Tree Blood

You could get almost anything to eat in Hong Kong, provided that you didn't ever want to eat potatoes or cheese, and normally didn't want to eat wheat or dairy. The Mexican food I also advise against, and it is fair to warn you that they fry the french fries in McDonald's in fish oil for that uncanny "familiar and yet alien" taste you haven't been pining for.

Bread was made with wheat, sold in little 8 slice packs since it was such a novelty, and we found one grocery store that sold cheese, in the entirety of everywhere they looked. They had three kinds, and normally about two packages of each. With these we could make grilled cheese sandwiches on our single-burner heating plates in a wok. Milk came in individual glass jars.

Fresh fruit was an adventure. We made a game of bringing random fruit home and trying to guess how to eat it.



After several incidents of eating rinds, seeds, stems, things which weren't suppose to be eaten unless they are cooked, and various grossly unripe or overripe things, we more or less gave up and stuck to pineapples and pomelos. Most of the fruits we never learned the names of, but the red thing with the green spines is a Dragon Fruit, the one with the points is called Star Fruit, and the one opened on the newspaper is Jackfruit.

After getting tired of fruit, the Russian Roulette activities continued as a drinking game using random candy with no English on it whatsoever, which became nearly ubiquitous during New Year's celebrations.

Pizza Hut was, unbeknown to us, a very classy establishment. The first time we went we had already had a few beers before we piled in to order pitchers of beer and a few pies, which we ate barbarically with our hands, without noticing the black tile floor, the nicely dressed waiters, the pasta dishes and mocktails on the menu, or the violin music in the background. Half way through dinner I turned around to see a local man wearing a tie and looking rather forlorn. His girlfriend, in black dress, looked unhappy, and I was suddenly struck with the realization that we had ruined the very nice dinner he was trying to treat her to.

We found wheat flour and made pancakes at home sometimes, because they were familiar and easy. We searched high and low, but couldn't find maple syrup for them anywhere. Eventually we started asking coworkers about it.

"What does it look like?"

"It's thick brown sauce, and it is sweet"

"What's it made of?"

"You take sap from Maple trees"

There was a pause, and my coworker gave me a very blank face

"Liquid in the bark, it brings food to the rest of the tree..."

"Yeah yeah"

"Then you boil it down a lot,"

"Ok"

"And then it's ready!"

My coworkers looked at each other for a long moment. Then one smiled, and in his most polite and patiently culturally-understanding voice he explained, very delicately as to not offend us,

"We're sorry, but we don't drink tree blood in China."

"And all I have failed to do..."

Mathematics and fist-fights are universal languages. This match in the subway station was started by somebody looking for an excuse to fight and somebody who gave him an invitation to act on it.

Cantonese, however, is not a universal language, and I found myself desperately gesturing to the woman behind the counter at the station's 7-eleven trying to get her to use whatever emergency police-summoning buzzer the place was equipped with. I, or the shouting voices and the little slapping dull thuds of hard impacts against human flesh, eventually did manage to get her to follow me over to the scene. She just stood there, wordlessly watching. A small ring formed of other people watching. It felt like ages before somebody stepped in to break it up.

***

I was at my locker taking out books. The place was swarmed with students and I had to crouch very close to my locker to avoid the tides of people running from one class to another.

"Hey Chu!" the voice called, "congrats on making the musical!" There was a pressure on the back of my head, then the front, that there was nothing.

I woke up in the dark, the room spun and I felt a pressure on the sides of my face. I tried to move my head but I found it was wedged, and moving it pressed the doorway of the half-width locker against my temples; a frightening claustrophobic kind of pain that causes you to flinch back into the locker until your forehead presses against the back wall. When I was in 1st grade at Girl Scouts we used vacuums to draw eggs into glass bottles with mouths too small for them mostly intact, and I immediately thought of that image. I breathed out, counted to three, braced my weight so when I let go with my hands I would fall backward, and pulled my head free.

The world went black again. When I came to the hallway was deserted. My own copy of Our American History lay on the floor next to me: I assume that was what had been used to beat me unconscious. I gathered it up with my other books and walked to my classroom, not 20 feet away. The teacher looked surprised to see me late, and it was obvious from his face he did not know what had happened. The other students avoided my gaze in a manner which said they did.

