’d mutter at the television on the MTR (we don’t have a TV in our flat,, so I spent the day riding the train and swearing under my breath). “Oh sure, show off your tanks all you want, but who d’ya think’s better at croquet, huh? Just answer that question, why don’t you?”

Or: “Yeah, so you’ve got 1,000 really hot looking supermodels you can dress up to look like soldiers, but we’ve still got Barbara Bush, and there’s no taking that away!”

All of that said, though? The truth of the matter was this: as much as I knew what I was thinking and feeling and saying was kind of stupid, there was a part of me that really did feel like the US is better than the PRC. Yeah, I know it sounds hokey and schmaltzy and other words ending in “y” that have been made up, but there it is. And what it came down to was this:

When the PRC got together to celebrate their birthday, it was all about the weapons and the guns and the marching and soldiers. All about the force and the power and the showing of strength. All about money and the government. Non-military weren’t even allowed into Tiananmen Square for the parade--they had to stay home and watch it on TV.

And in the US, when we celebrate our birthday? It’s all about junior high marching bands playing “Copacabana” out of tune, and eight-year-old girls in hoop skirts tap dancing, and old men in VA hats waving from the backs of station wagons. And when the parade is over, we all go home and gather with our families.

Geez, I can’t even believe how dorky this sounds, but there you have it: given the choice between monetary stability and military might, and going home for a half-raw, semi-burnt hotdog and lime Jell-O with pineapples in it, I’ll take the Jell-O every time.

What a doof, huh? I mean seriously, how lame can you get, especially for a guy who just spent 700 words railing about mindless, boob-brained, sentimental patriotism.

But you know what?

She’s my sister.

Note: This post, even more than most of my posts, is my own personal, stupid, uniformed opinion, and in no way reflects the views of the Fulbright organization, the American government, or those sexy Chinese soldiers in their white go-go boots.

Harmony

           Hong Kong is a CHC, Confucian Heritage Culture.  I mention this not because I’ve developed a sudden HK appreciation for CUA (completely unnecessary acronyms), but because it helps explain some of those elements of Hong Kong that might confuse us, or—more to the point—annoy the living crap out of us. 

CHC consists of three goals:  Inner Harmony, Social Harmony, and Structural Harmony.

The first of these is so foreign to this me that I’m not even going to address it, other than to say that as far as I can figure, it has to do with laying off the caffeine and not using Facebook to seek out old girlfriends—much less cyberstalking them until your boss takes your computer away, calling you “immature,” “irresponsible” and “an embarrassment to your sex” (which, given the likes of Glenn Back, is taking it a bit far if you ask me). 

Social harmony moves the circle out from the self to ones relations with others. Social harmony involves things like not rolling your eyes and muttering “So much for going up,” when a fat person starts to get on the elevator.  More specifically, social harmony involves matters of face—namely, allowing others to keep theirs.  As my friend William put it recently, it’s not necessarily about what you say, as how you say it.  While social harmony can be useful in that people tend to not call each other rat-faced bastards and seldom say things like “Look, here comes old mushed monkey brains.  I wonder what asinine thing he’s going to say now?” it can be a pain in the butt at other times.  Consider, for instance, that in Chinese culture it’s not appropriate to just tell someone, “No.” 

“Can I have the last cookie?”

“Perhaps it would be best if you left this cookie.”

“Really? Why?  Is it magic?  Will it turn me into a prince?  ‘Cause I would really like to be a prince, you know, with Prince Valiant hair, and a crown, and a pony.  Course, I’m kind of scared of ponies, ever since that one bit me when I was trying to pinch it for no reason.”

The tricky thing about face is that you never know if someone is trying to save yours.  For example, last week me and the rest of the Fulbrighters attended a weekend-long retreat at some place in the woods that I can’t remember the name of but from which, it appears, I’ve been banned for life.  Anyhow, before what will upon the advice of my lawyers forthwith be referred to simply as “the incident,” I heard all this stuff about CHC and thought, “Dang!  So that’s why no one’s returning my calls!”  Anyhow, once I made bail, I returned to campus determined to put into practice everything I’d been told.  In fact, I went straight to my boss and told her what I’d learned. 

