10,000 Buddhas Temple part 1 of 2

Next time you are in the Shatin area of The New Territories, the guide books will probably recommend you that you go to the 10,000 Buddha Temple. Go if you want to. When you walk out of the MTR station, follow the signs toward IKEA, but when you get to the bottom of the long pedestrian ramp, turn left toward the low mountains. You are going to have to climb some steps. (It should have been called the 10,000 Steps Temple). The temple does actually have 10,000 Buddha statues. They are everywhere. There are a few big ones, many medium-sized ones, and lots and lots of small one.

Me? I think that I am pretty much done visiting temples in Hong Kong. They are all starting to look the same to me. And they are all really new-ish. A thousand-year-old Buddhist temple? That’s cool. A forty-year-old temple? Not so much.

The minute you start your ascent, you will start seeing hand-lettered signs for two alternative destinations that you will never see listed in any guide books. I recommend you blow-off the 10,000 Buddha Temple and instead stop half way up the hill at the Wing Wo Bee Farm and the Starock Book Store.

Okay, the Bee Farm isn’t really a farm. It’s a house. Knock on the front door and the wife will answer. After welcoming you, she will lead you through their house and out the back door. There in the back yard that is little bigger than a volleyball court, the husband has built three or four dozen bee hive boxes from scrap wood. With bees swarming everywhere, he will give you a little demonstration. He will lift off the lid to one of the boxes and then slowly lift out one of the inserts so that you can see the honey comb. Take as many pictures as you want.

Back inside the house/shop, the wife will lead you to the display of jars of honey. Don’t be like the three-some who left just ahead of me who took up fifteen minutes of the couple’s time, took tons of pictures, and then left empty handed. Buy a little something.

Octopus Card

This is my Octopus card. I think that it is the thing that I love most in Hong Kong.

This electronic pass card allows me to ride the MTR trains. I can use it on both the green minibuses and the doubledecker buses. I can use it to take one of Hong Kong's many ferries. It also gets me on Hong Kong's tram.

Every time I swipe it, not only does this card know exactly how much to deduct, it dislpays how much I have left on my card. In fact, my Octopus card even lets me run a deficit of a couple of bucks. Nice.

If I drove a car in Hong Kong, I could use the card to to pay the parking meters.

But wait, it gets better. I can also use my Octopus card in both 7-Eleven and Park-N-Shop. No cash? No problem. Grab a Coke Lite with lemon, swipe, ding, and I'm good to go. Nice.

Even the guy in the Mr. Softee ice cream truck accepts the Octopus card.

Nice.

-Jack

Mao’s Last Dancer

I just finished reading “Mao’s Last Dancer” and I highly, highly recommend it, even if you aren’t really all that interested in China. It is hands down, one of the best books I have read in a very, very long time and definitely among the the most compelling auto-biographies I’ve ever read. It was completely gripping. I am a very slow reader and I blew through this 440 page book in less than three days.

In the midst of Mao Zedong’s 1960s Cultural Revolution, Cunxin Li was one of six boys of very, very poor parents in rural China. For the first ten years of his life, his family was near starvation.

One day, when he was nine years old, a four-person delegation from Mao’s culture department come to visit Li’s school. They had already selected one young girl and were leaving the classroom when the teacher tapped the last representative on the shoulder, points to Li, and says “What about this one?”

So begins a journey that would change Li’s life forever. At the age of nine, he was taken to Beijing to be trained as a ballet dancer. He would only see his family once a year. Eventually, he rose to the height of his profession and danced for kings and presidents. At the age of 18 he defected to the United States.

It’s a story about a mother’s unwavering love for her son, it’s about the irrepressible quest for freedom, its about only having one way out and doggedly pursuing that avenue with unadulterated determination. It’s about courage, determination, and hope.

If you only read one book between now and the end of the year, read this book.

-Jack

Published in 1993, “Mao’s Last Dancer” was turned into a major motion picture this last October and is available at Netflix and Amazon.com.

Elise After School

The school year is winding down. All of Elise’s afterschool activities are starting to come to an end. For the last three months her after school has been as follows:

Monday: Chinese Language Club

Tuesday: Jump Rope Club

Wednesday: nothing

Thursday: Reading Club

Friday: Ceramics Club

When she isn’t busy attending one of her afterschool club’s she can generally be found hanging out in my classroom playing on the classroom computer.

Because her daddy teaches eighth grade and her big sister is in the eighth grade, Elise is well-known on the fourth floor. She loves hanging out with the junior highers and they appear to enjoy having her hang around.

-Jack

Picture: Once again, Elise was asked to pose for a picture. This young lady was in the park with a bunch of her fellow Indonesian helpers on their day off, but she was the only one in her group brave enough to ask for a photo.

Happy Mother’s Day

Hong Kong is a bi-lingual city. Seven million people had to learn English so that I wouldn't have to learn Cantonese. Thanks for that. Remind me to write them all a thank you note.

But once in a while the English gets a little fractured. The girls and I get our low-brow giggles by checking out t-shirts and reading signs in small mom-and-pop shops.

Sunday was Mother’s Day. Inspired by all the haiku-like fractured English she has encountered since she's been here, Annika wrote her own fractured-English Mother’s Day card for Julie. Each of the lines was inspired by real signs, labels, and t-shirts she has seen around Hong Kong.

