HongKong

My Three Favorite Purchases from Hong Kong

were:

A Parker ballpoint pen
A new Seiko dive watch
A plain black merino sweater

These are the kinds of things that are impossible to find in Xiamen. Pens, for example, are easily available here, but their price/value distribution is bimodal. You can buy a big package of sub-Bic disposables for a couple of yuan, or spend 1000 yuan on a gold-plated fountain pen. The sub-Bic disposables are always overdesigned, with lots of fussy grippy bits or two separate tips, or somesuch, and the essential pen parts won’t work well. The clicky part breaks so the ball won’t retract, the ink is uneven and smears, or it gums up and ceases to work after a few days. There is no local equivalent to a Parker ballpoint: a $10 pen that just works. In China, if you want something effective, you have to buy the gold-plated fountain-pen version of it. (And then, you’ll come to realize, it doesn’t work much better than the sub-Bic disposable, but at least it’s plated with gold. Until the gold rubs off.)

What I’m really missing is stuff that’s simple and well made. Simple is just plain hard to find, because the Chinese really go in for fussy, fancy stuff. Some of this is just a matter of taste, and on a certain level I can get behind that. If you like your pens with lots of foofrah, well, good for you.

But you’d think that, given the economic situation of most Xiamenese (who are upper middle class by Chinese standards, which means “wealthy enough to not have to worry about food but poor enough to not be able to waste money”), physical objects would be better constructed. If you can’t afford to spend a lot of money on pens, wouldn’t it be more economical to buy one pretty good pen you can always rely on, rather than dozens of really crappy pens for the same price?

Somehow this seems to be related to a particularly Chinese aversion to maintenance: having one pretty good pen means taking pretty good care of it; easier just to buy a bunch of crappy pens that are all fancied up to look expensive. This, in turn, may be related to another particular Chinese trait, namely an obsession with glittery surface appearance at the expense underlying engineering.

I buy clicky metal Parker pens, they have the perfect combination of a) the minimum necessary features of a pen and b) durable overengineering. (This is also why we bought a Subaru.) I realize that, even by American standards, I’m a little Amish in this regard. But still: in America (or Singapore, or Hong Kong), you can purchase this Platonic ideal of a pen somewhere. Such things are literally not available for purchase in Xiamen.

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Hong Kong

We spent a few days last week in Hong Kong. HK is, without a doubt, the most vibrant , happening city I’ve ever visited. It’s certainly a “world city,” in the mode of Paris, London, LA or New York. Paris and London, by contrast, feel like museums. Berlin has some of HK’s vitality, but feels a little provincial. Los Angeles expresses a similar scale, but spreads it so thin that all the benefits of Bigness became diluted by the heroic task of simply getting around. I’ve never been to New York, maybe HK is like NY?

For all that HK is the densest city on Earth, it remains a surprisingly comprehensible city. All its life happens at street level, within human frames of reference, in the shadow of its cyclopean architecture. It reminded me of San Francisco’s Chinatown, but on the scale of an entire city. And for all its oppressive density, HK abuts uninhabited space: the forests of HK Island, its long white beaches, the open water crossing from Kowloon to Central. Geography conspires to strip suburbs from HK, and the product is (to my mind) the best of all worlds: rurality and urbanity along a literal border. You can go to the edge of the city and look at a wall of green.

Anyway, what we did:

Shopping. Lots of shopping.
Rode the damn-near vertical “tram” (actually a funicular) to the Peak, which we then circumnabulated.
Took the MTR and a bus to Shek O, a teeny beach town on the south shore of HK Island
Looked all over for shark fins, which Michelle wanted to photograph for a school project. When we finally found them, I realized that all the herbalist shops in Xiamen also carry them. I don’t usually feel sanctimonious about this sort of thing but the shark fin really sickens me. Maybe because it’s wasteful (they cut off the fin then throw the shark back into the water to die), or maybe because this waste is in service of such a dubious idea: if you eat something from a dangerous animal, you become more potent. FWIW Viagra is really taking off in China.
Starbucks, Starbucks, Starbucks. In Portland, I turned my nose up at Starbucks but when I see it in HK or Singapore, it’s like running into an old friend. Scones! Chai! Comfy chairs!
I finally bought some damn pants. The foreigner population of HK is large enough that we can find clothes that fit.

So: check out the Flickr stream for Hong Kong photos. You’ll have to sign up with Flickr and join my friends list to see them. I apologize in advance for the hassle...but this is a relatively simple process:

Go to flickr.com/photos/axoplasm and click “sign in.”
Register with Yahoo, then click through to flickr. If you already have a Yahoo account, you won’t need to register, but you will need to choose a screen name (next step).
Choose a Flickr screen name then click “sign in”
Go to flickr.com/people/axoplasm/ again. (Hey, why can’t Yahoo remember this for me?) Click on “Send FlickrMail”
Send me a flickrMail letting me know your screen name so I can add you to my friends list. (If you already have a Flickr screen name, this is the only step you need to do.)

Yes, this is a hassle, but it’s worth it, honest. I post a lot of photos to my Flickr stream, more frequently than I post to the blog.

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HongKong

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