The Shay Rebellion | Christopher Shay

Edison Chen is a superstar in Hong Kong. He’s an actor, producer, singer, designer, and Pepsi pitchman. He’s the heartthrob hunk with a mischievous smile—the “newcomer” to People’s 2006 Sexiest Man Alive issue, and it turns out, something of an amateur photographer.

A few hundred of his *ahem* “private” photographs were stolen from his computer and posted on the internet. In my classes, nothing is sure to elicit blushes and nervous laughter from my students than someone making reference to Edison Chen. This is no Pamela—Tommy Lee debacle, but something that seems to intensely interest every single person in Hong Kong. A couple of the women photographed in compromising positions turn out to be daughters of Triad bosses (the Triad is similar to the mafia), and a couple of the other women are stars in their own right. This “Sexy Photo Gate” has taken over the local media the way Britney never could in the U.S.

This became clear to me about ten minutes ago. Right now, I am at a coffeeshop overlooking the entrance to Times Square Mall—one of the busiest places in Hong Kong. Right at eye level is a two story tall television where Edison Chen’s press conference was broadcast live. Everybody stopped. There were expats in business suits, hip teen-aged girls, middle-aged men in fleece, and a person who stopped his run all looking up at the screen, mouths half open. Cab drivers even got out of their cars to watch the conference. The area in front of the shopping center—which is large enough to hold the occasional concert—was jam-packed as everybody in gathered to stare. I’ve never seen so many people so still and so curious. If someone were to set foot on Mars tomorrow, it would not get this sort of reaction.

Without being able to read characters, I have no idea what was said at the press conference, but people didn’t appear surprised by what happened. They just wanted to see their superstar. Until recently, poor Edison has been in hiding, fearing for his life. It’s never a good idea to anger Triad bosses, and he should know, he’s starred in a number of Triad movies. I guess he should’ve stuck to singing and acting, and never picked up his newest hobby: “photography.”

Long before St. Valentine was martyred on February 14, 269 AD, the day has been an important holiday. Valentine’s Day can be traced back all the way to a Roman festival, Lupercalia, a holiday that involved being whipped to ensure ones fertility. Though, I suspect the modern Valentine’s Day can be much more painful.

Three of us—all without Valentines for the night—decided that we wanted to go on a nice date for the holiday. We dressed to the nines. The men wore ties and put on too much cologne. Paul even wore these fancy snake skin loafers and a blazer. Julie put on a nice dress and some classy make-up. At the extremely popular restaurant of our choice, we put down our own white table cloth, lit our own candle, and busted out our own rosé. Nothing would get in the way of our romantic, three person date.

And let me tell you, rosé goes well with a french fries. We had our own white linen affair at the golden arches. Even though we ate our burgers with knives and forks, our McValentines Day didn’t get the attention that we thought it might. Though an apologetic manager did take notice of us and asked us to blow out our candle. We didn’t have any local Hong Kongers take photos of us, but I’d say we made our point (whatever it was), and we certainly had a blast doing it. Our date at McDonalds poked fun at the hokeyness of the holiday, but we really just wanted to avoid being lonely on V-day, which can surely be more excruciating than any the February 14th lashings in ancient Rome.

In my “kitchen,” I have a minifridge underneath my two stove burners. It’s wedged into a space between the sink and the wall, and I have to bend over, almost get onto my knees, to get anything out of it. It’s okay, because I don’t keep much in it—mostly vegetables and tofu—but in the upper-right corner, there’s a freezer big enough for only one very precious item: a bag of Stumptown coffee.

My little bag of coffee has traveled from Sumatra to Portland to Hong Kong, and right now, I only have enough of coffee left for two more cups. It’s the type of coffee used by many of the coffeeshops that I frequented in high school, and its smells like many of my best moments in Portland.

Part of the enjoyment of the morning coffee is the process. Every morning, I pour the grounds in the French press and add boiling water. While I wait for the coffee to steep, the world stands still. For those three to five minutes, it’s my time to do nothing, except to wonder why this particular coffee foams while it steeps while other coffees don’t. This is an important thought that I have almost every morning. When I feel I’ve pondered this enough, I push down the plunger slowly. I somehow feel that the coffee deserves better than to be crushed to the bottom of the glass with swift, violent jerk. After pouring the coffee into my white Ikea mug, I take the tiniest of sips for fear of burning my mouth.

I bend back down and put the coffee bag back in the tiny freezer. I can now start my day. Somehow, coffee can simultaneously slow down life as well as speed it up. I’m about to finish my Stumptown coffee, and though my morning ritual will stay the same, I fear its ability to momentarily transport me to a nostalgic Portland will be gone.

