| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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I have heard two or
three, mostly of the Beijing style; Cantonese is different, but I do not
yet know the differences. (One of the marvelous things about writing
and publishing a trip log is that unanswered questions tend to get
answered.) In any case, I have seen one Beijing opera about the
Monkey-King Sun Wu Kong causing Chaos in Heaven by disrupting all the
old gods. The story comes from the old Buddhist novel Pilgrimage to the
West. It has become a more popular opera since the current Chinese
government has cast itself in the role of iconoclast, disrupting old
religious values.
I have heard another opera that I do not remember well, but it is
about how the citizens of a besieged village co-operated in some sort of
deception--I don't remember what--to defeat the invading army.
I have read the story of other Chinese operas including the famous
'White Snake' in which the religious forces are again portrayed as bad.
A devil or a witch turned herself from her natural form as a snake into
a woman to woo a human. They get along well until a religious person
decides this love is unnatural and he is going to break it up to the
point of bringing floods to drown the lovers. It is sort of 'The Little
Mermaid' with a twist.
In any case I already had some interest in the Hakka people. There
was for a while a Chinese restaurant called Hakka Villa. My Chinese
office mate told me it was an odd name because Hakka was not a Chinese
name. I looked through my histories of China and did find references to
the Hakka centuries ago. Later I heard from my parents that they had
seen something about the Hakka (probably this same museum) in their
travels.
The next item was the Chuk Lam Sim Yuen, or so we thought. It
really turned out to be a sort of 'you can't get there from here' sort
of situation. For about an hour and a half we tried various sets of
instructions, all incomplete, on how to get there. One set did suggest
taking a bus and a sub-adventure turned out to be just figuring out how
to cross a busy highway to get there. We found an underpass finally but
then the line for the bus was a city block long and after about a ten-
minute wait we decided that approach wouldn't work. This was a very
frazzling period in a hot sun. I still claim it was also one of the
more interesting things we did since we really saw a broad segment of
people in the New Territories. In this part of the world, if you look
around you, you will find enough of interest that no time is really
wasted. You see a spectrum of people from stylishly dressed people
carrying video cassettes (and Walkmans--I have never seen so many people
with Walkmans in their ears!) to old women carrying bags of lentils (or
some such) in two baskets at either end of a long bamboo pole. That has
a much more traditional look. Then there was the woman sitting near a
street slicing a carrot that must have been three inches in diameter.
It was a fairly interesting time, though I admit exaggerating its
interest just a bit to try and make people feel better about the
frustration.
We decided to go on to the Mui Fat Monastery. We grabbed a
double-decker bus and Binayak suggested we go up to the top level. The
front windows are open and locals almost never sit in the seat right in
front because of the wind problem. After standing around in the
parching sun--it was really hot--it was a powerful blast of cold air. I
opened the window further and soaked in the cool refreshing air. I
loved it. In about four minutes the view went from big city to hillside
next to a big bay with hills sticking out and ships. Just beautiful.
It turned out we screwed up our instructions again and went one bus stop
far. It was the luckiest accident of the trip so far. We ended up
having to walk through a street market with a big indoors farmers'
market. Binayak suggested we cut through the farmers' market and
suddenly we weren't in Kansas any more. Huge arrays of vegetables, rows
of hanging mean. One place sold big fish heads. Ducks and chickens in
cages squawking and complaining (as well they might considering their
situation). One stand had what I think were chicken livers laid out in
a row. We were still talking about it over dinner. Then outside was a
street market, but not one with a lot of plastic tourist goods. It was
household goods and local clothes and roasted chestnuts, that sort of
thing. We were the only Westerners, though they get enough that we
didn't get any stares.
A policeman, whom somebody suggested would probably not speak
English, turned out to speak it reasonably well and gave us directions
to the LRT line. It was a long walk in a hot sun but we got there.
This appears to be a tram but Binayak insisted it was really a train.
It was only one car, so I am not sure what the distinction is. You buy
your tickets from a vending machine that has fifteen buttons. They are
broken into adult, student, and child, and have a button for each of
five regions. You press the button and it tells you in a liquid crystal
display window how much to insert. You do and you hear a printer inside
printing your ticket. Then it drops down to a window.
We took the train to the Mui Fat Monastery, or at least the tram
line running through the town it was in. We stopped at a small store
for soda. You really need a constant input of water when walking around
in what must be 95o heat. That first sip of soda is a pleasure sex
doesn't even approach. I know this isn't like Saudi Arabia, but it is
amazing how fast your body absorbs fluids and puts them out as sweat. I
got a Schweppes Pineapple-Grapefruit, but in the future I may stick to
distilled water. The sugar gets too cloying after a while. We sat in
front of the monastery replenishing fluids.
