Sham Shui Po and Spoon's birthday

I've gotten into the habit of having two dinners. Some days this is because I don't wake up until noon and this throws off my my entire schedule, but some days it's because there's just so much to do and I don't want to miss anything. Yesterday evening's dinner #1 was at Christian Lo's grandmother's flat, a homey affair with the whole extended family and Rachel and I there as guests. After class we trekked over to Sham Shui Po with Christian to meet his father and uncle in the train station, then walked around the neighborhood's crammed and crazy marketplaces where everything from pirated software to live toads is for sale, cheap. I had barely paused at a traditional medicine shop to puzzle at the shriveled brown root-looking things in the window when Christian's uncle Bill popped up beside me. "Do you know what that is?" he asked, and then took a moment to confer with Christian's Dad about the English word-- "They have them at Ocean Park? They do tricks?" I took a guess, remembering the smiling cartoon animal on the Ocean Park logo. "A seal?" "Yes, those are seal penises."

Christian bought some nunchaku in an old man's kung fu supply store, and we browsed the Hello Kitty wholesaler, a tombstone carver's workshop, and the stalls of the live animal and produce market. While Rachel and I were pondering the purchase of a durian fruit, a wizened seventy-something man passed by and deliberately poked my butt with his folded up newspaper (it also happened a few moments later a few yards up, same guy and same paper, so it was no accident). It was odd because it was the closest thing to sexual harrassment I've had since I've been here, and it was quite mild compared to the lewd pinchers of the Tokyo subway and the incessant catcalls of the Parisian streets. In general I feel quite safe here, but feeling too safe can be a dangerous thing. Anyhow, we didn't buy the durian-- not because of the lech but because we didn't want to stink up Mrs. Lo's apartment, where we were headed next.

As she greeted us at her metal security gate (standard on every flat's front door in Hong Kong), I saw what Christian meant when he said "my grandmother talks with her whole body." She welcomed us in with hugs and a kiss on the cheek and her few words of English. The grandfather was posted in a black easy-chair towards the back of the living room (with the best view of the prominent television), children's toys were scattered all around as the grandchildren Yan-Yan and Christy played on the floor (and eyed us shyly). We drank Coke Light and talked with Christian's family (mainly in English, though everyone graciously pretended to understand our Cantonese) until dinner was served-- three kinds of pork, chicken with black bean sauce and the most unbelievable mushrooms, rice, soup... I had planned to eat only a little and save room for dinner #2, but I ended up gorging despite myself. It's lucky I had to leave before dessert was served; still I felt like the worst guest jumping up to leave right after eating my fill.

Next stop: TST. I made record time to meet Lenny and more of his friends for Spoon's birthday party. (The names are getting slightly easier by the way, or maybe I'm getting more adjusted. This time was the highly-feasible roll call of Barry, Gary, Dicky, and Damon). Dinner #2 was at Indonesian Restaurant 1968, apparently one of Hong Kong's first and best Indonesian restaurants. It is now run by Hudson, the son of the founders and a friend of Lenny's (like everyone else in HK). He dashes around the restaurant in a black jacket and slightly unbuttoned white shirt, looking every bit like the movie version of a glamorous restauranteur (that's him in the collage above with his hands on the bamboo poles). The cinematic aspect of the evening became complete when he came by the table about an hour into dinner and said something in low and confidential Cantonese to our group. Immediately excitement spread across the steaming plates of spicy chicken-- everyone was laughing and chattering away and looking over their shoulders. Except for me, of course, since I had no idea what was going on. "Neihdeih gong matyeh a?" ("What are you talking about") I asked Barry. "Oh, he just told us that there are a bunch of Triads sitting at a table around the corner."

Dinner stretched on past the restaurant's closing time, and I half expected that the plan for karaoke would be scrapped. But no. Come 12:30am, down in the hot street with some friends zooming off on their scooters and others complaining about early work the next morning, Lenny leads the way to Red Box for us die-hards: Spoon, his girlfriend Winnie, Siu Pak, Kitty, et moi. Reinforcements await us there, including Joanne and Lung Jai (whom I had also met at the GDC party last week). The Cantopop starts blaring, the drinks start flowing, and I am just trying to find English songs on the system that I know and like before they hand me the microphone to ones I don't (know or like). "Here, you sing this one, you know Take That 'I Want You Back'? Do you know Dido 'Thank You'?" The selection of English-language songs was not great, so I couldn't do my show-stopping rendition of the Rolling Stones' "Angie" (which has always been my fallback in karaoke places from Sendai, Japan to Koreatown, California). But at least I got to rock "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Hotel California". The rest of the time I mainly listened to the pitch-perfect Faye Wong lip-syncing and Nicholas Tse posing, and Spoon's excellent improvement on a Coldplay song. Almost as good as the songs were the nuggets of local pop gossip-- Faye Wong is a bitch (Lung Jai, who's sound engineered some of her concerts, actually said "difficult", but when I suggested the word "diva" or "bitch" he just looked at me and laughed like, "you don't know the half of it"); Guns'n'Roses demand raspberry gum and bananas in their dressing room (according to Siu Pak who worked on their HK concert); and some unnamed Australian band is so racist that they requires all Asians working on their concert to "hide" in their presence. In the meantime, Joanne, Winnie and Lung Jai tried to teach me this dice-shaking drinking game that I kept thinking I understood and then losing pitifully again. There's another one that looks like a more complicated version of rock-paper-scissors that I wasn't even going to try.

Suddenly it was 3:30am, and the manager was bursting into our parlor to kick us out (but not before he courteously took digital pictures of us with everyone's camera). We cabbed to Mongkok and split into our separate siu ba (night buses), and I glowed with the tired excitement that I might actually be making friends here.