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...