The teachers were mostly in disbelief that one 12 year old girl would do this to another, nobody would come forward and say it was her and I hadn't seen my attacker at the scene of the crime. Because of this, she got a talking to but nothing else really happened to her. I knew it was her though, and she made sure I knew when no teachers were around.

I packed up the books from my locker that day and began carrying them everywhere with me so I would not switch books between classes, and I utterly refused to interact with my locker during highschool. My junior and senior years I didn't even figure out where it was.

The whole mess was all handled so nonchalantly that it was not until years later when I started telling this story to friends that I realized how abnormal it was.

***

There aren't words through the walls of the cheap hotel in Phoenix Arizona that US Airways put me up in when my flight was delayed, but I could hear a woman's screams, a man's shouting and crashes of things being thrown. They were big things too, like lamps and possibly bedside tables. I forced a small smile, telling myself that everybody has their own way of getting their kicks, and tried not to concentrate on it. The woman's screams sounded desperate and terrified, my mind couldn't help but focus on the next room, and slowly I began catching a few of the woman's word's.

"Leave! Stop!"

"Say what, bitch?"

I started fumbling with my cell phone and called the front lobby. "Hey," I asked, "I think there is a disturbance on the 6th floor, can you guys look into it?"

The man on the other end sounded a little distressed, "Yeah, we're having a bit of an issue down here in the lobby as well." He hung up.

"STOP IT," the voice came through the wall, "PLEASE STOP IT!"

The screams continued for what seemed like an eternity. I waited for security or the police or somebody to come, but nobody came. At one point somebody came upstairs and calmed the lady down, but her voice raised shortly after to a new level of terror and the headboard of the bed beats rhythmically against the shared wall. I would like to tell you that I sat there and called the police and the front desk over and over until somebody showed up and made it stop, but instead I curled up under the blankets in horror and told myself it wasn't happening, that none of it was real, that I couldn't possibly be in a place like this, that the woman was just into kinky sex. I might have actually fallen asleep while he was still raping her, and much to my shame I did not sleep very badly either.

I woke the next morning and laughed to myself. Surely it had all been a dream. I enjoyed a nice warm shower and was packing my bags when I found the six identical perfectly round dime-sized holes in my wall that somebody had hastily patched. That was when I realized it had all been real. How could I have convinced myself it was not real when faced with that kind of evidence?

***

I do not remember the priest's name, but I do remember he had a horrible birth mark which turned half his face a permanent sunburn color.

"Have you learned it yet?" he asked me.

"Mostly... yes..."

"What's mostly?" He smiled, "Let's hear it."

"I confess to you almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault... and...um..."

"In my thoughts and in my actions," he prompted.

"In my thoughts and in my actions," I repeated.

"For all I have done."

"For all I have done."

"And all I have failed to do..."

***

May God help us all, for we surely do not have it in us yet to help each other.

Little Dog Syndrome

I hate little dogs. As far as I'm concerned nothing under 25 pounds is actually a dog, its simply an overgrown rat with a bad attitude.

I'm standing on the grass outside one of Gamma unit and one is being walked past. If it was a real dog and behaving that way it would be in fact walking the owner. It snarls and leaps at every available opportunity, and half way through each leap the leash stops it short with a jerk. As forcing individuals to learn from the consequences of their actions is completely out of style the leash is even a non-choke shoulder harness for the dog, leaving it free to repeat this behavior every few steps.

"Don't come near," the owner says, "He doesn't like people."

Yes, because that's the appropriate solution to the fact that your dog would tear my throat out if it could, just ask me not to go near it. Telling people to "just not go near it" wouldn't fly with OSHA, any zoning ordinance and most courts of law...but somehow it is ok for your dog. You're willing to walk around and pick up your dog's shit every few feet but you won't teach it manners?

***

I seem to be specializing in the white trash ambiance these days. Couches and chairs line grass between the units in front of Gamma and a half dozen college students pick their way among them. A different lady walks by, but the only reason I can tell is because this one has two dogs in tow instead of one. The border collie walks relatively calmly while the little dog is still jerking like a crash test dummy against the impact of his harness.

"May I pet him?" I ask pointing to the larger dog.

The lady nods through chomps of bubble gum, "yeah but not the little one, he doesn't like people."

As I approach the little dog makes a dash for my shins and the owner wordlessly scoops him up. The larger one temporarily rocks back onto his hind legs like it might put his front paws on my stomach.

