Hong Kong Culture Points, Volume 1

One thing I love about traveling and moving is the chance to experience the varied ways people live around the world. Each city and country has its own oddities and aspects that stand out to a foreign eye.

So, before my newbie eyes are desensitized and lose their wonder, here are some things that stand out to me here in Hong Kong, so far:

1. Sanitizing

Luca and I walked with friends through a large aviary in a public park, pointing out all the singing and playing birds we could spot. As I stood at the wooden railing and watched some breed of dove fly from tree to tree, I noticed a small, laminated rectangle of white paper near my hands that read: “Sanitized 4 times daily.”

Really? An outdoor wooden rail at an aviary? How frequently would such a thing be sanitized in the United States… Maybe never?

And this isn’t isolated—many door handles, elevator buttons and bathrooms boast similar signs.

I suppose that’s what happens when a city sees something as awful as SARS spread like wildfire.

I certainly don’t mind.

2. Couture Malls

One Saturday as an outing, Joe and I took a ferry across Victoria Harbor up to Kowloon (part of Hong Kong, but attached to mainland China). Luca was looking sweaty, so we found refuge from the heat and humidity in one of the neighborhood's shopping malls.

We thought we’d entered the Twilight Zone: Burberry Childrenswear, Gucci Kids, Armani Junior, Baby Dior, Dulce & Gabana Junior, Fendi Kids—the entire floor was storefronts of only high-end designer kidswear.

And that’s not all—the rest of the mall was basically the same stores, but for adults. There was an Audi showcase in the middle of the second floor. In fact, of every mall I’ve walked through in Hong Kong (and there are quite a few), the only "middle class" clothing shops I’ve seen are Zara and H&M. And these are few and far between. Italian suit shops and couture are staples around here, filling the malls with the highest of high-end brand names.

I’ve never seen such a thing, and I have no idea how all these stores stay in business with the high rent that goes with crowded island living.

Ok, I have two ideas, actually: First, Hong Kong has the highest concentration of billionaires per capita (banks, banks, everywhere!). Second, Hong Kong is the place for rich mainland Chinese tourists to drop some major coin.

3. Mainland Tourists

Speaking of mainland tourists, I’ve heard Hong Kongers have unfriendly names (ahem, locusts) for the hoards who visit. Hong Kong may technically be part of China, but there are major cultural differences, to my understanding, and I’ve heard a local or two sneer at the thought of the visitors who crowd these shores.

Our own encounter with mainlanders was more entertaining than annoying. A few weeks ago, Luca, Joe and I were playing at the beach. I was enjoying my weightlessness in the extra-salty surf while Joe dug a sand fort for Luca. Our little man would run between the two of us, “helping” Joe or diving in the water to me.

As we played, a busload of fully-dressed Chinese tourists poured onto the sand, cameras at the ready. They took turns posing in front of the (apparently) famous background of Repulse Bay, and then some started to notice us, or more specifically, Luca. Some started snapping pictures of him playing in the sand, and others actually posed, making Luca and Joe the background. A few men walked over to interact with my little 2-year old.

Not one to be comfortable with strangers getting too close and asking questions in a language he doesn’t recognize, Luca decided to take a dive toward me. Of course, this was a major highlight for the tourists, who pointed and giggled to see such a small kid dive fearlessly headfirst into the water toward a white lady. Cameras snapped, and more tourists gathered. Luca and I bobbed, dumbfounded, in the water.

I wished—oh, how I wished I had my phone out with me to take a picture of the mass of grinning paparazzi—at least 15 of them—crowding on the beach to snap photos of us as though we were lively penguins at the zoo.

Just as quickly as the tour group flooded the beach, they cleared it, heading back up to their bus and on to the next site, their 10-minute Repulse Bay stop checked off the list.

4. Elevator Etiquette… and Speed!

In a city of skyscrapers, elevators are a way of life. As I mentioned in a previous post, my ears pop every time I ride the elevator down from our apartment.

Since we live partway up a mountain, we start almost any journey on the 17th floor of a circular 64-floor building with a band of elevators at its core. Once we catch an elevator, the ride down 14 floors to the 3rd floor exit on the main road below is done in a flash. It’s so fast, it feels like going down two floors in an average US elevator.

