An Ode to Aunt May (and Marisa Tomei)

Marisa Tomei
Rhymes with Aunt May.
You're a hot Aunt May,
Marisa Tomei.

Love Was...

Hong Kong.

Have you ever been to Hong Kong? My brother has. He arrived about a week before the wedding…

As we exited the air-conditioned airport I removed my glasses to clean off the fog that had formed. I turned to my brother, “Aircon. The humidity here is ridiculous.”

Hong Kong Fact #1: The Humidity is Ridiculous

We had two stops to make. Our second stop would be The Watering Hole pub in TST, and so we made the hour long journey to deposit his bags in my flat.

Hong Kong Fact #2: You will lose bags while drunk.

I hailed a green taxi. “Tsim Sa Tsoi, mgoi.” I told the driver.

Hong Kong Fact #3: The locals don’t know the abbreviated names you give to their towns so you must learn how to pronounce them:

TST     =>        Tsim Sa Tsoi   =>        Jim Sa Joy

I had told my brother many things about Hong Kong before he arrived, and like any sane person, he hadn’t believed one word I uttered. When you tell someone that people of all ages will expel phlegm regardless of location, be it in a park, on a bus, or in the cinema, the usual response is: stop exaggerating. You have to physically show them the signs in the shopping mall that read No Spitting for them to eye you less suspiciously.

Hong Kong Fact #4: You will see a lot of mucus.

“Can you stop doing that?” My brother asked.

“What?”

“The Hong Kong Fact thing. It’s annoying.” My brother had a short fuse. My fuse was lengthy. It’s a yin and yang thing; which was apt as we were in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Fact #5: Hong Kong is bizarre and that demands recognition.

But it's the locals. They are what makes Hong Kong so perplexing. Their indifference. Their lack of empathy with other living organisms regardless of its level of sentience. They seem to be knowingly oblivious to the plight of others. Imagine this, your ex-wife (who is your then wife) is pregnant with your first child and duly faints in a busy bus station due to low blood pressure. A few minutes later, she regains consciousness, picks herself up off the floor, and continues on her journey. She picks herself up. The other commuters simply step over her.

That’s one example! I hear you cry. Okay, well, if you hold a door open for someone in Britain, you wouldn’t expect to receive a look as though you were offering them a rat on a stick.

“All Gweilos are rapists.” I announced.

My brother wasn’t amused.

“I was dating a young Chinese girl when I first arrived here. That’s what she told me.”

“They don’t all think that.” My brother informed me.

“So I’m a rapist? I asked her. In Hong Kong, that’s what we say, she said.”

“So this taxi driver thinks we’re rapists?”

“No,” I replied, “he probably just wishes we were dead.”

My brother was having none of it. Part of me felt pity for him for not truly understanding.

“Do you think it’s because we took their country?” he probed.

I pointed out of the window as the taxi began its descent of the mountain, “Look at that…” It’s hard not to smile when you suddenly see the lights of Hong Kong come into view from high altitude. If they could bottle the feeling, they could use it to suspend all arguments globally. “They love blonde hair though, the Chinese. That’s the Peak over there.” I informed him. “The highest point on Hong Kong island. I’ll take you up there. There’s a tram that runs up its side. It’s almost vertical at times.”

He nodded. Seeing this kind of awe on my brother’s face was magical to me.

“But they do like to touch it.”

“Touch what?”

“Blonde hair. They think it brings prosperity or something. Good fortune.”

“What’s that over there?” He asked.

“Erm, that’s the Bank of China building. You can see where they’re building the Exhibition Centre just further forward of it. It’s on reclaimed land that stretches out into the bay.” I pointed at the flashing lights of a Boeing 747 as it was making its final descent into Kai Tak airport. He began to laugh.

“The crazy bastards. It’s lower than the buildings. It’s flying in between…”

Again, it was awe.

“There’s nowhere on the planet like here.”

He nodded.

I waited for the moment to end before redirecting the driver to a new destination – Mong Kok. “It is the most densely populated place on Earth.” I told my brother. “Nine human beings per square metre.”

“That’s not possible.” He corrected me.

See, this is what I mean, there is nothing about Hong Kong that is conceivable. If you want to picture a normal day in Hong Kong, think of the maelstrom of Christmas shopping in a big city. That's a normal day. “They’re all in high rise towers. If they all left home at the same time, they’d be shoulder to shoulder. They save that for Chinese New Year.”

Again he was quiet.

“And don’t apologise when you bump into them. You’re going to bump into them. Endlessly.” When you first arrive, you are in a constant state of apology. This lasts between 7-10 days, about the same length of time as the cold virus. After that you become numb.

