Holding children

Hong Kong, born of English imported opium and disputed territories, is now a place where more than 7 million people strive for their livelihood. Shopping malls and fast foods abound, among the various shopfronts offering wonderful foods and street eating houses, where small owners show their varieties of fish, chicken, noodles, beef brisket, and other wonderful dishes.

Many elderly women sweep streets with large fan like brooms. Many elderly women collect cardboard and stack them high on small steel trolleys, making off with them for whatever reason. There are many people of middle and elderly age who are dependent on walking sticks and frames. It is not a society that admires prams, children are worn on the chest, or as a backpack, preferably by a mother or a grandmother. There is hardly a temper tantrum. The children in the university courtyard scream and chatter, play and bustle around. Busy in their rules of the games. Outside the Toy'r'us store, within the vast canyon of Festival Walk, there was a two year living up to western standards for a two-year-old, stamping his feet and bottom lip curled over upper lip.

Hong Kong is an island of people striving to get ahead of the other. Although in doing so they do not see that it is the social niceness and the offers of pleasantries that help to make a society and a culture lifted. A philosopher said that it is the kindness and warmheartedness of all millions of people that outweighs the outrageous acts of human unkindness such as that wrought by a Pol Pot, or a Mao.

An elderly man, in his 60s, sits in the BU fiesta canteen most morning reading his texts on Chinese medicine. He is Dao, or Tou, which means seed. Over a cup of Hong Kong style milk tea he asked me yesterday, "Will you teach me technology?'. I will, but how do I explain that we are technology and that technology helps define us. I learn about his early life, in Kowloon before the university, life under an airport, as an unemployed 60 year old, and Mandarin, from our morning talks. He sits outside and is outside the university, Hong Kong Baptist University. I bet Dao's mother bundled Dao on her chest, and Dao kept his son on his chest too.

That's me above in the green, amid a family in Hong Kong from early last century. The exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum in Tsim Sha Tsui. very interesting and worth the hours.

Czech women, Corn Flakes and the Buddha

Talking with two Czech women outside a 650 year old Temple at Fan Ling, Hong Kong, and walking around with young students from Beijing and Boston are life's delights while an international student at Hong Kong's Baptist University.

Reading of life as a concubine in the Qing dynasty [1644-1912] in China or Australia-Chinese relations during the Howard years. And learning that Red Packets can be filled with coin or something that will give your friend good happiness during the coming year. Or eating Kellogg's corn flakes while listening to Fleet Foxes and reading the Naked Buddha by the Venerable Adrienne Howley. We are global creatures in an increasingly busy and digested world.

I was born in the Year of the Monkey, Hou in the Chinese calendar. The Buddha was born in the same month 2499 years before me. The calendar didn't exist then. I've read that the Chinese zodiac was invented on the Buddha's death. Monkey's are inquisitive, prone to narcissism, intelligent [that's the narcissistic side], fleet footed, quick, get into trouble. And generally a bother from time to time. But we traverse a lot of interesting things and issues, and learn quickly. I wish Mandarin was as quick as my English. But that's an impossibility for me.

The women are from Frenstat and from Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic. One of these days I will drink a little beer with them and ask about pilsner and life in a newly born republic. [The current republic was born in 1993.] I wonder if it was a breach birth?

This is We Are always too Late from Eavan Boland, from his collection, Outside History.

Memory

Is in two parts.

First the re-visiting:

the way even now I can see

those lovers at the café table. She is weeping.

It is New England, breakfast time, winter. Behind her,

outside the picture window, is

a stand of white pines.

New snow falls and the old,

losing its balance in the branches,

showers down,

adding fractions to it. Then

The re-enactment. Always that.

I am getting up, pushing away

coffee. Always I am going towards her.

The flush and scald is

to her forehead now, and back down to her neck.

I raise one hand. I am pointing to

those trees, I am showing her our need for these

beautiful upstagings of

what we suffer by

what survives. And she never even sees me.

