Hong Kong is rainy this time of year. . . .

Well, I’m back from Hong Kong. After living there for nearly 3 years, you would think that I would be able to remember what the weather is like in summer. Luckily, I packed an umbrella, because we definitely needed it. It rained everyday. Actually, rained is a pleasant way of putting it for some of the days. At one point, we encountered a “black rain” day. Basically, this means run inside and stay there, and don’t come out until we tell you to. The rain was so bad that it made news headlines for days afterward, with dramatic pictures and roads completely washed away. It turns out that the Midwest is not the only place being drenched. (Though Hong Kong is mostly prepared for this in a way that the poor farmers simply cannot be.)

In the next few days, I’ll be retelling and reliving my trip in snippets on this site, with accompanying pictures.

In a stroke of luck, I managed to be in Hong Kong when an outbreak of bird flu was occurring. Thus, I got a firsthand experience and access to things that I wouldn’t have dreamed of back in Berkeley. This will help my dissertation project as well as my thinking through the issue of public health, prevention, and the cultural significance of disease surveillance. What fascinated me the most was that no one local seemed all that worried. People still purchased fresh chickens, people still went to the markets, and life went on as normal. Only with a lot of dead chickens in one market in Sham Shui Po.

Stay tuned for more. . . .

Returning to, and Blogging from, Hong Kong

In a few weeks, I’ll be heading off to Hong Kong.

For 3 years, I lived there, and going back will be a crazy experience. First, I never thought I would. Second, I’m finally with the person I wanted to be with back when I lived there. Third, I’m finally getting to do some on-the-ground scouting for field locations.

This is going to be great.

And expensive.

I’ll blog about my trip when I’m there, with pictures. A travel log of Hong Kong before the Olympics. As a ‘China watcher’, I’ll be curious to see how much people either care or do not care about the games in Hong Kong, and to see all the merchandising. Anyone want a Yingying stuffed animal? How about a Beibei.

Reality, Made-up Memories and Memoir Writing

This summer, I have plans to work on a new book. This one will be centering on my experiences living in Hong Kong, my life as a tai tai (a largely literal, yet somehow derogatory, term for a wife), and the demise of my so-called marriage.

In the past, I have frequently thought about writing a memoir, but it seemed strange to try to categorize my life experiences in literary form. Real life, it seemed, did not often translate well into book form. Plus, I had a basic uneasiness with converting my strange life into readable nonfiction. The deaths of my brother and both my parents, while bizarre, seemed too easy fodder. I felt guilty even thinking about capitalizing on their individual stories, and through them, my own.

In addition, too much time had passed. Did I really remember everything? The things I did remember were fuzzy. Was I embellishing to make myself, or others, look better or worse? Did anything really happen the way I remembered it? Or by writing a memoir, was I just going to be pulling a James Frey by making shit up? In the end, did it matter? A good story is a good story, despite its truthfulness or accuracy in relation to reality.

Partially made-up memories, it turns out, are more the rule than we might otherwise believe. Our brains seem inherently pre-programmed to imagine or create reality. Our memories are not, in fact, entirely what they appear. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert writes:

This general finding – that information acquired after an event alters memory of the event – has been replicated so many times in so many different laboratory and field settings that it has left most scientists convinced of two things. First, the act of remembering involves “filling in” details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously.

In other words, people are prone to remembering things incorrectly. Except that the same people will go to their graves swearing that they remembered an event exactly as it happened. I’m sure that both the Hatfields and the McCoys thought that they were right in remembering that the other family had started all the trouble in the first place (for an interesting ‘tale’ of how it all began, check out  http://www.wvculture.org/history/crime/hatfieldmccoy01.html) . And we all know what happened to them; a lot of them ended up dead.

So, as I sit down and attempt to write out the story of my relatively short marriage, I find myself wondering exactly how much of it is realism, and how much of it is my own idealism. As I write, I will try to remember another quote from the same chapter of Gilbert’s book: “Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.”

In the end, my memoir can only reflect my own reconstructed memories, hopes, desires, and misimagined future. My ex-husband, I’m sure, will remember things much differently. His brain, no doubt, filled in different details than mine. Such is life, memory, and the foibles of memoir writing.