Such speed is typical of Hong Kong elevators I've ridden, and also applies to the elevator doors—I hardly have time to get the stroller and my own body through the doors before they’re closing. Many times, the doors have closed uncomfortably on my stroller or my shoulders, only to bounce open again.

Once, poor Luca didn't keep up with Joe and rode back down to our building's lobby all alone. He wasn't happy about it, but he never dawdles in the elevators anymore.

Waiting for an MTR elevator

Hong Kong people—expats and Cantonese alike—are a polite and friendly people. To counteract the elevator-door phenomenon, the first thing anyone does upon entering an elevator is hold down the “door open” button until everyone has loaded up. Even more—if someone sees another person walking toward an elevator, they’ll hold it. It’s fantastic!

One exception to the awesome elevator standard is the MTR, the metro. MTR elevators appear to have been designed to discourage anyone at all from using them. We may need to go down one single floor, but the wait takes ages, and then the thing moves at a snail’s pace—slower than any elevator I’ve ever ridden, anywhere in the world. The lightning speed of most other Hong Kong elevators—and the efficiency of the MTR train system—makes the lifts’ inefficiency all the more blatant. Also, the elevators are far uglier than their state-of-the-art cousins around the city, and somehow claustrophobia-inducing hot air is always blasting. But it’s tricky to sneak our stroller onto the escalator under the employees’ watchful eye, so patience is the name of the game.

A New Home, and... Disneyland

As excited as I always get for change, the flip side is the emotional toll it brings. So, as we settle in to our new home in a new country, I face the challenges reminding myself that I expected them. That they are all part of this lifestyle. The tricky part about the challenges is that they never take the form I anticipate...

Back-alley noodle stand! Yum!

On the flight over, Luca was a champ—as champ as a 2-year old can be on such a long-haul. We stopped to catch our breath for a few days in Tokyo, taking the chance to tour a few of the city’s highlights despite jet lag and my first-trimester nausea and exhaustion.

We even got to see some old friends from our stint in Seoul (pictured right)!

This about sums up Tokyo.

Luca woke up each morning around 2am, ready for the day. I’ll never forget the three of us cuddling in our bed, watching Cars on an iPad. Or sitting around the tiny table downing our 4am potato breakfast we cooked up in the hotel room’s kitchenette when our stomachs could wait no longer.

It was in Tokyo, at about 11 weeks pregnant, that my belly popped out. Yes, friends, this picture is from TWELVE weeks pregnant (left)—similar to my size at about 20 weeks pregnant the first time around (right). At least I finally realized I was not getting fat, as I’d thought, but getting a ridiculously early baby bump.

Baby 2, 12 weeks vs. Baby 1, 20 weeks

So, one of the basic challenges of our move is that my clothes stopped fitting—most of my maternity wear is in our slow-boat shipment, and I only had a few t-shirt material skirts to make it through. Enter my mother-in-law, whose second favorite hobby is buying me clothes (second to buying Luca clothes/toys, that is). Thanks, Umonee! A few weeks into our stay in Hong Kong, and I had shorts that fit over my belly again.

View from the Peak

In short, Hong Kong is amazing. The skyline is spectacular and there are several interesting ways to tour the city and get a unique view, like the Star Ferry or the Peak lookout.

Our building has a pool, an epic indoor playroom, a small outdoor playground, and a sizable outdoor elevated patio area called the Podium, where Luca can scooter or kick a soccer ball, level with the tops of skyscrapers farther downhill from us. We live halfway up a mountain and then almost 30 stories up. It’s so high that my ears pop twice each time I ride the elevator down. It’s so high that our view is spectacular.

The Podium

The challenge? Sometimes I feel a tiny bit trapped in our building. Not trapped as in I can’t go out or there’s nowhere to go, but trapped as in: Leaving our building takes a fair amount of energy for a pregnant woman towing a toddler. There are hills, stairs, elevators, escalators, extremely narrow and crowded sidewalks with lots of uneven terrain, and extremely narrow and crowded grocery-store aisles. And some days, the sky is thick with polluted haze, and all I want to do is hide Luca’s lungs and my own inside.