"GINGER!" The word from the owner is sharp an angry as she flicks the leash. Its a real leash as well, not a chest harness, and the flick puts a small amount of tension on the animal's neck. Ginger sits meekly and waits to be petted. The smaller dog in the owner's arms is still going ballistic.

I think this is a pretty good representation of what is happening in general. The owner could teach both of her dogs self-control, good manners and discipline, or she could simply control the small dog from doing any sort of significant damage. The border collie, however, was probably too big to be brute forced by a small woman into behaving and so she took the time to teach it proper manners.

***

When I was a small child I remember being told to walk close to my mother, and, in circumstances which included extreme shininess, told to walk holding her hand. This was sufficient to keep me from getting lost or being run over by a car.

I'm walking through the farmer's market now. A small child keeps letting go of his mother's hand in front of me and dashing at various stands.

"Ugh," the mother sighs, "that's it! You're going in the stroller."

I find it odd that physically restraining a small child is an acceptable substitute for teaching him manners, but our society has somehow decided it is. In addition to strollers I have also witnessed a variety of leash products for children. Most of these are backpacks with a long handy string on them but a few are complete harnesses which are designed to be difficult for a child to remove.

I wonder what will become of these children when they grow too large for physical restraints to be a feasible control tactic.

***

I had wanted to take karate for a long time but my mother considered it far too violent. However, with the number of kids who were attempting to beat up my brother it was becoming increasingly clear that he needed a way to take care of himself. In 6th grade I was permitted to go to Taekwando lessons with the explicit understanding that I was there for the purpose of taking care of my brother until he was able to take care of himself, and that nothing I learned was to be ever used except to stop bullies from hurting me.

I was forbidden to ever spar under any circumstances by my mother, even in the dojo under sensei's supervision.

About two months later my mother was very angry with me. I have no memory of why she was mad, only that she was, and that she was going to slap me across the face for it. I remember watching her wind up and realizing I did not feel like being hit at that moment, and that furthermore I did not have to let her. I found myself standing with my arm extended in an upper block, her face speechless and red as she found her hand was harmlessly a good foot above my head. I don't think I have ever seen my mother so angry. I backed down at this point and silently let her hit me a few times because I was far more afraid of the anger than her hand. I think she mostly did it to prove that she could. After that she never hit me again.

This is the problem of raising your children by physical intimidation and control. Even if you have no ethical qualms around it whatsoever it is grossly impractical. Your child will eventually grow to be as strong as you.

***

I'm sitting on a bench on the edge of a street amid a large cluster of cafes. I see parents jogging by with children in the strollers. Is it just me or are children staying in strollers until older ages now? I think I have seen some rather industrial models with children as old as seven or eight in them. Was my parent's generation raised like this?

***

The small child bellowed unintelligibly through heaving sobs and tears. The whole restaurant was completely silent and aghast, and alternating between staring at the family and trying not to stare.

I sat there, across from my coworkers, and realized that I was going on my 10th week or so in Hong Kong and that this was the first time I had heard a child throw a screaming tantrum in a public place since I arrived.

I only spent 2 hours on the Newark layover but I witnessed 3 meltdowns.

***

I suppose when it all boils down I don't hate little dogs at all. I hate their owners.

Busted

I've been attending to other matters but out of the corner of my eye I'm minding the table.

A blond girl with a beach bag of a purse approaches the table from the wrong angle to be coming off the table where you assemble a burger. She takes her soda from the table, then throws it in the bag, then a second. Emboldened by her success she grabs another one in each hand and begins moving them to her bag.

"What are you doing?"

The girl is cool as she keeps pocketing more sodas, "Our hotel doesn't have a soda machine, I'm stocking up. You know what I mean..."

"No, I don't."

The girl turns red and keeps taking the sodas "I'm just taking a few." She's probably taken at least 8.

"Stop."

"I'm just getting them for my team!" The girl is shouting now, "I don't know why you care!"

I stare at her for a moment. She takes one last defiant soda and stalks off in the opposite direction. Honestly if I cared about the girl I would have made her give them back, but I honestly was too pissed to care if she learned a lesson or not from all this. I have enough kids of my own that want to be taught for me to take on more that don't even want to change their ways.

Looking back on it though, I probably did that kid a disservice. Success only makes you bolder.

The next few kids try to take two sodas just to prove they can. I roll my eyes and give them a hearty "You're pathetic" look. Kids rarely respond to adult's rage, but anybody who ever survived middle school should know that people drop dead if you can combine disdain with any inner source of their guilt.

