Writings

CHASED BY A DRAGON

A Journey Through China

CHAPTER ONE
    February

It felt like a soccer ball, expanding inside of my skull, ripping through my brain. My sinuses tried to contain the excruciating pain. The plane was making its approach on Hong Kong, and with squinting eyes, I peered down through the ovoid window onto the gaudy lights � the orange, pink, and pulsating blue � of the Pearl of the Orient.

With two fingers on each temple, I rubbed and pressed violently to allay a bit of the pain. With a crack and a jolt, we finally touched down on the runway.

To deal with these insanely painful sinus headaches I'd recently discovered the "neti pot," a yoga tool used in India since time immemorial to cleanse the sinuses with a warm gentle saline solution.

I bee-lined for the first bathroom I spotted in the airport. I pulled out my neti pot, which is a terra cotta pitcher-like device that resembles an Aladdin's Lamp (but, generally speaking, contains no genies). I went to place it on the counter top, but it slipped through my fingers. It dropped through the air and smashed into 1000 pieces on the tile floor. I stared at the white shards.

A voice rang through my head. "Welcome to the road."

The new Hong Kong airport is on the coast of a little-inhabited island, on "reclaimed" land � as if the land were once ours, then were conquered by the sea, and now is finally back with its rightful owner. Perhaps, to the Chinese, Hong Kong itself is "reclaimed land," now that it has been regained from the British. After 157 years, that became a reality in 1997.

Between my gate and customs there were seventeen moving sidewalks. I changed money and headed into the warm night.

A bus took me to Kowloon, a stunning, swirling, overwhelming tornado of neon lights and crowded sidewalks. Dance tunes pulse and thump loudly out from big, modern clothing stores. Young people flock in, Chinese teenagers who long to look like the hip models on the endless posters. Littler shops jostle for space everywhere, down every alley, in, underneath, and above the bigger stores. The specialties of these hole-in-the-wall joints are custom-made suits, watches, leather purses and jackets, cameras and cell phones.

The Chinese word renao (excitement, but literally meaning "hot noise") came to mind, multiplied by ten. The city seemed unchanged since before 1997, when it was a British colony, but there were fewer tourists and I even heard some Mandarin Chinese in addition to the customary Cantonese.

I stayed in a guesthouse lodged on the fifth floor of a decrepit building, directly above the renao pulse of Kowloon. The innkeeper, a matronly woman named Liao, took to me quickly, kindly showing me how to make tea in the little kitchen, and offering to get my Chinese visa (Americans still don't need a visa to enter Hong Kong) through a friend, at "no extra charge."

Hoping to avoid a serious sinus infection, I improvised a neti pot from a tea mug, and poured heated, salty, mineral water down my nostrils. Finally I slept.

I awoke late without jetlag. For breakfast, I descended to the ground in a tiny elevator, leaving my "mansion," to search out one of the famous local Indian restaurants in another old "mansion." These Kowloon "mansions," as they're called, are huge crumbling, leaning, decaying urban towers with markets on their first floors and assortments of apartments, restaurants, guesthouses, bookstores, tour agencies, and tourist shops nestled discreetly on the dozen floors above. They are mutant combinations of low-grade, unmanaged shopping malls and shady, hard-bargaining, oriental bazaars. Entering the groundfloor of Chungking Mansion, the smells of incense from a tiny Buddhist shrine, and cooking mushrooms from the Pakistani and Chinese cafes wafted around me. I passed and smiled at all the shoppers, money changers, merchants, and seated businessmen. Two young touts physically pushed me, laughing at my indecision, into a rusty elevator. Up twelve floors we went, then into their Nepali-Bangladeshi restaurant. I waited a long time for my naan, noodles, and curried mutton, but when they finally arrived they didn't disappoint. The owner of the place sat down at the next table and asked about the internet and about my job in America. He urged me to make his humble place, there in its twelfth floor aerie, its own website. I humored him, but declined. And then I just sat there awhile, noticing an urgency in these non-Chinese vendors. "Of course it was better before 1997," the owner chuckled, when I asked him. "There were more tourists then!" The rules on residency for non-Chinese in Hong Kong were easier then too. Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and others from erstwhile British empire nations enjoyed native status in Hong Kong until the British handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997.

For 40 Hong Kong dollars ($5.25), I bought an etched, dragon-covered, blue-on-white teapot from a gregarious saleswoman -- not as a souvenir, but as a neti pot. The pain had subsided over 24 hours with repeated cleansings, but I didn't let up. For dinner I ate a simple meal of Chinese cabbage.

The next day I visited Kowloon's Tsimshatsui park, whick looked prettier than I remembered. I passed dozens of old men doing taiji, then I strolled to the new China-Hong Kong Ferry Harbor took in fine views of the harbor and the countless skyscrapers across the water that comprise the Central district, Hong Kong's Wall Street. Finally, that night, I bought a boat ticket for China, for Guangzhou, for my one-time home.

At 7:30 am the next morning, I watched the city pass by before me � this city of transitions, this sandwich of East and West, this Pearl of the Occident. Hong Kong, where English and dollars are used, where all the people, though Chinese, obey crosswalks and disobey their parents.

And then came China, again. We floated up the Pearl River and docked at the East River Terminal, outside of Guangzou. I was the only white face. My visa was stamped under heavy supervision. I was the only person who hopped onto the free bus to the Garden Hotel. Of course once we'd left the terminal I intimated to the driver that I didn't really want to go to the five-star hotel, telling him how I had taught English at Peizheng Middle School three years ago, and I wanted to look for any students who might remember me. He laughed and complimented my Chinese and said they'd remember. He took me to the Garden Hotel anyway.

And now I'm in Guangzhou, strangely sipping ginseng tea in an internet cafe that didn't exist three years ago. Tomorrow I will return to Peizheng.