This is a good piece by an Irish poet who hears his language anew. Lap it up, simply read it to yourself, listen and take in its cadence. I am lapping up my life now.

Glass bottled milk and Hotel Bone

Yesterday I bought Trappist Dairy milk, from New Zealand, in small 225ml bottles. Glass bottles. It's wonderful how small things can send you back The smell of clove cigarettes immediately places me in Ubud, Bali, 1979. Fresh milk in bottles puts me back to the time when we had milkmen place two bottles of milk [pints I think they were] on your front door every morning. The cream settled on the top and was sweet to have on your porridge, with brown sugar.

I wear old suede Keens shoes. They been with me through Agen, Montpellier, Hanoi, Puymirol, Sete, Hong Kong, Amalfi, Austinmer, Hue, Nowra, Paris, Mong Kok, Fan Ling, Bordeaux, Kowloon Tong, Bowral, Castelnau-de-Medoc, Hoi An, the Montmarte, Tsim Sha Tsui, Carcasonne, and Coledale.

The soles have worn through now. The spring has gone. But they did take me to Jordan where I spent a beautiful few hours at the table with roast suckling pig, salted fried fish, gai lan with garlic, a mussel soup, some honey roasted pork, or char sui, and crab, poor spikey thing.

Talking with some new friends about Hong Kong life, communism, the movies, food, wine, and generally laughing at life's simple turns.

I also learnt that it's good to enjoy those things that you are not comfortable with, where you have to stretch yourself or take a plunge, even when the only thing you might have on is a band aid. Life in Hong Kong can be like that.

I'd like to introduce you to Samuel Wagan Watson, a strong poet from Brisbane. This is Hotel Bone from 2001. Search out his works, buy a copy, sit and read. They are a great hit on life in the hard times of Australia.

the street resembles a neck
from a wayward guitar
with Hotel Bone sitting idle on a vein,
wedged between two frets
where the bad tunes can reach her

these white stucco walls, I imagine, once carried a vision of pearl
now a gourd for asylum seekers
Iraqi, Indonesian, Sri Lankan
and one crazy Aboriginal... who lives with a typewriter
but not with the brevity of a visa on my head; no,
my longevity was guaranteed before I was born
in the 1967 referendum
the freedom to practice the voodoo of semantics
within the marrow of Hotel Bone

existence only 2 minutes walk
from some of the best latte lounges in the city
yet, white faces don’t come down here
until they’ve been classified, unfit for duty
no longer permitted upon the chorus line
of the cappuccino song
where multi-culturalism is in an airline format
first-class, business and economy seating

but those of us who submit to the chance of mystery-flights
end-up on the tar, of Hotel Bone

a haven from Saddam, Suharto, the Tamil Tigers
and One Nation
this Hotel Bone;
it is hard

it is reachable

it is home

I am not home yet. My Keens are still taking me to some different and strange places. I need more words.

Loving to learn and George

George Cole taught me a lot about an inquisitve mind and love of the stuff that warms the shoals of your heart -- learning, good wine, rugby, cricket, and laughter on those cold mornings when you walk with your head bent down. I'll miss George. He had a warmth that rose from underneath his gregarious laugh. He loved the winter swims [but not the cold water] at Austinmer in the early morning. He always had a warm smile and strong handshake for me. "Going on your morning constitutional, Lachie?" He would ask on the mornings as I passed him coming back from the morning swim, his large yellow fins sticking up like humming bird wings.

George had a truly generous and loving family. Brownwyn taught my partner jenne to drive. Jenne didn't trust me. Bronwyn has a generous smile and phrase. She probably got a bit greyer teaching Jenne. I taught his son George Cole to play football.

George used to help with the school fetes and selling badges to early morning train goers. He would raise money for young teens with cancer.

Now we are missing a friend and a good, generous man, gone from his friends at Austinmer when he was looking forward to many things in his life. I didn't get a chance to see George before I got back from hong Kong.

