chinatroll

In the midst of NaNoWriMo and the genesis of the never-ending sinus infection, I got the undeniable urge to get the hell out of Dodge. I wanted to be among Friends of the capital F variety (as in Quakers, for those of you who don’t spend Sundays sitting in silence), and I wanted to have a day off from Mainland China. I decided we would attend the Hong Kong Monthly Meeting of Quakers. Athena and I got up early on a Sunday morning, loaded up the pink Walmart stroller, and set off for the Metro station. I had planned the trip out on the computer, and thought I knew what I was doing and how long it would take to do it. Things were going along fine until they weren’t anymore and Athena was throwing a sort of continual fit of the “I’ve been dragged out of bed too early” variety, and I managed to miss a stop, and become generally flustered. Athena had chosen this day to experiment with the effects of biting me, and was hanging from my hand by her teeth while striking other passengers with her purple polka dotted umbrella.

We were on the right train now but we were running half an hour late, and I was struggling to keep my head from blowing right off. Julian, the clerk of Hong Kong Monthly Meeting, was going to meet us at the station at 10:00. The stress of the situation was mounting in my snot-clogged mind, and by the time I had disengaged Athena from my hand and wrenched the purple polka dotted umbrella from her grasp I was fighting back tears of frustration and general despair. A woman standing next to me, who had boarded the train at the same stop we had, asked me if I was okay. She spoke with an American accent, and had two children with her. “You look like you’re about to cry,” she said, not unkindly.

“That’s because I am,” I said, and promptly burst into tears.

She gave me a hug.

This was not a moment I was expecting to have in the constant hustle and anonymity of Hong Kong, and it was immensely comforting. We talked for the rest of the train ride. She and her husband have five children and attend The Vineyard. They had been running an orphanage somewhere in China up until last year, and are now working with an aid group in Hong Kong. We got off the train at Central together, and she pointed us toward the right exit for Statue Square, where Julian would have been waiting for us forty minutes earlier. I had detailed directions to the Meeting, which is held in the David Kwok Room in the annex of St. John’s Cathedral, in an email from Julian. I  carefully read the email on my iPhone and we set off. Athena was somewhat wigged out by what had transpired on the train and not wanting me to burst into tears again, was on her best behavior for the time being. The next time I looked down at my phone to confirm the directions in the email, the email had gone with no hope of retrieval. All that was left of it was a title in the trash. This left us at the Cathedral without much of an idea of how to get to the David Kwok Room. We went into the cathedral bookstore and asked the teenager behind the counter if she knew where the David Kwok Room was. She was sorry, but she didn’t. We wandered around the cathedral. I was trying not to feel frantic and failing miserably.

When I was just about to give up, we stumbled across the annex and there, on a little plaque, was a sign for the David Kwok Room. I bustled Athena and the pink Walmart stroller up what seemed like never-ending flights of stairs, parked the stroller next to the door of the David Kwok Room, took what I could of a deep breath through my painfully congested sinuses, and went through the door.

The room was silent. I took an empty seat in the circle and tried not to sniffle too loudly. Athena proceeded to rummage around in the backpack for snacks and coloring gear. A boy about Athena’s age sat quietly on a couch outside of the circle. I couldn’t quite get my breathing back to normal, and my nose was dripping pitifully. I took out a tissue and pressed it to my nose. Tears worked their way out of my tear ducts. I felt noisy, and sweaty, and gross. Anything but centered.

After all hearts were clear, the tea and coffee emerged and people chatted with each other. Julian introduced himself to me, and mercifully overlooked my tearstained and snot-streaked face. Athena and the boy, Julian’s son JohnJohn, began to play wildly with the cushions from the couches, after having spent the Meeting casting shy, sidelong looks at each other. It rapidly became apparent that Athena and JohnJohn are cut from the same cloth. A group of us went out to lunch at a nice Vietnamese restaurant. Athena and JohnJohn sat next to each other, and kept themselves amused by blowing bits of coconut juice into each other’s hair and sloshing peanut sauce all over the tablecloth. I sat between an American man, who has been living in Hong Kong for well over a decade, and a visiting professor from England. Julian, JohnJohn, Athena, and Jessie, JohnJohn’s mother sat across from me.

Listening to these guys talk was thrilling. I am used to hearing people use presidential administrations as time markers, as in, “Oh, that was during the Reagan years, when ….” Or, “I remember when Kennedy was in the White House, and ….” These guys were using Chinese history as their marker: “Strange times, that was during the Cultural Revolution.” Or, “Oh, after Mao but before Deng.” Julian has been in Hong Kong for verging on two decades. “So you were here for the changeover,” I said, excitedly. “Ah, yes, I was here for the Hangover,” he said, and chuckled. The American described being in Shenzhen during a tour of China he went on as a graduate student in the ’70s, “It was all rice paddies.”

After lunch, Julian and Jessie invited Athena and I to join them for their Sunday outing with JohnJohn, which we happily did. First there was a stop at a coffee shop, the appeal of which was based solely on their offering of blue vanilla gelato.  Athena and JohnJohn ate this with gusto, sharing a waffle cone bowl of it. And then we went to the zoo, which is free in Hong Kong. To get to the zoo, we went up the world’s longest escalator. (No … really. It is the world’s longest escalator.)

At the zoo, JohnJohn asked his mother for a Fanta. Athena went over to the stand where Jessie had bought the Fanta and noticed that they had the same kind of Lifesaver popsicles we had gotten on our previous expedition to Hong Kong. She was very excited, so I got one for her and one for me. JohnJohn, who had contentedly been slurping away on his Fanta, caught sight of Athena with her Lifesaver popsicle, and exclaimed, “Mummy! Mummy! I want a colorful ice lolly too!”

JohnJohn managed to get quite a bit of his colorful ice lolly drizzled down the front of his shirt, and it was deemed necessary that they go back to their apartment for a change of clothes. Athena and I were invited to join them. We all piled into a taxi. Athena and I were ushered up to their rooftop garden, which Julian tends with great devotion. Pots of roses and bougainvilleas and plants that I don’t know the name of (being botanically rather illiterate) line the walls of the roof, creating a little oasis in the urban jungle. Athena was exhausted, so she cuddled up on my lap while we watched JohnJohn ride his new bike around and around the palm tree that serves as centerpiece to the garden. The children had chocolate milk, and we drank tea and munched on nuts and dried fruit for a snack.

I needed a haircut and had been planning on stopping by the place in Causeway Bay where Billy works his magic. Julian said that there was a salon just underneath the apartment, and that, as he needed a haircut himself, we could take the kids and go down there together. Which we did. Athena and JohnJohn terrorized the hairdressers, corralling all of the stools in the hair-washing room and locking the bathroom door with the key still inside, while Julian and I had our hair cut. It was fantastic.

Athena and I left for Shenzhen that night feeling restored. I had been nearing the end of my rope here. Frustrated with teaching, and parenting, and the day-to-day difficulties presented by living in a country that runs on little pieces of paper and red-inked rubber stamps. It was a reality check of the best kind.