The poetry of Special English

Well, it's been a long time between posts, mostly because I've been in Australia, and I don't feel any great need to write about that.
It was lovely to be back in Hong Kong, and as I was wandering around on my first full day back, I noticed this sign, on the scaffolding where a row of older buildings (唐樓) have been knocked down to make way for some (presumably massive) new building.
Now I recently read a book called 'Oracle Bones' in which the author talked about a type of English with a more limited vocabulary, of about 1500 words, called Special English which was used by the USA in their worldwide radio programs to be more accessible to their listeners whose first language was not English. As someone who had taught English in China many years before, he was still in touch with many of his former students, who liked these programs, because they were a good accessible way to keep up their English skills.
I liked this idea. There are a lot of jokes made by English speakers about the way English is spoken by native Chinese speakers. This is probably because there aren't enough examples of how badly Chinese is spoken by native English speakers, because so few of them actually try. Being in the process of learning Cantonese myself, I have great respect for how well many HongKongers speak English. I hope my Cantonese is that good some day.
But for now, I am liking the idea of Special English, because it conjures up the distinctive perspective that comes through when someone speaks a language not their own. For example, it makes a lot of sense when Chinese people substitute the words she and he for each other in English, because why would you distinguish between them when in Cantonese there is a particular word, such as 佢 for she, he or it.
Which, getting back very slowly to my original point, is why I loved this sign. No native speaker of English would talk about an undulating pavement, and what a terrible shame that is. Undulating is a beautiful word, a poetic word, conjuring up the Latin root, undis, waves. It made me imagine the rolling curves of the pavement bearing down on me, sweeping me away into a land where all public notices were written poetically, and life was just that little bit more humane.
 

Hong Kong Tropes

Hong Kong image from here under Creative Commons licence

In homage to my new favourite way to waste spend time on the Interweb, this page is a shout-out to TVtropes, a site that despite its name, covers all manner of popular culture. It does not, however cover cities, though I am not going to let that stop me here.

Sadly, unlike the original, which relies on the wisdom of crowds, this one will be based on my poor isolated grey matter, and will be all the poorer for it, although perhaps that is the true fate of all homage.
Nonetheless, I will forge on, confident in the knowledge that a true fan knows no bounds! Some will surely disagree with these, or maybe just think that I don't know what I'm talking about. Having only lived in Hong Kong a short while (十個月), I cannot be sure I have these tropes nailed, but I'll give it a go.

Floors are dirty

Now if you come to Hong Kong from far enough away, you quickly learn that something is up with the floor. Either it's dirtier than where you came from, or we're all much cleaner. This is easy to notice at restaurants. You walk in, get seated, dump your bag on the floor (no!), and before you know it, the super-efficient staff will pick them up, pull up a chair, and seat them next to you, like a crowd of small, but surprisingly silent children. Sooner or later, you eventually get it, and you start to look for a table with enough chairs for your party, plus one.
This is not just about good service at eating establishments, it's EVERYWHERE. A great example, from the other day, was a group of young men, perhaps in their late teens, early twenties, handing out flyers. Now, this is not an age-group or a gender that I associate with hygiene, but nonetheless their bags were all piled up on some carefully laid-out sheets of newspaper. Now, I am sure it can't be because the whole population is really worried about germs, so where does it come from. Knowledgeable Hong Kong friends tell me that there is a class element to it, because everyone knows you just don't sit on the floor. Now, obviously there is a reasonable element to this, as you wouldn't want to spend too much of your time eating food off the floor, and yet, so much of what was normal in my former life was about sitting/putting things on/lying down on the ground, all without a care in the world. An associated trope is bag hooks, those indispensable items for keeping your precious possessions off the filthy floor.

Whacky photos

This one is a tricky one. Presumably many of the photo-takers I see are actually tourists, and so not from here, but then why do I see it here all over the place, and not so much elsewhere. Is it something in the air? You know what I'm talking about. It isn't enough to actually be having your photo taken - you have to do something whacky! Hey, maybe you could look like you're resting your hand on the head of that Giant Buddha in the background? Perhaps you need to act as if you're not just happy to be on holiday, but ecstatic! At the very least you need to make some effort, like making the classic double 'v' sign. You know it's the rules.
I wonder if this is something that you just normalise over time, into you find yourself doing it without thinking. I know I've been tempted to do it in photos lately, out of a sort-of ironic homage, but it could be easy to slide from that into seeing it as normal. Contrast this trope with German Photo, where everyone is very serious and self-contained.

Can you see how seductive this whole process is?
 

De Natura Lavatorium

Just a quick post today, as I am still mulling over a longer one. Making good on my promise that this blog would talk about design, I was pleased to come across this very stylish hand basin in the washrooms at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, on the waterfront at Tsim Sha Tsui.

I had always thought of Norway as the epitome of child-centred societies, and perhaps they do a better job across the board, but if you just want to look at the material culture of this one public toilet, then you'd have to say that either the designer, or the ones preparing the brief, should get top marks for considering the needs of those small in size or age.

My curiosity was piqued firstly by the sign on the door. Now once upon a time I would not have paid attention to the signs on the toilet doors, but after a very memorable Women's Studies lecture about fifteen years ago, I have never looked at a toilet door the same again. I could go on at length about how gender is 'created' in both the signs themselves, and the normative choice we must make, out of two very limiting options, whenever we use a non-unisex bathroom, but I will leave it at that, for the sake of brevity and sanity (however I will say thank-you to Dr Annamaria Jagose for one of the few genuinely memorable lectures of my educational life). So back to the sign, or signs (because they always come in matching pairs); they were fairly typical stick figures (i.e. two generic humans, one in pants/trousers, and one in a skirt), but on each sign there were two figures, one larger and one smaller. A nice touch. I suspect you are supposed to read this as good for both adults and children (they being a large category of generally small people), but really it could just as easily be a shout-out to anyone of small stature.

And in a rare instance of cohesive design, this small-friendly sign was borne out by the design of the rest of the bathrooms, which were organised to make everything easy to access, whatever your height. As an added bonus, the sinks were a sterling example of practical industrial design, with clean lines, good materials, and all teamed with water pressure moderate enough for washing without precipitating a fountain!

If only all toilets could be so satisfying...

Fire dragons and website design

Find some better photos here...

If there's one thing that Hong Kong people seem to love, it's a festival, and almost anything is an excuse for celebration. Some are late additions, like Halloween, which is big here at the moment. Others, like the Fire Dragon dance, seem to have a longer and richer history. I could go into detail, but you're much better off looking at the website, which you will NOT want to miss (how could you not love the Tron aesthetic?)

