Definitive Post, Conclusion

If you were like the many who thought that I was done, you’re wrong. I need to conclude the gargantuan endeavor that is this blog with one final post. I’ve been back in the United States for about a week and a half now, and I’ve begun packing and preparing for my return to the University of California, San Diego. Workload permitting, I’ll edit over this whole blog so it flows like a novel, consolidating posts where necessary and refitting everything so it works, more than partially so that I can relive the experience that I am so missing, and know that I will continue to be nostalgic of for the foreseeable future.

And if because of the reverse-chronological format of blogs you arrive at this post first, I encourage you to start at the beginning four months back. Though I’m biased, I think it’s worth it.


Des Amis, Des Ennemis

I have this nasty habit of getting sick in some way or another before entering a new environment. So before heading off to Hong Kong, I happened to be going through the usual. It kept me going to the bathroom in short and my head was persistently and consistently hot. Thinking there was the possibility of getting quarantined, I can’t say I filled out the health declaration form truthfully, and I self-medicated to get me through the lines should they take my temperature.

Showing how much I knew, since Hong Kong just gave sick people respiratory masks and advisory literature but nothing more, I entered the cab on the way over marveling at the sheer number of bridges on surface roads that there were and the lights of Central, only to be nearly shocked at the superficial condition of buildings outside of the tourist drag.

I was sick and I get sick in such situations because of my nervousness and I know it. I didn’t know who my roommate would be, how cliquish the locals would be, how accepting my fellow exchange students would be of the contrast between my national origins and my ethnic roots. All I could tell myself was that it would all work out and that whatever happens happens.

And as I’m blessed time and time again, through privilege and circumstance, everything worked out better than I could have ever assumed. Out of my perceived adversity, though profoundly false, I guess I could say that I became a stronger person in my first learning experience of my four-month exploration.

I guess I’m a naturally shy and soft-spoken individual. Though I do enjoy the company of others on a regular basis, I also enjoy my own company alone, reading a book, writing (this blog), and much less often watching television.  For some reason I had a hunch that I would be the second case more often than not. That’s not to say that I can’t have fun, because in new situations I turn up social butterfly mode and go with it until I have at least a few good friends.

And more than a few good friends I got. They weren’t exactly the friends I was hoping for, being that I wanted to immerse myself in Hong Kong and its locals, but in some ways making friends with other international students gave me a better world view, especially an Anglophone world view, rather than just a Hong Kong- or Chinese-centered one.

Of my friends, of course some were better than others; for a few we parted ways over personality, never ideology. So I guess I’ll go bad news first.

My luck with roommates varies a lot over time. I know he doesn’t read this blog, so in this conclusion, I have few qualms about describing our dealings, especially keeping him in anonymity (at least from those who don’t know him).

He happened to have come from Illinois, the same state where I can say my parents are from (having been educated there, met there, married there, and lived there for a long time). That’s not to say that he’s like my parents though, because he turned out not to be in so many ways.

In being cordial we were good friends for the first month and a half. Though it sounds corny, this was what I like to call the honeymoon period—that being before people fully get to know each other and personalities fully materialize. Things that were so minor to me during the honeymoon period, such as his perceived need to get a girlfriend right then and there in the first two weeks, and his staying up way late to play video games only to complain of exhaustion and boredom during the day began to really annoy me.

In addition, his preconceptions of me came out one by one, one by one revealing themselves to be more specifically misconceptions. For one, he kept insisting that both my parents are from China, to which I had to remind him that my father’s from Detroit and my mother is originally from Hong Kong and immigrated mid-childhood. It followed that during a discussion about learning languages he believed that I speak Mandarin natively, as taught to me by my parents. I had to remind him that my father is a natural-born American and that my mother is from Hong Kong (where they overwhelmingly speak Cantonese over both Mandarin and English), to which I told him he should be able to speak standard German, since he claimed Austrian roots.

And I’m no saint, but on the other hand many of my hunches about him turned out to be true. For one, he whined a lot about not having enough money, though he blew it like no other, spending plenty on drinking and partying. And when he found out that I don’t get financial aid from the government, he assumed that I’m from a rich family, thereafter pointing to expensive sportscars and telling me to buy them for him. The cherry on top was the rigid attitude that he had to all things world. He described his disdain for Islam Week at HKU and described the locals in terms he should have thought twice about before saying to me and my Asian self. In his intelligence, he managed to tell his mom about me in not-so-excellent terms with me in the room. He assumed since I had my earphones in that I wasn’t listening when in reality he should have saved it for later, when I wasn’t present.