A Shameless Plug for my First Fiction Book – The Eye of the Virus

My novel’s main character is a virus itself – a new strain of avian influenza that makes its debut in a small village in Vietnam. Like the American movie Crash, the story follows the virus as it travels first to Hong Kong and then to the United States. Like a ricocheting bullet, the virus affects the lives of businesspeople, wives, children, doctors, and politicians until it is stopped by a team of Chinese epidemiologists in Beijing and Hong Kong. The story follows six main characters – in addition to the virus itself – in their efforts to cope with the global pandemic and its effects on their individual lives.

Myriam is a British PR executive on holiday with her husband when he becomes the first person infected in Hong Kong. Her life is completely changed by the experience, in ways she never predicted, including an involvement with a Chinese-American doctor who works for the World Health Organization.

Brian is an American scientist who invents a new antiviral medication, but fakes test data so that it can be released early. When the drug begins losing effectiveness, the world discovers that it also has negative psychological side-effects, ultimately causing Brian himself to commit a rash, violent act.

Casey is Brian’s girlfriend, who finds herself stuck on a small island off the East Coast during the pandemic. After losing both her parents to the flu, she loses herself.

Jie is an epidemiologist with ties to Harvard and a director at the Chinese CDC in Beijing. When she gets a call from her old classmate, Will Shen, a WHO worker stationed in Hong Kong, the two work to solve the puzzle of the new virus.

These are just a few examples of the multiple, interweaving storylines followed in my book. As the unknown virus quickly spreads its way across the globe, entire societies are affected and changed by the outbreak, leaving the reader with the ultimate question: What would be important to you, what would you do, if a pandemic actually occurred?

Year of the Golden Pig – with an ironic twist . . .

The New York Times reported last week that an epidemic was killing pigs across the border from Hong Kong in mainland China, in two areas in Guangdong province.

This is ironic because this is the year of the pig in China, and the mystery disease allegedly began to surface immediately after the New Year celebrations. I’m no expert, but even in their golden year, this doesn’t bode well for pigs. Efforts are being made to slaughter the infected pigs and to prevent any spread of the disease.

All joking aside, however, this story raises new concerns about the age-old issue surrounding Chinese transparency and global health issues. The entire Southeast region of China has residual fears from its bout with SARS in 2003, and Hong Kong authorities are especially concerned about the issues both of accurate and timely reporting and effective containment of outbreaks. Although this disease does not appear to have any of the same symptoms of either SARS or bird flu, concern remains since pigs’ immune systems are very similar to our own. Pigs are often key links in the natural chain of disease transmission, which is why this story is causing so much alarm in Hong Kong in the first place. Authorities both at the WHO and in Hong Kong are worried that China is not being quick enough to disseminate information and, when an official report is finally released, it is perhaps not entirely forthcoming.

The link to the full story is here:

www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/world/asia/07cnd-hongkong.html

Good thing I wrote my fiction novel (Eye of the Virus) about a pandemic early! Gallows humor is my forte, just to be clear. I’ll keep an eye on this story, but unless it’s serious (in which case we’ll all know more about it because CNN will pick up the thread and the panic button will be pushed), it will largely fade into the “needs further investigation” file. As somewhat of a layman disease expert, I know that something will eventually break through our largely inadequate surveillance system, but I hope it’s not in the near future.

But I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so it behooves me to be optimistic about any predicted catastrophes.

My New Book In Progress (hereafter known as BIP)

Would anyone read further, if this were the first paragraph of something?

It all started with my father. At least that is what I tell myself as I stand on the roof deck, staring out at all the neon of Hong Kong invading the night sky. Eleven stories up, leaning over the concrete edge and staring down, I wonder how anyone could actually be brave enough to jump from a tall building, an open window, a bridge. I heard once that there are cameras on the Golden Gate to count the objects falling into the bay and that over the years it has added up to hundreds.

The red cabs below me line up on the street, honking whenever the drivers get frustrated, which seems to be every few seconds. From eleven stories up, they look like the toy cars that my neighbors’ kids would leave scattered about the sidewalk. From eleven stories up, everything looks smaller except the sky and the clear, big moon that shines down on my bare skin like a strobe light. It’s nearly four in the morning and I suddenly feel ashamed of myself and scared.

