I turned 30 in Hong Kong, during my first visit. On my birthday, I submitted the first chapter of my first book to my publishers in California, and that evening went to the theater to give a performance with the Wooster Group, a theater company I was in the process of resigning from. I was also trying to get over a woman I had loved very dearly, and whom I had left a couple of months earlier when it became apparent that she did not love me as I loved her. All of this was contained in my first visit there, and I think the place has for me now an aura of collage, of wrestling with the problems that one has in the middle of one's life - some things beginning and others ending, and the pain that that overlap can cause.
I find that I am expert at dealing with chaos but far less so at dealing with complexity. Hong Kong, at least when one does not actually live there, presents little of the latter and a great deal of the former.
A friend of a friend, an architect who lives in Hong Kong, invites me to Thanksgiving dinner with a group of American ex-patriates. The apartment is lovely, owned by a trader working for a Very Large Financial Establishment, it's Goldman Stanley or Bear Smith or something. Since almost everyone at the party works at a V.L.F.E, the names become hopelessly jumbled in my mind.
What surprises me, what continuously surprises me about Hong Kong is the normalcy of expat life, a kind of Western normalcy which is consciously imported in the same way that our Thanksgiving turkey has been imported. I learn over dinner that last year not enough frozen turkeys were shipped in, and some Americans actually had to do without, an event which was regarded at the time as something of a scandal.
China, awash in opium use, declares a war on drugs. Britain, growing rich opium profits, declares a war on China. The resulting "Opium War" secures, among other things, the island of Hong Kong and the Kowloon peninsula as a British colony.
I selected a club whose name I cannot now remember, walked in and sat down at the bar, and before I could even order a beer, three women came over to me, one sitting on each side of me, one sort of hovering from behind, and I began talking with one of them, a beautuful Thai woman. When it became clear that I had chosen, the other two disappeared, and the apple of my eye suggested that I buy her a drink too, priced rather more expensively than mine, and that we retire to the back, to a kind of semi-private banquet.
As soon as we sat down, she began to undress me, I began to caress her, she was writhing and moaning with pleasure and very obviously enjoying my touch. It was a performance which was at once utterly convincing and totally synthetic.
A lifetime in the theater has given me a rock solid conviction that appearance and reality are not divisible, that to act out something, to represent it, is to embrace it somehow. I realized that though her performance was illusory, it would kill something in me if I were to go any further, that even once being with someone for whom I was merely a client while making all the noises of my being a cherished lover would change me, and not in ways I wanted to be changed.
Simultaneously addled with lust and fearful for my soul, I abruptly stood up, paid her a sum of money for her two minutes of attention (which constituted something like two days of my per diem), and burning with shame, left as quickly as I could. I think I have never been so glad to be gone from a place as from that place.
For some time I felt badly, as if I had insulted her. It is only as I am writing this that I realize what male vanity this was. From her point of view, my sudden departure must have been the best possible outcome.
The neon is not the same as neon in the States, and for a time I can't figure out why. The colors are the same, and though the signs are written in Cantonese, it is the quality of the light that is different, not just the signs themselves. I decide that it must be the sheer amount of light, when I suddenly notice none of the signs are blinking, every inch of neon is burning without interruption.
The next day, pursuing this, I learn that as the airport is in the middle of Kowloon, electrical signs are not permitted to blink or flash, so as not to distract the pilots during the notoriously difficult landing.
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