It all culminated towards the end of reading week, when after landing at the airport from our group trip to Beijing, he said that had to get off the plane to go meet his friends, with the implication that we were not his friends as denoted by his overly forward tone.

That friend turned out to be a “girlfriend” located an hour’s ferry away in Macau who he probably met on the Internet. In earlier weeks, he would browse the personals section of Craigslist in his boredom, telling me about them while I was trying to study. I ended up disappearing to the library more often than not to study or at least get away from him and he ended up disconnecting from the group and disappearing to Macau nearly every weekend to go see her. That’s not to say I assumed their relationship was one of convenience, because I know how he described her to some of my other friends.

And on the upswing, throughout the whole semester, his opposition to picking up a few words of Cantonese became quite irksome. Yeah, others were like that too, since it’s plenty evident that it’s not hard to get by in Hong Kong on English alone, but with him, it fit his personality in such a way that could only be described in American English-only campaigns by many of the uneducated too lazy to press number “1” or “2” on their phones when prompted.

This isn’t to say that we weren’t friendly though, being that we had to be as we were roommates and all. We parted ways on the appropriate note. He packed away all the People’s Liberation Army “Commie” hats at Mao Zedong quote books for his friends and had be chuckle at the appropriate time. I told him he gets cheap thrills from that stuff. He said it was for his friends. I modified my statement to say that he and his friends get cheap thrills from that stuff. He also was trying to figure out how to pack away a rolled poster for his right-wing father that featured Obama morphed into Mao. He thought I was laughing with him at the witty piece of art. I was laughing at him since he couldn’t get it into his backs without crushing it, putting about thirty folds in it. And as much as I can disagree or even hate someone, defiling someone’s image simply isn’t constructive and if you have to lead with your emotions than you aren’t going to get anywhere (or haven’t gotten anywhere).

And in another falling out, this friend happens to read my blog instead of updating his own (October, November, and December all went down without a single word). This is the friend who I described as not understanding face (in the universal sense) and social relationships that I used as an example in my Traditional Chinese society class.

All of a few hours after my post went on screen he called me during class. I hung up on him since I was in class, so he texted me describing how sorry he was and how he wanted to start anew. I forgot about it by the end of the day, so he ended up sending me a message on Facebook telling me that I defamed him to the point where I should remove and retract my statements. I told him that he was in the wrong, and since it would be sufficiently difficult to figure out that it was him (though the lack of a name and a face), and because I presented my writing as my opinion and not as undisputable fact that in no way could my statements be construed as libel (which he incorrectly termed slander). In addition, he had no career of which to speak to ruin, no would anyone care about what I say about him. I told him that those people who figure out that I was talking about him already have opinions formed of him, and that my little post wouldn’t shift things one way or the other.

With nothing good to say to him and knowing that he had nothing good to say to me, we avoided each other until the last few days. We were cordial and did not mention the disagreement we had.

Later, I was told that he doesn’t like me. I replied to her that I don’t really care. What happened happened and it had gotten to the point where I practically brushed it off my shoulder.

And for the good news, most of the people that I met were genuine and open-minded. I found myself discussing contemporary issues with them and debating the past (often over coffee). I found good travel buddies after thinking for the first few weeks that I should probably find some tours to take me travelling.

Though it seems that I sold them short in this conclusion, I described much of what we all went through in nearly all of my previous posts, from travels to classes and simple cultural differences.

Seeing all of them go was in itself the end of this Study Abroad chapter in my life, since they were more than there for all of it—they were an integral part of it. I plan to stay in contact of course, and who knows?—maybe we’ll have a Hong Kong reunion in a decade’s time.


Lectures and Tutorials

It may just be because I belong to this system, but I can’t describe fully how much I appreciate the liberal arts education. Something also must be said about learning in the common language rather than the elite language.

But first things first: liberal arts as a type and theory in methods of education has a different meaning to the general public and American university students than in the international higher education community, especially along the Anglophone front. Here, we like to think as liberal arts as primarily and often exclusively referring to those institutions of higher learning termed liberal arts colleges. Names aside, this distinction is made primarily to distinguish them from research universities—the difference having less to do with what is liberal arts and more with how big the student population is, how many students there are per class, and what the professors do during their free time.