We seem to miss far too many of these, so we thought we would make the effort to get along and see this Fire Dragon that we'd heard so much about.We turned up pretty close to the advertised time, but perhaps we should have been a bit more skeptical - we had to wait a long time for the Fire Dragon to appear. Still, this was an 'Event', so I suppose they needed some build-up. This consisted mostly of a platform on wheels, which contained a big sign, lots of fairy lights, and a succession of very energetic drummers, old and young, female and male, getting us into the right mood for the night.
It is very much a community effort in Tai Hang, and it looks like everyone who wants to can be involved and find a role. Some of the children got to march around with lanterns on poles, many of the elders of the community marched in a dignified fashion up and down, and the energetic helped put together the fire dragon, which involves thousands upon thousands of sticks of incense. Perhaps it goes without saying that it can be a bit overwhelming being downwind of the dragon, which is partly why it needs to be held up nice and high!

The best of a bad set of photos...

Part of the long delay was the coordinated effort to get those thousands of incense sticks lit and pushed into the body of the dragon - this is impossible to do quickly, but needs to be done quickly enough that the first ones won't have burnt down before the procession ends (actually, I think at one point they stopped and replenished a whole lot that had gone out). Something we hadn't calculated for, was the way at a certain point in the night, when the dragon was almost ready to go, they closed the few pedestrian accessways across the roads that had been open, leaving us stranded within a small block of streets with no way out. This would have been okay, but the crowds were pretty intense, even by Hong Kong standards - you wouldn't have wanted to have a panic attack. So we resigned ourselves to going with the flow, and settled in for another half an hour or so.
The dragon is pretty cool, very very long, and ablaze with incense sticks. I can imagine this would have been much more impressive by comparison back in the 1880s (when it started), before we had all become jaded by neon lighting, CGI imagery, the wonders of smartphones, etc.
More puzzling to my mind, and never explained, was the full 'Scottish' marching band, with kilts, bagpipes, the works. I thought Tai Hang meant 'big water channel', not 'Scotland in the South China sea', but then translation is such a complicated affair. If someone can set me straight on the connection that would be great. I mean, I like bagpipe music, perhaps more than most, it was just hard to see how it fits with all the rest; the incense, the lanterns, the tradition.
When it was all over, we were glad we had gone, but next time we will make a better exit plan!

Dot painting on Cheung Chau - The good, the bad, and the ugly

A Hong Kong perspective on Papunya Tula?

Having moved from Australia to Hong Kong, I am always on the look-out for signs, however tenuous, of the connections between the two places. In part, I suppose this is an attempt to know how and where I fit, in this chaotic and bustling metropolis.

So it was interesting the other day to be wandering one of the back alleys of Cheung Chau, one of the outlying islands, and come across one of the ubiquitous private education businesses in HK, whose sole purpose seems to be about taking advantage of the desire of parents to hot-house their kids. This particular one focused on art, and what caught my eye in the window was a display of (Australian) indigenous dot-painting - or at least some Cantonese young people's take on this. Who knows what they had been told/taught about Aboriginal art practices and history, or how much Australian indigenous art they had seen, thought about, or enjoyed. 

As an early childhood teacher back in Australia, I did some 'teaching' of art, though it is certainly very informal in the preschool years, and much of it is about exploration. I also did a lot of thinking, talking and teaching about Australia's indigenous culture, because it is something that is unique and valuable to Australia, and also to the world, being probably the world's oldest continuous culture. On a side note, there was a nice piece in the BBC news online, about Aboriginal science, and their early interest in astronomy, based on analysis of a site in my home state of Victoria.

So this subject interested me on a number of levels, in part because there has been some controversy in Australia about whether it is respectful to teach 'dot painting' to children, as if this can effectively 'do' Aboriginal culture for the class the whole year. It might be different, perhaps, if children experimented with dot painting in the course of a whole year's learning about all the different forms of Aboriginal art, because dot painting is just one technique of many, mostly associated with an art movement based around Papunya, in the central part of Australia, northwest of Alice Springs. Or indeed if children were given some sense of the meaning, the history and the traditions of dot painting, which would give them some sense of the intricacies of indigenous cultures in Australia. At the root of it all, I suppose, is respect, and whether it is disrespectful, particularly in a country that still has a wide streak of racism when it comes to the treatment of indigenous people, to take one tiny element of a culture, and appropriate it without thought or meaning.

Of course, in Hong Kong, it is entirely different. Without the troubled relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia, who can say what meaning it has in this context. Perhaps a traveler from Australia with Indigenous heritage might smile on seeing that same display in Cheung Chau, knowing how far their culture has travelled. Which all reminds me of a beautiful poster put out by ATSIC years ago, which if you can track it down, remains one of the best images ever...

National Day celebrations, or, Why red is doubly significant in China

It was a pleasant surprise to find out, when the National Day fireworks began down at the harbour the other day, that we could see a surprising amount over the tops of the buildings from our apartment window.

This scrappy iPhone photo cannot in any way do it justice. Not only was it hard to capture the moment with the loooong camera delay on a phone, but the phone seemed to struggle to capture the contrasts between the glare of the Tsim Sha Tsui at street level (I'd never noticed it was that bright!), the darkness of the night, and the stunning fireworks.

What made it more amusing was all the televisions I could see tuned to the fireworks in the apartments across the street. Truly, even with much of the view cut off, they still seemed more spectacular seen through my own retina than on the television screens I could see.

It was an impressive fireworks display, as these things go, and a reminder of how much money is still floating around in Hong Kong despite the worldwide recession. It went for twenty-five minutes, which I'd guess results in a hefty price tag. If you want to see some better photos, and read the work of someone who has done some background research, click here.

As for me, I merely reflected on how fortuitous it seems that red has always been an auspicious colour in China, and is also the colour of the International Labour movement, and hence the colour of the flag of the PRC. Nothing like starting off with the public relations battle already won. I don't feel I have learnt enough yet about China's history, ancient and modern, to make more of a comment than that right now. I have lots of opinions, but I am sure there are wiser heads out there to listen to, such as this guy, whom M and I have enjoyed reading.

Instead I will leave you with some appropriate music...