"Don't be such pigs."

One kid who already has two sodas in his hand takes them to prove he's not scared of me, but the line goes back to one a person after that.

I guess that's the latest and greatest in the American way. If you get busted, pretend you're right, and if pressed, its the messenger's fault. After all, we're all delicate and unique snowflakes right? Being wrong might hurt somebody's ego.

What I find most impressive was that these kids were also jacking what I personally thought to be some pretty nasty soda. When was the last time you saw high schoolers buy fruit seltzer?

***

Once when I was in Hong Kong I was on the subway with about 20 non-native kids from my university when in walks a little girl and her mother. The child is holding her mother's hand by the thumb. I smile and wave at her. The little girl looks at me for a long moment and then says to her mother in Cantonese, "Look mommy, there's a devil here."

Chinese body language is so subtle compared to ours, but I don't see any visible reaction from the mother. She instead walks to a hand loop and puts her arm in as she guides her daughter to a cherry red pole to hold on to so she can weather the movement of the train.

"Mommy," she continues still in Cantonese, "There are so many devils here."

There's not hatred in this little girl's voice. The sentence wouldn't have sounded a whole lot different if it had read "There are so many chairs here." She continues her ramble, but her speech is becoming progressively more complicated and I have trouble following it.

"Mommy, I have never seen so many devils together here."

I feel bad calling out a little girl, so I sit quiet and turn to smile at her.

"Devil's looking at me!"

By this time we're all looking at each other, and a few of us are chuckling nervously. We had read how in Hong Kong the language barrier meant that racial slurs had just become part of the language. If somebody started calling me names in America I might fear for my physical safety but here there was supposedly no need to fear. We had all read that this wasn't culturally meant as a serious insult, and that it carried no threat of harm, but we all felt a little awkward being cursed out and not knowing what the socially acceptable thing to do about it would be.

"Devil's are laughing!"

I remember looking around the train for any sort of social cue at all but everybody on the train, including the kids from Hong Kong University who were helping us learn our way around, were avoiding our eyes. For a brief few seconds I could hear every clatter of every wheel on the train track. The little girl turned away from us and was quiet.

I remember being very impressed that the mother seemed to share in the shame she thought her daughter should feel rather than ignoring its existence or handing it all back to her kid. What I found more bizarre was that everybody on the train seemed to share the kid's shame, like one bizarre cold shoulder of an apology. Oddly enough, the shared guilt which created this neat little line between "us" and "them" was more alienating than being called names in some sense.

Half in defiance, and half from not knowing what else to do with ourselves, being called out as "ghosts" after that became a sick little game. I would wait until somebody went on a reasonable rant calling me a ghost and a devil, and then turn and respond in my politest Cantonese, "yes."

The response was always the same. The speaker would always look away in shame, and sometimes even apologize in Cantonese a few times. Apparently most white people didn't learn to speak any Cantonese there, so they were not use to being caught. I was amazed though that none of them ever got in my face about it, they just acted embarrassed.

Where did our society lose that skill of admitting we are wrong when we are?

***

"And," the officer leans in close to Py, "Do they let you do this at home?"

Its dark outside and we're standing on a rural bystreet not too far from the university. I'm facing one cop car, and I can tell there is another behind me from my shadow. There's a third one on my left and behind the one I am facing I can see two more. Ginger, Gilby and Py aren't doing a whole ton better.

"My dad...we lit these off when I was little...I thought fireworks were a fine-able offense in this state officer...not an arrest-able one..."

The officer leans over close to Py's face and raises his flashlight, "Oh?"

"Look," I interrupt, "Officer, we're sorry and we have given you everything. Please let us go."

The officers tried hard to rattle us after that and we pretended to be appropriately terrified of jail time or not graduating or whatever they were theatening at that moment (for portions of it, I'll admit, I did not have to pretend). Then they took our fireworks and left. I remember being thunderstruck. All they wanted to see was a little fear in us, scare us into saying sorry and hopefully into not doing it again.

***

"So what happened then?" I asked.

"Not a whole lot," Magpie shrugged, "The kid who ratted got suspended for a year, the kid he ratted on just went on academic probation."

"But I though that was part of his plea...he turns in his cohort and..."

"Guess the campus hearing board didn't feel that way for very long. Ratter didn't apologize in his closing statements, CoLo did."

"And that made..."