“And I think,” I told her, after I’d explained it all—leaving out the stuff about the summonses, of course—“I need to start paying more attention to protocol.  And not, you know, calling people snot-face and stuff.”

“This is very interesting,” she said, “but not necessarily so.  It depends upon what circles you are moving in.”

I felt better after she said this, and headed back to my office.  But then it occurred to me that maybe she just said that to, you know, save my face.  I mean, it makes sense, right?  Tell me what I need to hear to stop feeling like such a jerk? 

And this, in a nutshell, is the problem with social harmony:  you never know what the heck is going on.  Which, if you ask me, is a bit too much like being back in college and drinking too much ouzo before going up to Carrie-Anne Matthews who’ve you’ve had a crush on for two months and asking if you can lick her face and then she gets all huffy and you can’t tell if it’s real huffy or just pretend huffy, because you know, there’s a difference and everything and one is good and one is bad and how’s a 22-year-old with his head swimming from aniseed-laced liquor supposed to tell the difference? 

Anyhow. 

The third area, structural harmony, really expands to cover a lot of territory.  Basically, though, what it comes down to is respecting the structures. particularly hierarchical, that have been set in place.  In practical terms, this means following the rules, no matter how stupid they are.  My colleague Eugene points out that in HK, civil servants are paid extremely well—and not one of them has ever been fired for following the rules.  

This is important to remember, because at times, Hong Kong seems to run on rules that are so archaic and so just plain peculiar, that you can’t imagine what whoever wrote them was thinking. 

Case in point.  Last Thursday was the 60^th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.  In Chinese culture the character for China 60 signifies the completion of one cycle and the beginning of another; as such, the Chinese treat 60-year celebrations the way we would centennials.  In short, last Thursday was a big deal.  We don’t have a TV in our flat, but most of the MTRs are fitted out with screens, and most of the day Thursday these screens were filled with images of thousands upon thousands of People’s Liberation Army troops marching back and forth in front of that big red building on Tiananmen Square, the name of which I’m entirely too lazy to look up—but you know the one:  it’s big and red and would look like an oversized Pizza Hut if it weren’t for the picture of Mao on the front (though in parts of Vermont, this is exactly what most Pizza Huts look like). 

Anyhow, image after image flashed across the screeen:  troops goosestepping in acrobatic precision, tanks hauling missiles before a grand stand, women “soldiers” with red mini-skirts, shapely legs, and white go-go boots (I am NOT making this up!) carrying rifles as various high-party officials tried not to drool too visibly. 

But most of all, the TV stations showed images of Hu Jintao, the current chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, being carried from one end of the square to the other and back in a big black Hongqi limousine.  Hu is standing in the limo’s sun roof, arms at his side, back ramrod straight, visible only from the waist up, looking for all the world like an inflatable “Rock’em Sock’em” punching bag I used to have when I was a kid, that when you hit it in the face would flop backward until it met the floor, then boomerang back to take another beating.

Not that Hu was taking any sort of beating.  He was staring straight ahead, moving not an inch—even his hair seemed made of hard shiny plastic.  Every so office his jaw would work and the words, “Greetings Comrades,” would boom over the loudspeaker.  To which 8,000 soldiers (and 1,000 dancers and models in go-go boots) would respond, “Greetings Leader.”

(Seriously, the next day the South China Morning Post wrote, “Hu appeared solemn in the live television broadcast, without a trace of a smile on his face.  But when the blocks of service and militiawomen, who were wearing red miniskirts, berets and mid-calf boots filed past, his face broke into a grin.”)

I’ll admit that I found Hu’s lack of emotion peculiar.  Horny grins aside, he looked so uncomfortable, so unnatural, so surreal.  These days in the US, leaders do everything they can to seem one of the masses:  loosening their ties, rolling up their sleeves, revving up their chainsaws, and widening their stance in the bathroom stall.  Who on earth would vote for a man who looked like he’d been shellacked?

Oh wait:  did I just say “vote”?

Let me put it another way:  why would standing stock still in what looks to the west like a stunningly artificial attitude gain the respect of the masses? 

Answer:   because it shows inner harmony. 

Now I get it. 

 

But that’s not where I was going here.  I was discussing structural harmony.  While I’m neither here nor there regarding the founding of the PRC 60 years ago, I am the father of three small children, so when someone told me there were going to be fireworks to celebrate the day, Ellen and I packed up the kids and headed down to Kowloon.

