Chinese New Year
One of the little guys
This month I spent Chinese New Year at Carmen's grandmother's house in Shanghai. Loads of family members came for the event. "Abu" cooked non-stop for days despite her 86 years. She prepared so much food that dishes had to be stacked on the edges of other dishes to all fit on the table. Nonetheless, she kept saying humbly, "there's no food, there's no food."
When the meals would finish, the adults typically watched TV or played mahjong, and the kids would go outside to shoot off fireworks. It was my job to light all the big fireworks to make sure nobody got hurt. It was a great job becasue I got to be told over and over again how brave I was and because the fireworks I was shooting off were truly massive; one misdirected rocket almost shattered a neighbor's window.
Every New Year's eve, so many fireworks go off in Shanghai that the entire city is blanketed in smoke.
Ian
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Wearing Pajamas in Shenzhen
I've always been a fan of wearing pajamas in public, though admittedly I haven't done it in recent years given the social pressure to look my age. Many Mainland Chinese adults don't feel that pressure. Many comfortably walk their neighborhoods in the most ridiculously looking pajama tops and bottoms. It's one of the many reasons I liked China so much when i first arrived.
Most foreigners, however, Hong Kongers, and a growing number of Mainland Chinese, find the habit atrocious. They think it's crass. They lump it together with two other Mainland Chinese stereotypes: spitting and urinating in public. I love the freedom to hawk a loogie wherever i please (spitting is a US $200 fine in HK).
Given my childhood love for pajama wearing in public, I was delighted to take part in it on a grand scale last weekend.
Multifaceted Macau
I love the steeple in the background Macau, a former Portuguese colony near Hong Kong, is blowing up. The city already generates more gambling revenue than Las Vegas, largely due to the big spending habits of mainland China's nevo riche. But developers are betting on more to come. 30,000 more hotel rooms (double Macau's current #) are in the works. All the big Las Vegas guys are on the scene as well. They have something like 14 big casinos planned. The Venetian opened a few months ago, and the MGM Grand opens in a few weeks.
I took a shot at blackjack over at the Venetian a few weekends ago and roundly lost US$75.
Hong Kong is so well organized, but the choices are endless
Hong Kong is brilliantly put together, but without a little experience under your belt, the sheer number of possibilities is overwhelming. That's my excuse for not writing in so long.
I was getting lost all the time. I went to so many boring places and bad restaurants. There really wasn't all that much to write about. All my energy was focused on just getting from point A to point B.
But now I'm over the initial hump. The learning curve is pretty steep here since everything is so well thought out. Now that I finally have my bearings, I'm beginning to realize just what an awesome place I live in.
Moved to Hong Kong
I moved to Hong Kong a few weeks ago. I live in a tiny, but very homey little apartment with Carmen. Her parents live about a 3 minute walk away. I’m working from home for the same company I worked for in Shanghai., still part time.
Life here so far is very mellow. I’m either spending time with Carmen and her family, doing yoga at an awesome studio nearby, studying Cantonese, or working. Not too social, unlike my lifestyle when I’m back in Austin. But I’m not lonely or bored. I will admit though, a few times already – unlike my usual self –I’ve had sudden and unexpected emotional breakdowns, like I’m a pregnant woman or something. The internet went down the other day and I practically went ballistic. Silly. I guess somewhere deep down I’m just not quite settled.
The most interesting occurrence so far involved Carmen’s grandfather, who passed from this world many years ago.
Ritual
I’ve been in the US since Dec. 22 for the holidays and I go back to tomorrow. These last 3 weeks have been really calm because I got to enjoy the comforts of home without having medical problems. My lastest tests at MD Anderson a week ago showed that my brain tumor hasn’t grown. So this time around, instead of being bombarded by an intense mix of fear but also affirmation of life, I started thinking about the mellow but meaninful topic of ritual, especially on Christmas morning.
What I've been thinking about: China is Going Green
I haven’t written for a long time because my blog suddenly got blocked in China and it took me a while to find a way to get in under the radar screen. The program I’m using called TOR does the trick, but its a pain to use because it makes surfing the internet really slow and it’s complicated to setup. So in the meantime, folks in China who want to read my blog aren’t gonna be able to do it easily unfortunately.
Anyways, what I’ve been excited about lately is the big cleanup effort going on here. It all started when I read about China’s plan to implement Green GDP.
Wenzhou Trip
Two daredevils randomly performing at a nature park in WenzhouIn the picture those are two guys on a wire, hundreds of feet up in the air, one riding on a bike and the other hanging from the bike on some sort of trapeze thingy. I have no idea how they managed to balance up there, especially when they were moving back and forth and doing all sorts of tricks.
The interesting thing was that this wasn’t going on at a carnival. I was in the middle of a nature park in Wenzhou, a big city south of Shanghai which takes about 6 hours to get to by bus.
Rats in the kitchen and all the shit that followed
The rat exterminator pulling a dead rat out from under our sink2 days ago, after telling my Chinese Medicine doctor just how trying things had been over the last week, he decided I needed a little acupuncture in addition to the usual massage routine to call me down (Unfortunately, he got confused and thought he'd already given me acupuncture once before, so he proceeded to jam a needle into my foot without any warning.)
It all started two Wednesdays ago when Carmen and I came home to discover that our kitchen had flooded. At that point we didn't realize it was rats that had chewed into our laundry machine’s water house. It was only after a Chinese guest of ours, Zhou Tong, discovered bite marks on our rice bag, and rat shit beside it.
Trip to the Chinese Medicine Doctor
According to the Chinese Medicine doctor, my hand are too yellow, which means I don't have enough blood in my body.
Finally went and saw a Chinese doctor, which has been on the list for a while. Dr. Li's diagnosis? My palms are too yellow and my pulse ain't too good, which means there isn't enough blood in my body. It's a very interesting conclusion, because the chemo I'm taking does lower my blood counts to some extent, since it destroys rapidly growing cells. On the other hand, he said the same thing about a friend of mine that came along for a diagnosis as well, and she seems perfectly healthy.
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