I commit another faux pas

Last week, I went to the Wong Tai Sin temple complex in kowloon. It's a pretty big tourist draw (including groups wearing same-colored nametags led by young women holding flags), but I thought it would also be a good occasion to burn some incense to commemorate the death of my grandfather. So I bought a package of little sticks outside, and walk to what looked like an appropriate site, lit the bundle of them, and tried as faithfully as possible to copy what the other people around me were doing: bowing their heads forward, raising and lowering the burning incense, creating a cloud of fragrant smoke. I didn't do an amazing job, but I guess it's ok because I'm third-generation chinese-american (and so would not reasonably be expected to know what I was supposed to do), and the last time I spoke with my grandfather, he was happy for me that I was coming to work in Hong Kong, so I figure he won't be offended.

As you can see in the photo, there are little gas flames near offering sites. After bowing and presenting the incense, you take a few of the sticks and put them into a sand-filled box in front of the temple (or altar, or wherever). I was at this point in front of the temple in the photo, the name of which I didn't quite catch, but which seems to be "Three _____ Hall." I chose to believe the second word was "virtue" or something, since if I remember correctly there are three cardinal virtues in Confucianism (which supposedly parallels the three "honor" tiles in mahjong), so it seemed like a good place to be.

I figured that since eight is an auspicious number, I should put that many in at a time. Other people also put in groups of three, so I did that in a few places too. At this point, I was walking around with a rather large bundle of smoking incense sticks, but it didn't seem quite right to just kind of stick them all in one place. I walked to the main temple, which was nearby, and offered some more of the bundle there, but I was still left with kind of a lot of incense.
This was when I realized that some of the sticks in the middle hadn't really caught when I first lit everything, and were not sticking out of the middle, whole and unburnt. I went over to another gas flame, to try to relight them. In my limited experience with incense, you seem to need to get a decent flame going, and then extinguish it by waving it around a little bit, or the incense won't catch at all. So I tried to really get the stubborn middle sticks to light, and caused a little bit of a conflagration. I took them out of the glass box around the flame, and was trying to get them to die down, but shaking them only made the flames more intense (because, as we all know, adding oxygen to fire only encourages it).
Needless to say, a temple complex security guard immediately came running over to me, and yelled something angry-sounding in Cantonese, pointing at the nice-smelling torch burning in my hands. I saw a bucket of water next to a nearby trash can (which is used to put out all of the offered incense when it is periodically collected from the sand-filled boxes and thrown away by the staff), and gestured to it. The security guard nodded sternly. I half-lowered, half-dropped the flaming bundle into the water, and then threw it away myself. I tried to discreetly make my exit, although I don't know how the other worshipers and tourists could possibly have missed the sight of the tall foreign guy lighting his incense on fire and then being disciplined by a security guard.

I figure, at least I tried, and at least I managed to offer up about half the package before sending the whole enterprise up in flames. I'd like to think that as his second daughter's son, my grandfather wasn't hoping for too much more than that in the way of filial piety.

language

One of the things that had me most excited about going to Hong Kong was the chance to learn Cantonese. It feels like a language I can claim (my grandparents speak it, although it wasn't their local dialect), "sensible" people don't want to learn it (since putonghua is rapidly catching up even here, where Canto has long been both a colloquial and official language), and it's challenging. Basically, it has all of the obscurity and difficulty that made Hungarian a fun language to learn, plus I can answer those pro-Mandarin haters with a claim of birthright.

I'm sufficiently incompetent with the language that the most basic conversational exchange is still beyond me. Ordering lunch (even at mcdonalds, where the meals are numbered), receiving directions, explaining that I'm teaching english and from the USA, all require me to slip back into English to convey any real meaning. But. I can usually say the words that initiate a conversation in Canto, and I do, to practice. Examples: "Yat hou" (at mcdonalds), "Bin dou sai sau gun a?" (where is the bathroom?), "Lok wai" (we need seating for six), "Siu siu a" (I can speak a little). On the basis of as few as two words, people immediately assume my level is good enough to complete the conversation in Canto, so they respond with a lengthy question (or statement, depending) which goes completely over my head. I guess it's only fair; I think it might be worse if my speaking was SO so bad that I was answered in English. But that doesn't seem to mean that anyone speaks any more slowly, even though the two words I said were slow and as halting as a single sentence can be, or more clearly, although I still don't have a good ear for the language and would be hard-pressed to pick words out of even well-enunciated speech. At any rate, I'm frequently embarrassed by the utter lack of comprehension I have, even as I'm mildly flattered that anyone would think, even for a second, that I actually speak Canto well. Unless their question is, "That was so bad, you have no idea what I'm saying to you, do you?" Then, I guess, my dumb stare in reply is entirely appropriate.

Sidenote: the hit counter that I put on back in August 2005 (or so) has me at 4998. It is taking EVERY LAST CELL IN MY BODY not to just reload the page a few times to see it turn over.

