Hong Kong’s now famous skyline, the world’s best.
Shot from outside of the Star Ferry Pier, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

• Leave a comment in the box below
• Read why Hong Kong is a Shopper’s Paradise 
• See other photos from my arrival in Hong Kong (and Beijing)
• Marching for Democracy in China (and what I learned)

First, watch it to see just how good I am at karaoke (as a matter of fact, I’m not shy to say, that the first time I saw this video I mistakenly, thought The Beatles WERE actually there.)

Second, and more importantly, pay attention to the karaoke music video at the end of the film. Karaoke music videos in Asia are hilarious. They either can’t afford or choose not to buy the rights to the actual music video or there is no music video, so they substitute extremely low-budget videos set to famous pop songs, and the videos often don’t have anything to do with the song or make any sense for that matter. I find the “music video” for La Bamba absolutely hilarious.

Click on the image below to see the video on link directly to it by clicking here.

Well, in Asia, on the other side of the world, where everything is opposite—including the direction the water swirls in the toilet—there’s a bit of a difference in what is required to be considered “The King of Karaoke.” In Asia, where they take their karaoke very seriously, it’s not a funny thing you do at a birthday party or drunk at the bar with your friends, its practically a religion. From Japan to Sri Lanka it becomes apparent how serious they are when you see the multiple storied karaoke bars with hundreds of private rooms with large screen TVs, Dolby surround speaker systems, and wireless mics.

Where I come from, the more terrible of a singer you are—that is to say the louder, more obnoxious and more off key—the more you are celebrated by the masses as a karaoke champion (which is also the reason the “masses” are usually drunk off their gourds while listening to karaoke).

Well, in Asia, unbenounced to me, the rules of karaoke are different and to be the ‘King of Karaoke’ you—surprisingly—have to actually be able to sing. From the streets of Kyoto to the alleys of Shanghai to the Yurt tents of middle Asia, kids flood the karaoke bars each night and sing like angels to the tunes of Avril Lavigne Rain, Bon Jovi, Fai Wong, and Sammi Cheung among others—and in most cases you’d believe the pop stars where actually there.

Knowing all this did not stop me, my family, and a half dozen friends from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and America from visiting Neway Karaoke Club in Mong Kok (Hong Kong). What do you sing when you have a 58-year old American couple who can’t read Chinese, a few dozen 20-ish Mainland Chinese grad students who speak English as a 2nd language, a guy from Cameroon, and a handful of American-raised twenty-somethings?

The Beatles, of course.

So between choruses of ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Love Me Do’ we sipped on Carlsberg, iced milk tea, and Coke’s and sang, danced and laughed our way through five hours of karaoke. As the clock rolled passed 4am, my parent’s decided it was time to head back to the hotel. They said they stayed out so late (early) because they were having so much fun, but actually I think they couldn’t get enough of The King of Karaoke.

• Leave a comment in the box below.
• See the short video What It’s Like In A Karaoke Bar in Hong Kong
• Read a story about pop stars, terrorist threats, and the hope of a nation in Nepal

“Meet me at the corner of Temple and Tai Chee Lo Street, near the taxi stand,” the voice on the other end of the mobile phone said in Chinese, as we wandered the narrow streets of Mong Kok, the literal beating heart of Hong Kong’s lively local youth shopping and night scene. Dingy, cramped Chinese restaurants overflow with diners who are sitting in front of tacky laminated tables on plastic chairs resembling overturned buckets. Next door, haphazardly arranged shops are filled with towering mounts of jeans, t-shirts, shoes, and hand bags, all of which were dropped shipped directly from the tens of thousands of smoke-vomiting factories just across the border in Mainland China in the mega-industrial complex stretching from Shenzhen to Guangzhou and further north—an area whose pollution is so bad that often the day’s noon sun may be as fiery-orange as if it were sunset.

If you’re in the market for dirt-cheap clothes ($2 t-shirts, $5 jeans), cheap hand bags, scarves, watches, and Chinese trinkets (jade Buddhas, Chairman Mao figurines, designer chopsticks) then Mong Kok is a shopper’s paradise. Actually, if you’re into authentic Dulce and Gibbona bags, Prada threads, or any of the myriad of other global “she-she-fu-fu” fashion brands, then Hong Kong is also for you. If shopping is your passion, Hong Kong is a must see destination with, on one end, more Louis Vuitton shops then Paris and, on the other end, more cheap t-shirts, designer look-a-likes, and cut-rate plastic tennis shoes than a Walmart discount rack. If you can’t find it in Hong Kong, you probably can’t find it anywhere. The entire city is overrun with the hyper-air conditioned Disneyfied shopping malls of the West, as well as the open-air, arbitrarily priced, buyer-beware markets that are found in the rest of the world—all stocked with every conceivable thing you might want to buy: cameras, clothes, shoes, bags, computers, electronics, appliances, antiques, fruit, meat, candy, home furnishings, and—in the case of our search that day—pirated designer hand bags.