Kung Fu in Kowloon - 功夫喺九龍

Gotta love those outfits, and the concentration

It feels like there are many things that have been on-the-to-do-list for quite some time, without ever quite happening. So once in a while it is great to tick something off that ever-expanding list. One of these is the Kung Fu demonstrations in Kowloon Park, which ought to have been easier to get along to, given how close they are to our apartment (perhaps a three minute walk, at the absolute maximum).

These happen every Sunday, weather permitting, in the sculpture garden of the park - an area is roped off, seats are set-up, and various martial arts groups and people go through the paces for the benefit of an audience that seems to comprise mostly of old Chinese guys (former or current martial artists, or armchair enthusiasts, perhaps?) and sundry curious tourists.

It was a thrill to finally see it, because I didn't really have a sense of what it would be like. Sure, there would be martial arts, but would this be sparring, impromptu lessons, people doing practice drills, or who knows what?

It turns out that it is a bit like what might happen at an Agricultural Show, or a local fair, back in Australia. Though I have no idea how it is organised - is there a peak body for martial arts in Hong Kong? - it seems like it's a forum for the sort of heart-warming, get-the-locals-involved event that every place needs. So while I was there there were demonstrations from one particular school, where the teachers (師父) seemed to be two women. So I saw demonstrations from the beginners (some of whom looked about three or four), through intermediate groups, to some of the older students (late high-school age). Most of the groups ran through a set of moves lasting around three minutes, though a couple of the exhibitions were of stylized, choreographed fights, almost like a dance.

Swords too!

There was also some single performers, mostly older men, and it was hard to tell whether they had just signed up to give a demo, or were part of the same school as the kids in the bright uniforms. Some had uniforms of their own, while others were just in comfortable training clothes. They were all fun to watch - a good reminder that martial arts is about lots of hard work, practice and consistent discipline, rather than what you see in the movies. The most fascinating were two individual demos which were of a style that seemed to be mostly about marshalling your chi (氣, I think!) because these involved very restricted movement, and a whole lot of straining of the face and neck muscles. To me it put me in mind of something I had only vaguely read about, the One-inch punch. It turns out that wikipedia has quite a lot to say about this, if you follow the link, which is all about the differences in Northern and Southern styles of martial arts. Being southerners, here in greater Guangdong province, I suppose I should conclude that those performances were the most local and 'authentic' of them all.

While I'm on the subject, and because I'm unlikely to get back to this topic anytime soon, if you're looking for a good bit of escapist fiction including the beautiful city of Hong Kong, some rollicking martial arts, and the odd Daoist diety, then look no further than this series by Kylie Chan. Lots of fun...

A milestone, of sorts

The Chinese U course. Thoroughly recommended.

Well, I've finished my first Cantonese class, and am eager to do the next one, but will have to wait until the New Year, until a time when I can attend enough of the classes.

It was great to have been taught some of the most fundamental structures of Cantonese, because now when I go looking for information in my various resources, both online and dead-tree, I understand a lot better what I need to know, and how I might put it together in a sentence.

The milestone I talked about in the title, was actually a simple but profound moment for me - I went to the fruit stand nearby, and purchased some fruit, but did so entirely in Cantonese. The interaction wasn't long, and of course, it wasn't complicated, but what mattered was that I understood what was happening and had no moments of feeling lost or confused.

I am not trying to suggest that this is some great watershed in my language-life, or anything. I will still know far too little to get by for some long time yet. But it gave me hope, hope for a time when I could feel relatively normal in a Canto-world. A more normal moment for me is like my experience of sending a parcel at the Post Office the other day. I asked, in good Cantonese, courtesy of my great teachers, how much it would cost to send to Australia (I know I did this okay, because I am getting good at reading the wince or the frown on people's faces when they are either pained by my pronunciation, or merely mystified as to what I have said). This part of the conversation was fine. The postal worker then of course asked me questions I couldn't answer! Do you want to send it airmail? Do you want registered mail? Very legitimate questions, but with words I didn't know and that lost me completely. As always with learning a language, there will be a next time, and by then, I will have learnt the words for registered mail, and airmail, and perhaps may register another oh-so-small success!

Geek out? The Woman as Warrior

Shu Lien in combat with Jiao Long (Jen Yu)

It has to be said that this post about the woman as warrior (from here WaW) is straying a bit far from the stated aims of my blog, in not really having anything to do with either design, coffee, gardening, or cultural dislocation. So be it. This is what I want to write about right now!

When viewing television or movies in Hong Kong, I am always a bit biased towards trying to find movies either from Hong Kong, or that are in Cantonese, just as I might once have sought out Australian movies - it is about connecting with a sense of place. So the other day I was watching a movie from 2009 called 'Hua Mulan'. This is about the famous story of a young woman who joined the army in place of her sick father, and ended up saving China and becoming a famous General. I thought this version of the movie, co-directed by Jingle Ma and Wei Dong, was quite compelling, focusing on the horrors of war, the difficulties soldiers face, and the impossibilities of managing your emotions in such a debilitating environment. I always find it inspiring to see a woman acting as a warrior because it disrupts our conventional ideas about gender, and forces us to confront one of the last taboos, women fighting on the front line. I am probably just as interested in films where men confront one of their taboos - taking care of children and taking real responsibility for house work - but most of the latter films tend to be played for comic effect (think, Kindergarten Cop, Daddy Daycare), rather than heroic, such as 'Hua Mulan'. I haven't seen the Disney version, but if someone wants to give an opinion on it, please do.

The most compelling vision of the WaW is in the movie, 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon', directed by Taiwanese director Ang Lee and based, I believe, on a series of stories popular about fifty years ago in Hong Kong. This movie has three women warriors, Shu Lien, Jiao Long and Jade Fox, all with complex storylines, and individual styles. From the first scene, which opens on a cart moving through Beijing, in 1779, the sense of the history and richness of Chinese culture really hits me, and I am swept up in the story. Mostly, though, I just love the character of Shu Lien (played by Michelle Yeoh, apparently a genuinely competent martial artist herself), whose nobility of character, subtle appreciation of diplomacy and deep-seated wisdom shines through the whole movie. If you have never seen the movie, at least do me the favour of following this link to the fight scene between Shu Lien and Jiao that uses this not as an excuse for action (though it is that) but as a way of demonstrating the essential differences between the two warriors. Watch as Shu Lien demonstrates phenomenal competence with multiple weapons, and fights an uphill battle against the 'mystical' sword that Jen has wrongfully stolen. As if this wasn't enough, the character of Dark Cloud, a sweet and funny young man who falls in love with Jiao, simply makes the movie that much better. If you see only one martial arts movie in your life, make it this one.