Sometime around two today, I walked to my open window and leaned out. I rested my forearms on the window sill, holding a mug of lychee black tea over a twenty-six story drop. There was nothing pressing for me to do, so I just stood there and stared at the view. I smiled and sipped my tea as I enjoyed the breeze against my face. My iTunes played Brahms’ Piano Trio No. 1 in B—though not very loudly. I still haven’t gotten around to buying speakers. I looked out and tried to find the apartment building where four of my friends live. The view of the building was blocked by some trees, but I did catch a couple from a neighboring building bringing up tea to their roof. They sat facing each other, both leaning forward until their faces almost touched. I started to imagine what romantic words they were whispering to each other, but my mind soon wandered. I thought about everything that was going well for me here. Teaching is a joy; I live with a postcard view, and I keep going to new, wonderful places in Hong Kong. But most importantly, I have met all sorts of bright, fascinating people for me to enjoy these new places with. I looked back in the direction of where my friends lived and felt pretty lucky. I finished my last sip of tea and decided to spend the rest of my day in tea shop attached to a bookstore.

EDIT: And then I found five dollars.

After class, I noticed one of my students squirming in his seat as I talked to a handful of his classmates. After all the other students had left, he got up and nervously asked me a question.

“Can I have a hug?”

I was taken aback but agreed. It was one of those short, awkward ‘man hugs,’ where each person does the three-pat back-slap. As soon as it over, he skipped off to his next class. I stood there for a moment and realized that I have a student who looks up to me. I hope I made his day too.

Lying on the top deck of a Disney yacht, a friend told me after a long silence, “You know, I’d spend the rest of my life traveling on a boat like this.” At that moment, I’d had the exact same thought.

I’d never been one of those people preternaturally attracted to water. Before these last couple of weeks, I would’ve preferred to live in the mountains than on the coast. Then, I went on a series of “junk trips”—a term used in Hong Kong to describe an outing on any type of boat. The first junk trip was also filled with interesting, intelligent people who were a joy to talk with—as well as having five Princeton graduates. We went wakeboarding, which I’d never done before and is an absolute blast. Periodically, we would leap into the bay from the top deck. Mostly though, we just lied out on the roof, shooting the breeze.

On the return into Hong Kong harbour, while everybody else was mesmerized by a rare sunset, I watched my apartment window come into view, and I felt lucky to be where I am. I turned to watch the sunset, which put the Hong Kong skyline into silhouette against an orange sky. A friend turned to me, handed me a beer, and asked, “Ain’t this the life?”

I thought to myself, “Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that this really is my life.” I sipped my beer, watched Hong Kong get slowly larger ahead of me, and chided myself for not bringing my nice camera. Then, I went on two other junk trips the next week.

This really is the life.

A thousand activists yelled, “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” A young man—probably my age—played guitar in front of the crowd, leading us in song. In English, the guitarist admitted that he just learned to play the song an hour ago. The crowd didn’t care. Holding candles, the protesters belted out in stilted Spanish in support of the Burmese people who were taking to the streets. Every so often, we’d shout an English chorus: “The people united will never be defeated!” We were singing in Spanish and English with Cantonese speakers about a Burmese uprising. There were the activists in Che t-shirts who gesticulated enthusiastically, and there was bad protest poetry. It could have been Portland.

But there was something a little sad about the vigil. People cared deeply about what they said, but they’d been saying it for years. No one risked anything, and no one had any new strategies. With one exception, every speech contained the same predictable rhetoric. It’s not that these categories of thought are wrong, but after traveling the world many times over, they seemed tired. It’s one thing to deploy the rhetoric of the universal, but it needs to be shaped to a time and a place, given purchase in a particular location. The activists seemed to accept wholesale a certain outlook on what a protest should be and what one should say. Surrounded by four banking towers and a Ritz-Carlton, the built environment constantly reminded me of Hong Kong’s position as a rich global center of exchange. Money and ideas from across the world meet here. I imagined that they’d occasionally bump into each other, maybe creating something new or perhaps knocking something off the old idea. Hong Kong is the only place in China—one of the countries propping up the military regime in Burma—where one can safely protest. It could be an activist incubator, where new strategies are tried out, tweaked, and sent around the world for others. Instead, the protest was not just average, but an average of all the protests across the world.

A friend from work asked me and the two other American teachers if we wanted to go to a tram party. We’d be gliding through the streets of Hong Kong at night in a convertible trolley. Oh and there was going to be home-cooked food, he told me. Combining my favorite things in the world—light-rail, food, and adventure—I was going to be living a mass-transit fantasy I never knew I had.

Without air-conditioning or window panes, even the new trams belong to a different era, and priced at only two Hong Kong dollars, the fare also seems old-fashioned. Unlike the other trams, this old one, painted deep green with gold trim, had an open air top.

We were among the first people to arrive and the only people to have brought any alcohol. Linda, the hostess, greeted us warmly in perfect English, and we sat at the back at the back of tram, struggling in a futile effort to open a bottle of Australian shiraz with a faulty screw top. We could twist it in a full circle, but the seal would not break. It was the only thing that went wrong.

Linda announced something to the party to great applause. Of course, we couldn’t understand a word. A moment later, Eric, our colleague, introduced us to the crowd in Cantonese, again to cheers. People seemed genuinely interested in us. This takes some getting used to.

