Our New Daughter: The Trip

All trips begin with adrenaline and chaos. I spent the morning assembling the crib, replacing a stair rail to the basement, and fitting and placing the oak transition strip to the nursery. Being busy supposedly keeps you from going out of your mind, but in my case it wasn’t working.

Then came loading our suitcases for the last time. Looking for those camera cables to download images to the laptop, repacking the 7 pounds of See’s candy, seven gifts for officials with undoubted sweet tooths.

Then the car trip to the airport’s remote lot, with its dust-devils and loping coyotes, and its shuttle-bus driver who insists on stopping at every single pick-up point, whether there are waiting passengers or not (and chatting with all other bus drivers he comes across, a lonely socialite trapped in a world he never made).

Finally we make our plane: we flew economy via United to San Francisco, ate sushi at the airport and waited 4 hours, then flew economy again (First class, Business class, Underclass) via Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong, somehow losing all of Friday the 17th to our trip and the International Date Line.

Hong Kong is a tremendously fascinating town with a true sense of public architecture and space. Its reminds me in some ways of San Francisco (where do you think that city’s Chinatown came from?) and in some ways of Tokyo (canyons made of buildings and individual structures sometimes the equivalent of visual screams).

The area of town that you walk through determines very much whether you feel you are in the first or third world: the skyscrapers in the central city (whether Kowloon or Hong Kong Island) give a gleaming sense of order and security that any business or government wants to project. Then there is the chaos of North Point, where butchers grab fat birds out of cages and slaughter them to order for customers, and freshly filleted fish sit on ice baths on display tables, their red hearts still attached, still beating (I have pictures).

But the day we arrived was Kwan Yin’s birthday, and we made our pilgrimage to two temples and asked for mercy from this goddess of mercy: mercy for ourselves, mercy for our daughter. There were hundreds of supplicants and even more coils and sticks of burning incense, driving the temperature of the temples.

We are staying in the YMCA on Salisbury Road, in a suite overlooking the harbor, upgraded because the room we had booked was not available. 200 meters away, up Nathan road, is Chungking Mansions, a huge chaotic structure full of flop houses, and cheap restaurants, and south-asian men selling cameras and knock-off Rolexes. Suzanne, my wife stayed there last time she was here over 20 years ago. Its only change really one of time—it is seedier and more decrepit. But no opium dens that I could find.

We found a noodle shop that probably can’t be beat near the corner of Canton street and Haiphong Road, and there is a smoothy shop around the corner that sells dragon fruit juice at HK$10 a glass.

Today we take a ferry to Macau and tomorrow a flight to Guangzhou, where the following day we will meet Mei-Mei for the first time.

Then life (everyone tells us) as we have known it ends and a new life (hopefully better, always hopefully) begins.