The temple building itself cost HK$60 million. It is three stories
high with Chinese architecture and dragons curled over the front. There
are statues out front of the Imperial Foo Lions, the male with his paw
on the orb, the female with her paw on the cub. Originally they
represented the Emperor and Empress of China. Flanking them are two
statues of six-tusked elephants. Inside, the walls are decorated with
pictures of Buddhas. On the second floor is a lunch room. At the top
floor is the real temple room with three huge statues of Buddhas, twenty
or thirty feet high. In front, priests (monks?) chant and try to ignore
the steady stream of tourists (many from tour buses). Around the back
there is another Buddha in front of which prefect pieces of fruit are
placed. They were apples and oranges. There are several other shrines.
From there we walked around the grounds for a little while. They
make the place like a little campus complete with schoolrooms and a
laboratory. I said that they were looking for the perfect gong to chant
to in the laboratory. It was a Bell Laboratory.
Well, after some of our members made powder room stops at less than
perfect restrooms, as one might expect, we returned to a line of small
markets and restaurants. We chose one where it looked like somebody was
eating what looked like fried squid. We tried it. At first we had
trouble communicating. We had no Chinese. The proprietor had very
little English. We asked if the dish we'd seen was squid. He didn't
know the word and asked if we wanted sweet and sour pork. I tried
writing squid in Chinese. I think the hook at the top of the fish
radical did not have all three strokes and the ink radical looked more
like an English script 't'. He didn't recognize the word. Evelyn
showed him the words in the phrase book in Chinese ideogram. He said,
'Lamb?' Finally he said yes, that was what it was. Then he brought out
a large plate of fried squid. He suggested, 'Roast pork?' Sounded
good. It was. It was served with peanuts. Binayak suggested it was
'kung pao.' I told him I didn't think so since 'kung pao' to me means
not just peanuts but peppers. It was good anyway. We were very pleased
with the meal and it came to about US$3 per person (actually less--I
think it was HK$20 each).
After lunch we walked back along the same street. Barbara bought a
pomelo at a fruit stand. It was expensive, about HK$20.
Next we took a tram to a bus to two old walled cities, Shui Tau and
Kam Tin. The first of the two was the more authentic or at least less
touristy. It was a long walk in the heat. There wasn't really a lot to
see. It was some fairly rural houses from the 18th Century behind a
wall. I almost felt we were intruding. The second walled village was
more touristy. We were flocked with old women in black wearing the same
hat, a sort of a straw disk with a circle missing in the center and a
black veil under it. They made something of a fuss over me since they
apparently had never seen opaque wraparound sunglasses. These things
fit all the way over my regular glasses. They were given to me by a
traveling companion in Africa. The women were anxious to have us buy
their souvenirs and to pose for us--at a nominal price. I think I later
heard that Steve had bargained about six of them to a total of HK$2.
That's about US$0.26.
After, we walked down the street to a modern grocery and bought
more soda and distilled water. It is an odd sensation to have been
bloated with soda just a short time before and to be this thirsty this
soon. In the future I think I will try to cut down on soda and drink
more distilled water. I feel like I am just filtering all the sugar out
of the soda. What you really need is not soda but what you are losing,
which is water. This could turn out to be expensive. Luckily you can
get by without buying water. If you add four drops of iodine per liter
to clear tap water, shake well, and wait a half-hour, it is safe to
drink. The flavor is a little like band-aids and things like mercury
aren't fixed by iodine but it is still a good way to make tap water
safe. There are probably places (like Hong Kong) where the water really
will come safe to drink, but the safest policy is to assume all water
really needs to be treated.
After this there was a long but uneventful trip back to the hotel
by bus, tram, and mostly on foot. All the walking is pretty painful on
the feet. In fact, I think I am going to get myself pads to cushion my
feet. (Well, that sentence is dishonest. I am writing this two days
later and have already done so.) Perhaps the worst part of the trip
home is getting to the room. Something more should be said about the
Chungking Mansions. It is an economic structure like I have not seen in
the United States. It is on a piece of prime real estate. Nathan Road
is to Kowloon what Fifth Avenue is to New York. In New York you have to
be very rich to own real estate on Fifth Avenue. Not so here. There
are lots of people just barely getting by who jointly own and mostly
reside here. Mr. Ng owns a large apartment which has been turned into a
guest house. That means his part of the house is a tiny room about 71/2
feet square and a tiny kitchen that is common area usually. Even that
he has rented out right now. There is a guy sleeping there. His wife
and baby live there also. His brother lives the same way/ Our room is
really what would be the master bedroom. Steve's, Barbara's, and
Binayak's rooms are smaller than ours. With the exception of tiny ants
in the shower stall the place is kept operating theater clean. You can
watch the overhead fan by looking down and seeing it reflected in the
tile floor. The place is not fancy but what is here is somebody's
prized possession and it is supremely maintained. Walk into the
corridor and you could be in a Turkish prison. Filth. Cockroaches.
Leaking pipes. Some of the stairwells in some of the towers reputedly
have rats. Garbage often carelessly thrown around. This is neutral
territory and nobody cares for it. There is often a ten-minute wait for
the elevator going up or down. At the base there is usually a long line
of people waiting of an interesting international mix. Some you
wouldn't want to meet, however. Some clear their nose and spit in
corners. |
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| Copyright © - "Mark R. Leeper" |
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