We don't know the time or manner of our death.

When I'm back in Austinmer I'll have a quiet peaceful swim in the cold Austinmer rock pool. And then shiver up the street. I don't have humming bird fins.

I was thinking of Robert Frost. But this is from Seamus Heaney , an Irish poet. From 1966, when I was 10.

'Light came from the east,' he sang,

'Bright guarantee of God, and the waves went quiet.

I could see headlands and the buffeted cliffs.

Often, for marked courage, fate spares the man

It has not marked already.'

And when their objection was reported to him -

That he had gone to bits and was leaving them

Nothing to hold on to, his first and last lines

Neither here nore there -

'Since when,' he asked,

"Are the first and last lines of any poem

Where the poem begins and ends?'

George loved our language too. You could tell.

Above is the big Buddha from Lantau Island. You can get a warm, vegetarian meal there included in the cost of your visit. The Buddha weighs how many tonnes? George would find out and post the question on the blackboard at Austinmer beach.

Lyrics and other gifts

Meadowlark, fly your way down,

I hold a cornucopia and a golden crown

for you to wear upon your fleece'd gown.

Ah meadowlark, sing to me.

Hummingbird, just let me die,

Inside the broken holes of your olive eyes.

I do believe you gave it your best try.

Ah hummingbird, sing to me.

This is from Fleet Foxes' Meadowlark. Such a poignant song and wonderful story. My son, Stefan, showed me this band. You don't know how much you change a person's life with a small gift such as, 'listen to this, you might like it.'

Yesterday I gave a hug to a young women who received a bad mark for a small quizz. I hope the warmth of the hug was a small gift that will change her outlook in a small way.

Stefan is completing a Masters of Fine Arts in a prestigious Australian arts school. I haven't seen any of his work while I have been in Hong Kong.

Yesterday I bought Qing dynasty [1644 to 1912] coins in a Buddhist temple, the Temple of 10,000 Buddhas in Sha Tin. I will give Stefan a 'redpacket', a small gift in a red envelope, for luck and prosperity, when I get back into Australia.

I sometimes don't realise how fortunate and lucky I am.

The picture is a little tug making its way up a busy Hong Kong harbour in front of the tallest building and the mid-Autumn sun under its veil of chemicalled sky.

Hong Kong has more malls than it does parks [the ones with grass and trees]. It's not hard to work out where the loyalties of the Xiang Gang [literally fragrant harbour] people lie.

Festival Walk is a brief five minute walk from the university at Kowloon Tong. It features all major brands, including Camper shoes, a wonderful shoe company who sells their brand, extraordinary crafts, keep walking. Camper is Spanish for peasant. Also in Festival Walk you can find a large skating rink with little Hong Kong kids twirling better than whirling dervishes. In Hong Kong in the 32 degrees. It's impressive but also quite shameful. Anyway a friend suggested that people visit the malls because of the air conditioning and its a good way to escape the heat and humidity. But it's more than that. Visit IFC, Langham Place, and any suburb and you will find a mall. The need to be with many people, the social hunter and gatherer, even if it is for shoes that you neither need or will use every day. So next time you are in Hong Kong go to a mall and watch how many of the population spend their leisure hours.

Today I found a wonderful poem by Carol Ann Duffy, a favourite. And Jenne has gone back home so this is fitting. It's called Colours by Someone Else, 1987.

Sweetheart, this evening your smell is all around

Down by the fishing-boats, the sky trembling

above the pier. Your tears have dried on my palms.

Darling, we should never have done that.

You made me your own, painted my face

into smithereens. Who can say where my tongue

has been in your dark boudoir? Soft heelprints

on my shoulder, sound of the hummingbird breathing its last.

Also listen to Suite Bergmasque [Clair De Lune] by Claude Debussy. Such a wonderful piece. I don't know how music and poetry can move you so. But it does. Makes the hackles on your neck rise. Try explaining that English to cantonese or Mandarin speaking students.