Liberal arts colleges aim to boast more intimate student experiences, with students being able to learn better through a more Socratic classroom environment with the format more along the lines of a pseudo-discussion rather than a rote lecture in which only the (doctored) professor talks.

On the other hand there are the research universities, where professors teach large lectures with much of the grading being left to teaching assistants, often graduate students, allowing them to research with the time leftover (though often research comes before teaching). In this sense, students have to work at getting to know their professors, most notably by taking advantage of office hours. Misconceptions about research universities stem from that basis—that because lecture halls regularly encompass three hundred students, they cannot be nearly as effective as liberal arts colleges.

In my opinion, people should choose what works better for them rather than just thinking that liberal arts colleges are just better or worse. I know two things: that both formats work well for me, with me myself preferring the anonymity that a large lecture hall can afford me, and also that out of the fourteen or so classes that I have taken thus far at UCSD, most have had less than seventy students, with my smallest class having around ten. I believe that the value of what you get out of anything is what you put in, meaning that it’s irrelevant which format, whether it be large lectures or small discussions, you choose, insofar as you take full advantage of the resources at hand.

But American public definitions aside, what is really meant by attaining a liberal arts education is not the methods in which you met you ends, but rather what you get out of it. As I understand it, without consulting any literature on the matter, the liberal arts education is one of breadth, notwithstanding continuing depth, meaning that you should come out of college understanding not only your subject, but also other subjects—not necessarily all of them, but of those that you do, at least their basis or even some finer points, or in other words, well-roundedness. The theory behind this is that by getting a good depth of feel for more of what our universe of knowledge is about, you can produce more profound critical thought on your own discipline, seeing material in a more comprehensive manner if you will.

In this sense, American universities and colleges are all based in liberal arts, since all have general education requirements of sorts to gain breadth {as well as to keep accreditation). You can contrast this with vocational schools, which, being more skill-based, teach you what you need to know for your future job with much less emphasis on critical thought.

In other countries, higher education is often somewhere in between liberal arts institutions and vocational schools. In Hong Kong for example, general education is advertised by the university as something for personal enjoyment rather than as a requirement. So in this sense, breadth is more an optional asset rather than a requirement for graduation.

Of course, there are pros and cons. Using the simple comparison between the American education system and that of Hong Kong, graduates from American universities and colleges come out as highly skilled in terms of critical thought, or more pragmatically put—problem solving. Graduates from Hong Kong universities will come out with more specific knowledge on the specific fields that they’ve trained for.

So automatically, one would compare the two and ask which one is better. On top of the fact that I just got back from Hong Kong, I compare the two because of their similar economies. Hong Kong’s is based on the service sector, largely in finance, with much industrial manufacturing having gone to nearby Guangdong Province in Mainland China. That of the United States is going in that direction, with (industrial) jobs going overseas because of cheaper labor in places like China. As such, Americans are finding it more and more necessary to upgrade their educations with children now being expected to go to college or likely end up in a dead-end job.

So which system of higher education is better? Though I’ve tried to fully express my viewpoint in earlier posts and very simply stated my ardent appreciation of the system I happen to be in, I’m not going to delve into that again here, because then I’ll end up going into dollars and cents, and past subsistence (including security), I’ve never felt like happiness or the meaning of life were embedded in numbers of any sort.

The second point of contention that I intend to mention is the language of instruction. Hong Kong, having been a British Crown Colony for the vast majority of its successful history, tends to over-idealize and overestimate its colonial heritage. As such, much emphasis is placed on English-language education, with the appropriate policies being in place and in action in the territory’s major universities, of course including the one that I attended on exchange.

Before coming to Hong Kong, I read in the pamphlet that the school sent me to help me find my way upon arrival that though classes are all in English, the local students speak to each other in Cantonese. I took a double take at the sentence, knowing that there is generally the tendency to prefer speaking in the language with which one is most comfortable in. It was in a sense of what was to come, because the pamphlet was correct as expected.

While I fully believe in language rights, certain things about Hong Kong local students weren’t quite clicking as I was hoping. The pamphlet itself used funny English. It had funny constructions, odd prepositions, and “the” before nearly every noun, whether it needed it or not. I assumed that the way the pamphlet was written simply reflected the variety of English used in Hong Kong. I don’t think this was an unreasonable assumption at all. It is well known that especially since English has such large geographic spread, there are bound to be vast differences in various technical usages of certain words and even different grammatical features. For example, a British English speaker would say, “at weekends,” whereas an American English speaker would say, “on weekends.”