The illegally produced ‘pirated’ products trade, once quite synonymous with the very name “Hong Kong” has long since been cleaned up—well, mostly. Walking down the street you won’t find a $10 Tommy Hilfiger handbag just sitting in a shop window, though you might still find a Tonny Hilfinger bag for $8. You won’t see shop keepers out in the open flaunting blatant disregard for the trademark and copyright laws of the West, but if you know where to look you may still be able to find hidden shops selling, among other things, “factory excess.” (That is to say, a factory was contracted to make 100,000 Ralph Lauren watches and, after sending the initial shipment off to Ralph Lauren stores around the world, the factory, “accidentally” turned the machines back on and made 20,000 more of the same watches.) In the hands of such “pirate” shopkeepers these $2000 watches can sell for as little as $50. Are they the real thing? Yes, just not through the proper channels. Is Ralph getting his piece of the profit? I bet not.

All of this is what had my friend Justin and I in search of a set of Louis Vuitton designer bags for his mom and sister. His mom had, in an effort to guide her son with no fashion sense, printed pictures of the bags she had in mind, and Justin and I, with photos in hand, asked a friend to take us to see a woman she knew that said could help us.

At the prescribed time, in the prescribed manner, we met the woman (whose name I never caught) at the designated corner near the taxi stand. She was a short, stout Chinese woman, whose face showed the ware of years raising a child or two while running a street market shop through Hong Kong’s turbulence economy of the last decade. She had a very honest face and wore a white blouse with a blue flower print. She led us through narrow twisting alleys, behind noodle shops, through crowds, and up a flight of stairs to a building, I’m still not 100% sure I could ever find it again (that was probably the point). It was a typical Hong Kong residential building, with floors upon floors piled on top of each other up to the sky, dirt stained staircases with a sardine can elevator that had a rickety old gate that stuck a bit when you tried to close it. The building was entirely residential, with kids running up the stairs, elderly folks lugging bags of groceries to their 22nd floor apartment, and the distinct smell of ginger and fish sauce that typically wafts around nearly every Chinese kitchen.

The woman took us to the door of a small apartment on an upper floor, the kind that in Hong Kong often holds a family of 8 or more—about 400 square feet in size—and everything looked ordinary until she unlocked and pushed opened the front door to reveal that the typical family couch, television, dining table, and every common apartment amenity, had been removed and replaced with rows and rows of cheap pine wood shelves stocked with every conceivable designer brand handbag, purse and watch imaginable. She closed and locked the dead bolt after we entered and we just stood there and stared for a few moments taking in the scene. The room smelled of new plastic and leather and gave the distinct impression of freshness, just like when you sit in a new car. She spoke no English and not knowing where to begin we handed the photos of the bags to the woman. She nodded, headed directly to a shelf across the room and within a minute returned with the exact bag in photo #1. She then looked at the second photo and without hesitation said in Chinese, “This is last year’s model? Do you want this year’s model? It just came out two weeks ago.” We blinked, stunned. “Um, ask her what the difference is?” Justin said to my Chinese friend who was translating. “She says the new model has white straps, the old one has brown straps.” She quickly produced both bags for us to compare.

In the end, we left with bag #1 and the new model of bag #2. What’s even more stunning is the woman not only had exact duplicates of the bags, designer price tags and all, but after we paid the equivalent of $90 for both bags (the “real” bags retail for something like $500 a piece), the woman kindly wrapped the purchases in authentic Louis Vuitton shopping bags. After our purchase, she led us back downstairs, past the boisterous children, past the elderly Chinese couple I could see watching Chinese soap operas in their living room, and through the pungent odor of ginger and fish sauce.

In a few months, if we ever found our way back, which is probably not even possible, we’d find that her bag “shop” had moved—usually once every few months—and finding her again might not even be possible. But, that would be ok, because a group of even more daring sellers set up small stands throughout Mong Kok on the side of the street with nothing more than copies of the latest Louis Vuitton, Rolex, and Omega catalogues yelling at passing tourists, “nice watches!?” You simply walk up, point at the watch you want, negotiate a price, and wait 15 minutes while they run up past the children, past the elderly couple, through the ginger and fish sauce aroma and back down with your newly purchased “factory excess.”

As we headed home (two grown men with two designer ladies handbags) we walked past a street hawker holding plastic sleeves of DVD’s he was selling for $4 a piece. On top of the pile sat a copy of the new Superman Movie, one month before it was slated to hit theaters…

Hong Kong is a shopper’s paradise.

In the same noodle shops, karaoke bars, pubs, bus stops and skyscrapers, embarrassment arises when I can not name a single pop star from my new friend(s) country. Here…you try…name a Japanese movie star a la Tom Cruise, a Chinese singer a la Madonna, or a Hong Kong socialite a la Paris Hilton?

Right, me neither.

With the possible exception of Jackie Chan (who most Hong Kong people have a sort of love-hate relationship with) and Yo Yo Ma (who is actually French-born Chinese, I think) most Americans can not name a famous Chinese movie star or musician.
I decided I needed to fix this, at least for myself. So, I joined a few Hong Kong friends to see ‘Sammi’ live in concert.