It was melodramatic, I’ll admit, climbing the stairs to the roof, propping open the door with a brick and sobbing as I thought about the effects of killing myself. Because I was never going to do it, anyway, it was simply the thrill of thinking it. The power of the suggestion. Like all the mystical words before it: birth, childhood, marriage, sex, love, truth, death. But in the end, suicide is something that is not in my deck, not a card that I can actually play. It is the ace of spades and I only hold a couple of queens, a jack, a seven of hearts and a two of diamonds. Instead of focusing on the high pair, I have always been obsessed with the two low cards that life has dealt to me. My father being one of them, but not the lowest.

 

 

 

 

My Trip to the ER

I just spent the last hour in the late outpatient/emergency room in Hong Kong Central Hospital. Luckily for me, it is within walking distance of my apartment. Here’s what happened:

I decide that I want to make a cheesecake. Not just any cheesecake, but Key Lime cheesecake. So, I get out my ingredients and I’m hard at work, when I suddenly forget everything that has been taught to me about knives.

In case you didn’t know, you are not supposed to use knives unless you have an appropriate cutting surface on which to cut. Also, you are supposed to use an appropriate knife for what you are cutting. Most importantly, never let your fingers get into the way of the blade and never, never, EVER, under any circumstances, cut something in your hand.

Guess which of these I ignored?

If you guessed “all of the above” – you are correct.

Because I didn’t want to have another thing to clean, I decided to cut the cream cheese into cubes in the palm of my hand. Then, I chose a serrated (sp?) steak knife for the purpose.

Can you guess what comes next?

If you guessed “slice your finger/hand off” – you are correct.

Basically, my hand slipped. The next thing I know my hand is auto-flinging itself back from the knife and blood is spilling over the white cream cheese and the floor and I am screaming. Then, I start hysterically laughing. For those of you who have never seen me in a crisis, my modus operandi is laughing. It’s how I get through things.

So, I giggle my way down to the ER and by the time I get there, the wad of paper towels surrounding my left hand are soaked. The nurse behind the desk takes one look at me and I’m ushered into a room where they stop the bleeding and give me a good look at the damage.

Stuff is not supposed to come out from behind your skin, people, it’s just not. My left pinky finger was just about sawed in two at the middle joint. Those steak knives were worth their money, I guess.

The doctor proceeds to tell me that because it’s a joint, it’s the pinky and the slicing action was smooth, I would be better off without stitches. Because, he tells me, he could do more damage with stitches. I can bend my finger, so nothing too serious has been done.

I tell him in Chinese that I am a silly melon (a jackass) and that I don’t have good meaning (I am embarrassed). He gives me a look. It’s somehow comforting that “the look” is universal for disappointment and “didn’t you know better”. Then he has the nurse patch me up with butterfly stitches, uses a wooden stick to stabilize my finger and bandages me up. Then he tells me to take antibiotics – just in case of infection and not to use my left hand for anything and not get it wet for a week. Then we’ll see.

Great.

I think that this proves my point about me learning lessons the hard way. I think my mother, my grandmother, my aunts – everybody I ever cooked with – admonished me not to cut something while holding it. I always thought, “What’s the big deal?” One chunk of pinky finger less and my first HK ER experience later, I now know what the big deal is.

And I am a silly melon.

Safety in Hong Kong

Tonight we went to see a late movie. Since our apartment move (more on that later), we are now more central to everything and well within walking distance of our favorite movie theatre. So, instead of the usual jump into a red taxi, we walked home past midnight, down by the docks and through dimly lit bus areas.

Now, in most cities, I know what you’re thinking. This is crazy behavior that would inevitably lead to trouble if you did it one too many times. Maybe, if you’re really unlucky, even the first time. I, for one, would never be caught dead walking alone through a dimly lit section of Manhattan at 1am. No way.

Hong Kong has the reputation of being a very safe city – and it is. But, doesn’t that just mean you can relax your worrying, but not your precautions? Wouldn’t it still be stupid for a single woman to stroll down a dark street at midnight? I think so. Which is why I was so flabbergasted that my husband felt it okay to storm off after I made a stray comment about crossing a series of intersections without a crosswalk. Leaving me alone to walk home by myself. Late at night. Down by the docks. And through the empty bus terminus.

For the first time, I felt relieved to be in Hong Kong. Because I do feel safe here. Despite the fact that bad things do occasionally happen here – it IS a CITY, after all. But it is safe-ER, or safe-ISH.