As I would find out, it’s hard to classify Hong Kong English as a true variety of English. This is because the differences in word usage between Hong Kong English and American English were anything but consistent (and hence not predictable and not easy to internalize). When Hong Kong English speakers would say something, it seemed often that any preposition could go in conjunction with any verb, and because of that, it took a great deal of effort during my entire stay there (meaning it didn’t get any easier) to understand what people were saying.

Their lack of English skills was in large created by the fact that they don't speak English with each other, and based on what I have heard and witnessed, that they seem to subconsciously view English as a hindrance to their educations despite its advantage in their futures. The reason I say that is because during a floor meeting at Lee Hysan Hall, the students conducted all their business in Cantonese despite the presence of non-Cantonese speakers. This meant that instead of everyone switching to English (which they are all expected to be able to speak), they had one member translate for those who could not understand. It seems as though if they had more practice, they would either get their prepositions correct or at least consistent.

I say this to mean that everyone should speak English properly, like many Americans would have it be, just that in a school that boasts English as its language of instruction, it might be good as a student to get to speaking well a consistent variety of the language if not an already existing standard.

This isn’t to say that everyone was a bad English speaker, for I’m sure there are. What I mean is that overall, the local student population needed dearly to refine their English-language abilities.

What this meant for my classes was that in my opinion they were largely diluted. Ask me what I learned in class and I’ll tell you I’d rather talk about my travels. Professors had to speak slowly so that students understand. This meant that in the fourteen-week semester (my quarters at UCSD are ten weeks), I feel I learned less than back in California during a significantly shorter term.


La Gran Obra de Arte

I know I’m not the first in using my passport as a something of a symbol of my travels, but I’m going to do it anyways. Doing so is popular because such a representation is apt. After all, that little booklet accompanied me all along the way.

The original sections of that little booklet were completely full by the end. If you recall, by mid-November, it readily became clear that my passport book was filling up with stamps. Since Hong Kong and Mainland China have separate immigration schemes, the fact that I did a lot of frequent traveling to the mainland meant that most of those stamps were red rectangles and ovals. Under advice online from the Department of State, I ventured over to the consulate-general to have more pages added to lessen the likelihood of being turned away when going through immigration. Unfortunately, none of those pages were actually used since no one wanted to be the first to stamp on those pages, being that they are a different color from the rest of the booklet. Instead, they took the liberty of being economical and went backwards the booklet, stamping wherever they could find a corner here and there.

Most know of the pride I take in my passport, and the fact that I will have to get a new one soon means that this one, once invalidated, will likely find its way into a bank vault somewhere (though probably not). I may be one of the few who do this, but I like to exhibit my passport when people ask about my travels. The fact of the matter is half of them are asking to be polite more than out of interest, so handing over my passport to them for the first time gives them something physical to match with the various stories wandering around my brain. I know that I’m not the best storyteller in speech, and I don’t deny that there is always room for improvement in my writing.

Before going to Hong Kong, I had been to China for the first time in my life on a two-week tour of some of the major sights. Prior to that trip, my international travels consisted of one road trip to Canada from Ohio with my aunt and uncle in Dayton. Back then you didn’t need passports to re-enter the United States through that border—just American birth certificates or American naturalization certificates plus identification. Even now with passport control, the United States doesn’t stamp Canadians (I’m pretty sure) and Canada doesn’t stamp Americans (I’m certain).

I went through Canada again at the end of an Alaskan cruise, having been routed through Vancouver. But the bottom line is that I got my passport first for my trip to China. I used it again for going to the Schengen Area when my family and I toured Paris and much of Italy. This means that in the first three years of having my passport, the first two pages were used: one with my Chinese visa and one with immigration stamps.

Applying for my Hong Kong student visa through the university and receiving my new full-page sticker made me pretty happy despite the fact that it was one of the ugliest pieces of paper ever designed. It made me realize both the definite fact that I was going to be going on a long trip and that that trip was happening soon.

And as visas go, I had to get one more to enter Mainland China, for which I applied and received in Hong Kong. The process reaffirmed my nationality in the fact that my visa cost over $1000 HKD when most other people in line paid less than $300 for exactly the same piece of paper.