We made it to the harbor in plenty of time and went right down by the water.  Ellen, though, was nervous about the trip back and kept wondering if we shouldn’t position ourselves a half-block back, where there was a raised walkway and easier access to the MTR stations.  Lucy had to go to the bathroom anyhow, so she and I strolled across the massive footbridge over Salisbury Road.  Once on the other side, it took us a good 10 minutes to find the bathrooms.  But the real problem started when we tried to re-cross the footbridge and join Ellen and the two boys. 

Gathered at the entrance to the bridge was a mass of people, grumbling quietly.  It didn’t take long to figure out what was going on:  a half-dozen Hong Kong police had strung plastic tape across the entrance and weren’t letting anyone cross. 

“What’s going on?” Lucy asked. 

“They closed the bridge.”

“Why?”

Good question.  The term “footbridge” is deceptive here:  this was no gigged up rope ladder with slats of wood that’d send you tumbling to your death if you miss-stepped an inch or two to the left.  No, this thing was as wide as a football field, made of concrete, and supported by pillars as thick around as Hilary Clinton’s calves.  It could have easily held two semi-tractor trailer trucks side by side, with room to spare for Rush Limbaugh’s big fat head (just to be non-partisan in my insults). 

“Don’t worry about it,” I said to Lucy, and hefted her onto my hip before elbowing my way through the crowd.  I find, when asking for help from anyone, it helps to have a six-year old blonde girl with blue eyes the size of tea saucers looking woeful beside you. 

Once I made my way to the front, I tapped the nearest policeman on the shoulder.

“The bridge is closed,” he said.  He didn’t even turn. 

I tapped him again.  I mean, what good is a blondie if he’s not looking?  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but my family’s on the other side.”

“It’s closed,” he said, but this time he looked.  He threw a glance at me, then his eyes settled on Lucy.  He smiled.  Here we go, I thought. 

“I understand that,” I said, trying to sound rueful and worried.  “But my wife, you see, she’s on the other side.  With my children.   My other children.  Including my baby,” I threw in, deciding to go all out.

The cop chucked Lucy under the chin, trying to see if he could get her to laugh.  She just gave him a look like ‘What the hell?’ and I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t pinch her where he couldn’t see to bring tears to her eyes.  “They can come this way,” he said, “but no one goes that way.”

I tried not to snort.  “Excuse me?”

His eyes turned to me.  “They can come this way,” he repeated slowly, as though talking to the victim of a tragic accident involving a javelin and a clown hat.  “But no one crosses over.”

“Well that doesn’t make any sense,” I said.  “People weigh the same walking one way as they do the other.”

“But then,” said the cop, “we’ll have to let everyone across.” 

I looked around at the docile crowd.  I couldn’t imagine folks raised on the idea of social harmony getting up in arms because some dumb white guy with his stupid kid was allowed to go back to his family.   “No you won’t,” I said.  “Not unless everyone else has a wife and two kids waiting for them on the other side of the bridge.”

“No,” he said, “Too many people on the bridge and it will be dangerous.”

“I’m not saying you have to let too many people on the bridge.  Just me and my daughter,” who, I wanted to add, has blonde blonde hair and blue eyes the size of tea saucers.  And damn, she was getting heavy.

He shook his head.  “Too dangerous.”

Seriously, if my hands had been free—dang, what did she have for dinner, lead?—I would have grabbed his ears and used them to slap his slack-jawed face raw. 

“So I can’t go over there?” I said.

He nodded.

“But they can come over here?”

Another nod. 

“Even though there’s three of them and only two of us?”

Again, a nod.

“Do the laws of physics not apply in this country?”

He frowned, gave me a look. 

“Listen,” I said.  “Just let me through.  My wife is over there with two of our kids.  It’s hot.  It’s late.  I want to see the fireworks.  Please let me through.”

He just shook his head.  He’d been given his orders and he was going to stick with them, no matter how stupid they were.  Because no one in Hong Kong gets fired for following orders.