Of course, the WaW phenomenon also has a strong presence in novels, with my personal favourite being 'The Deed of Paksenarrion' by Elizabeth Moon. Intriguingly, the author is a former US marine, which perhaps lends her narrative a little more realism and grit about the mundane details of military life. Mostly it is an inspiring story that never fails to bring tears to my eyes, no matter how many times I have read it before.

Most of these WaW texts, both novels and movies, exist for me in the shadow of Maxine Hong Kingston's iconic feminist novel, 'The Woman Warrior'. This part-autobiography, part-novel helped shaped the women's movement of the 1970s, by exploring issues of women's power given the constraints of gender and race. Which circles me neatly back to the beginning of the blog, because one of the stories told by the protagonist's mother, in the book, is that of Mulan, which is a very old Chinese folk tale, and the very story that inspired this blog post in the first place. I don't know whether it was reading this book that started me on my secret, or not-so-secret, love of the WaW meme. Perhaps it was having a feisty feminist twin sister, who always won all of our battles, no matter the place or the time. Whatever the reason, I love to feel wrenched out of the everyday reality of gender relations in the 21st century, and forced to imagine a life with more possibilities for everyone.

Awe and wonder at Kadoorie Farm

Caribbean flamingos, far from home

Some time ago now, M and myself made the trek out to Kadoorie Farm and Botanical garden, a place I'd been reading about since we first came to Hong Kong. What little I knew was that it was an organic farm, with some walking trails, and a small restaurant attached.  Well, it turned out to be so much more, and I hope my terrible iPhone photos do it some sort of justice.

First of all, the setting is stunning, as so many places in Hong Kong seem to be. We wended our way out along the West rail line to a station called Kam Sheung Road  (錦上路站), and then took a bus that would eventually stop at Kadoorie farm. So our classic Hong Kong double-decker took us up into the hills and dropped us in front of what turned out to be an almost vertical farm. I don't know why I should have been surprised by this - the only flat land in Hong Kong is that created by human beings, whether through levelling hills, or filling in the harbour. So from our point-of-view outside the front entrance, much of the farm complex was laid out in front of us, up a steep hillside, and it looked like there was much to explore.

Ox carries pig! What next?牛馱豬

One of our aims for the day was to do a bit of walking. Don't ask me why, because this was August, the height of summer in Hong Kong, which means mid-thirties temperatures and high humidity, and on this day, more sunshine than we could really deal with. Fortunately most of the walking tracks were through areas with plenty of tree cover, so it was possible, though the steep hillsides made it probably our sweatiest experience in Hong Kong so far.

Before heading on our walk we stopped in at the farm shop and museum, which is where I caught up on the history of Kadoorie farm. It turns out that it has a fascinating history. It was built in the 1950s, in the heyday of agricultural triumphalism, as an experimental farm to assist the poor farmers of the New Territories (新界, some of this week's vocabulary). So there were some great pictures and stories of these early days. I was most fascinated by the cattle and pigs being used as pack animals on the steep hills (Who knew pigs could or would carry loads? I thought they were too smart for that), with the best picture being the pig being carried by a cow. Love it! And was that a bamboo structure it was being carried in? Almost certainly.

These days it has morphed into a multipurpose environmental centre, with more strings to its bow than a whole orchestra. Amongst the things we saw were herb gardens, flower gardens, orchards, vegetable gardens, the museum and farm shop I just mentioned, a cafe, homes for all sorts of lost non-farm animals, a pig-breeding program, a huge collection of chook breeds, reptile enclosures, a tea plantation and many different sustainability educational centres (definitely my kind of place). It will certainly be worth a return visit on a cooler day. The 'lost' animals are a quirky aspect of the place. Apparently there is quite a lot of exotic animal smuggling transiting Hong Kong, and so when these are discovered (liberated?) they sometimes need a home to go to. Kadoorie farm seems to be one of those homes. So as well as actual Hong Kong wildlife, it also has such exotic delights as Caribbean flamingos, and South American caiman. The flamingos were a sort I'd never seen before - a gorgeous orangy-peach colour - much more exciting than the relatively drab pink ones in our local Kowloon park.

The walking tracks, which if you make it there, can take you right up to the summit of one of the hills, called Gun Yan Saan (觀音山) in Cantonese, which will be more familiar to English-speakers as Guanyin mountain, named after the Buddhist 'Goddess' of compassion. This has apparently been a sacred spot for many hundreds of years, but we didn't make it there on this visit, given the steepness of the slope and the heat of the day. We weren't the only ones crazy enough to be walking, but there would have been no more than a handful of others. It was beautiful, as I hope you can see by the photos of some plants that I took. The highlight for me, though, were the insects, of which we saw many, including some fantastic dragonflies. Mind you, you don't have to go to Kadoorie farm to see those (we saw stunning hot-pink dragonflies around the ponds in Hong Kong park just last weekend). Apart from the insects, I think most creatures were hiding from the heat. We saw a few lizards, but they were so hyped up by the temperatures, they were gone in a flash.
It is excursions like this that make me wonder how much there is out there to see in Hong Kong, if we just keep looking. Such a small place, but so so much to see.

Alternative masculinities in Hong Kong

I have always found it fascinating to crowd-watch in Hong Kong. There is always something to see that reminds me that this is not where I grew up, that it was and is a different culture with different motivations and different values.

Being interested in gender, and being male, means that I am always curious about how people 'do' their gender in the everyday, whether it is what they wear, how they walk, what they do, how they relate to others, or any of the myriad ways in which gender plays out in the modern world. It is a good place to start in thinking about the differences between Hong Kong and Australia, because having lived for thirty years in Australia (as a male), I can safely say that I know what expectations there are around gendered behaviour generally in Australia, as well as how it has played out in my life.

The picture on the left illustrates one of those moments where I can be sure that I am living 'elsewhere' (note the man on the right with the light blue umbrella). Although very occasionally you would see someone using an umbrella as a sunshade in Australia, I had never ever seen a man using one, but in Hong Kong it is, if not common, at least a fairly regular occurrence. I've even used one myself this year once or twice, but I feel very strange doing so, because I know that I am breaking some unwritten rule established for me in the process of being inculcated into Australian masculinities.

So it is forever fascinating for me to be in a place with new (gender) rules and norms. Clearly it is okay for men to shade themselves from the sun with umbrellas in Hong Kong, even if men are less worried about sun damage than women here.