Mom:

Thank you for the thing you do. Every day hte sun loves you liek me. You remind me of fantastic. Even ddung loves you. Every body love you.

-PigPig Family

A Table for Two part 2 of 2

After we finished our burgers and chocolate shakes, we walked over to our new friends and joined them at their table. Sure enough, they were visiting from Australia and had been in Hong Kong for less than 24 hours. We got to chatting. They were doing a week in Hong Kong before continuing on to Las Vegas. They were a lot of fun to talk to. One of the cool things about living outside of The States is hearing people's thoughts on the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.’

Over the course our of twenty-minute conversation, the woman revealed that the thing that she absolutely loved the most about the States was Walmart. So big, so cheap, so much selection. As long ago as ten years, she heard rumors that Walmart was going to set up shop Down Under. But alas, nothing yet.

She also shared with us that back in Australia when her son was young his favorite t.v. show was COPS. She had to explain to him that life in America wasn’t really like that; it was just all exaggerated for the t.v. camera. Then she visited Vegas for the first time. Just outside of her hotel room window, she saw a man being frisked, handcuffed, and arrested while surrounded by half a dozen police cars with their light flashing. She had to go back to Australia and tell her son, nope, life in America is pretty much just like the show.

It didn’t affect her love for Vegas though; this was going to be her fifth trip back.

Nice to know that when the world thinks about America, they think of Walmart, COPS, and Las Vegas.

It’s enough to make an expat all misty eyed.

Jack

-It always amazing to me how much people know about The States. You were born in Nepal, grew up in New Zealand and now live in Hong Kong, so why in the world would you know that South Bend in is Indiana? I always feel like they know so much about my country and I know next to nothing about theirs. New Zeeland: lots of sheep and that famous Opera House, right? Oh what? The Opera House is Australia? Oops, sorry about that.

A Table for Two part 1 of 2

It had been a low-key Saturday. We had social plans for the evening, but our friends canceled due to illness. It worked out because I was having a hankering for a big ol burger.

So later that night, we found ourselves deep in the belly of one of Hong Kong’s innumerable malls. We ate at “Triple O’s” a Canadian burger chain that makes the best –and among the few- chocolate milk shakes in the New Territories. As Julie and I were walking away from the counter, I overheard the Caucasian man behind me say to his wife “What do we have to do to get a table around here?” as he surveyed the very crowded restaurant.

I turned to Julie and said “Uh oh, somebody’s new to Hong Kong.”

Obviously, they didn’t know how things worked around here.

Fast food restaurants and mall food courts –like everywhere else in Hong Kong- are almost always crowded. Invariably, there are more diners than there are tables. Last Fall, after several meals which included the four of us walking around a food court with our trays aimlessly looking for a table while our food got cold and our patience grew thin, we developed a system. After we all decide what we want to order, Annika and Elise fan out into the restaurant to secure a table while Julie and I place the order. The food usually takes about seven or eight minutes to arrive which can be about how long it takes the girls to secure a table.

As the Anglo couple wandered past our table, I offered “You just have to kind of keep milling around until a table frees up.”

Julie chimed in “If you see people who appear close to finishing, just go ahead and stand right next to their table -even if it takes a minute or two.”

“It’s just kind of the Hong Kong way,” I added.

They express their thanks and wandered off.

A minute later, we noticed they had themselves a table.

Welcome to Hong Kong.

-Jack

In Hong Kong, you don't clear your own tray from the table at fast food restaurants. They have people for that. In fact, they get upset if you do clear your own tray. It's as if you are trying to work somebody out of a job.

Stand up.

Walk away.

Asian!

A friend of mine sent me a link to a music video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=546zAa57AJE) made by a group of Calvin College students. It’s pretty amazing considering it includes about a hundred participants and was filmed in one continuous take.

My homeroom students just finished filming their own mock commercial for a school-wide competition, so yesterday I showed them the Calvin video.

Calvin College grew out the Dutch, Christian Reform tradition and historically has not been a hotbed of diversity. Now please know that Calvin College has made great strides in diversifying its studentbody and teaching staff in the last few decades. None-the-less, the majority of Calvin is still Dutch. The Van Somethings constitute about 30% of the student directory. Calvin remains in large part a bastion of middle-American whiteness. And this comes through in the video.

But about one minute into the four-minute video, an Asian student appears on screen. Without prompting, half of my homeroom pointed and gleefully shouted out in unison “Asian!” They seemed pretty excited to see a representative of themselves embedded in the middle of this very American experience.

In general, my students have a pretty acute sense of identity. While they might not refer to themselves as American, they strongly identity with America even though most of them have never lived there. After all, they do attend an American school; most of them speak better English than Cantonese; the majority of the music and movies they consume is from The States.

My students really liked the video. When it was done, one of my homeroom students said, “I want to go there.” It’s quite possible that the Calvin student they saw in the video is an ICS alumni. ICS has sent several students to Calvin over the years.

After showing this video, if any of my students ends up going to Calvin, I am fully expecting a commission.

-Jack

In the Eye of the Beholder

In Hong Kong and China, it is a sign of . . . distinction, beauty, sophistication, virility? I'm not quite sure what . . . to grow as long as possible the hairs coming from the mole on one's face.

When I first came to Hong Kong, it took me a while to get used to this.

In fact, I'm still getting used to it.

-Jack