My dream comes true! Living France for a first trip in Asia and in Hong Kong!
I board the plane in Paris with my wife and our one year old little girl. A long trip to the other extremity of the world, I am excited!
18 hours later, a beautiful city of lights appears. It is already night, the plane slide between the buildings towards Kai Tak. Frightening! It impressed me, from my seat I saw people cooking in their kitchen. We arrive safely the weather is still very hot, and I start to sweat. The luggage did not arrive, lost!
Kai Tak, strange place, I saw hundreds of young girls in uniforms seating in the airport. “Is it an army camp?”I asked.
- No, they are school girls; they come here to do their home work, because of the free air conditioning!
We boarded a taxi, my little girl is tied and crying, we are going to live with a Chinese family. The taxi is speeding, the driver did not say hello, and did not speak a single word. He looks angry, I don’t know why. I look at the window; I don’t recognize the beautiful modern city I have seen on postcards. The streets are busy, narrow and very noisy. The houses are quite old and dirty.
No lift, we climb a very dark staircase in a kind of green and white small ceramics. The family, some relationship to my wife, is warm and welcome. I am the first “guilo” in the neighborhood, they said. The flat is small, the walls paint in a light green, and the room partitions go only half to the ceiling. They introduce us to our room: a bed for 2persons, a small bed for the baby, and a very big fan on the ceiling, a small statue of the Guanyin on what side and on the other side a statue of the Virgin Mary. I though: Good! Everybody will be happy! The window has an iron gate like in a prison. We have not even a square meter left to walk.
One hour later, they call us for the diner: a beautiful welcome dinner, they put old newspapers on the table and arrange the dishes on it, like this, they told me, I can spit directly the bones on the table. Great meal with barbecue pork, fish and a kind of black mushroom with something long which look exactly like black hair. I feel it hard to swallow, but they keep on saying “eat! Eat! It is good for health! Good for health! Good for Health ? I will ear that every 5 minutes...
The dinner is finished and they give me a soap and a towel: “go to take your shower! I feel unease; I am not a little boy anymore. They even give me a pajama!
But I found that all the family one by one go to the shower and come out in their pajamas. I start to feel much tied after the long trip; I thought to go to bed but no! Impossible, all the family is on the move again, going down the staircase in their pajamas!! ! We have to follow.
I ask why, where are you going?
It is time for “siu Ye”! Mystery! What is Siu Ye? I discover it when I saw the entire street full of people at 11pm in their pajamas crowding the open air restaurants for a midnight snack.
The Hong Kong people are very big eaters! We climb back the staircase and were at last going to bed, but at midnight the bell ring: “hello Sir, your lost luggage! I can believe it; they bring it from the airport a Sunday at midnight? It would have been impossible in Europe.
Time to sleep, the baby in his bed, and me and my wife under the big fan on a bamboo mat on the bed.
But it was hard to get to sleep. The kitchen is outside and somebody washed the dish. A strange noise of falling tiles come from everywhere with sometimes very loud Cantonese voices. It is Mahjong! Said my wife! And every 10 minutes a huge noise makes the windows tremble. It is the plane passing up the roof before landing in Kai Tak.
I fall in sleep looking at the big fan, but I wake later in the night with the noise of the plane, the mahjong, the big turning fan, I start to dream and have a horrible nightmare. I was sweating in the middle of a war with noise of helicopters attacking, machinegun shootings … I dress up in the bed shooting: Oh, It is apocalypse now!
But N0, my wife and baby looks ok, just the plane on Kai Tak and the mahjong? I awake and get up to the Kitchen looking for fresh water, the family grand mother was already up for her tai-chi, she spoke a little English. She asks me:
“Do you like here?
I said:
- I don’t know but Hong Kong doesn’t look at all like what I have seen on TV or on books!
She replied: “Of course, you are not in Hong Kong; you are in Sham Shui Po!!!
Gérard Henry 2/3/2011
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