Kaohsiung

The airport was so familiar, the smell of pollution and cigarette smoke that hit me the moment the automatic doors yawned open even more familiar, and the language--the beautiful, careless sounds of Taiwanese--most familiar of all, resurrecting the bittersweet half-faded memories of another life. I'd spent so many months here before, but now it was four years since I'd last seen this place, this city, since I'd last smelled the thick blend of industrial chemicals, moped coughs, run-down cars, thoughtless construction that formed invisible clouds for us to push through as we walk on sidewalks and across streets where the cars never stop for people, not even for children.

And that was just the city. When the car pulled in at last to my grandparents' building, all four floors of it, I could feel the little child who sits, always, in some forgotten chamber of the mind begin to cry, because I was not a child anymore as I stood staring at this building which I would never again skip into, never again play fishing in with stuffed animals, never again...

The next morning proved to be another test, feeling like a child again amidst giants.

Hong Kong

And on the last day in Hong Kong, a beautiful Christmas day, the weather was a perfect thin-jacket sort of weather with a suggestion of natural clouds instead of the usual smog obscuring the sun. The streets and elevated sidewalks were lined with seemingly endless numbers of Indonesian and Filipino women, in small clusters, in large groups, with a single friend, with cards, or presents, many with dishes of food, or with nothing but their purses, on cardboard, or pieces of cloth splashed across the cement to transform even the dirtiest looking sections of the walkways into comfortable picnic grounds. The phenomenon was fascinating. Wherever one looked, the dark-skinned women were there; the quick beats of their language filled the air, and a woman in Statue Square yelled into a microphone in a foreign tongue to masses of women for whom it was not foreign at all.

Here was an entire subculture and subclass in one of the most prosperous cities in the world that consisted of immigrant women who worked 16 hours a day enjoying one of their only holidays of the year with their friends. Set apart by their skin color, their facial composition, and their language from their more affluent native employers, they nonetheless found joy and a reason to celebrate on the day of Christ's birth. The poetic beauty in that was hard to ignore. The city had closed long stretches of streets in Central, whether for them or not I cannot say, but they took advantage of it and here, too, they sat, exchanging humbly wrapped Christmas presents, sharing potlucks with delicacies from their homeland, or simply chatting about nothing and everything at the same time with the people they considered family in a land where they had no husbands, no brothers, no fathers, and no sons.

Later that day, we left by plane and flew to Kaohsiung, a place I could very well call my third home (after Fremont and Honolulu) and a city I had not seen in four years. But that I will leave for another time, when I have more time, for it's past 1 AM now and my leg is quite numb...

edit please

New blog thanks in part to the new version of blogger and the fact that I didn't have the privilege of switching over!

Hong Kong and Taiwan have been fascinating. From the shameless materialism in Hong Kong to the unstoppable torrent of memories in Kaohsiung, nothing and yet everything seems to have changed for me. Another post another time. Perhaps when I can figure out how to view this page in English instead of Chinese.

And of course, my old blog, Burnt Ovens (7/2005 - 12/2006), is still there (and upgraded!), but too many posts contain so much anguish that I've decided to discard it. So here I am. A fresh start.