We
wake up at six a.m. in our tiny hotel room in
Lower Kowloon, and he rushes off to
the airport to look for a lost suitcase. I wait in our room until about
nine, and
then he arrives with the green cloth
bag, and we go out for breakfast at the expected Delifrance.
I begin
to wonder what I see in Hong Kong,
as I fail to make big money here, or
even middle money, and also do the same things over and over again.
I see now
the city through the eyes of a Returning
Born Here, and he feels only the stifling heat.
We
are incredibly workaholic, and go off to a Cyber
Cafe, large and air-conditioned, to
work on Career Letters, sending off 36 emails, a few faxes, and one
phone call.
At
5 p.m. we turn into Dutiful Hong Kongese, and
rush off to the front of the hotel
to meet a Chinese aunt, a Chinese uncle, and a Chinese cousin of Joe's.
They are going
to store all our valuables, and take
us out for dinner.
I
start counting at dinner the numbers of hours
we have been up since we left Canada
Thursday morning: 48 hours. I then count my number of hours of sleep,
and those
were interrupted: 4 hours.
Joe intervenes
in a heated debate between Uncle
and Cousin, letting me know he wants harmony.
Sadly,
his Uncle has been the victim of pharmaceutical
company experiments gone wrong some
decades ago in colonized Hong Kong: he has major hearing problems, like
the Sister and
Brother of Joe.
His Aunt
is very affectionate towards me, though
she asks me more than a few times How often do you go to church? She
is a widow still rather cute in
her early fifties, with a loyal son,
and lives in Wan Chai, where she works irregularly, collects a pension,
and reads her
Bible nightly.
His
Uncle seems to be giving Joe advice and I can
only hope that it is not Ditch The
White Person type of advice in my Cultural Paranoia, though of course,
it might be done
more tactfully.
Anyone
who worries about relationships between
Whites and Chinese must be at a Baby Level of Human Problems.
I
have seen a lot worse than that,
and if you give me a hard time, I'll give some of it to you!
We
go back to the hotel after finding the lost
suitcase, applying for 36 jobs, and
contacting the Chinese Family, and sleep the long healing sleep of the
industrious.