There are also very different rules about touching between men here, though I can't say that I can pinpoint them absolutely. My neighbourhood, Tsim Sha Tsui, is quite an ethnically diverse neighbourhood (for example the street behind me is known for its Korean restaurants and stores) and so I don't want to make bold claims about Hong Kong masculinities when I might instead be observing Korean or Japanese masculinities. Nonetheless, there is a great sense of expansiveness for me in Hong Kong to walk down my street and see (in this case, I'm fairly sure) straight men holding hands with their male friends. This simply does not happen in Australia, and even same-sex attracted men are cautious about where and when they do.

I'd love to take photos of some of these difference performances of masculinity, but it feels pretty intrusive to do so, particularly around something as sensitive as gender. I knew I could get away with the photo at the top because this was during a dragon boat race, and plenty of people had cameras out.

This is not to try and imagine that gender relations are all sweetness and light here in Hong Kong. What you gain on the roundabouts, you lose on the swings, as they say. Although it is much more common for women of all ages and classes to work here, this is as much about making ends meet in Hong Kong, and supporting your family, as it is about being a citizen or finding fulfilment in work. I will probably post about feminities in Hong Kong at a later date, but it is probably enough to say now that being a tough, assertive woman is probably even less admired in HK than it was in Australia.

The statistics I've seen about this for the whole of China, suggest that sexist assumptions about women's and men's roles are more entrenched in China that in 'Western' countries. Sadly, in many of those 'Western' countries, while attitudes may be changing, actual practices are not changing as fast. Back in Australia men still take very little responsibility for housework and childcare, and women still have a hard time getting the recognition they deserve at the upper end of company hierarchies. As Arlie Hochschild has suggested, men's failure to take responsibility for domestic duties has been a 'stalled revolution'. 

So if you're male, and you're reading this, get off the computer already, and go do some real (house) work! And if you'd like to read more about these issues, I cannot recommend highly enough this book by Chou Wah-Shan (周華山).

I love my Cantonese class - 我鍾意廣東話班

An apple for the teacher?

As I mentioned, I have been studying a proper Cantonese class through Chinese University, and I am amazed at how much I have learnt in just a few weeks. It has helped tie together all the little bits and pieces of 廣東話 that I had taught myself over the last six to eight months, and has given me a grammatical context within which to frame it all.

I feel much braver about asking for things out and about, having spent some hours now practicing boring conversations with my classmates. Today I felt able to go and ask the person staffing the desk in my building whether they had a photocopier and whether I could make some copies. Though I didn't do so perfectly fluently, of course, I could conceive of doing so, and it worked out okay, even if I couldn't totally understand the directions to the nearest copy shop!

Along the way I pick up curious bit of information about Cantonese of the sort that I enjoy. I like the way all languages, except perhaps Esperanto, have their little quirks. So at class yesterday I asked why the character for 'noon' that we'd been taught (晝 or dzau - mid flat tone) was different from the one I'd been noticing on parking signs when they say things like 'no parking 7-10 pm', which was clearly different (午). I was told by Crystal, the teacher, that the one I have seen around is the written form, whereas the one that we'd been taught is the spoken form. Okay, I can understand that, but then, if it's a spoken form, then why does it have a character to represent it? How does that work? According to Crystal, perhaps if they were writing the word 'noon' in a very informal context, such as a game show on TV, they might use the spoken form. Fair enough, but then why is it a more complicated character to write, if it's more colloquial? A little mystery that I may just let go for now, as I try and learn a more basic understanding of the language!

'Welcome to the future!'

The other day, while looking for the art gallery in Harbour City that I'd read about, I decided to check its location on what I thought was one of those standard electronic shopping centre maps.

I touched the screen and wondered why it was taking so long to load (it was probably no more than fifteen seconds, but you know how long that feels when you're waiting for something to load). Suddenly up pops a window containing a genuine customer service person, in real time, no less. I was too surprised to do anything but blurt out my question, 'Where's the art gallery?', in English, as I don't know the words for art gallery yet. In excellent English he explained where I should go, as if he were standing right there next to me. As he did, he underlined these directions by writing the name of a prominent store near the gallery, in some mysterious fashion so that it appeared across the screen in front of me, handwritten. After thanking him in Cantonese, I wandered off, and sure enough, it was just where he'd described.

The art itself was an anti-climax. I felt like I'd just seen the shape of the future, with virtual helpers popping up where you need them to give you assistance and then disappearing silently and swiftly once they are done. Of course the technology isn't quite that smooth, but it certainly felt like it was close at that moment.

Have I been watching too much 'Big Bang Theory'? Is my inner-nerd showing through?

Home?

Everything seemed to be flowering prolificly

I had the delightfully odd experience recently, of heading back to Australia, after having lived for six months in Hong Kong. It was odd because I realised that for the first time in thirty years I was arriving in Australia but not coming 'home'.
It forced me to think, as I did over a lot over the three weeks of my visit, about what constitutes 'home' and why. Some of it is pragmatic - you have a house, a room, a place of your own - and that is what makes it feel like home. Some of it is emotional - this is the place where you feel the strongest connections to people, and to the land. Some of it is practical - the place feels familiar, and you know your way around, at all sorts of levels.
Looked at like this, travelling to Australia perhaps ought to have felt like coming home, because I still have strong emotional and practical attachments to the place, even though I don't have a house there. And yet, and yet... it wasn't home, and I could feel that quite viscerally. So perhaps at its core, home is about where you have chosen to be, and want to be. For now, and for the forseeable future, Hong Kong is where I want to be, and so leaving it, even to go somewhere like Melbourne where my connections are long and deep, really did feel like being 'uprooted'.
So what did I notice that was great, or not so great, about the visit? Seeing friends was wonderful, and being 'on holiday', even a working holiday, meant it felt like I had the time and the energy to chat at length, about all sorts of things. Of necessity, given the political awareness of many of these friends, it meant catching up on the issues of the moment in Australia, which consisted mostly of; the carbon tax (let's hope!), the ban on live cattle exports (bizarre - 'we're going to kill and eat you, but we feel bad that we're doing it so brutally'), and asylum seekers (Australia's racism on display). It also meant catching up on eating 'Western food' that is hard to find in Hong Kong, like good baklava, and great artisan bread.