But when you were in Hong Kong, you could be that person you were never given permission to be back home. You could be ill-mannered, badly dressed and rude. You could take the last seat – the weary old woman be damned; I will swear as loudly as I like; and if I’m coming through a doorway, you’re getting out of my way. You walk in a straight line through the crowds, the cries of Aya! and Cheesin Gweilo! following you as the locals ricochet off you and into each other, into shop windows or onto the beckoning roads of chaos.

We left the taxi and, avoiding as few locals as possible, headed towards the MTR.

“Smells, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.” At last we were in agreement.

“I can’t smell it anymore. It takes about three weeks to get used to it.”

“It’s like something died.” He said.

“Yeah. It’s like decomposition, recycled body odour, grease, the rotten corpses of animals, human waste and potato skins.” For all its failings and putrescence, it is a place I can only ever look on with fondness. It was physically impossible for me to get more than five feet into the market in Yuen Long, but I am glad that smell was so offensive. It gave the place even more character. And on 30^th June 1997 it would all be given back to China. Goodbye to the bilious odour, but also, goodbye to the nightlife, the food, the sunshine, the Kowloon waterfront with its view of Hong Kong island, its mountains, the lights of Central, the Admiralty and Causeway Bay at night… it was breathtaking. Spectacular. Some say weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects, but I would give anything to feel that glow once more.

We forged on through the crowds and I noticed the build-up of sweat causing my brother’s t-shirt to stick to his back as we shimmied under the bamboo scaffolding that clung to the outside of one of the buildings like an intertwined colony of stick insects. “Gets hard to breathe in this heat, right? I’ll be in work a couple of days next week so you’ll be by yourself. If you come down town, just remember these three words for when the hawkers follow you down the road – I live here.” I played the words back in my head: I. Live. Here. Yeah it was three. Phew.

“What do they sell?” He asked.

“Copy watch. Copy suit.”

“Copy suit?”

“Yeah, like Armani, or… Gucci? Do Gucci do suits?”

“The fuck should I know?”

We didn’t know. Maybe we’d never know. I looked up at the scaffolding. “You know, on average a worker a week dies falling from bamboo scaffolding.”

He looked at me. “And that’s funny?”

“No.” I replied, “Well, yes. You have to live here a few weeks to see the humour in it, I suppose.” Basically I was describing the amount of time it takes for your morals to decay like the Chinese teeth of a fifteen year-old girl. It’s the constant attrition. “There’s no Health and Safety here. They don’t care.” I told him. “No one cares. The locals don’t care so we don’t care. They don’t care that we don’t care and we don’t care that they don’t care. No one cares.” He was silent. “It’s liberating.”

When you talk to your friends about the locals, it’s never with adulation or awe, it’s always with disgust and derision. “I saw one defecate by the side of the road. She didn’t even go behind the bushes. She was stood – crouched next to-”

“Thanks.” Maybe I’d said enough. I was bombarding him, but like I’d already said, Hong Kong is bizarre and that demands recognition – Hong Kong Fact #5.

I needed a new way in so that he would see the place I loved through the same contemptable lens from which I saw it. “They spit on you. Well… in front of you. Have you noticed all the fat little boys yet?”

He smiled at this. “Yeah, I did notice that. It must be a genetic thing going back to the times of the dynasties when the emperor would-”

“McDonalds.” He looked at me. “Ronald McDonald. He arrived here in the late 80s and the diet of the little uns went from rice to fries overnight. It’s the only thing in Hong Kong that is disproportionately under-priced. Hong Kong discovered McDonald’s. Or maybe McDonalds discovered Hong Kong.”

“It’s probably genetic.” My brother corrected me. I stayed silent. The contradictions were beginning to irritate me, but it’s how our conversations always went when I was educating him. He’s always been two years older than me, you see? But I let the argument on the cause of Hong Kong’s growing childhood obesity go. I had a surprise for him that I didn’t want to ruin by too much talk around the topic of McDonald’s disproportionate pricing.

As we made our way across the street to the Mong Kok station a teenager on a four year-old’s bike swerved out off the pavement into oncoming traffic as carefree as you like and then swerved back onto the path. Yes, there were horns blown from the cars, but the horns on Hong Kong cars are ever-present. They're connected to the accelerator. And the brake… the indicators, the headlights, the radio dials… they’re basically connected to everything inside the car and so go off incessantly. The noise of Hong Kong is car horn. The smell is rotten potato.

I smiled and looked at my brother. His mouth was agape.

“What the fuck… did you see what that kid just…”

“They’re fucking idiots.” I told him.

Our journey continued.

Oh, but I have to go back to the teenager on a child’s bike anecdote… they all, all of them, from five to ninety-five, ride children’s bikes. Not bikes made for an eleven year-old, or an eight year-old, but bikes made for four year-olds. I don’t know why. I never asked. We just used to watch them ride past. We would watch them. They didn’t even notice us watching them. They didn’t care. They all rode bikes made for little children.