And on my multiple-entry visa, I got most of my passport stamps. On exchange, I went to Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Guilin, crossing the border between Hong Kong and Mainland China twelve more times. Other trips that I made were to Macau and Taipei. Outside of Greater China though, I only made one trip—to Phuket, Thailand. I genuinely intended to get to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, and Tokyo, had it not been for the increased costs in traveling alone, and I’m confident that had I stayed for the entire year, I would have gone to Vietnam and Cambodia as well.

I guess it’s difficult for me, especially as an American, to say that I'm not well traveled. Because although the farthest trip I made when I was under 10 was from northern Los Angeles to San Diego and my first plane trip happened the summer right before September 11, 2001, it’s hard for me to claim such a statement in the present. The fact of the matter is that not only have I gone to New York state and back through thirty states, but also my passport has become the great work of art that it now is.

With my internalization of the fiction that is nationality, I understand that talking about my passport in such a manner can be construed as a double-edged sword, but because it’s recorded the majority of my travels in such a succinct yet unique way, it serves me more as a momento and a souvenir rather than a document proving my citizenship.


Dollars, Yuan, Baht, and Those Unsung Heroes

In planning this conclusion, I initially intended to list out the costs of my study to Hong Kong. I’ve decided as of now though to stop short of this. I will say that after making my final summations the number is not small, or at least not nearly as small as I would have expected.

I consider my lifestyle comfortable, perhaps upper-middle class, but not lavish or particularly elitist. My travels were much of the expense. Encouraged my mother in words and parental financial assistance, I found myself going somewhere nearly every other weekend. In short, traveling outside of Hong Kong added up to about 40% of my total expenses.

However, my biggest single purchase came in the form of a digital single-lens reflex camera, which, being on sale, I splurged about 9% of my total expenses on. I got a Nikon D90, which sits at the top of the mid-range section, right under professional.

It cost me so much that in a very stable, rational matter I assure you I just about didn’t hand over my debit card to my salesperson. After the fact, I lamented for weeks about how much I paid for it, comparing it to how much money I would have spent on more trips and such, how much it costs to free a modern slave, how many times over I could have paid off my friend’s library late fees.

Since I did study abroad rather than just travel abroad, I should probably mention how much I paid for my education abroad. At just over 30% of my total expenses, tuition was about $4000 USD, paid to the Regents of the University of California. I actually don’t know how much it costs to go to the University of Hong Kong because since the University of California sends as many students to the University of Hong Kong as the University of Hong Kong sends the University of California (under the exchange program), students pay their home institutions. This means that the amount that I paid was about equivalent to how much as semester would have cost at Berkeley or UC Merced.

And herein I start my thanks. At the urging of my father, I applied for a $500 USD-scholarship at UCSD (with multiple recipients). This is one of the very few merit-based scholarships that don’t look at financial need.  I happened to get this scholarship (for whom I have no idea who to thank) and it was automatically transferred to my EAP program in a miracle of the bureaucracy that feeds into UCSD Finance office.

For the longest time I had no clue where the $500 came from in my EAP financial accounting. I assumed it was a glitch in the system. When I had to pay a bill to UCSD though for a Programs Abroad Office administrative fee, I saw the two register lines devoted to this scholarship (receipt and subsequent transfer). So to whatever committee or person thereof that I got this scholarship from I owe my first thanks.

My second thanks goes off to the Programs Abroad Office here at UCSD, the staff of which (save one particular advisor for the Global Seminars Program) were all extremely nice and helpful. They, along with the system-wide Education Abroad Program office helped me and all the exchange students sift through all the paperwork involved. Especially regarding immigration-department paperwork for Hong Kong students, these two offices, along with the Center for Student Development and Resources (CEDAR) pushed all my paperwork through the bureaucracy of Hong Kong immigration.

If memory serves me right, I had to submit about ten forms through the offices. The two big forms were the application to the University of Hong Kong after my acceptance to the program which took me the better part of an hour to fill out in English and my student visa application that in all its thirty pages was divided into parts “A” through “K” with every letter in between.

Of course, my greatest thanks go to the financiers of this expedition and my support crew, both of whom happen to be my family. As cliché as it sounds, my family has always been there for me, if not emotionality at least in person, and without them it is clear that at my age, and especially because of my financial viability, that this trip would not have gone as far as it did. Without their assistance and their blessing, I would not have had the ability to jet around East Asia. I also acknowledge that while my parents pay for much of what I do so that they have a controlling interest in what I do, it is always for my own good if not for the good of the family.