While I understood exactly one song, You’ve Got A Friend In Me—the only song in English—I was treated to a concert that was more akin to a Broadway musical than any concert I’ve ever seen in the US. Sure there was music, audience sing-alongs, and guest appearances (including MC Yan, the guy attributed with bringing hip hop to Hong Kong….Hey Snoop Dogg, you think rhyming English is hard, try rhyming a language that has 9 tones that, if pronounced incorrectly, distinctly change the meaning of the word), but the crazy costumes (”crazy” does not quite capture the essence of her costumes), flying staging, pyrotechnics, and lighting put even a U2 show to shame.

I’ve included some photos for you to check this stuff out, keep in mind on the other side of the camera there were about 12,000 screaming, singing, and fainting Hong Kong fans.

Next time you’re in China, I’d put a Sammi concert on your to do list, fo’ shizzle.

Where I come from in America, licking a stamp is so common it is pretty much a cliche, and most Americans have some childhood memories involving stamp licking (Mine happening when I was about 12 and had to lick 500 stamps for an event at my church and there was so much glue on my tongue by the end of the task, that I licked a hotdog and it stuck). On the other side of the world in Hong Kong, where most days things seem very similar to life in America, I sometimes forget that the smallest cultural differences are actually often the most problematic.

I asked my local friend Catherine to take me to a post office to mail a couple post cards and a parcel, and upon arriving, I asked the postal clerk for eight postcard stamps. He counted them out and passed them my way, and as he weighed my parcel, I absent-mindedly picked-up a stamp, brought it up to my mouth, and licked it…

As the postal clerk glanced up and saw what I was doing, my action was met with a paniced look of shock. Startled he pushed his chair back from the counter, gasped for air, and as politely as a man who had just had his pants pulled down on live television, he said, “Sir….sirr….um….there is ah, ah, water over there….,” pointing to a little moistened sponge that sat on the counter.

“Huh?” I looked up still unaware of my social faux pas. As I paused with the second half-licked stamp hanging from my tongue, I glanced over at my friend Catherine whose face had the unmistakable look of horror, disgust and shock, as if she had just watched me eat a pile of steaming, live cockroaches. “U…use….this….” she stammered, as she pointed at the same moistened sponge and took a step backwards.

You see in Hong Kong, a city that still has scars from the SARS and Avian flu epidemics—and with a long, sordid history with food sanitation and health—there is a much higher level of caution towards germs and dirt in ways I’ve never considered at home in the US (For example, everyone uses straws to drink out of cans of Coke and bottles of juice because who knows where top of the can has been, and it is a common cultural practice to re-wash the dishes you get at a restaurant right at the table, upon first arriving and before using). By licking the stamps, I was breaking a minor but significant cultural norm, that gave the postal worker a partial heart attack and a reason to nearly lock down the post office and quarantine me, my stamp, and my post cards.

As the second stamp cleared my tongue, I still had yet to recognize what I had done, and as I followed the motion of his hand pointing towards the wet sponge on his counter, I said, “Oh, ok, thanks,” and after a short pause I proceeded to press the half-licked stamp right onto his wet sponge….

For the story’s sake I wish I could say I was then arrested, quarantined, deported, and the post office was burned to the ground—but unfortunately (or fortunately) for me I didn’t really realize what I had done until I walked out of the post office—but I imagine the postal worker, incinerated his sponge, quit his job, and became a monk—all because I was just trying to send a letter home to my mom.

So, I put on my best fitting running shoes, protective long pants, and of course, grabbed my camera before heading out of the door.

Then, on the way there, I stopped by Starbucks and grabbed a chai tea…venti size.

“Huh?,” you remind me, “Andy, you can’t light a chai tea on fire and throw it through a storefront window!?”

+ + +

Chinese-American relations have been on shaky ground for quite some time. In the last decade alone: an American military plane crash lands while spying on China, all ends well but the Chinese threaten to keep the plane; Americans love the “low prices” of their Chinese-manufactured goods, but then turn a blind eye when sweatshops are discovered; America need China to negotiate with North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program and everyone is buddy-buddy,but then tainted Chinese toothpaste shows up in American consumer’s bathrooms, spurring threats of US Congressional trade sanctions.

Asked by Pew Researchers in February 2006 whether they viewed China’s emergence as a world power as a “major threat, minor threat, or not a threat to the well being of the United States,” 47% of Americans saw it as a major threat, while 34% called it a minor threat (that would mean 84% of American see China as a ‘threat,’ either minor or major).

“How can the people of China support an oppressive authoritarian communist government (with an emphasis on the word ‘communist’) that doesn’t even let their people read Wikipedia!?” asks an American.

“Isn’t it hypocritical for America to mettle in our country over isolated ‘human rights violations’ that we ARE trying to clean up, when they’ve just made a total mess out of The Middle East against the wishes of the rest of the world!?” asks a Chinese.

The reality of it all is that things are a bit different then most seem to perceive based on what I’ve seen, and my experience during the pro-democracy march helps to begin to illustrate this (And my hope is that my upcoming posts about my travels in China will help me share my new found perspective on this relationship).

You see in the end its much more complicated than, ‘the kung fu masters, oppressed by the communists’ versus ‘the freedom-loving Americans’ (as many Americans often see it). And its much more than the ‘hip-hop wearing American’s with cool movies and TV, power-mungering around the world’ (as many Chinese often see it). Things on either side of the Pacific are a little bit different than most perceive.

