Dave Barry - Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

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So today Hong Kong is nervous. People with money or connections are fleeing by the thousands. But millions more can’t leave, or don’t want to abandon their homeland. They’re staying, and waiting. Nobody is sure what’s coming, but it’s definitely coming. Five years. About 2,000 days, and counting. This knowledge hangs over Hong Kong like a fog, giving the city an edgy, quietly desperate, Casablanca-like feel.

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Or maybe not. Maybe my imagination was just hyperactive from drinking San Miguel beer on a moody gray day and watching the harbor being whipped into whitecaps by a typhoon named-really-Fred. The truth is that, most of the time, daily Hong Kong life seemed pretty normal. People were teeming and working and shopping and eating and laughing just the way people would if they weren’t doomed to be turned over to a group of hard-eyed old murderers.

While my family and I were there, in August, the big news story, aside from Typhoon Fred, was the trial of Hong Kong businessman Chin Chiming, accused of blackmailing actresses into having sex with him. The Hong Kong media was covering the heck out of this trial. Here’s an excerpt from the South China Morning Post story concerning a witness identified as “Mrs. D” being cross-examined by defense attorney Kevin Egan:

Mr. Egan started by asking Mrs. D if she had noticed whether Chin’s organ was erect while they were in bed. The witness said it was.

Mr. Egan then asked if it was “fully” erect, but prosecutor, Mr. Stuart Cotsen, objected to the question on the grounds that the witness could not be expected to know.

Mr. Egan said the objection meant he had to ask the witness to describe Chin’s sexual organ as fully as possible.

So apparently life goes on in Hong Kong. I highly recommend it as a travel destination, at least until 1997, although you may feel a little intimidated by the crowds until you learn how to teem. You have to get your elbows into it. I learned this one afternoon when we decided to take a ferry to Macao, which is the other non-Communist territory in China, about 40 miles west of Hong Kong. Macao is an old colony belonging to Portugal, which will turn it over to China in 1999. Gambling is legal in Macao, and a lot of Hong Kong residents regularly teem over there on ferries and go to the casinos.

One day we went over, and when our ferry landed, the other passengers tried to kill us. OK, technically they weren’t trying to kill us; they were trying to be first in line to get through Immigration and Customs. But they did not hesitate to shove us violently out of the way. We were bouncing around like kernels in a popcorn maker and quickly became separated. Occasionally, through the crowd, I’d see my wife and son, expressions of terror on their faces, being jostled off in the general direction of the Philippines.

I tried being polite. “Hey!” I said to a middle-age, polite-looking man behind me who was thoughtfully attempting to hasten my progress by jabbing me repeatedly in the spine with his umbrella tip. “Excuse me! I SAID EXCUSE ME, DAMMIT!”

But we quickly learned that the only way to function in these crowds was to teem right along with everybody else. When it came time to purchase return ferry tickets, I was practically a professional. I got into the “line,” which was a formless, milling mass of people, and I leaned hard in the general direction of the ticket window. I finally got close to it, and it was clearly my turn to go next, when an old man—he had to be at least 75—started making a strong move around me from my left. I had a definite age and size advantage, but this man was good. He shoved his right elbow deep into my gut while he reached his left arm out to grasp the ticket window ledge. I leaned hard on the man sideways, and then—you can’t teach this kind of thing; you have to have an instinct for it—I made a beautiful counterclockwise spin move that got me to the window inches ahead of him. I stuck my face smack up against the window, confident I had won, but then the old man, showing great resourcefulness, stuck his head under my arm and shoved his face into the window, too. We were cheek to cheek, faces against the glass, mouths gaping and eyes bulging like two crazed carp, shouting ticket orders. unfortunately he was shouting in Chinese, which gave him the advantage, and he got his ticket first. But I was definitely making progress.

However, I never really did adjust to Chinese food. I like Chinese food the way they make it here in the U.S., where you order from an English menu and the dishes have reassuring names such as “sweet and sour pork” and you never see what the food looked like before it was killed and disassembled. This is not the kind of Chinese food that actual Chinese people eat. For one thing, before they order something at a restaurant, they like to see the prospective entree demonstrate its physical fitness by swimming or walking around.

One afternoon we were wandering through the narrow, zigzagging (and of course teeming) side streets of Macao, and we came to a group of small stalls and shops; in front of each one were stacks of big glass tanks containing murky water filled with squirming populations of fish, eels, squids, turtles, etc. At first we thought we’d entered the Aquarium Supplies District, but then we saw tables behind the tanks, and we realized that these were all restaurants. People were eating these things. You, the diner, would select the eel that you felt best exemplified whatever qualities are considered desirable in an eel, such as a nice, even coating of slime, and the restaurant owner would haul it out of the tank so you could take a closer look, and if it met with your approval—WHACK—dinner would be served.

We walked by one restaurant just as a man reached into a tank and hauled out what looked like the world’s biggest newt. It had legs and a tail and buggy eyes, and I swear it was the size of a small dog. The man displayed it to some diners, who looked at this thing, thrashing around inches from their faces, and instead of sprinting to a safe distance, as I definitely would have, they were nodding thoughtfully, the way you might approve a bottle of Chablis.

A few minutes later, we came to a larger restaurant that had an elaborate window display, with colored spotlights shining on an arrangement of strange, triangular, withered, vaguely evil-looking things.

Shark fins,” said my wife, who reads all the guidebooks. “They’re very popular.”

At least they were dead. Around the corner we found another restaurant window display, consisting of a jar full of—I am not making this up—snakes.

“Come on in!” was the basic message of this display. “Have some snake!”

So as you can imagine we were a tad reluctant to eat local cuisine. But one night in Hong Kong we decided to give it a try, and we asked a bouncer outside a bar to recommend a medium-priced Chinese restaurant. He directed us down a side street to a little open-air place decorated in a design motif that I would call “about six old card tables.” Several men were eating out of

bowls. We sat down, and the waitress, a jolly woman who seemed vastly amused by our presence, rooted around and found a beat-up hand-written English menu for us. Here are some of the entrees it listed:

Ox Offal and Noodle Sea Blubber Sliced Cuttle Fish Sliced Pork’s Skin Pig’s Trotters Clam’s Meat Goose’s Intestines Preserved Pig’s Blood

Using our fluent gesturing skills, we communicated that we wanted chicken, beef, and pork, but definitely not Preserved Pig’s Blood. We also ordered a couple of beers, which the waitress brought out still attached to the plastic six-pack holder. Our food arrived maybe a minute later, and the waitress stayed to watch us eat it. Several of the other diners also got up and gathered around, laughing and gesturing. We were big entertainment.