We left our nook at the back and mingled with the crowd. Linda handed us a sheet of paper and a colored pencil. She explained to us that we had to introduce ourselves to everyone on the tram, and after a conversation, we had to write a first impression about the person on their piece of paper. On my sheet, someone compared me to Jude Law. No, seriously.

As long as we were moving, a light wind kept us cool on the hot, muggy night. We moved smoothly underneath neon signs: some in English, some in characters, and some with cartoons of chickens. We slid by jealous businessmen in Central and gawking tourists in Causeway Bay. As we passed a tram going in the opposite direction, we were inches from workers taking public transportation home. We’d look at them, smile, and wave. Someone would always wave back.

After our two hour tram trip finished, we headed to a karaoke bar. I was a little apprehensive about singing. I mean if the Chinese government heard my crooning, it’d be banned as offensive. Hell, I’m probably already banned from karaoke in Singapore. But all it took was a cantopop cover of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and I was hooked. In that great ballad, the imitable Bonnie Tyler sang, “Together we can take it to the end of the line.” On that night, we already had, and it turns out “the universe” could really be as “magical and wondrous” as she had hoped.

In Hong Kong, the sun doesn’t set. It just slowly vanishes. There’s never that golden light that makes buildings and sidewalks glow. At dusk, the city remains in muted colors. On some days, you can actually see the sun as it sets, but it barely penetrates the clouds. The sun’s clearly defined perimeter manages to punch a perfect circle through the fog, but it doesn’t radiate. The sun just sinks into the haze, a fading coral saucer.

Supposedly, many wealthy expats have moved to Singapore to escape to colored sunsets, where clouds go from persimmons to oranges to dragonfruit. It’s not Hong Kong’s fault really. Much of the pollution comes from coal-powered factories north of the region. But walking around the city, it’s easy to imagine the flecks of carbonaceous gunk that one constantly inhales. I can’t help but think back to when an elementary school teacher showed us actual lungs from a smoker. Cigarettes had mangled them and deposited black, glutinous tar throughout the once white organ. I am only being a little neurotic. One oft-cited study blames air pollution for killing 1,600 people each year in Hong Kong. It is no wonder the deterioration of the air quality has become the major issue here. Perhaps with increasing environmental controls in China, the residents of Hong Kong will soon see the sun set on this part of the old British Empire, but with the explosion of growth in Shenzhen, I don’t think it’s likely.

You can always spot the tourists, because their eyes constantly glance upwards. I guess that makes me a tourist. I still unabashedly stare at Hong Kong’s charismatic skyscrapers and massive residential slabs. On the one hand, this means I’m actually seeing buildings—unlike local residents who whisk past them with an efficiency of movement that prohibits even a momentary look upwards. The tourist’s gaze, however, rips buildings from their context, fetishizing structures instead of understanding the building within the fabric of the city. Certainly, my photography does not help, but only further pulls them out of their place. In photography, one takes images, even the verb implies a plucking out of context. Perhaps stemming from its origins as a gateway city, Hong Kong’s built environment encourages a global—even placeless—outlook on the world that, paradoxically, is distinctly Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s architecture aids in this destruction of context. Much of the city is in an international architectural style that ignores the local geography. The ten story mall near me has no windows; with its inward looking atrium and high-end chain stores, it could be anywhere in the world. This refusal to recognize a place is not uncommon in Hong Kong. Even the few efforts to create a Hong Kong identity through architecture only furthered the erasing of context. Many Hong Kong residents were furious with the construction of the Bank of China Building, because it did not adhere to the rules of feng shui. One well-known politician even refused to live in the central city to avoid the bad feng shui that reflected off the building. Despite the attempt to create a unique Hong Kong architectural style, the Bank of China Building did not adhere to local standards. However in eyes of the Bank of China, the building succeeded in its goal of becoming an international icon, strengthening the image of the bank around the world.

In stark contrast to the iconic buildings of Central, my favorite areas to explore are residential neighborhoods that consist of rows upon rows of high-rises. These buildings were not built for the sake of any architectural statement but rather to maximize profit through cost-efficient construction. Even more so than New York, the architecture of Hong Kong unapologetically inscribes capitalism into space. These nondescript residential slabs look as if they could belong anywhere, but at the same time, they are the direct result of government land use policies that I’m only beginning to learn something about. This combination makes these buildings simultaneously “placeless” and particularly HK. You can feel it when you walk around these areas. These neighborhoods blur the boundaries between the eerily familiar and the new and strange.

This month, HK was again ranked the “most free” place on Earth in terms of trade. Blessed with few natural resources, Hong Kong grew as a wildly successful site of exchange. Both the residential slabs and the iconic buildings are indicative of a so-called import-export mentality that’s devoted to profit and global trade. The tourists snapping photos of famous buildings may not understand the particular set of policies or cultural milieu that gave rise to them, but by circulating photos of the buildings, they enhance the buildings’ global appeal through exchange. And nothing could be more Hong Kong than that.