Also, I'm optimistic we'll hit 10000 before, say, October 2009. Open question: where do you think I'll be by then? (optional part b: where do you think you'll be then?)

keeping in touch, 2007 edition

Tomorrow morning will be the morning when I complete all those tasks on my to-do list left over from earlier this week. Familiar. But I guess it's nice to know that you can move me halfway around the world and I'll still keep all my bad habits intact. List-making does help a little, but it'll always make the biggest difference in what I do with my tomorrow morning, which is the day I swear I'll actually get up with my alarm clock.

This is a really long way of saying I'm not going to actually post photos and content about the last week, although I do have some stuff that I want to write about.

Instead, I just wanted to mention the little pang of sadness I got just now when I updated the links in my sidebar. "friends who write" was a vast vast improvement over what I had there before (nyt? the onion? I don't exactly remember, but nothing particularly personal), but I find that it requires a little more regular attention, as people start and stop writing, share and fall silent, get busy or become idle, etc etc. This puppy's been running for quite a while now, back when the stories were about Budapest and Hungarian class (which, although I'm afraid/reluctant to draw such a direct comparison, remind me in their own ways of HK and Cantonese class), back, frankly, when I had a different set of in-close-touch friends, and so on and so forth. Anyway, it's something I'd rather not dwell on: this is supposed to be about everyone else who writes stuff on the internet that I read.

Although my list of bookmarked blog URLs disappeared when my laptop was stolen last spring, I'm pretty sure I've found all but one or two of the pages I used to read. I try to hold on to addresses, just in case people return to them, but it's a little sad to check up on all the defunct pages, to see all the dust on the pane of these little windows into people's lives. By the way, please bear with me on the I'm-embarrassed-by literary devices; I think it's a side-effect of spending my days either speaking in English, but trying to clarify pronunciation of "thin" and "thing", or speaking in Cantonese, where more than half of the words I say are "this one" (and I usually mess up and pronounce the 個 like in putonghua). So I guess there's a part of me desperate to get all faux-poetic and deep-down-I-know-I'm-not-gonna-want-to-reread-this-y. This is what happens when I stop writing in my journal, apparently.

But yeah, the churn, like in economics. But the churn of blogs: I took down another one tonight, added two, and am thinking about linking to some of the other ETAs here, who actually *do* include things like photos and narrative accounts of what exactly we do here. I honestly hope that all of you (the audience) will keep writing, start writing again if your own domain has fallen into disuse, and that you'll maintain the consistency that I feel like I'm sometimes lack in terms of schedule, promised content (ha!), media, and the link. And Sarah, I don't know if you read this, but I really will put up that video of you and the dolphins on youtube. Hopefully tomorrow, but soon. It's in writing.

apparently, it was destiny

So the other day was my friend Joe's birthday. He's interested in astrology, numerology, Daoism, etc, and so I thought it would be a nice thing to go to a fortune teller to celebrate. We went to literally the tiniest office I've ever seen (room for him, a desk, and two chairs for us only), in Mong Kok, on the sixteenth floor of what looked like an old apartment building, with sketchy little elevators that served only either the even or the odd levels. He was recommended by a couple of Canadian student-teachers, whose situation is a little like ours, only they arrived a year prior to us.

Basically, I went into the session, a palm and face reading, with no small amount of skepticism, but I came away impressed. His readings of our personalities, based on our palms, were quite accurate, and he definitely had different things to say to each of us. Apparently, my palm includes the information that I will be married three times. He also had some very good things to say about our relationships with friends and family, and how we responded (and should respond) to situations that may arise in the future.

For the face reading, he pointed to different facial features and described them as representing different periods in our lives. The forehead represents childhood, the chin old age, etc. I was told that my weak cheeks signified that the years when I will be 46 and 47 will be difficult, and that the moles on my forehead were reminders of bad things, while the one lower on my face was good. The scar on my forehead from that skiing accident was a caution against some kind of personal betrayal.

Most interestingly, though, he said that my young adulthood would be very good, based on my "strong, full" eyebrows. He then reiterated: "You have very powerful eyebrows, good shape." I thought at this point about telling him that, yes, thank you, they were shaped by a Vietnamese woman at Star Nails in Denver. I decided against it, figuring that if a scar, a cosmetic change that occurred sometime earlier in life, had meaning for my fortune, so must the shape and condition of my eyebrows. The lesson: waxing and tweezing can indeed improve one's future.

quick follow-up

Since I'd almost forgotten: the scooter plan is pretty much out. Not for road-handedness reasons (though I'm sure it would make things more difficult), but rather because of the remoteness of our campus. I could get to the Tai Po town center from here no problem, but basically everything else requires highway driving. Oh, and for LA people, whose understanding of "highway" may be influenced by ten-lane monsters with flyover interchanges, every highway here is like the 110 coming down from Pasadena (though some are newer-looking), so highway driving is extra-exciting.

Scooters, although probably not subject to Hong Kong's onerous vehicle taxes, are probably illegal for highway use (and if they aren't illegal, they should be). So I'm going to just suck it up and use the bus-suburban rail-metro triathlon to get into town.

Who knew that after four years at Pomona, I'd end up working in basically the Claremont of Hong Kong? It takes over an hour to get into Kowloon from here, and that's if you catch the bus as it's leaving.