Up and over the brine
today. I’ve been settled for these past
few months, in the dry ochre silt. Yanjing.
Rooted. Anchored, Focused. I can watch the dust settle and
accumulate. And it is fine now to smell
the salt. Refreshing fluidity, the unlimited
possibilities of the Ocean. At first the
crossing is only a metaphor. A mere
river’s worth, a brackish rivulet between two different jurisdictions. The same river my friend swam to escape China
in the seventies.
The passage was, wretched.
We used the Huanggang crossing thinking it would perhaps be a bit
quicker than Futian. Last time we used
Futian and there was an unfathomably long wait on the Hong Kong side. At Huanggang you take the bus straight to
Wanchai rather than the long, local MTR ride.
I’ve done the ride back from Wanchai and it is certainly faster. Today I discovered that departing from
Shenzhen this Huanggang bus wasn’t any faster at all. I assumed I’d buy a ticket, board a bus and
face the border a bit further on, but as soon as we arrived we saw the
swarming, inescapable concentration of humanity.
It’s times like the crossing at Huanggang that you remember
just how dense the population of China is.
Modernity and convenience allows one to bypass much of the volume. But its never far. Never hard to find. In Tokyo, which is just as dense, it only
ever presses in, when something breaks down, snow suddenly stops a train for
example and the system breaks down and people don’t know what to do. People are agitated and their civility
evaporates. When you’ve no choice but to
work through an enormous crowd in China, it reminds me of a train station in
Wuhan in 1993, trying to buy a ticket.
There was a scrum to reach a window that was positioned up high, so that
everyone who approached it would feel insignificant. Police guided people at the perimeter with
electric cattle prods. It’s one thing to
watch. It’s quite another to be stuck in
the middle of a crowd that has its own momentum.
We’re in Hong Kong now.
My kids are trying to observe all they can about what’s different from
two hours ago in “mainland” China. They’d lived here before, but it has been
years now. The license plates the street
signs and of course, that they drive on the wrong side of the road here. I just asked my little one, where else it was
drives this way. I could think of four countries
she’s been to that do. She considered,
and then mentioned one, correctly that I hadn’t thought of.
It must have gotten much easier over the years, for Chinese
citizens to do the walk over crossing because it never used to be this
bad. It certainly is now. And there is nothing to do, once you’re
committed to the cattle queue, but endure it.
Standing in line. Something
about the Hong Kong side of the queue in particular, is demeaning. Like they haven’t caught up with the fact
that people are in fact people. Many of
them, by choice, not desperation, need to make this crossing. Standing and waiting, waiting to move a
little bit. People pressing. Your children leaning on you. It’s a systemic problem. Staff more people for God’s sake. Hold it up to the light. This is not only inconveniencing nice people
like myself, which is immaterial, but it is making tens of thousands of Chinese
people daily, hate Hong Kong. That’s a
karma no-no. The 苦海茫茫[1]
Everyone staring.
Staring at you. Staring at
me. We’re stuck. There is nothing better to do. We’ll be here for at least another hour. All in all I guess it took ninety minutes to
enter and then exit. I think I saw one
or two other foreigners. Has everyone
else wisely given up on this method? I
missed the memo on the newer-smarter way to cross over. I used to have a Hong Kong ID that let me cut
through the fast line. But now I’m
simply a “visitor.”
Cruising along now in this crowded bus, it is finally the benign
familiarity of Hong Kong. You exhale a
bit after the debasement of the crossing.
Intentional? Traffic works a
little bit better. Outside, the port.
Cantonese everywhere sounds sharp and refreshing, actionable. Traditional characters are on the walls. The signs look beautiful, and of course, are even
more difficult to discern.
The big, spotty face of a not very attractive middle aged
man trying to smile, off to left. The
poster is fastened to the guardrail.
He’s on the other side of the street too. I think to point out these election posters
to my girls. “So, why don’t we ever see
these in Beijing?” Being here I will
need to capture my thoughts on the Hong Kong I wrote about. That was roughly eleven month’s ago. Time to revisit the section on greed, avaritia, in my manuscript. Greed’s still here. So is all the potential for disenfranchised
Hong Kong to model leadership with the Beijing government in the not to distant
future.
The bus on the ride in has a TV, of course, and it is
broadcasting drama, the news and a
propaganda video showing people how to avoid scams when they are shopping for
apartments. Don’t be fooled by
this. Don’t be fooled, fool. Why do I feel at peace with Hong Kong propaganda
and feel that it is generally positive and appropriate and reasonable, where as
CCP propaganda feels ominous, suspect, clumsy?
They are both, actually, rather intrusive.
Now it’s later in the day.
It’s nearly five but the sun is still up in the sky. I forgot that in a more temperate longitude, the sun sets
later. Riding now on Pok Fu Lam
road. It is so familiar. It feels something like the FDR Drive. So many routines and time honored ways of
getting from here to there. There’s the harbor.
That tall building across the way used to forever be unfinished. Now, it’s done. And Kowloon is so close now. You could throw a stone.
Sitting now on Elgin, finally. Bad food, good wine, good view. Watching.
Cabs pause and drop diners off.
People meet. Chinese going
here. Europeans going there. Sometimes they go together. That section of HK where you can pretend that
it's still a British enclave that Chinese come to occasionally.
Ears flood full with
a bop mix. The Brooklyn tenor Al
Cohn. I know the name but not the face,
so I check. He looks like he’s Al Cohn
from Brooklyn. One of the "four brothers" from Woody Herman’s “Second Herd.” “Unless Its You” This disc is from the 1981 album, “Nonpareil.” I looked on line but couldn’t find much at
all as to who he really was . .
. I've determined that he, like Stan Getz, but not Zoot Sims, was from Brooklyn. But where?
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