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They ask me if I’m tired and I say yes.  They tell me what I’m doing is amazing and I say “thank you very much, but its really normal,”with a head nod and a shy smile, bashfully attempting modesty, guiltily accepting the complement as justification. We speak in small words and language helpers like “well”, “I suppose”, “that’s great”, and let long acoustic breathes flop into our big meanings like ice cubes in a tall glass of water, melting, always fills you up, always cools down the awkwardness of silence that burns ears. Aahhh。 

We’ve been in big land ever since the wedding in Guanzhou when all of a sudden we were in the company of more white people than I’ve seen gathered in one place in 3 years.

In Japan, I knew my limits, and rested meekly on the foreigner crutch that allowed me to be aloof and ambiguous. In Asia, you can laugh when you’re embarrassed, or pretend you don’t understand when you don’t have anything to say.

In big land with its big ideas like carbon emissions, and non profit organizations, and one child polices, these tricks make me look silly.

 I found myself standing on the red carpet of a hotel banquet room coiling and looping with story book fantasia: glitter and confetti and ribbon and a bride sparkling in white and waitresses refilling whiskey flasks and people hunting for other people to talk to. This could be Hong Kong at night spinning on curvy sky ways, tubular lights making car trails, captured at the peak of speed, in a quiet postcard that moves like a bus in a floaty pen streaming down a snowy road where little people tidy little houses.

 I found myself twirling and turning trying to catch the clink of wine glasses toasting and the shriek of whispers shooting sharp tunnels through unprepared ears and the pillowed muff of heels piercing the cush carpet beneath them and the round body above them and the shrill staccato of confident lobby diners from the non-wedding world where people are free to be mute and untouched. The underworld of magnified sound padded me carefully against the onslaught of human interaction in big land. I kept my head steady for wind changes, ants carrying their eggs before a storm.

This is an eco system and I am an ant ducking for cover in carpet bush. Everyone is a predator.

I always get flabbergasted whenever we go to a big city like Shanghai or Hong Kong。 I feel like Alice looking into a world that makes little sense。Streets glow like computer animated cartoon characters that appear 3D， I cannot tell if they were drawn or graphically created。 And one seems realer than the other。 

 I find it hard to fit my writing into the vast space of a city。I am spread thin。Words appear in comic bubbles。They are not their descriptions。 They paint cartoon pictures of the people who speak them in this magnified setting of “meeting new people” and “making new friends”。 We scramble to project positives images of ourselves because this is what people will remember of us。 First impressions pressed into the presence like a name in a gravestone。   

We are in Hong Kong now and it is big. Jim has little patience for neon lights and the crowds and the trams and the billboards with the big models and their big abs shooting sexy laser beams with big omnipotent eyes. He’s a Montana man who dragged elks out of the woods before he could grow a beard. Buildings will never replace mountains.

I grew up in Xiao Dao Guo, that’s small island country to mainland Chinese. This does not suffice for the Hong Kong island people whose colonial past has spread out the whole world at its tiny finger tips.  One Nation, Two Systems. But this system, on the Hong Kong side, is much much bigger.

Globalization has the tendency to make small countries act big, or, in my country’s case, developing nations believe that they are developed.

The Bahamas and its relatively stable political climate draws in armies of international tourists imprinting pink feet on its tiny shores. 

Hong Kong has one of the busiest sea ports in the world and is fifth in attracting international passengers to its airspace.

The Bahamian dollar is pegged to the US dollar, and the economy leans on the service industries of tourism and banking. We manufacture nothing and have very little natural resources and skilled labor. We import everything that we cannot produce ourselves. We fear the Free Trade Area of the Americas gulping us down with its highly skilled, lesser demanding workforce, a long island ice tea that only kicks in when you stand up.

Hong Kong’s factories which initially built its wealth, are quickly being swallowed up by the cheaper, harder working, dispensable Chinese workforce. Now it is Hong Kong’s job to manage the huge amount of money generated in the mainland and its drudge task force of worker ants.

There are mouths all around tonguing crevices that tickle when touched.

But small country turn big doesn’t want to be touched. Doesn’t want the particles to drift. Wants to keep itself a subject – a being, a one and only. Leave the niceness to the big countries with the big aid like the US.

It is not an easy task for a mainland Chinese person getting a tourist visa to enter Hong Kong. Immigration officers turn away women who look more than 5 months pregnant fearing that they might intentionally remain in Hong Kong to make sure their babies are born there so that the child may have the right to better social health care and educational systems.

In Bahamas, we are constantly worried about Haitians stealing our jobs, exhausting our healthcare, and committing crimes, all of these accusations unproven by statistics, but highly feared.

But this is the big world. Or the small world under a microscope that unwraps it and all its cells out onto the sizzling sand so that one goes hungry for small wanders like purple oyster shells spat out onto the sea shore, and babies who wonder precariously away from the peripheral vision of their parents.   I am lying on the sand and my vision of the families playing at a beach near Mayrknoll is sideways. I feel lonely because I want to play with the children, but their parents and nannies are there. And I don’t want to be weird. This is not the mainland where children run rampant, invading our campsites and pulling us into their schoolyards to play. I have to scurry the sand for imagery.  I have to sulk.