When I mention the pollution, Luca’s automatic response these days is, “The indoor playground is waiting!”

Out on the streets and in grocery stores, I often feel like my stroller is a plow. Move it or lose it, people! Other times, I feel plain old stuck, behind someone’s grocery cart or a group of people stopped to talk.

Between my own pregnancy exhaustion, the crowds, a toddler’s needs and pollution avoidance, running errands at all is a day’s big event for me; a huge accomplishment.

Thankfully, there are a lot of order-online grocery options, so I am experimenting.

And thankfully, even when shopping in person, all the grocery stores deliver non-perishables, so if my load is too big to stuff into my umbrella stroller (which broke, by the way, from the beating it took hauling perishable groceries and constantly trekking up and down stairs), I can leave certain items with the cashier and see them that night or the next, left at my apartment’s back door, the entrance to the maid’s quarters.

Oh, does that sound weird? Maid’s quarters? Yes, our apartment has a maid’s quarters, past the kitchen and the laundry room. A walk-in-closet-sized room with its own bathroom and shower. More on domestic helpers in another post.

Settling in is slow-going for me, but you know what helps?

The fact that, as I said, Hong Kong is AMAZING.

There’s a beach! Several, actually, though I’m stuck on the one that’s easiest to get to: trees for shade and calm waters that are so salty my growing pregnant body floats effortlessly and my sore joints get a break. The inaptly named “Repulse Bay” is so far my favorite part of Hong Kong.

Luca’s, too. I took him one weekday morning on the public bus—we sat in the front row of the second level of the double-decker, right up against the window—and the morning was fantastic (though, not fantastic was the hour-and-a-half, bumper-to-bumper-traffic bus ride back downtown. I definitely don’t begrudge the student protestors their fight for democracy, but no matter what the reason—traffic is the worst).

We loved the beach so much, we took Joe back two days later, on the weekend.


And, there’s Disneyland! I’m not sure if it was the general Disney magic, the reminder of my college season-pass-holding days or just the glimpse of home, but I was beyond excited, and my excitement spread to Luca, whose eyes lit up at the thought of seeing Mickey Mouse.

Plus, we rode Hong Kong’s metro all the way, which is a delight in itself, for train-loving Luca.


His first real theme-park ride ever: Small World.

There was no line since Columbus Day was an average Monday in Hong Kong (the U.S. consulate is closed for U.S. holidays), so Luca ran through the switchbacks, not understanding what he was headed toward but knowing, just knowing it would be more than he could imagine.

And it was. He insisted we go on Small World again and again, though we stopped for lunch after the third go-around. He loved the other rides, but kept begging to go back “on the pink boat.”

Joe and I couldn’t get enough of the wonder lighting up Luca’s eyes. There is magic in the sight of your own child’s happiness.

Too much magic

Luca finally fell asleep in his stroller around 3pm, so we began our trek back home in time for dinner.

Of course, today, I was exhausted. Luca and I both were. And it was polluted, so we stayed inside most of the day. But it won’t be like that every day. There is simply so much available to do here.

And we’re going to soak up as much of that pure fun as we can.

Funny to see Mickey on a metro map

The Disneyland Train! Mickey handles and windows!

Occupy Central: The Well-Mannered Fight

In case you haven’t noticed, Hong Kong is going through an historic moment. Crowds of mostly students have managed to shut down the main part of downtown, camping out along the road that serves as the major artery through the city.

Friends have asked how we’re affected, and I’ll say quite simply: We’re not. We live in a tower of mostly Western ex-pats, complete with a pool and an indoor playground. Transportation has been haywire, so Joe had to walk all the way home from work on Monday evening, when things were really crazy. Since the main street is shut down, the normally quiet winding road in front of our building is buzzing with cars. The playroom is overrun with too-rowdy older kids home since schools were closed, which, you know, is mildly annoying because it isn’t fun for Luca.

But that’s it. We’re fine. We’re safe. We’re just watching with interest to see what will come of this protest.