Swan River pea (Brachysema lanceolatum)

It has been a wet year in Australia, after ten years or more of drought, so all the native plants that I love so much were looking amazing. Everywhere I looked my favourite plants were flowering, from grevilleas, to Banksias, to the humble Hardenbergia. One of my favourites, the flame pea (Chorizema cordatum), which originates from Western Australia, was in full flower, with its arresting combination of pink and orange. It all felt like a feast for the eyes, even if I had to endure Melbourne winter weather to see much of it.
As I was studying while I was over there, I was lucky enough to find a spot in the library at Monash's peninsula campus which looked out on some beautiful gum trees, and this offered the perfect backdrop to an intense study session. It was also great to get some intellectual community while in Melbourne, and attend the Winter School at Monash, and have the chance to talk study and research related issues with other students and staff.
So there were a lot of good things about my trip - both things that I had expected to enjoy, as well as things that I hadn't. There were some things, though, that were not so good. If you've read any of this blog, you'll have realised that I love the public transport system in Hong Kong. It works so well, that travelling any other way seems like an inconvenience. So it was a shock to the system to come back to Melbourne and be reminded quite forcefully that many public transport systems do not work so well. In Hong Kong very few people run for public transport, because it comes so frequently that there is genuinely no need to do so. Why get hot and sweaty when the next train is a minute and a half away?
[.....] I wrote a couple of long paragraphs about my experiences trying to have faith in Melbourne public transport, but I decided to delete them in the interests of not sounding like a whinger. I could write a similar couple of paragraphs about my experiences driving in Melbourne, of which I also had the dubious pleasure. The latter was a reminder of how ridiculously spread out the city of Melbourne really is - even travelling on a freeway it takes a long time to get places.

Hardenbergia violacea

All of these transport experiences are a reminder of what a huge impact urban design has on a city. I hadn't realised how much I had normalised the conveniences of high density living until I came to Melbourne and realised how far away even the relatively 'close' things can be. One example will probably tell the tale very simply. Walking away from my apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui, I will usually pass two or three supermarkets within a five minute stroll in any given direction. One day in Melbourne I drove for an hour, but because most of it was on freeways or arterial roads, although I must have been within reach of many supermarkets, I didn't pass even one.  To me, those two experiences side by side speak volumes about the liveability of the walking city versus what Newman and Kenworthy would call automobility.

A blurry, but empty Northcote Plaza

On a more amusing note, when I did get to a supermarket another day, I was genuinely confounded to walk into a shopping mall and find all the shops closed. I had forgotten that 5pm was a 'normal' time for most shops to close, because I have adjusted to Hong Kong, where everything is open until ten or eleven at night, and often much later. For a moment I genuinely wondered if it was much later than I had thought, because my mind was refusing to make sense of all the shut-up shops. I did at least find the supermarket open, but it was a lone island of people amid a sea of vacated real estate.
Perhaps 'home' is actually about these everyday expectations about what happens at a station, in a shopping mall, or on the street?

Just like school...

Sadly, no photo for this, but better a post without a photo than no post at all. My new (low) ambition is to actually write something other than my thesis, however short!
So tonight was a big thrill because M. and I started an actual bona-fide Cantonese class. So instead of all my ad-hoc practice and learning from books and online lessons, I got to sit in a classroom with other students, and go back to the basics.
I loved it! My pronunciation is definitely going to improve. Our teacher, Crystal, was a very clear and consistent speaker, and was good at explaining the nuances of the mouth muscles which help shape the different sounds and tones of Cantonese. She was very quick to correct people when they were wrong, but she did it with a smile, and was very encouraging, with lots of repetitions of 好 (good) and 得 (okay) to help us along. We practised all seventeen initial consonants and the 51 final sounds of Cantonese, and repeated them all many times. Very useful, even if it felt like being back in Grade 1. M really did not enjoy this part of it. For myself, I hope I get corrected on my pronunciation every lesson for the entire course. What a thrill. M swears she is not going back, but I trust that she doesn't really mean that!
In the second half of the lesson we learnt to say, 我叫 (I'm called... My name is...) and 我係澳大利亞儿 (I am Australian, or really, I am Australia person), or whatever country you were from. I was pleasantly surprised at the diversity of the class. There was someone from Germany, France, Italy, Taiwan, Austria, Fiji, three from Japan, three from the US, and three from Australia. For sure I had learned how to say all these things already, but the endless repetition of them in a classroom situation, as well as having to say them out loud, on your own, in front of a roomful of people, really helps them stick in your mind. Bring it on!

At last...

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I finally made it to a Dragon Boat race. It's June 6th, and so it's 端午節 (Dragon boat festival), a public holiday devoted just to this event. If I was going to watch a Dragon Boat race this year, I figured it had better be today. The public holiday commemorates the sport (which is pretty ancient) as well as the story of Qu Yuan, which you can read about at the wikipedia link, if you're interested.

Now there are many different dragon boat races on today, but I wanted to go back to our old neighbourhood, and enjoy the familiarity of Tai Po. I've walked many times in Tai Po waterfront park, and figured it was as beautiful a place as any to watch some racing.

Loved all the bamboo structures

My interest in Dragon Boat racing came about because of a book that I read by two New Zealanders called "Time to eat the dog", which was an attempt to put some numbers on the environmental impact of many common activities, such as sport, keeping pets, or whatever. Their discussion of which sports had the smallest carbon footprint concluded that the best, at least out of the ones they examined, was Dragon Boat racing. Now at the time, I don't think I'd even heard of it, or at least it hadn't made much of an impression on me. Their analysis at least intrigued me enough that when we moved to Hong Kong I thought, 'I must see one of those races', and so here I was. The 271 bus provided a convenient, and uncommonly peaceful, way to get there, and the place was buzzing with people, even at 8.30am.

So what did I learn about Dragon Boat racing? Well, only what I could learn with my eyes and ears, because I didn't see any explanations of the proceedings, and I didn't understand the commentary, except for the numbers and the word Tai Po! Every dragon boat seems to have twenty rowers, ten on each side, each with an individual paddle. There is also a drummer, who keeps time up the front with a regular beat on a big drum, and an oarsperson at the back who stands up and keeps the boat heading in the right direction. I liked the way it is a mixed sex sport, as there aren't that many of these, and certainly a mixed ability one, as some of the teams were very strong and fast, while others seemed to be just happy to finish. I think this is because most, and perhaps all, of the teams are formed by local businesses, community groups, or whoever (at least one team was connected with a bar in Tai Po), and so they will all take it with varying degrees of seriousness depending on the culture and size of the organisation.