And in this sense of family, there is one thing left of my heritage that I think is not only important but also incredibly moral. I vow never in my life to ever just send them off to a nursing home. The fact of the matter is that while I’m told I was an easy infant to take care of, the amount of good that my brother and I brought to their lives in constituting a family is offset by the negatives, such as opportunity cost in careers lost, significantly long periods of sleep deprivation, and financial well being. At one point in my mid-teens, my parents noticed I was drinking expensive lactose-free milk at such an alarming rate that I equated the situation with water being flushed down a toilet. But ultimately from a moral perspective, it would just be wrong to cast off one’s parents in their time of need.

Honestly though, I can’t say that it’s only because of my heritage that I aim to espouse such a principle in my conscience. My parents have always struck the right balance between being imposing and controlling to the point where I’m led in the right direction and laissez-faire to the point were I could find the right direction by myself. Because of that, not only have I never had an intense period of rebellion, whether it be in middle school, high school, or right after leaving the nest, but also my parents are the two people who I’m most open with, whether or not they would like to believe it.

And though friends don’t usually get mentioned in such a context, I feel I owe thanks to my friends both at UCSD and at HKU who gave me first-hand support. From my friends at UCSD, their interest in the normalized craziness of what I was doing have a certain kind of value to this endeavor that, while kind of superficial, made me enjoy the whole thing that much more. And my friends at HKU, who came to the territory as disoriented as me helped pull me through all the changes set in front of us, though many of us came from different backgrounds, different homes per se. I guess it was through diversity that we aided each other in perceived adversity and because of the lot of them that I went from missing California then to missing Hong Kong now.

If you haven’t slipped into beta mode yet, you probably realize that I gave you enough information to figure out how much I spent in acceptable detail. I just didn’t want to throw numbers around for people to preoccupy themselves with.


In the Quest

This blog itself had an interesting role in my experience abroad. Though I had no intentions of telling anyone about my blog because I wanted to have the freedom of conscience in a sense to write whatever I wanted to write on it, word leaked. I could blame Facebook for not allowing me (at least at the time) to promote my blog to friends back home at the exclusion of new friends in Hong Kong—but that would be somewhat irrelevant.

In this age of social media, I knew what I was getting myself into by starting a blog for the whole thing rather than just writing my thoughts down into a physical journal. And therein lies a paradox in my said motivations in writing a blog rather than a traditional journal.

I have said a few times that in all my writing I write for myself. And it’s true. So the paradox that seems to be lies in the fact that I write for myself yet I publish it on the World Wide Web for the whole world to see. Now I wouldn’t be publishing it online for others to read in my own self-interest.

Actually I would. Let me explain. I write for myself in the sense that most directly I write for my own purposes—say so I may be able to read this when I’m old and crumbling. I also write for myself in the sense that ultimate benefit will come to me. This isn’t to say that you lot who have read my blog won’t get anything out of it—just that by you reading it I get some ultimate benefit, often in addition to yourselves.

This works on two levels. I talked about how on a superficial level seeing that other people take interest in what I’m doing gives me satisfaction in the sense that what I’m doing is worth something rather than in the sense that now I can become popular. On the higher level, me publishing what I have to offer (in a sense) puts something out there for everyone, including people to whom I have no connection, to comment on. This means ultimately that as I get older and mature into a career, I will have mileage posts to speak of about my life. From there not only will I able to reflect upon my past, but also what other people have to say about my past. For all my uncertainty in life, this blog is staying on the Internet.

To me, this means that this blog can prove more interactive and in a sense provide advantages over traditional publishing. Taking a step back, I write papers for class ultimately because I need to get a good grade on it to a good grade point average to go to a good graduate school and establish a solid career in which I will hopefully be able to do meaningful work. These papers are unlike a blog though in that there are only a few people who will ever read them.

Because of my inhibitions about my work, I am and have always been hesitant about putting it out in the open for everyone to view. But because of the fact that blogs and the Internet come off in my subconscious as quite anonymous, I have few qualms about putting nearly everything about my experience out there on the web.

And honestly, it’s nice not having any editors past yourself. I’m ultimately going to have to go over this monstrosity of over well one hundred ten thousand words (a mid-size novel) to make it flow. My photos that I have put in separate posts out of convenience could be integrated into my text, ultimately reducing the number of posts (currently one hundred forty-six), which I’ll make look more like chapters, yet increase the number of words in smoothing everything over.