The students want full universal suffrage, what they say they were promised in the 1997 handover from the UK, but Beijing would rather pre-approve any candidates for chief executive, the top job in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

We’re here in Hong Kong as guests. I have no stake in Hong Kong’s future other than as a resident of this world. But… come on, it’s a fight for freedom and democracy.

The journalist in me has been itching to visit the protests at night, hear the peaceful chanting with my own ears, see the waving cell phone screens lighting the night, and talk to students about what they hope will change with this giant sit-in.

Could this be the biggest nonviolent demonstration since Martin Luther King, Jr.? I just want to see it.

But consulates and embassies will always send out warnings to us, whichever country we’re posted: Even protests intended to be nonviolent can turn. Better to stay away from such crowds.

And I’m pregnant, so I would not want to risk exposing myself to tear gas.

Oh, did I bury the lead there? Yes, I’m pregnant. Expecting in spring. More on that later.

So I’ve been following the events on the news and Facebook, praying the Chinese army doesn’t decide to respond in violence. Praying that no violent-minded person or group darkens the tone.

On the news, the protests look pretty crazy, but from what I’ve seen and heard, these are just kids, students sitting under floodlights and doing their homework behind the barricades between chants and speeches. I’ve heard some news reports have referred to them as “riots,” which, wow—they are not, to my understanding. No broken windows, no looting, no violence. Perhaps it's the influence of years as part of the stereotypically proper Britain, but the protest is mainly polite, Hong Kong-British-accented kids blocking the road.

And while I won’t go down there at night to risk tear gas and rubber bullets (or an international incident), Joe and I decided to wander over this morning to see a piece of history.

Ok, before anyone freaks out (Mom, I’m looking at you), we visited the protests during the safest possible time: The morning. Night is where the action is, and this morning there were several little clusters of families checking out the scene. I saw a couple that looked like they were walking the normally-busy road for exercise.

One Western dad was taking a photo of his two little blonde daughters in sundresses, one barely older than Luca. He paused when we walked behind—Joe and me pushing an orange stroller doesn’t make for a good protest background. I heard later in the morning, bunches of little kids were down there riding scooters.

We saw another young ex-pat girl pointing to signs hung on the overpass, translating the Cantonese to English for her parents and two younger sisters.

The scene was fascinating. We walked from our neighborhood right through the center of downtown on the main thoroughfare, which was neatly lined with groups of protestors. It was surreal, and an interesting view of the city at a standstill.

At first, it felt like a university quad, young people sprawled on cement barriers texting, others sitting around chatting. Some napping.

Except the mood was too muted. Too exhausted. These students have been living on the street for days. Groups of protestors sat under tent shelters manning stations of donated water bottles, snacks, and donated umbrellas.

Some manned stations to recycle cans and water bottles.

Others, wearing masks over their noses and mouths, collected trash in big black bags they organized in piles for removal to dumpsters down some alleys.

“Have you ever seen a protest like this?” A trash collector asked me after I snapped a picture of him and his friends throwing bags into the dumpster. He was clearly educated, with a pristine Hong Kong-British accent behind his face mask.

“I haven’t,” I said. “You guys are cleaning up trash—that’s pretty awesome.”

“Thanks,” he said.

It’s a conscientious crowd that clearly cares deeply for the city and hopes their civil disobedience will move the giant that is Beijing.

I saw one photo on Facebook of a police bus with an anarchy sign spray-painted in the front window. A strip of cardboard sat under the windshield wiper, a polite apology written in marker. “This doesn’t represent us,” the note read.

Another picture showed a few protestors trying to scrub clean a wall that someone else had sprayed with a red line, in anger over the police using tear gas.

Yet another showed protestors sharing umbrellas with police officers during last night’s thunderstorm.

Part of me felt strange for acting as the tourist in such a protest. As a friend of mine pointed out: It’s not a show.

But actually, it is a show. It is a show to prove a point and to make a difference. They want people like me to go down there and see how orderly they are being. To snap pictures and to share them with people like you. To witness.

I have no idea what will come in the next few days—or rather, nights—but for now, what I see is a group of young people fighting for the future of their city, with probably the most well-mannered protest the world has ever seen.