All the teams getting ready to race

I was expecting the boats themselves to be a bit more varied. I love the dragon-head prow, and dragon-tail stern, but they all seemed very similar, at least to my undiscerning eye. Perhaps there is a standard design to try and level the playing-field for the sport? One of the curious aspects of it was the difficulty in getting six to eight very long thin boats lined up at the starting line. When the wind got up a bit, many of them got blown around so that they were facing sideways, and often this seemed to necessitate one boat, and then another, paddling around in a circle to get in place again. I don't know how common this is, but certainly one race seemed to take about ten minutes before everyone was lined up to the satisfaction of the starter. Perhaps this is normal for boat races - I'm certainly not a regular visitor at any others.

One of the most startling things to me, as a newbie to Hong Kong, was the complete absence of commerce at the Dragon Boat races in Tai Po. With so many spectators, athletes, and officials, I would have assumed there would have been many small food stalls, if nothing else, and perhaps a bit of a mini-fair besides. Certainly the Tai Po district council had organised things very well, with a number of different bamboo VIP viewing platforms, plenty of portaloos (Kenny eat your heart out), a number of St John ambulance divisions, and various police, Leisure services staff, and others I couldn't identity, on duty. So where was the commerce? I mean, this is Hong Kong, where there must be more places to shop per person that anywhere in the world. And nothing?!? It was actually reassuring to have it be all about the racing, rather than anything else, though given the sticky 31°C day, I was secretly hoping for at least an ice-cream vendor. As there seems to be with many festivals here, there is a particular food associated with the Dragon Boat festival - sticky rice parcels wrapped in, I think lotus leaves. There weren't even these for sale at the racing, which would have at least fitted with the theme. Fortunately I got in early, and tried a vegetarian version of one a day or two earlier, so that I didn't miss out. I learned at Chinese New Year how fast some of these special foods can disappear, once the holiday is over, and I'm always happy to experience Hong Kong through my tastebuds, as well as my eyes and ears.

The joys of a local library

Feeling like you have settled into a place is different for different people. Probably everyone has their rituals for feeling settled, whether this is getting all your boxes unpacked, cooking a first meal, learning the names of your local streets, or perhaps finding out the best pizza place in the vicinity.

Today, M. and I went and found where our local library now is, the compact and slightly-hidden-away Tsim Sha Tsui library. In fine Hong Kong fashion, to get to this you have to go up in a lift - only one floor, mind you - but enough to remind you that Hong Kong is a vertical city. I'd like to think there are stairs somewhere, but if so, they are not easy to find. Naturally, the first thing we needed to do was to get our library cards. One of the beauties of a Hong Kong Identity Card is that it gets used as a multipurpose form of identification for all sorts of things. In a car-oriented culture like Australia, a driving licence gets used most regularly for this sort of thing, but in Hong Kong, where few people want or need to drive, the HKID is a very useful and universal form of identification.

Even better, as we found out today at the library, it can be used as our library card, due to the power of the microchip. So instead of my bag getting cluttered up with too many library cards, my HKID card can do the lot. The library staff very patiently, and with very competent English, explained which form to fill in and the correct way to insert your card in the card-reader (wait until the light stops flashing), and so we were on our way.

Best of all, this is a library that will just be for pleasure, because we are desperately in need of reading that isn't just academic. One of the great finds of today was the book above, that describes all the local neighbourhoods, in just enough detail to make them interesting, unpacking some of the history and culture that has resulted in what we see today. I did not know, for example, that until the 1960s, the Tsim Sha Tsui area was quite dominated by the (then) British military, so  that much of what has shaped this place is the requirements of the military personnel at the time. This explains, in part, why there are so many restaurants, bars, nightclubs, tailors and so on, in this area. It is the sort of detail that I would not have even thought about - TST just seemed to be that way - but naturally all places have a history and a reason behind their current existence. I suppose as the bars and restaurants sprang up, so people from other neighbourhoods were drawn here for the nightlife, and so as the military presence was withdrawn, this more 'tourist' aspect took on a life of its own. I had the funny thought as I started to read the book, 'Wow, this book is as good as Wikipedia', and then felt a bit ashamed at how Wikipedia has started to colonize my life! It is very easy to forget how much information that used to have to be searched out painstakingly is now at the tips of our fingers, quite literally.

The English language fiction section of the library is quite small, as you would expect, in a country where the first language of 97% of the people is 廣東話. On the upside, our new library membership gives us access to all forty-two (I think) branches of the Hong Kong library system, so there are bound to be quite a few books to read across all of those. And no matter how small the fiction section, it was certainly a lot more books than we had available to read at home. I was secretly pleased to see the library so well-used. All the communal tables were pretty much full, with people using them to read books, newspapers and magazines. Most of them looked like they were retired, and reminded me of one of the many things I am going to do more of when I retire. Shouldn't heaven be more like a library?

It was an interesting reminder of the local culture to see the balance of books in the social sciences section (academic curiosity). Most of the sections were pretty small, except for the sections on finances, money-management and information technology, which were pretty extensive. It is hard to miss when you come to Hong Kong that the power of money is big here. People respect money, and everyone wants to earn money. This is true of many places, I know, but in HK it is tied up as well with a lot of other religious and cultural aspects of the place that I am still only just getting a sense of. It is why the most common greeting at New Year is 恭喜發財 (which means sort-of 'Congratulations on becoming rich'). In a way that I have only seen elsewhere in the US, the myth that 'if you work hard you will prosper' seems alive and well. Given all the things I have been reading about social class and the education system in the last few months, while it may be true that all things being equal, you will do better if you work harder, for many people the harsh truth is that even working very hard brings few rewards, and for many the deck is really stacked against them.

Fresh from the glow of public education that is the library, we swung back past Crema Coffee, for a delicious espresso, with the added bonus of being able to flick through our new books. For the espresso aficionados, the latte art on M's coffee today was a swan! A lovely morning...

Oh what a bad blogger am I?