Knowing I was just seconds from committing a homicide in front of 300,000 witnesses, I turned and made my way back through the crowd.  Lucy and I trotted down the raised walkway, past the bathrooms (she had to go again), and down a flight of stairs to where there was an MTR entrance that led under the road.  All I had to do, I figured, was go down one side, cross under, and up the other, then make my way along the opposite sidewalk back into the arms of my sweaty wife and two tired and grumpy sons. 

But no.  The police had closed that MTR entrance, as well as the one across the street.  Indeed, two hours later when the fireworks were over, we’d return down these very stairs to discover that, instead of letting a crowd of some hundreds of thousands make their way into the subway using three separate entrances and thereby relieving some of the congestion, the police would allow access to the trains through a single entrance only.  The crowds would be as thick and packed as any I’d ever seen in my life, so much so that Ellen and I would wrap our fists into the cloth of the kids’ shirts, afraid that if we lost them they’d get crushed. 

At this point, though, all I knew was that Lucy and I couldn’t get back to the rest of the family.  In fact, once we get back up the stairs I realized that no one could cross the street.  Looking over the edge of the walkway, I saw a steady stream of people being herded down the left side of Salisbury road away from the harbor and the fireworks display.  The right side of the road also appeared to be blocked to traffic—no cars roared past—but it was entirely empty.  What was happening was more than I could decipher, but it appeared that the some higher up had decided that the best way to control the crowd was to make sure that there was no crowd, that everyone who wanted to view the fireworks actually spent their evening having coffee in a Starbucks somewhere near the Chinese border.  There was, of course, a certain wisdom to this, but it was one too twisted and—well, insane—for me to really admire it. 

In the end, Lucy and I are forced to make our way back along the walkway to where the crowd is gathered at the footbridge.  Reluctantly, I call Ellen and inform her that we can’t come back, that, alas, we are pyrotechnic Diaspora, forced to wander in the HK wilderness for years to come, eating nothing but fish balls and those little custard cups they seem to serve everywhere, including at KFC. 

We consider our options for a few minutes and hang up.  Then Lucy and I wait in the humid night, the dull glow of a streetlamp shining down on us as we cling to one another, human flotsam in the backwash of life.  Eventually we see the elevator on the other side of the footbridge rise.  The doors open.  There’s a pause, then someone steps out.  Someone in a striped shirt, someone four-foot tall, someone whose surly self-pitying posture I recognize even from here, a hundred yards away.  It’s Will.  Tears come to my eyes.  Then there’s another pause and Ellen pushes the stroller bearing our youngest son onto the unforgiving concrete walkway of the footbridge. 

“Look,” I whisper to Lucy.  “It’s your mother.”

We cling to each other in an even more clingy way, barely willing to believe that what we’ve hoped for for so long is actually about to happen. 

Slowly, the three figures make their way past the policeman on the other side, men whose lives are as barren and heartless as the double mocha lattes they swirl in the Styrofoam cups in their hands.  Then Ellen and the boys are into the no man’s land stretching across Salisbury Road, with its half-empty lanes, concrete pylons, and misplaced associations with Peter Gabriel.  Lucy and I watch, breath held, though we don’t know that it’s held, and won’t know it until minutes later when we let it out and realize that we’ve been holding it.  But that’s in a few minutes, not now.  Right now, we’re clinging to each other, and holding our breath, and not knowing it, and sweating like the dickens under those damn streetlights, and watching the three people we love most, especially when Ellen’s cooked a supper that doesn’t suck and the two boys are playing quietly or doing their homework instead of running around screaming like idiots—we’re standing there waiting for these three people to cross this concrete waste land and step into our arms. 

And then they arrive, just like that, almost as if they’ve been walking while I’ve been thinking deep and philosophical thoughts.   The guard lifts the plastic tape, tousles Will’s head and lets Ellen through.  She lifts the stroller up the few stairs that divide us, and then our eyes meet.  Relief floods my heart, like ice cream that’s been sitting in the trunk of the car for too long.  She gazes at me carefully, searching my face, wondering, I’m sure, if time has ravaged my heart as well as my visage.  “Don’t worry,” I want to tell her, “it’s just too much spray-on tan,” but the words catch in my throat.  She draws nearer and I reach out a hand, eager to feel her touch.  She takes a breath, about to speak honeyed words, and as she does so, she hands me a diaper bag.

“Better get Jamie to a bathroom quick,” she says.  “I think he needs to poo.”