For MJF
And with my hands tied I won't crack
('Cause in my mind I called you back.)
-REM, The Ascent of Man

“How many gulps do you think it would take me to finish my glass of milk, mom?”, one of the hundreds of answerless questions my brother asked when he wasn't pushing the flight attendant call button to show them his mechanical dog. My mom was nervous, I could tell. She also seemed exhausted and she fell asleep, then my brother, then my dad. I tried hard as I could to get comfortable and to wrap myself in tissue airplane blankets and cotton ball pillows but to no avail. Life on a plane was sleepless.

During my 400th toss, 13 hours later, saw out the window the unbelievable neon lights of Hong Kong. It was night and that’s all you could see. My family woke up and stared, dad and bobby and mom all excited and by this time I’d been able to enjoy myself as I always do flying, imagine, flying. I was curious and nervous about Hong Kong.

We got off the plane and waited in a crowded, noisy airport for the checkers of our papers and baggage handlers to send our suitcases barreling down those filthy strips, the conveyor belts. We took our millions of bags and went outside to hail a taxi. Amidst a sea of black haired heads, me with my blonde (Bobby, mom and dad all dark haired) stood out like a taxi beacon anyways. In line for what seemed like forever and there were more people than I’d been amongst in my life and the air smelled like noodles in some kind of seafood broth and soya sauce and oiled woks and car exhaust.

We took our long awaited cab to the Grand Eaton Hotel and checked in. Dad didn’t think much of the elevators as they were glass and sailed clear to the top of Hong Kong. We got out on our floor and fell into our a room, a pile of us and our suitcases. The room was tiny. Unbelievable. Like a shoebox. Hong Kong was overcrowded so they needed to conserve space. This was a luxury hotel too. Two single beds right next to each other and on either side right up next to the wall and the bathroom was like my bedroom closet at home. We slept and I slept like a baby, I couldn’t have stayed awake if I had tried. I dreamt about my dog back home, Sydney, and his beautiful brown eyes.

I awoke to a miniature christmas in a miniature hotel room in crowded Hong Kong. Mom regifted some candies bobby and I ripped off from some store at home - a lesson I’m betting, (but lost on us! We spent the next morning following the maids around the hotel stealing tiny bottles of shampoo). I got some books, some notebooks you know so I could write about this bloody trip. This morbid trip to the bowels of Earth I had thought. They also gave us Gameboy. See, back then I was all backwards. I thought hip hop and game systems were great and traveling to far corners of the earth was a great travesty that only evil, evil parents would make their children do. Fuck, I was so wrong.

The whole day we went out wandering around this dingy, grey, dusty city. It was beautiful. Most of our kind (white, middle class, North Americans) would have felt dirty, cramped and out of place. They wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the pace of Hong Kong. It’s people were laid back and lovely but the city itself had a pulse that never slowed. The cars rushed by you when you stood on curbs along the side of the roads. There were no sidewalks, just curbs. There was a McDonalds across the street from our hotel, where unfortunately, I forced my family to eat as I was terrified of chinese food. I was afraid of the oily wok smell and the markets that decorated every corner of every street sold poultry, alive. There seemed to be a lack of hygiene in this city, although I know now that these people are meticulously clean, I suppose it was just the unfriendly smell and the dirty smog dust settling on everything. We honkies are so used to our cities shiny and glassy and scrubbed clean. We hide our dirt. The Chinese let it all out. In fact, most places that I went later on were the same. They didn’t hide all their bad stuff like we do, they let you see it so there was some sense of reality going on, not a sense of extra shiny put on happy bullshit. No, Hong Kong was raw and beautiful. There were tiny little men running around pulling families in carts on their back for pennies. The alley ways were like slivers. There was a lot of neon and an enormous amount of people, wonderful, smiling, happy people walking slowly from place to place. Some stood in place doing Tai Chi, some played games behind chain link fences and wouldn’t let you take a picture. They all talked so loud because they had life and were happy and you could see they were happy.