Let’s start with Hong Kong.

As it turns out, the pro-democracy march I speak of was held July 1, 2007 in Hong Kong. Hong Kong, though officially part of China, is not really like the rest of China—but it IS China. It developed for 150 years on its own as a British colony before being handed back to the Chinese government on July 1, 1997 (10 years ago), with the requirement that the Chinese Communist Party make no changes to the laws for 50 years. (The most embarrassing thing about being an American here is that huge number of Americans who believe that Hong Kong is in Japan?….including the Oscars.)

So despite what you hear about China, Hong Kong is a bastion of freedom, consumerism, internationalism, Chinese culture, wealth, air conditioning, busy streets, sleepy cafes, wide beaches, tall skyscrapers and, often contrary to the general intuition of those who have never visited, it is home to:

• The world’s freest economy (the US is tied for third)
• The world’s most efficient subway system
• The world’s best airport (as voted in passenger surveys)
• One of the lowest tax rates of any developed country (if it were a country), at a flat rate of 15% (the US ranges from 25%-39%).
• The above mentioned tax rate with a respectable per capita income of $27,466 USD (as opposed to Mainland China’s $2,001USD and America’s $44,190 USD)
• The world’s best shopping (more Louis Viton stores than Paris, France, plus all the cheap goods from China you could ever want)
• 1.3 mobile phones/person (The US is at .74.), with one of the world’s most advanced cell phone networks
• Unfiltered internet, unlike Mainland China (so everyone can read Wikipedia, and does)
• Reportedly, the most Rolls Royce’s per capita.

Not exactly the Hong Kong you were thinking of, eh? Hong Kong has all of this, yet the citizens are not allowed to:

• Vote
• Assemble without a permit (though the law grants ‘the right to assembly,’ in theory it can be limited by the permit process, though the freedom to assemble is generally respected)

The debate to pass “universal suffrage” (i.e. one person, one vote) in Hong Kong is a complicated, long running debate, and may never find an end—right now the legislature is elected by a sort of representative democracy in which representatives of different sectors of society vote on behalf of their sector for the legislature and the head of the government. (On its surface it seems pretty fair, but there is a lot of accusations of fixing by China’s Central Government in the process.)

So Hong Konger’s have low taxes, great subways, and lots of Rolls Royces, but they can’t vote and are discouraged from mass assembly.

+ + +

All this is what had me walking down Hennessy Road on July 1st, 2007 in Hong Kong, with an empty Starbucks cup and a camera, not quite sure what I was about to see.

What I did see was between 25,000-50,000 people (depending on who you ask) of all sorts—Chinese, British, French, German, American, Filipino, young, old, fat and skinny–all marching in a four hour long protest (it was actually more of a parade than a protest) across Hong Kong Island to the government’s main offices.

What struck me most about it was that not everyone was chanting and screaming for ‘universal suffrage’—as the protest organizers had promised. Sure they had that in mind, but they also had a hundred other causes as well, from stopping “genocide” in China, to the freeing of Tibet, to domestic workers rights, to putting an end to the ill-treatment of Hong Kong’s orphaned pet population (”Hong Kong’s should adopt a ‘No-kill policy’ to pet over-population,” declared one sign). The signs were as varied as the faces of the people and though it was, at its heart, a pro-democracy march (calling for the government to give all Hong Konger’s a vote), it was really a march for much more—and I guess, that’s the point of democracy: anyone can stand up and fight for whatever they want and in any way they choose. This is a right that has not always been respected in Hong Kong’s long history, and maybe something that some of my American friends take for granted.

But coming from a small, liberal, hippie, protest-oriented town in middle America (Iowa City), a town known as the home of the university that first admitted men and woman on an equal basis, one of the first towns to have fair housing laws to allow African-Americans affordable housing, and most recently a key campus in the worldwide “Students Against Sweatshops” movement, I’ve seen a protest or two, and know how to exercise my right to assemble. The protesters in Iowa have their own causes too: “Farmers for Fair Trade Coffee,” “Iowans for Peace in Israel,” or one of my all-time favorites “Students Against Students Against Sweatshops.” In the end, everyone has their own cause and they stand up for what they want—-and in a free society, that’s the point, right?.

In the end, maybe the scenes (both in Hong Kong and Iowa) were summed up by two Europeans I caught rigging up hand-made signs on a curb as I walked across Hong Kong. Wide smiles crossed their faces as they chuckled and stretched long strips of grey duct tape on the back of a piece of ripped cardboard, taped to a bent broom pole. As they tossed the tape roll aside, exchanged glances, laughed a bit, and ran into the melee of 50,000 protestors, I was just able to make out what their sign said: Hastily written in plain black marker across their ragged piece of cardboard were the words, “Down With Evil.”

And maybe that sums up the experience best, I think we’re all against evil, however we define it, but I guess that’s also where the problem lies too, because what we may think is ‘evil,’ might actually turn out to be a lot more like us then we might at first have imagined.

See more photos from the march in my Flickr account by clicking here.

