許留山

[At right: photo of me (with my cool, new samurai hair) drinking a Hui Lao San mango with sago and coconut milk drink. Pretty standard HLS fare. This was taken right outside our hotel. The area looks so kitsch, doesn't it? It is. Our hostel is called "Mirador Mansion." Anyone who has been there, or to the exponentially more notorious and seedy "Chungking Mansions" knows that in Hong Kong, the term "mansion" denotes a building that is exactly the opposite of what anyone from the rest of the English-speaking world would expect.]

[For the benefit of those without Chinese text-support: the name of this post is "Hui Lao San" in Cantonese, or "Xu Liu Shan" in Mandarin. I was also thinking of entitling it "Festival of Photos" since there is a rather high photo-to-word ratio, which I'm trying to emend by adding more text. I fear, however, that I will still come up short in terms of actual content—and in spite of my obvious efforts here to fill up an entire bracketed paragraph by rambling on about this very dearth of words!]

So I'm in Hong Kong for my third and, as of yet, most enjoyable trip to the "Pearl of the Orient." If you check out the post about my first and second jaunts, you will notice that each visit here is more enjoyable than the last. On my maiden voyage to this vibrant, ostensibly tri-lingual community, I was disgusted by the lack of a true high brow culture: everything revolves around eating and shopping. While this perception has not changed, my tolerance for it certainly has.


Above: one of the HLS mango boutiques. They're pretty much ubiquitous here in Hong Kong; I think this one is near the Mong Kok subway exit. Below: the best dessert for any mango lover: it's called "Mango with Mango juice and extra Mango."

Which leads me to wonder if my values are drifting to the more worldly. By way of an interesting anecdote that I recently shared with Danny (he responded with disbelief), I will illustrate my point:

[Left: staring at the mango-ee goodness of a HLS dessert.] To say that I had no interest in fashion in elementary school would be erroneous. While many of my peers were blissfully ignorant of trends in apparel, I observed them carefully and then rebelled against them with near religious fervor. I wore what I liked, which consisted mainly of T-shirts emblazoned with the images of Mario, Luigi, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. [The Simpsons, Bart in particular, were the cartoon characters of choice for most kids beginning in my 4th grade year, but I considered them too antagonistic to good, middle class family values. They represented a grave threat to the moral underpinnings of American society, and as far as I was concerned, ought to have been censored, or better yet, removed entirely from public airwaves. The Simpsons, in my mind, were the first step on a short road to the total socio-politico-economic collapse of our nation. Needless to say, I boycotted the show and all Simpsons products and —encouraged others to do the same—in an effort to starve the demonic Matt Groening and his unholy army of animators of funds for the abomination they called "entertainment." (Thus far, my efforts have met less success than one might have hoped for.) I couldn't have articulated this at the time, but had a genie granted me my current lexicon and lingual dexterity, I would have expressed my feelings in more less these very words.]

[Right: here comes the airplane, through the lips, over the teeth into the airplane hanger! Open up!] So fashion was an anti-interest of mine. I loathed classmates with their "hyper color" shirts, asymmetrical ponytails, and humongous bangs held aloft by industrial strength adhesives. Maybe my contempt for the styles of the '80s and early 90s was due in part to the sheer hideousness of the trends at this time; I recall thinking that being trendy was not only shallow, but just plain ugly. Whatever the case, I considered all the students at my school—and by extension, everyone, everywhere—who adhered to the (some what arbitrary) rules of fashions slaves to an Evil Empire that was just as bad as the one over which Comrade Gorbachev was presiding.

I had a schoolmate who ran to the bathroom to apply water to a very small stain on his name brand T-shirt during lunch. "Why bother with all that fuss?" I wondered. "Just wear clothes you don't care about, and make life easier on yourself. Who cares about the microscopic stain on the bottom corner of your shirt?" This from a man who now carries at least two Shout wipes with him at all times. (Danny was in total amazement when I recounted this part, because he knows I do the exact same thing every time a little fleck of food or sauce lands on my pants.)

Over the last few years, the question of whether I am on the slippery slope to conspiring to overthrow the moral order of our nation, a path that I'm sure involves regularly viewing The Simpsons, has plagued me more than once. Does it matter that I embrace the fact that being in Hong Kong is not much more than one great shopping adventure, punctuated by visits to diverse restaurants to rest and refuel to give my body the strength it needs to keep on browsing? Though I can permit this sort of hedonistic behavior this once after two months of deprivation in rural China, but next time perhaps I ought not be quite so permissive. I'd like to philosophize some more, but I have a coconut milk and mango craving to satisfy.