But I do have a problem crossing streets here and not because I am mentally or physically challenged. People here are hit almost daily, while in the crosswalk, while it is okay to walk. Seriously. I’ve never in my life lived anywhere else where a pedestrian death just isn’t that big of a news story. Maybe page 6-7 in a small column. I just read today about two teenagers being struck down by an ambulance. And when I first got here a bus rammed into a building when it took a corner too fast, wiping out a woman just minding her own damn business on the SIDEWALK near the middle of the block. I know this because it was near to my first Chinese classroom and I saw the aftereffects on the building. It made me more cautious, let me tell you.

But as for other things – random attacks, thefts – they are largely petty crimes. Clever pickpockets mostly. Some of the older apartments and those without doormen (like our new building) have gates on the doors. We have one, but we can’t use it because we only have one key and I can’t find anyone with the tools/skills to cut a new one because the key is – get this – hand cut. Yep. So, I’m hoping that the nice old man who sits downstairs by the entrance all day is all the security we really need.

And, hey, I made it home alright, despite my husband’s failed attempt to “lose” me. Maybe if we were in a different city he might have been lucky and something could have happened to me. Better luck next city, I suppose.

Christmas in Hong Kong

I realize that I have been terribly remiss in updating this site. I do, however, have some valid excuses. The first is that it was the end of my semester and I was cramming Chinese into my increasingly storage-capacity-challenged brain. The second is that I have been having a slight health dilemna involving a sexually transmitted virus (my academic expertise in viruses should have made this an ironic natural next step). Now that everything has calmed down a bit, I would like to pick up where I left off and comment on the Christmas season in Hong Kong.

Having spent my youth in the freezing cold of the Northeast of the United States, I have come to associate the month of December and the holiday of Christmas with nose-chilling, finger-aching, butt-numbing weather. Perhaps with a dash of snow. Throw in a few icicles for fun.

Although most natives of Hong Kong would view the snowy Christmas scene with a slight aversion verging on horror, I am enamored. The best things about being cold, now that I have been gifted with a bit of perspective, is that you can warm up by taking a hot bath, drinking a cup of hot beverage, and/or sitting by the fire that you just spent an hour crumpling up newspaper to kindle. These are beautiful things. The irony is, of course, that I never appreciated any of these things to their fullest until I no longer had them.

Case in point. Last year, a few days before Christmas, we went to see the Pops at Carnegie Hall. It was a sentimental journey of my own making. I wanted, in my last Christmas in the States, to have a picture-perfect holiday. This, I decided, included sitting through the Pops’ Christmas concert. Which was, by the way, incredible. My husband, however, not being of the same mind about cramming in one final Christmas with all the trappings, spent the evening watching the percussionist in absolute amazement. “Look at him go! He can do symbols as well!” he whispered excitedly.

Once the concert was over, it was around 10pm. Of course, there were no cabs to be found as they were all taken. We decided to walk the scant 20 or so blocks back to our apartment building. For the scenic route, we took 5th Avenue to look at the lights. It was absolutely freezing. For those of you unacquainted with New York City, 5th Avenue acts as a natural wind tunnel, vying with any street in Chicago as the windiest in the world. The wind chill factor that you see on the evening news is a valid, scientific proof. All it takes is a nightly walk in late December on 5th Avenue to become a believer in the negative effect of the wind on your average body temperature. And no amount of down padding is going to help.

By the time I got back to the apartment, I had bitched about my stupid idea to dress up in a skirt, the fact that I had forgotten my fuzzy, wool hat, how the boots I had on were not made for walking, and that 20 blocks was a ridiculous amount of blocks to have to traverse back to the warmth of indoor-heating. Christmas cheer my ass.

Now, however, I think of this scene – and due to the miracle of time and space – I am wistful. I am nostaligic for freezing my ass off. This is what cultural shock can do to a sensible person. After spending a lifetime wishing for warmth, I am now longing for cold. The human being is a strange creature indeed.

Hong Kong at Christmas is a bit strange for someone like me, however. It’s hard to get used to the sight of Christmas trees without snow, surrounded by lush greenery. Hell, orchids are still blooming in the garden outside our apartment building. Everyone you go, the entire city is now decked out in its best Christmas finery. Wreaths, bows, ornaments, even snowflakes – which I find incredibly amusing since there is literally not a snowball’s chance in hell here.