What you can do now:

• Leave a comment on this post.

• See more of Andy’s photos from the Pro-Democracy March in my Flickr account.

• Read about Andy’s first impressions after first arriving in Hong Kong last August and Surprise #1 and Surprise #2 on my first day out of America.

• Read about Hong Kong, Japan and The Academy Awards.

• See some of Andy’s photos of Hong Kong Places

For those interested in learning more on the subject, there is a great post today on Learning Cantonese—-a blog by National Geographic Traveler columnist and travel writer Daisann McLane. In her post she talkes about some of the best English names her and her friends have come across including “Gucci,” “Sincerely” and “Alien.” (”Smacker” is still my favorite though.) She takes a much deeper dive into the subject than I and begins to get at the root of the motivations of why someone might choose these names that so many non-Chinese perceive as a “bit” strange. (For those non-Hong Kong based readers who jump to this link “Long Hair” is a local political activist and legislator operating in the socialist revolutionary realm of Che Guevara, and he is about as anti-establishment as they come in Hong Kong. Donald Tsang, on the other hand, is the establishment, and his recent “re-election” as the head of the Hong Kong Government, as it is commonly know, occured only because of the “blessing” by the powers that be in Beijing.)

Learning Cantonese is quickly become one of my favorite travel related blogs, as Daisaan uses Cantonese—the mother language of Hong Kong—to frame her stories of life in Hong Kong and her insights into culture—all with a well developed storytelling style and a great wit. If you want to learn and understand more about Hong Kong, this is a good blog to bookmark.

The Hong Kong film that The Departed was based on is Infernal Affairs (2001) staring Hong Kong mega-star Andy Lau (no relation to me) and an ensemble cast, and “based on” should actually be “a remake,” because Scorsese’s version follows nearly the same script. I’d suggest you stop by your local video store, library or Net Flix account and check out Infernal Affairs, because, in my opinion, it is actually better than Scorsese’s version, with a better ending. (with all due respect to Marty). And I would suggest “global” Hollywood, pick up an atlas on the way to the bank. I am not trying to be rude, I’m just trying to remind us all what travel has taught me this far on my trip—we all need to spend a little more time on our geography.

The plane touched down in Beijing, a quick three hour hop for Hong Kong. Four days earlier, my traveling partner Erick had come all the way from Cedar Rapids, Iowa for a few days in Hong Kong. We had dined on steaming plates of seafood, watched the bustling city teaming with throngs (and throngs) of hard working Hong Kong people from high atop “The Peak,” rode trolleys through the crowded neon-lit streets below, drank Captain and Cokes on the 40th floor of a skyscraper overlooking Victoria Harbor, played in the night markets overflowing with cheap clothes, fake designer watches, and little jade Buddhas, and danced, drank, and sang our way through Christmas in a crowded night club until early the next morning.  I’ve posted some photos on my Flickr photo stream and they are also below:

Photo: Erick arrived from Iowa for four packed days of taking in Hong Kong. First stop, Maxim’s for Dim Sum. (you’ll note the famous chicken feet on the plate right above the green things, to the right of the green things deep fried squid tentacles. yum)

* * *

We exited the plane, excited and a bit nervous, the plan was to spend two days in Beijing, then onward to Tokyo and the land of the Rising Sun.

We didn’t know anyone in Beijing, I spoke about 100 words of Chinese (not well or necessarily in the right order), and we had no specific plans, we only knew that we were to meet some friends of a friend, who said they could help us get around (all we knew about these people were they were young, Chinese, they spokes some English, and they went by the names “Ice” and “Tool”).

We slipped off the plane, into the airport, through the long lines at immigration and hustled our heavy packs off the luggage carousel (Erick’s backpack bursting with the acquisitions of his buying escapades in the ‘shopping capital of the world,’ Hong Kong). After we hoisted and strapped on our heavy packs, we headed toward the airport exit. Erick turned to me and ask “So, what now?”

“Well,” I said jokingly, “now all we have to do is find an English speaking taxi driver.”

I smiled and just as I looked up, a man stepped in front of us. “Taxi! You need taxi?” he said. Taken so off guard by his abruptness and his English, we didn’t respond immediately and had only barely half-nodded, when he grabbed Erick’s luggage and started to whisk us away to what we thought was a taxi line, only to find we were about to learn our first major lesson on travel in China: “don’t say ‘yes’ to a con man.”

(Continued in Tricked in Beijing)

So, the point of the story is: It worked. (Though any hope on that Starbucks endeavor, clearly has failed.)

One of the most difficult things for me so far in traveling is dealing with the language barriers at times, and it has been fortunate for me that English is the langua franca of the world. And I’ve come to realize how essential knowing English is to being able to operate globally. For example, in Hong Kong, you can always count on an English speaker maning the counter at Starbucks, cause how in the world do you say “venti drip vanilla double soy espresso macchiato with room con pana” in Chinese? (actually I don’t even know what I just said in English?)

