Starting this global trek in China serves well as our starting point on the opposite side of Western civilization, one of the world’s oldest cultures providing us with fresh context. When Captain Cook landed on the Australian continent, China had already existed for thirty-seven hundred years. When Gustave Eiffel erected his giant Tinkertoy in central Paris, the Chinese had already given to the rest of the world paper,1 umbrellas,2 earthquake detectors,3 and rockets.4
As in China, famous landmarks in other parts of the world will become the bookmarks in our travel log, the check-marked paragraphs between pages and pages of walks down nameless neighborhood streets and jet-lagged descriptions of cheap local noodles for dinner, where the bulk of our days are lived. All cultures teem with creativity, on display both via inconceivable monuments and in the flawless blend of two spices. I want to see the birthplace of all of it, the homes of humble geniuses who make our lives better, more interesting. I am grateful for our time in this country and its people who have stretched me emotionally, mentally, physically.
The best souvenir China bestows on me is on our last day in the country, in the late evening in the Yangshuo inn’s backyard. I am floating in the pool with six-year-old Reed during a starlit swim. Timid in the water for years and reticent to swim without a life jacket, he quietly, uneventfully lets go of the edge and swims out to the pool’s center, stars shimmering and karst hills shadowing in the rippled water. This is my child, who is labeled by many as developmentally different. He is fraught with sensory issues, and a frequent question mark hovers over him as we navigate parenting waters. He has already tried mango ice cream in Beijing, and now, he is swimming.
“Hey, buddy—do you realize what you’re doing?”
“Yeah,” he says between exerted breaths. “Yes. I guess I can swim now.” And so he can.
3
HONG KONG
As a Westerner, I tend to lump Asian ethnicities together as one mass of people. Of course, they are vastly dissimilar from one another, like peoples in all pockets of the world, and this is the great downfall of the human race: we tend to homogenize those who differ from us (I hear many Easterners think all Americans look the same). Asia is a behemoth continent, and an hour-long puddle jump of a flight within its geographic boundaries whisks us to wildly different social mores. For the first time since departing the United States, there are seat belts in the Londonesque taxi that takes us to our home for the weekend. We are on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise, and still more architecture towers above us. Welcome to Hong Kong, the most vertical city in the world.
We are graced with a light show from our living room windows, incandescent squares blinking and neon stripes dancing, a wall of man-made structure. There is no room for sky and stars.
I tuck the children into their new beds and Kyle ducks out into the rain and into a supermarket; he returns with jars of peanut butter and jam, a loaf of bread, some apples, a bag of oatmeal, and a small packet of brown sugar. We will only be here a few days and don’t want to overload on groceries, but Hong Kong is expensive, and we cannot afford to eat out every meal. The imports in the plastic bag look foreign and global. Western.
We wake to the sound of city, of industry. Despite its proximity, our transition from Chinese village to Hong Kong—the financial leader of Asia—is jolting. Asian script on storefront signs outside looks similar, but it clashes with the praxis of buying and selling inside. I have walked on Communist sidewalks for only a month, but my capitalist tendencies are sore from lack of use. The commercialism of Hong Kong is a workout. It is a mash-up of old-world British Empire and modern Asian sensibility, and it is one more city to add to the list of cities where I am three years behind sartorially.
We stroll through Admiralty and SoHo and Mong Kok districts, and I am consistently seconds late with my camera as I am witness to a coruscating kaleidoscope of color and fabric combinations. I momentarily abandon my family to chase after an Adonis of a man; I want to document his royal blue Italian suit. Like many cosmopolitan men, he is most likely popping by the bank before his dentist appointment and simply tossed something on before leaving his flat this morning. He sports an oxford shirt and tie, pants cut three inches from the top of his ankles, and leather shoes without socks. In the American suburbs he would look entirely out of place. Here, on the cobbled streets of Hong Kong, he looks just right, quintessentially debonair. From these mean Hong Kong streets I also learn that a man can pull off a button-down gingham shirt, salmon-colored bow tie, mid-thigh-cut khaki shorts, and flip-flops.
Hong Kong is completely cool, straddling the Western world and its preeminence as the wealthiest spot in Asia. She fully embraces who she is. She is the older cousin in town for holidays, whom you awkwardly admire from across the family table. She is quirky; she is fun; she is serious; she is not to be taken lightly. She is into art.
We are here during a large-scale protest against its Chinese-run government, and this makes international news; but the mobs are calm and confident. We walk through protesting crowds, and locals smile, play cards on the curbside, chat in assorted languages with beer and coffee in hand. Several young people knit. It is the hippest protest I’ve witnessed. Tate asks me if people are waiting for a parade to start. The protests give me brief maternal pause, but the friendly nature of the situation soon evaporates any concern. Our kids barely notice the crowds with a political bone to pick after a month in congested China.
The biggest mistake we make in Hong Kong is not staying long enough, but this is the consequence of planning our trip’s first leg in advance, before leaving home. Some travel decisions must be made in faith with the hope that wisdom we collect in Asian street markets will help us make right our early wrongs. This is mishap number one. If in doubt, always spend more time in Hong Kong.
We eat peanut butter sandwiches and cheap noodles for lunch, oatmeal for breakfast, and apples from our packs when we are peckish. We ride a roller coaster on the edge of a cliff that graces us with a two-second view of the ocean, and we watch a panda named Ying Ying munch on bamboo and scratch her back on a tree. We window-shop; we replace the reeking watch Tate vomited on in Beijing. I stop trying to take photos of the fashion-forward scenery and instead I simply enjoy the view: cotton-candy hair, iridescent pants, men in granny sweaters, power suits with short-shorts. We are overwhelmed at all we do not see, cannot do. Then we return to the airport and board another two-hour flight. Onward to Southeast Asia.
4
THAILAND