Well, it has been a long hiatus between blog posts. I hope this is not the sign of a longer term trend. That have been many reasons for this; moving apartments, no internet connection, guests visiting from overseas, and so on.
Some of it is also that I spend far too much of my time at my computer studying, and when I am done it is hard to feel like I should sit down and stare at the computer some more. As today is Sunday, I am having a (relatively) study-free day, so I can feel free to blog.
I am excited by our new place in Tsim Sha Tsui. It is small (M. worries about this), but I love it. Unlike in our previous apartment, where I felt like I had to walk too far to find anything, even in the kitchen, in our new apartment, everything is conveniently closeby. Most importantly, the storage is great, so everything that needs to be can be put away, leaving the place uncluttered and simple, which is what we like. Now if only we had tatami floors and shoji, it would be perfect! In the picture you can see the view out of our living room window, which encapsulates so many aspects of Hong Kong that I like.
There is the combination of old and new, as evidenced, in the foreground, by the grungy older building opposite, and the gleaming facade of the Miramar to the right. Looking a little further away, there is the gorgeous spread of Kowloon Park, which is going to be a favourite for morning walks, or simply getting away from the apartment for a bit of 'nature'. Looking beyond the park you can see the somewhat tacky 80s (sadly there is no wikipedia entry to confirm or deny this) facade of the Royal Pacific Hotel, beyond which is Victoria Harbour, and a splendid view of Hong Kong Island. Conveniently there is an easy walking route that cuts across the park, over a pedestrian bridge, to an attractive waterfront promenade, to make this an even more enticing option.
The park itself is one of the biggest in Hong Kong, with a wild outdoor swimming pool, bird aviary, resident flock of flamingos, regular Sunday martial arts demonstrations, and so much more. Every morning, it is incredibly well-used for tai chi practice, with individuals and groups practicing in all corners of the part, at various levels of skill. Perhaps when I get familiar enough with the twenty-four move tai chi style I am trying to learn, I can find a group that does that and join them occasionally. Given the very multicultural nature of the area (we are close to Chungking Mansions after all, as well as one of the main mosques on Kowloon-side), there will also be people doing other forms of exercise, such as yoga, although this is strictly a marginal affair compared to the tai chi practice.
For us it is such a contrast from living on the very edge of Tai Po. Now we have everything, almost literally, at our doorstep. For a chemist shop we need only walk ten metres. For a newsagents, perhaps 50 metres. Our closest supermarket is 100 metres away, although there are many in the vicinity. There are innumerable cafes and restaurants, but I am most interested in ones that serve great espresso, and for that there are at least four closeby that meet my standards - my favourite at the moment being Crema Coffee. It is a little daggy (to use an Australianism) as far as decor goes, but the coffee is excellent (they roast their own in-house) and they do a very cheap breakfast too. There is even a resident dog at certain times of the day, which keeps M. smiling. There is a Post Office just around the corner, a number of vegetarian Chinese restaurants within a two or three minute walk, and, I think, four cinemas within a five or ten minute walk of the place. I think we feel like we are in Paradise, at least as far as the convenience factor.
As those will know who have visited us, at our old place it could be quite a chore to get a taxi, mostly to explain the complexities of how to get there across the English-Cantonese barrier. At our new place the majority of the traffic that goes past our door is taxis, a little bit like in central London. I cannot imagine there would be any time, day or night, when there wouldn't be a taxi in view, though I haven't currently been awake here at 3am to test that proposition. Mind you, with dozens of buses going down Nathan road at the end of the street, the MTR nearby, and a free shuttle-service to the airport express, it is hard to know when we will really need a taxi, unless we have so much luggage that a bit of laziness appeals.
Our apartment move was actually achieved in Hong Kong style, via taxi. We thought of how little stuff we really have (given our furnished apartment) and how difficult it might be to organise movers when we didn't know where to start, and the taxi option seemed appealing. So we have made four taxi journeys down on various days, with a full load of bags/boxes and this has mostly done the trick. Given the price of taxis in Hong Kong, this was all managed surprisingly cheaply. Even better, it gave me practise in saying my new address in Cantonese.
Actually, in one of the first taxi rides down, I heard my taxi-driver talking on one of his phones to someone, and saying something that sounded oddly familiar (I am oddly fascinated by how many phones most taxi-drivers have - the most I've seen is six, all lined up in their own brackets on the dashboard). It took me a moment, but I eventually realised he was saying our street! It made me smile, because so much of the time random words and phrases that I understand in Cantonese, pop out of people's conversations around me. Unless they're saying something very simple, it is usually not enough to know what they are talking about, but it is enough to make me realise I am making some progress, however slow. Another thing that is available in our new neighbourhood, is actual lessons in the language, organised via Chinese University of Hong Kong. So that will be one of the first tasks on my list for next week...

Space to think, space to move...

I'm never quite sure what the ethics of taking photos of unsuspecting strangers is, so this photo is artfully blurred.
Just a quick post, tonight, to say that yesterday I had one of those moments when I really knew I was in a different culture. I mean, most of the time as a newcomer to Hong Kong, I live my daily life knowing that it's quite different, but mostly acting as if it's all quite familiar, because that seems to be a good way of getting through the day. I think I can only take so much novelty in any given week - I think my brain is being stretched taking it all in at the moment - so this strategy keeps me moving along without worrying too much about the detail.
Anyway, back to what I wanted to talk about. So I was on the MTR, as I am quite frequently, and about to get off the train at University station. I'd got up from my seat (yes, I actually had a seat) and gone to stand in front of the door, you know, facing it ready to get off, with my nose perhaps 30cm from the actual door. About 2 seconds before the doors actually opened, someone moved into that really rather small space between me and the door, ready to get off. Now this wasn't a bad thing. I wasn't in a hurry, and I hadn't been jostled. From my perspective, coming from Australia, this would just never have happened. Whether it is about different approaches to personal space, or whatever, I can never remember any similar thing happening to me there - it is almost literally unimaginable. As it was, in this particular instance I  didn't know what to think. If you'd asked me I would have said I was as close to the door as I would ever want or need to be, unless the train was packed, which it wasn't. And yet someone saw the space in front of me as a socially acceptable gap to stand in, ready to deboard, as our American cousins might put it. Strange.
What made it a little bit stranger was that I couldn't put it down to aberrant behaviour, as if this was some outsider, even from an HK perspective. As I'd been sitting down I'd been watching these two older women chatting across the aisle in front of me. They seemed like perfectly average women, in their late forties/early fifties, chatting about life while on their way home. And if you'd asked me to think of a profile of a person, by age/class/ethnicity/gender/whatever who might step in front of me, one of these women would have been about the last on my list of candidates. I'm not going to obsess about this much longer, but it reminded me, quite forcefully, that I truly don't understand this place, and perhaps never really will.
That's actually quite a useful lesson to have underlined every now and again, particularly given the almost negligible inconvenience or harm I suffered from it. I wonder when I'll get my next reminder....