Cantonese is the main language spoken here in Southern China, though English is very prevalent in Hong Kong (all street signs, subway info, most shops, and many menus are in English) so it hasn’t much prevented exploring the city, though my spoken English has had to be simplified a bit. This leads to my attempt to learn Cantonese and Mandarin, an endeavor which has proved to be quite difficult. Chinese (and its numerous dialects) is based on a tonal system, which means that the same word, depending on if your voice rises, falls, stays level, etc, as you say it, can mean entirely different things.

For example, the word in Mandarin for the number “four,” (pronounced like “si” with your voice falling as you say it), if mispronounced (as “si,” with a tone that goes down and comes back up) can instead mean, death. This of course means, that in a restaurant when flirting with the cute waitress and attempting to give her your phone number, you may instead, inadvertently, tell her to die—–which is frankly, a slightly awkward social situation to put yourself in (trust me).

Interestingly this also makes 4 an unlucky number in China, as are many numbers that end in 4, which, if also said incorrectly, can sound close to some other not so lucky phrases including: 14 (’must die’) and 24 (’easy to die’). This leads to people avoiding the number 4 when giving gifts, the removal of the fourth floor in many buildings (not all too different than American’s removal of the 13 floor), and incredibly cheap prices on mobile phone numbers involving multiple number 4’s. (9461 4444 for example). Though in reverse, mobile numbers, license plates and addresses containing lucky numbers like 8 are often auctioned off for thousands of dollars. So when speaking Chinese, it is very important to pay attention to your tones, which has been very difficult for me (and I imagine most people whose 1st language is not so tonal), and I have struggled greatly. But I am reminded that Chinese is not the most difficult language in the world, one of which I recently learned more about from a friend.

From an email from my friend Eric McDermott, who is living in Wema, South Africa and who is learning the local language of siSwati (aka Swazi or Swati) and some Zulu, which involves “clicks” among other sounds. He writes:

“To make the sound of the letter c in siSwati, you stick your tongue to the top of your mouth and then release it (kind of like the sound my Grandpa Burke would make if he was shaking his head back and forth in response to something really unfortunate happening). Zulu has the same c but also has x and q. The q is the clicking sound made by popping your tongue off the top of your mouth (that’d be what most people get from watching [the movie] The Gods Must Be Crazy – which I watched with my first family.)The x is more similar to the sound you might make to get a horse to move faster- but with more of a click to it. The ‘hle’ sound is similar to how you would pronounce an s in Spain. ‘th’ and ‘ph’ are just like p or t. All of these sounds are reasonably simple (and I like the fact that I can at least properly execute the sound on its own, since I can’t with the double-r in Spanish), but put one or two of them in the middle of a word and it gets trickier…”

Thus, if I were to order a ‘venti drip vanilla double soy espresso macchiato with room con pana’ in a Chinese owned Starbucks in Wema, South Africa, it might be easier to just ask for the #4, or, um, order a water.

Truly the Gods must be crazy.

(If you have your own language story to share, send it my way or post in the comment section below.)

[Note: The photos on the NoBoundaries website are mirrored on my Flickr Website (www.flickr.com/photos/andystoll), so you can also see them there as well. As time allows I am geotagging the photos, which allows you to view where they were taken on a world map. (Pretty cool I think.) There is also a static link to the geo-tagged photo map under the "Map" button on the main menu. Please leave comments!]

Today I’ve posted a set of photos called Hong Kong: Places, and its meant to help you see what Hong Kong feels like.

As you’ll see Hong Kong truly is a collision of East and West, of modern skyscrapers mixed with open air food markets and peppered with traditional Chinese temples and shrines. Hong Kong isn’t all hustle and bustle, big city either, its got long beautiful beaches, massive forest reserves, and quite little harbors. In the coming weeks I’m going to experiment with some other formats (still photos over live sound, video from a little hand-held Canon point-and-shoot digital still camera, and probably some full-out video too.) Let me know what you think or if you have any ideas, and enjoy the first photos of Hong Kong. Tomorrow, I’ll post all the photos from the sideshow in a still photo gallery so you can look at them a bit slower and I’ll include captions! All the photos can be seen in the photo gallery called Hong Kong: Places.

Click HERE to view the video.

Thanks to John over at audihertz and radiozoom for the plug on your site, yes, you’ve spurred me into action buddy. John is a long time blogger, and one of the first podcasters (he was podcasting before podcasting was cool, possibly before it was a word?). You really should check out his site, if you want to see how this blogging and podcasting stuff is supposed to be done. John and I go way back, our most notorious collaboration was with Christopher Linn, when we produced the short-running radio show The Frequency Brunch on KRUI 89.7 FM in Iowa City. The show featured all sorts of madness, with a ton of guests including They Might Be Giants, John Freyer (a guy who sold his entire life on eBay), and a college student who bought a car with $40,000 cash in $2 bills, among others. ($2 Larry, please take a bow).