We took a boat from the island called Kowloon to the other. We slid across the slippery harbour amongst brown and cobalt blue junks with happy men who missed some teeth waving and smiling as though they were proud they were missing teeth. The water was a dark turquiose green and blue with white caps all around. The sky was grey but the air was humid and very, very stuck to me. On the other island there were some markets up in the hills. The hills were like a cream color, like sandstone and they overlooked the beach below and it was a delicious view. We bought a million silk ties, a thousand rainbow colored junks on t-shirts and little silk change purses at the markets to give to the loved ones back home.

We cut back through the gem colored water, to the main island, back up to the dollhouse hotel room. Mom and Dad and Bobby and I head out to the night markets after a quick meal of greasy Mcnuggets, Hong Kong style. There are people everywhere. The markets are social, not commercial. Noisy, with chickens and children and foreign music and old Chinese merchants bartering at the top of their smog-filled lungs. Grandmothers meeting up with mothers and granddaughters and grandsons and boyfriends buying girlfriends steamed custard buns and Hello Kitty pencil cases, neighbours chatting with friends, and grins and smiles and holding hands. Ribbons are falling from every stall and banners with beautiful blue-black Chinese ink and red and gold satin and silk. There are produce stalls that smell of fermenting fruits selling nature’s finest offerings, most of which I’d never laid eyes on in my 15 years. Spikey, pungeant, big-as-a-basketball fruits and slices of what look like cucumbers that are a foot in width. There are tourist stalls with the same silk ties we’d bought across the water, pins and pens and paintings of junks and Buddhas. There are meat stalls with half carcasses of cows, pigs and animals I didn’t know we could eat. Live chickens in cages, feathers flying everywhere, middle-aged chinese men holding their sides, their wings down as they raise them to the scale, shouting abrubtly. Most importantly for my Western electronic mind, there are stalls with video games, and CDs and Bobby and I stock up on games for our Gameboy, preparations for a year of travelling. What else could we do where we’re heading? White talcum powder sand setting off rich green tourquoise seas and palms and brightly colored fish and eternally-grinning locals, happier than anyone I’ve ever known just to see we’ve come to visit their out-of-the-way island. What could we possibly do other than play Tetris?

We jet-lag trudge back to the Eaton and say goodnight to Christmas, and sleep, open-mouthed snoring in what the still grid-locked cars below are spewing out.

An early morning flight on Cathay Pacific. For breakfast we’re served cheeseburgers and fries and M&Ms in our free firstclass upgrade. Mom and Dad start a fresh new day with champaigne. The attendant my brother has befriended gives us Cathay stockings, knit green and red wool, Christmas stockings with chocolates and crayons and paper and sunglasses. great. crayons. I hide in the world of falling Tetris blocks and the tinny walkman version of Naughty by Nature’s O.P.P. Not too long after we’ve already landed, bellies still full of burgers and fries. It seems Mom and Dad had enough time though, to get a little champaigne-giddy. Looking back, it could have been a giddiness caused by the excitement of just having landed in Bangkok. I don’t know. I just followed them, waiting in lines, and picking up cases, and waiting for cabs.

Driving through the streets of Bangkok, gritty, more intensely gridlocked traffic than Hong Kong in a city that seemed never to end. We drove past slums and ghettos and projects and shacks and beggars and bums, children on the street crying, vendors selling cheap knock-offs of Gucci, Versace, Chanel, Nike, Rolex and Reebok, moms panhandling to feed their sons who are missing legs and arms and eyes and in and amongst it all, clean, ironed, starched and shaved white middle class Westerners taking photos of it. It’s a perversion almost worse than the girls no older than I standing on street corners in bras and imitation-leather minis and stilettos waving down cars with pained grins and tiny teenaged fragile shaking hands.

This time it’s the Park Hotel, Sukhumvit 22, dark alley dirt road, no sidewalks just knock-off stalls and stray dogs and American shoppers looking to get the best deals on Nike straight from the sweatshops so they don’t have to pay the mark-ups back home, trying to find them fast enough so they don’t have to witness the horrific reality that is Bangkok too long before they try to wiggle their McDonalds, Carl's Junior love handled bodies back to the safety of the shiny, golden out-of-place Park Hotel on Sukhumvit 22. “It’s such a shame” is a phrase I’ll hear out of too many of them, staring, gawking, snapping photos but refusing to drop a couple baht in the cans and hats of visibly starving beggars.

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