This is big land and I am Glorified Individual. I have to walk with a click and suck the sound like a cup of coffee, my morning comfort. It’s become a habit here in Hong Kong. I have to lean my head forward, peaking at workers smoking in alleyways, exposed pipes on the backsides of buildings, cracks of white paint on the ceiling above my bed, floods on the 5^th floor of a shiny mall, accents that don’t match faces. Did you know that there are Indians of Mongolian and Caucasian races?

In big land, I find myself comforted by the parks that are inhabited at any given moment by 80% immigrants. There are Indian or Pakistani men with greasy puffs and stonewashed bellbottoms smoking on the walls. There are beautiful Filipinas and Indonesians picnicking on plastic tarps beneath footbridges and on the edges of buildings. This is abnormal to me until I get kidnapped by a friendly Indonesian at a park beauty pageant for domestic workers, who explains to me that this is how they hang out. She takes me to a street stall to get coconut rice and curry chicken for $10 HKD. You know you’re in big land when you can get cheap ethnic food on the street corner.

I used to hate when the Japanese used the word “ethnic” to describe foreign food in Japan. They did not describe French food or Italian food or American food as ethnic.  Only the more exotic places, or the lesser developed country foods: Thai, Indian, Jamaican.

Peter noticed that they included Mexican and Italian food on the menu at Ruby Tuesday’s in Hong Kong, whose motto is “Simple Fresh American Dining.” 

One of my favorite slam poets, Chinese American from Oklahoma, Beau Sia, once argued in a poem that spring rolls ought to be classified as an American food.

This is big world, where identities come pre-packaged in combat boots, opaque leggings, bleached puffs, and kimono sleeve A-line jackets. At the mall at the top of The Peak, there was a store that sold “cool Japanese style” drinks. I can’t wait for my country to become a fad.

I like Kowloon better than Central. The restaurants there are more raw. There is still fish being squished and scaled in buckets out on the street. You can still get slimed if you’re not careful. There are night markets where crafty market ladies don’t take crap from bargainers. The Indian restaurants here are owned by Indians. And the interior is not decorated but for internationally renowned white plastic chairs. Sit and eat and make sure your glass is clean before you drink the water.

There is peace in the tranquil oasis of Mary Knoll, the 1920’s brick monastery that’s opened its doors to us for a week. It is on the other side of Hong Kong Island, behind several mountain ranges, where the land rolls out its tongue to the ocean. There are beaches and coconut trees here and it reminds me of home again. 

There is peace here, shadowed by a vague discomfort. A sense of incompleteness. Like I don’t belong here. The Pacific Islander maids and nannies pushing children with blonde ringlets in strollers and walking chestnut golden retrievers smile at me with familiarity, the same look I get from Ethiopians selling write-off Timberland boots on the street. I am one of them.

But not. Not a maid. Not a merchant. Not selling suits. Not an immigrant in search of a better life. Just passing through on a bike. My friends are Minnesotans who know the difference between fly swatters and robins. Their vocabularies are different from mine, but we share the same passions. I am caught between familiarity with the foreign English teacher and the immigrant, the first world and the third world, the concerned hippy and the dirty pretty thing.  Beauty smiles up at me from big brown eyes in shadowy sockets gaping down as I use its face to start a blog.

Shameless graphomaniac that I am, I feel the need to write everything down to claim it the way a photograph claims an image in a pose. Keepsakes, the authority of memory. A ticket stub that shows I have been there before. I want to scar myself with experience so that I have something to start with. So that people ask me to explain: “What do you mean by that?”  So that I always have something to say at a wedding.

In big world, I find peace in immigrants. Those assimilated in inner city grime. Their culture is still raw like an unhealed wound, still steaming. Immigrants from finicky countries that may or may not ascend to G8 status. Immigrants that still speak their own languages, that still have little Indias and little Mexicos and little Indonesias gathered in apartment blocks in snowy cities, the scent of their curry or their pita bread carried through the pipes.

Immigrants that form little countries labeled in neon signs hung above highlighted streets in big land. Immigrants who push blonde babies in strollers while their own babies speak their first words to them via an international phone card. Immigrants that may or may not have a chip on their shoulder, but still manage to smile, unassumingly at someone automatically distrustful of their intent.

Immigrants who live under the intense, laser-colored city sky, bracing their shoulders against a marching crowd, arming themselves in fashion, and taking pics in the park on a lazy Sunday afternoon, their fixed off day, when the blonde children are under the supervision of their French and Finnish parents.

 Immigrants that have to start from here, and build.  Their journals burned. Their visa pages shrouded in work permits and extensions. Their memories of homeland unsticking themselves from the scrapbooks of their marmalade childhoods.  This makes big land seem much much smaller。.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 5:04 am and is filed under
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