"All the difference I guess."

Nothing Says "Merry Christmas" like a Dead Fish in a Jar

When I lived in Hong Kong our work there related to removing as many workers as possible from a designated market. Seeing as there isn't exactly a worker's shortage in China we had to find a place to move all these people into ourselves.

We heard tell of a group of fishermen who had turned their former livelihoods into a tourist concept. Because of tax laws in Hong Kong and the fact that their tour location was out on the ocean they hardly had to pay taxes. It seemed pretty ideal, and as foreigners we were pretty well situated to evaluate whether this would likely become successful or a larger market which we could put our market sector into.

A large flat floating dock formed a "town square" and fishing boats were parked continuously along the perimeter.

What fascinated me most about this place was the gift shop, and what fascinated me most about the gift shop was a rack of small bird-like objects with a slick plastic coating on the outside which hung from fishing line and a key chain loop. They had small googly eyes and a straw hat glued on to them. The small beaks on them made them look nothing short of alien but obviously somebody had found them endearing to dress them and market them like this.

Picking one up I shook it. It made a bizarre rattling noise but seemed to have a significant amount of internal structure to it. Why would somebody put so much internal structure into a cheap little keychain? It could have been solid with a single plastic mold around the outside and it would have held up just fine.

"What is this?" I asked. The translator who we had access to (since this was during work hours) turned to one of the shop owners.

"They are keychains," the translator reported, "They are made from sun-dried baby puffer fish."

I thought about Americans and what those who feel a need to compulsively buy things out of gift shops expect out of gift shops. These were not shot glasses with "I love ex-fishermen" on them nor T-shirts not coffee mugs printed with the same.

They also could not pass as some traditional art form which makes white tourists feel culturally aware and superior by the fact that it hangs prominently on their living room wall at home where passers by might politely ask about it.

Visitor who has come over for dinner: oh, what is that?
Smug host: that's a hand-made Incan blanket from our trip through South America. Its made out of real Alpaca wool and dyed with natural pigments just like the native persons there have done for thousands of years.

Alternative scenario
Smug host: that's a key chain from Hong Kong. Its made of a dead baby fish and coated in plastic, just like former fishermen of Hong Kong have been doing since the invention of the plastic googly-eyes to glue on the front.

I just didn't see it going over quite as well.

It was then that I realized I simply had to have one. What would be more hilarious than to show it off with the same air of arrogance only to watch the people who cared about petty things like that recoil in horror? And it would only cost me about a dollar fifty American? Sounds like a deal to me!

So I bought it and I brought it back to my apartment and placed it in an empty nutella glass. I put the jar with the dead fish in it on the table and stared at it for a bit. The initial amusement of it had worn off and so I left it there and turned my attention to my computer. There I spotted an IM window open previously with PJ.

Every year there are people who you care about but who you don't know what to give them for Christmas. You want to give them something, but you can't think of anything they need or want within a socially acceptable price range. PJ was one of those people that year for me. My solution to this is every year I choose one of these people and give them a small cardboard box filled with small cheap items which they find amusing, and whose sum total equates about to one present. Christmas had already passed but I was scheduled to see PJ in March so I had told him I was bringing his present then. PJ's box had been previously filled with strips of LEDs, a few small parts I had scavenged which were perfect for making robots with, and other misc junk which I knew he would love.

Then I turned to the fish. Even better than me acting proud of this as my own possession, how much more infinitely hilarious would it be if I passed this off as a valuable gift?

I'm not the most rational and logical person I'll admit, but PJ seems to have an abnormally low general opinion of my common sense. Unfounded or founded, it is an awful lot of fun to mess with him using that fact. Opening the IM window again I decided this was a great time for continuing this tradition.

Pika: I got you a souvenir
Pika: hopefully they won't find it in customs, I think they would be upset with me
PJ: What have you done now?

I choose to leave the situation there for the time being and not discuss it further.

In March I brought PJ his Christmas present. He eyed the box carefully, obviously remembering the customs comment.

"Come on," I coaxed, "open it."

He opened it and found the Nutella jar directly on top of his other presents. "Huh," he asked intrigued, shaking the jar slightly, "What is this?"

"Its a dead fish in a jar!"

PJ nearly dropped the jar but instead placed it to one side.

"Come on!" I said, "Nothing says 'Merry Christmas' like a dead fish in a jar!"

"You know," PJ laughed, "I guess its true."