In which I reflect on the beginning of the year of the tiger …
Thursday morning sunrise in Sha Tin, as seen from my balcony:
It’s a lovely, lazy Sunday afternoon and it’s also Chinese New Year’s Day, the first day in the year of the tiger. What’s traditionally wished for is health, happiness, and wealth to be with you in the coming year, which is what I wish for my sweet babies and the rest of my family and all my friends and anyone else who might be reading! On New Year’s Eve here folks eat dinner with their family, and it’s seemingly not optional. The universities close for the week to allow their students to scatter all over the far east to be with their relatives, and the few number of folks I know who couldn’t get away were really upset by it. In some ways the night is a lot like Thanksgiving, although when the dinner is over people go out.
I was invited to a friend’s house for dinner last night and it was a great. Not crazy, but warm and genuine and relaxed and easy and full of great food—a multi-course foodie extravaganza that began with fabulously creamy Epoisses de Bourgogne and prosciutto and salami from Italy with a great poppy seed baguette, followed by a wonderful green salad, and then huge Australian shrimp with a fine homemade and very heavy-on-the-horseradish cocktail sauce and then, finally, the main course, crazily tender Osso Buco (with veal shanks, as it’s meant to be) that melted in your mouth, complete with a bone full of delicate marrow that tasted like rich foie gras, and cheesy risotto with orange essence and saffron. And then there was the wine, which was from all over the world and was flowing and in every color and flavor. I preferred the heavy reds, as ever, my favorite of which was Justin Cellars’ Isosceles. It cracked me up that these people I was supping with are serious oenophiles and at one point exchanged tales about these great wines they love from the Bedford Falls Valley from whence I came. “Um, yes,” I said, “I’ve had Bedford Falls Cellars’ Syrah. You can buy it in the supermarket. And the winemaker’s a drunken jackass.” Okay, I didn’t say it but I thought it. Interestingly, these folks are investment bankers, art dealers, high-ups in Big 6 media companies and the like—major players in huge international companies; they’re from a world which I would simply not be a part of in the States. But HK is a different place and I’m continually amazed by the expat community here in which people from across the strata freely befriend, date, cohabitate, marry, and otherwise intermingle with one another, seemingly without regard to social rank or income. Here we’re all foreigners, and that pull to gravitate towards that which is familiar is much more powerful than the social divisions that might otherwise create barriers back in the US. HK is such a cool place, and sweet Jesus but it was a good night.
Flower markets and fairs spring up for just a couple of days prior to New Year’s at which they sell the normal state-fair type junk and also, as the name implies, flowers, which are good luck to have in your home during this celebration period (which is hard-core for three days, and then continues on for another week and a half). There are a few renowned huge markets, but there also local ones in every municipality and I went to a tiny one on a tennis court. The most amazing thing was the purple orchids, which were the most beautiful enormous orchids I’ve ever seen and they went for about $330 HK ($42USD), which is amazing compared to what far inferior specimens go for in the States. I now have some beautiful purple lilies and a ton of baubles scattered throughout the house.
Lilies:
Baubles hanging from my living room lights:
As I sit here and type, I can hear the sound of varying pulsating drums wafting up from the many celebrations happening on the valley floor down below. It’s like the sounds of the drums in the Mines of Moria scene of The Fellowship of the Ring, only without the sheer terror. It’s very cool and I like this holiday and am really enjoying being in HK to see it first hand.
I ate at an Italian restaurant a few days ago at the insistence of a host who assumed I must have been wanting “western” food. On the one hand, at least it wasn’t Ruby Tuesdays, which is flocked to by folks of all nationalities—go figure—but still, it was predictably awful and I think it gave me food poisoning. Or maybe it was the humidity and I got horribly dehydrated, which is also an option as Thursday was close to 90 degrees and 100% humidity and I probably lost 3 gallons of water from sweating so much. Gross. The few days before had been in the high 60s with no humidity, so I think maybe the sudden temperature jump, in combination with awful food, got me sick. But I was all better yesterday and the weather was wonderful. It wasn’t a day that I want everyday, but for yesterday’s mood it was dreamily nostalgic and turned my thoughts to glorious days gone by. It was cold (for HK anyway, low 50s) and a fog moved in that was so thick you couldn’t see through it at all. It was wet and heavy and reminded me so much of growing up in the SF Bay Area, which I was fortunate enough to do in a magic time.
New Year’s Day from my balcony, the same POV as the pic that starts this post:
Because everyone in HK was eating with their families, when I set out for my friend’s house in Causeway Bay, I had the bus nearly all to myself and even got a seat on the MTR almost all the way there, which never happens. It was the only time since I’ve arrived in HK where life seemed to pause and allow for introspection. There were few people out and the ones that were out seemed to be in no hurry. As I sat in the MTR blazing along through the ethereal mist listening to an amazingly cool band called The Pains of Being Pure at Heart on my iPod and looking out the rain specked windows at the hazy spectral outlines of the endless towering urban skyline, my mind wafted back to a Chinese New Year’s Eve from sometime in the mid 1980s during which I went with my beloved college roommate Chris to see the Grateful Dead on the opening night of a three show run at the Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland, which also required a combination bus and commuter train ride to get to from the suburban wonderland in which we lived. (My mom always called our town “the golden ghetto,” in part because at that time it really was a picture perfect city and in part because when my parents first moved us there from Idaho the cost of living in the Bay Area was way more than they could afford, but they did so anyway because they thought it would be a good place for me and my sisters. Thanks mom and dad! And happy anniversary, too.) Seeing the Dead in those days, which required calling the Grateful Dead hotline every day and mailing in a postal money order with your ticket request on a 3 x 5 card on the exact day sales for new shows were announced, and then waiting for days by your mailbox in the hopes of receiving a thickly embossed and glittery ticket, was beyond special. It was before the backward hat frat boys discovered acid in the early 90s (you don’t mosh at a Dead show you f***ing morons) and the Dead regularly still played small Bay Area venues almost monthly—the Greek in Berkeley for summer solstice every year, at the Kaiser all the time (and before that at the Oakland Auditorium, which is what it was called before it was remodeled), the S.F. Civic (now the Bill Graham), the Berkeley Community Theatre, the San Rafael and Marin Civic Centers, The Frost at Stanford, The Warfield, amazing spots all, and intimate and ingratiating and the kind of places that contributed to your feeling of belonging to the world’s most special secret club when you saw the Dead in the Bay Area.
Sometimes you’re reminded of a memory that’s less of an image or a narrative and more of a feeling, a recalling of that sense of possibility, of being alive and ebullient and optimistic and certain that indeed too much of anything is just enough and that “all good things in all good time” isn’t just a lyric but a permeating philosophy that goes hand in hand with the belief that once in a while you can get shone the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right. You don’t lose this feeling as you get older—at least I hope you don’t—but as the complications of adulthood increasingly mount and you get bogged down in trying to compete in the era of late capitalism, with its accompanying fears, doubts, and recriminations, it doesn’t come as easily as it once did and it can be much harder to hold onto in the fleeting moments in which it unexpectedly returns. Seeing the Dead with Chris always came part and parcel with the aforementioned flood of gorgeous youthful feeling, and for whatever reason last night’s trek to HK Island brought it back to me in full, and as I hurtled towards my destination time seemed to slow and I let it wash over me and I could smell, hear, and taste the moment and it was magic. And then the train stopped in Causeway Bay and it was gone and I stumbled out into the fog feeling just a little older than I was only a moment before.