Having struggled for the past few days to shift my internal time clock half a day, I have found it has made it difficult to do just about anything that requires extensive concentration—though my state is very useful in creating really funny stories of the “lost in translation” sort. Having wandered blurry-eyed into the orientation program for my masters program at The City University of Hong Kong (After a bit of maneuvering after arriving here, it turns out I will enroll in a Master’s Program for the next 9 months, more on that later…), I was invited by a group of local classmates to a lunch of the traditional Cantonese variety: dim sum. Dim sum is more a style of eating then a particular type of food, its closest culinary relative, through an American lens, is probably a Mediterranean tapas meal, like that of one of my favorite restaurant, Devotay in Iowa City (USA) (Iowa Citians should note, Devotay has a new web address at devotay.net; no longer devotay.com)
Being 1 of 2 foreign students and a Dim Sum virgin, there was much curiosity by the other students in seeing if I could a) use chop sticks and b) would eat what was put in front of me. Squid, cow intestines, fish balls, shrimp dumplings, pork buns, and other tasty treats came my way and I tried them without hesitation—all placed in my bowl by my eager new friends in a motherly “here eat this…” sort of way. (Being in this new country makes me feel like a four-year old at times, unable to express myself, unable to understand what is going on around me, lost if not for a guiding hand, and reliant on the kindness of others to sometimes do the simplest things (“how the ‘hell’ do you use a squat toilet?”)

Anyway, one of my classmates, with a slightly knowing grin, stuck a chicken foot in my bowl and said, “try this…” probably knowing very well that most of those outside of Asia and Africa rarely dine on this particular part of the chicken. I felt the amused glances of the locals as I cautiously stuck the entire poultry paw into my mouth. I looked up to see that everyone was watching for my reaction. I chewed. They watched. I chewed some more. They watched. Slowly grins began to emerge, though I didn’t feel that my facial expression had changed much. I kept chewing. They started to giggle. After checking to make sure my I didn’t have a dab of chicken foot sauce on my chin, I asked, “ok, what’s so funny.” Finally, one of them leaned in and ask, “Are you going to spit out the bones?” Laughter broke out around the table.

You see, here is a perfect example of that “East Meets West” thing, dangerously coupled with new foods. To my Chinese friends: in America it is not really acceptable to spit out bones or other pieces of food while eating, and is usually done about as discreetly as Chinese people use toothpicks (veiled under a hand or napkin). On the other hand, to my American friends: it is extremely normal to spit out bones here directly onto the tablecloth (no hands, napkins, or tactful head turns needed). Oh, and no one had chosen to inform me that there were bones that required “discarding” so I had, in fact, consumed the entire thing. (This would be the American equivalent of giving someone an artichoke, only to be given back an empty plate.”). Though this experience hasn’t given me cold feet on eating the myriad of new food, it will lead me to be a bit more cautious when eating cold feet next time.

This, I’m certain, is only the beginning of culinary tales of comedy.

…no one seemed to notice.

What I learned my first night and subsequently since my arrival is that when you take a Japanese American nurse and a German American social worker (both of Midwestern American origins), marry them in the 1970’s and ask them to have a child. This first child—when he, at the age of 27, moves to China—will find that everyone thinks he is Chinese. This has come as a surprising answer to the many race related question I had thought about since confirming 10 months earlier that I would move as a Japanese-American person to China. My concerns arising out of the fact that the Japanese and the Chinese have a very long complicated love-hate history stretching back thousands of years (the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) is still fresh in the memories of much of the older generations here in Hong Kong when the Japanese invades major parts of China). I was concerned about which half of the Japanese-American blend they’d choose to see, not whether or not they would see see neither side.

Though some may dismiss my worries as overly guarded, they are not when you are someone whose identity created by others has always revolved around how you are “seen.” In America, especially in the prominently Caucasian Midwest, I stick out everywhere I go. The frequent looks and questioning micro-glances have followed me around for as long as I know. As a child it often bothered me, and all I wanted was to look like “everyone else.” As I grew and matured, I began to see my often unclassifiable race as an asset, and have since prided myself as a guy who is easy to find in a crowd, explaining to new acquaintances when meeting in coffee shops that I’ll be, “the tall Asian guy in khakis.” I have never taken the looks and glances as insulting, but as a confirmation of being different, distinguishable, and memorable.

But here I am a foreigner in a foreign land, unable to speak the language, unknowledgeable of its history, new to its culture, naive to its nuances, and as different as I am, for the first time in my life, I looked just like everyone else.

Alone in a crowded restaurant off Man Fuk Road in the district of Kowloon, Hong Kong, I couldn’t do much to suppress the smirk that had gently risen on my face over what was a scene that seemed almost too contrived to be real.

The phrase that is often pasted on the multitudes of Hong Kong marketing materials, so overused it almost becomes meaningless, is Hong Kong, “Where East Meets West.” This idiom played out last night so perfectly that any group of Hong Kong marketers would be clinking glasses over dim sum for so successfully summing up in four words my first night in this “foreign” land.

Three hours earlier, I had landed at the airport in Hong Kong, the first planned international stop on this Midwestern American boy’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe. I headed to my hostel, my home for the next few days and dropped off my life—contained in a single backpack (having sold off, given away, and abandoned nearly 95% of the rest of my possessions, somewhere between Iowa City and San Francisco, a rather cathartic process I highly recommend). I headed out to explore the streets, but needed to eat, since the 13 hour plane flight had surprisingly done little to nourish me with delicious food of either Western or Eastern origins.