The fact that this is not, really, a Christian place also makes the holiday a bit more odd. Christmas, it seems, for most people in Hong Kong, is more about bonuses and presents than the concept of giving. However, people do tend to see it as a family gathering day, so that’s similar.

But, in the end, I just couldn’t conceptualize Christmas here, so we booked a trip to Cebu for the day itself. I may as well be lying on a sandy beach if I cannot sip cocoa next to the wood furnace. And I have almost forgotten about the date as well. It’s not the 18th of December, and I haven’t even started my Christmas cards yet. So, in other words, this is your Christmas greeting.

Shengdan Kuaile! Xin Nian Kuaile!

Culturally Confounded

I am a little depressed. This could be because I have been enduring my first “Asian” cold of the year, which has left me feeling lethargic and like I just ran up a steep mountain in flip-flops. Every part of my body is aching. I have noticed an acute correlation between my physical well-being and my mental well-being. But I figure if the mood is ripe, why not pluck the ideas anyway, even if they might still be a bit sour.

The thing that I don’t seem to understand about the cultural part of this city is the following:

Everything is about the show.

Now, I come from what someone once famously said is the “biggest stage in the world.” In other words, I hail from that surrealist tabloid existence called the United States of America. So, by all rights, I should be used to the facades of modern life. But call me ever hopeful, I am still always surprised to see just how much people can buy into the hype. It makes me think that the only people who truly wield any power are the creative geniuses behind the latest ad campaigns. However, it’s amazingly effective. If you convince people that the way they are living is their own fabulous choice, there is no longer any effective resistance to the rampant capitalism all around us.

What on earth has got me feeling so despondent?

Weddings.

That blissful moment when two people converge and promise to only irritate each other forevermore, so help them God, until death or divorce do them part. Here, in Hong Kong, weddings are just ludicrous. Here’s why.

A.) Instead of having weddings with some semblance of cultural traditions, the weddings here look like some Midwestern teenage girl’s version of a wedding. Puffy white dresses, tuxedos with tails, and all the fixings. To make matters worse, it seems that a marriage here just isn’t official until the bride and groom pose in some public place. Not just any public place, but specifically, gardens or impressive buildings. The other day, wandering through the courtyard of City Hall, I saw about six couple trying to pose so that no other couple was in their picture in the background. All in a desperate attempt to pretend like they were the only couple that just got married.

Outside, on my way to the supermarket, I just saw three Range Rovers adorned with huge bouquets of roses on their hoods with matching, tiny versions tied to each door handle. There is absolutely no reason for this except ostentation.

Now, I know what you are thinking, I am from the US, where the wedding industry – and I do mean INDUSTRY – makes literally BILLIONS of dollars out of women’s desire to be a princess for a day. And why? I cannot blame the women, for I know that every day they are bombarded with images of the perfect life and the perfect romantic wedding. In a sea of anonymous women that grows larger each year, who can blame them for wanting to stand out for one day? To have all eyes on them as they prance around a gorgeous room in a white dress, smiling happily as if the bliss were neverending. I swear that we even hear our own soundtracks playing in the background.

What depresses me the most, I guess, is that we have shipped this hollow sensibility of what a marriage should be to the farthest reaching corners of the world. How sad. I’m certain that the Mandarins had just as silly a version as we do, and in the end it probably all boiled down to the same thing, so I really shouldn’t be upset at all.

It’s just that as I age, I realize that I am a hell of a lot happier having unmasked the fantasy. Having realized that no matter how “perfect” the wedding, the marriage might be an unmitigated disaster. Having realized that no amount of makeup or clothes can disguise a person’s true value or lack thereof. And sometimes I just wish that instead of learning our lessons the hard way, there could be another answer. That women could stop wanting the movie version and go out looking for the real thing. And learn to tell the difference between the two. Maybe if we all hadn’t see one too many “perfect wedding endings” in movies, we wouldn’t have such a high divorce rate.

It’ll be interesting as we all march through life, who makes it and who doesn’t. Right now, 8 out of 10 of my friends are married. I wonder, in ten years, whether or not the lights will have gone down on any of those players.