All right, don’t believe me. Whatever.

Now, before I get to the next part of my story, I have to preface it with a boast. In my younger days, I was freakishly strong. I was the strongest person in my school at fourteen when the eldest pupils were as old as seventeen. I had muscles on top of muscles, as my dad would say. My brother was freakishly strong, but, although I was two years younger, I was stronger than he.

Preface ends… please read on…

It was actually my brother who reminded me of this story a few years later. I didn’t remember it when he told me, but it sounds like the kind of thing I’d do to get through the day without resorting to actual murder. I’d warned him about the trains. They just push on. They don’t let you off. They just push on. He told me he hadn’t believed me at the time. Pushing onto a crowded train is counterproductive. No sane person would do that.

“We were getting off the train at that place,” he said.

“Tsim Sa Tsoi.”

“Yeah… I couldn’t believe it. As soon as the doors opened that guy just tried to push past you to get on…”

“Did I push him out of the way?” I asked.

“No. You grabbed him by his upper arms, lifted him up off the ground and walked him back onto the platform. You then placed him to the side and carried on walking. I was in shock.”

We both laughed at that. I don’t remember it, but I really do hope it was true.

The underground exit led us out on to Nathan Road. In the air was the bitey taste of skewered duck, chicken, and meat of no recognisable type. The smoke clouded the air above the rickety looking stalls that lined the pavements and there was the sizzle of fat which complimented the neon buzz of the signs outside the many hundreds of electrical outlets. The signs glowed, but never flashed. Flashing was verboten. The low flying aircraft could mistake them for runway lights and that could be tragic.

So tragic.

We perspired off towards the Watering Hole, or rather, my brother perspired. It was October. The temperature was around 30°C and the humidity was comparatively low. To me, it was bliss.

“Look at that.” I said, pointing.

My brother looked and his mouth opened slightly in preparation to chide me.

But he didn’t say anything. He just looked, trying to work it out and trying to find some words to explain it.

But there were none.

And so he processed it.

He watched as the woman got closer before finally asking: “What’s she doing?”

I responded in my driest of tones: “What’s up… it’s a fifty-five year-old woman on a bicycle made for a four year-old. What’s unusual about that?”

He didn’t appreciate being mocked. “I can see that. Why?!”

She was getting closer. “You should ask her.”

“Would she understand me?” He asked.

“Probably—but she’d pretend not to.”

The woman cycled past us, not a care in the world. “We’re here.” I said and gestured across the other side of the road with an upwards nod. “The Watering Hole.”

The Watering Hole was an Australian pub, but we never held that against them. In there, I had spent many evenings singing along to the jukebox, laughing at the talk of the misfortune of others and destroying my liver with extreme prejudice, and now, as I entered with my brother, I was giddy with excitement.

“I’ll get them in.” My brother announced. It was happening just as I’d planned.

Now, I wanted to warn him. I really did. But I stopped myself. It was going to be fun after all. We’d laugh about it one day. What made this moment even more exhilarating for me was that my brother was also serving in the Royal Air Force. He was based in Germany, and whereas, in England, a pint of lager at that time was about £1.80, in my brother’s squadron bar he would pay around 1DM… 30p.

I took a seat and set my eyeballs to [RECORD] … … …

About five minutes later my brother arrived back at the table. I had enjoyed watching his return as he held the two cold, frosty, welcoming pints in either hand. He looked exsanguinated. Opaque. White and clammy. “Two pints”, he said, “it cost ten quid for two pints.” Now, at the time of writing, I haven’t spoken to my brother for twelve years, but when I look back on that moment, a moment that happened twenty-one years ago, I remember that I loved him deeply. We named our first child after him. When I refer to him now, it’s usually to say, I have a brother, but I don’t talk to him anymore.

Hong Kong Fact #12,762 – Thousands of miles from home, your family may grow used to you not being there…

I smiled. It was a broad smile. The kind of smile that exposes the maximum amount of teeth without causing discomfort.

He stared around the bar looking for answers. “Ten quid.” I didn't tell him I once paid £13 for half a pint. He didn't need to be haunted by such details while still in shock.

I raised my glass and he clinked it instinctively before seating himself. He exhaled. “Cheers.”

I scanned the bar fondly and took a sip of my beer. “Yeah,” I said, “It’s extortionate, it smells, the locals are evil… but there’s nowhere on the planet I’d rather be. Just wish we saw more of each other. Glad you could come.”

“I'm your Best Man.” He replied and smiled, “I had to come.”

I laughed, “You've always been the best man, Michael.”