Hong Kong seems to present itself as an eater’s heaven, with restaurants lining every road including Russian vodka bars, Italian pasta shops, noodles houses, KFC’s, and traditional Chinese eateries serving the cuisines of nearly all of the Chinese provinces. Since my grasp of the Chinese language and its associated signage is…well…non-existent, I headed to the cleanest looking restaurant with an English sign (The Cheer-o Cafe), figuring if their name was in English, well, maybe the menu would be too. (I have yet to determine what percentage of the population here actually speaks English, since by the sound of it, though English is an official language, it is not THE official language (which is Cantonese, a dialect found mainly in Southern China (including Hong Kong) and Southern California.)

Anyway, back to John Denver. Walking in I was directed to a seat in the back of the small dining room adored with Chinese lanterns, Heinz Ketchup bottles, Chinese tea pots, pictures of Elvis, chop stick holders, photos of Humphrey Bogart, and small square café style tables. (Try to build that picture in your mind.)

It was 10:00 pm in Hong Kong (though it was 9:00 am in my head), busy waiters in orange and white-stripped long sleeved shirts (possibly an homage to the A&W server of yesteryear, or not) shuffled briskly between the tightly packed tables, serving up plates of udon noodles (Japanese noodles. “烏冬” in Chinese), congee (the Chinese equivalent of oatmeal, “粥” in Chinese), and chicken fried steak (American cafeteria style, or is it Chinese, or is it..?).

A group of young children all around the ages of 6 or 7 recklessly ran around the front area of the restaurant, laughing, giggling, and crashing into each other—reminding me that children, regardless of their country of origins, are, at heart, the same. Two young boys used their fingers to paint Chinese characters in the condensation that had formed on the glass of the front windows next to the air conditioning–the vent blasting exceptionally cold air against the window that held back the wet, soggy, humid, 95 degree (Fahrenheit) air that densely fills the streets of Hong Kong. My only hope is that the character stood for “fart” or something equally juvenile and entertaining.

I ordered dinner and as the clocked rolled past the hour, the night’s entertainer stepped onto (or should I say stepped over) the tiny ill-conceived stage wedged in front of the window of the Cheer-o Cafe. The lanky Chinese guy with a wide grin wore a bright aqua-green polo shirt and he slipped himself onto a short stool on stage—his black hair brushed hurriedly to the side of his pale white face. An electronic keyboard, a microphone, and an acoustic guitar sat on stage. He picked up the latter, struck a chord, and the music began with a seemingly familiar guitar rift. Just as I connected the melody to the words, he began signing in heavily accented English,

“All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go…I’m standing here outside your door.”

7,000 miles, 3 years of planning, 13 vaccinations, 11 beds in 4 weeks, all to get literally to the other side of the world and my first night here I am greeted not by the words of Budda or one of the 6 million strangers who call Hong Kong home, but by the pining words of John Denver…

So kiss me and smile for me, tell me that you’ll wait for me.
Cause I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when Ill be back again…”

I smirked. Somehow John Denver had come (I assume on a plane, a, ah, jet plane) around the world to welcome me to China. That was one of two surprises of the day. (More on the other in Part 2)

The rest of the meal was peppered with a sampling of covers of some of the greatest and some of the most notoriously bad American pop songs of all time, played out on a little plastic Casio keyboard, in a sometimes Karaoke-esk voice, with a heavy Chinese intonation.

If you had traveled those 7,000 miles, given up a comfortable life at home, and sold your entire life on eBay, all on a whim to see the world… when faced with this situation, you might find these lyrics as a cute little way to personify some of your feelings–the strange blend of excitement, nervousness, delight, and anxiety. The lyrics of Billy Joel, Andrew Loyd Webber, The Beatles, and Roy Orbison could so easily serve to indirectly and lyrically represent the many questions you may have…Was this trip a good idea? Where will I go? What will I find? Will I miss home? Will I survive? Can I make friends with all of these strange people? Yes, the lyrics might help to personify those things, but that would be too easy and, well, cliché. And we all know rule #1.

So instead, suffice it to say: I finished off my first meal in Hong Kong, set down my chop sticks, dropped some newly acquired Hong Kong money on the table, wiped my mouth, and headed to the door to go explore China, my new home for the next year or so.
As I stood up, the singer, whose name I never caught, started in on some Bob Dylan,

“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind….”

I slipped past the rambunctious group of children and as the door closed behind me, I noticed one of the kids was wearing a shirt with yellow English writing on a gold background that simply read, “World Without Strangers.”

I looked at him, smiled, and slid out the door into the humid Hong Kong night.

Hmm, I wonder if John Denver wrote that one…

Follow up: To help you picture this scene, and proving that you can find ANYTHING on the internet, our friends at YouTube.com are sporting a video of a different, yet equally compelling, set of Hong Kong rock musicians doing covers at the Cheer-o Cafe. Watch Tri’s Hi’s version of “Oh Sinnerman” at the Cheer-o Cafe.

Follow up #2: After exploring Hong Kong a bit more, the slogan “World Without Strangers” it turns out, is the slogan for Giordano, a Hong Kong clothing brand not a bad American pop song (yet). See a photo of the t-shirt.