As for the style of my narration, I wrote everything descriptive in the past because everything of substance happened in the past. In terms of flow, I understand this blog to be more formal-sounding than most. I have also been told that I write like I speak, which meant close to nothing to me since I think the best writing is genuine thought, regardless of research. My conventions I wrote in my native dialect without regard to Standard American English (except in orthography). This means that the overwhelming majority of grammatical mistakes you seem to find are actually perfectly fine in my eyes. If you see few and far between in the way of weird words and odd grammatical constructions, it means that you and I have more in common than you may outwardly imagine. Bottom line is that my balance between sheer informality and stringent formality strikes a tone of authenticity in myself from which you can gauge yourselves.


After the Quest

I go to UCSD, but when I was applying to Harvard I wrote for one of my essays something I entitled “The Last Prologue.” Obviously it either wasn’t enough to get me accepted or it was enough to get me rejected, but either way I mean the title as a way to see how I positioned myself in my surroundings.

You could say that immaturely, I felt like my childhood was kind of a prologue to me real life, which would begin when I became an adult. The first time I doubted this conviction came the day I turned 18 and felt nothing different. In my newfound adulthood I was no different than the day before, and at that moment I thought in a different way how there are so many young people who have wisdom beyond their age and so many old people who lack the years that they possess.

I don’t mean maturity in playful banter. In this regard arrogant people would be classified as immature. Ultimately though, if my childhood of eighteen years was my prequel, then my old age lasting a few decades, say from retirement, would be my afterword, my conclusion, and my epilogue beginning with my death. In my reformed mindset, I feel that since to call old age an afterword would be unfair, to call childhood a prologue would be nonsensical.

I now firmly believe that one’s life is the entirety of one’s life. So though there’s no getting rid of your past, for the rest of your life there is always opportunity for maturity.

In the same regard, I will be graduating college within a year and a half. It could even be as soon as fifteen months, each month of which I am confident will fly by whether I want it to or not. Before studying abroad, I’ve gone through my childhood and the various levels of education in the public school system. I’ve worked in a few very small jobs as a tutor and as a translation assistant and I’ve also sat on a large non-profit’s Board of Directors. After studying abroad, I’ve lived and studied outside the country. I’ve felt lost in translation but not as lost as some people. I’ve discovered that I’m a dual national. Most notably yet most simply though, I’ve advanced one term in my university career and became a more mature, open-minded individual in the process.

People like to say that the journey is the destination in that what you learn is in the journey. I would like to modify this to say that the journey is but after. I have learned so much my studying abroad, but I know that as much as I have learned and will have learned by the time I, say, turn 50, there will always be more to learn. Hence, the journey is after, and in that sense, you’re always in a journey, since the day after tomorrow is but tomorrow come today’s tomorrow.

And so in the title I refrain from calling this the last post, because though this is indeed my last post to this blog, in no way is it my last bit of writing. And though it’s usually uttered in a different context, it’s always the case that when one door closes, another one opens, even if it’s not the one you planned for.

So out of college in less than a year and a half, what’s my next door to open?

After the Quest

Back in the States

So I’ve arrived in the United States. As if there was no turning back earlier, I’m pretty much back now. I forgot that winds work so that it takes much less time to go west to east over the Pacific than the other way around. To get to Hong Kong to San Francisco, it took thirteen-and-a-half hours. Going back, it took just under eleven hours, and here I am now, sitting in the domestic terminal of United Airlines.

It’s currently around 9:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, and I’ve just gone through immigration and customs and went back through security in about an hour and a half, having arrived here just before 8:00 a.m. Though it’s still early in the day, my all-nighter that I pulled yesterday may have just paid off. I’m not tired, though it is around 1:30 a.m. in Hong Kong (at which point I would be snoring).

The flight was on par with other standard long-haul flights. There were two meals serves and a few meals in between. Unlike many other airlines (probably most), United though doesn’t have individual entertainment screens for economy class. It was fine, because I slept about half the flight, and the other half I watched the movie Julie and Julia as well as the beginning of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I had already seen many times previously.

I arrived better than other long flights. With this being my sixth such flight (a number that pales in comparison to some of my friends), I guess practice makes perfect. I went through immigration first, where lines are divided between United States Residents (including non-residents) and Visitors. In line, this one duddy young adult behind me kept asking his father if they should move over to the citizens’ line, which, if he had taken a quick glance, would have realized that he was in it.

I went through without a hitch and asked the officer to stamp my passport. He did, but it was funny how he decided to skip my extra pages added mid-November by the United States Consulate-General in Hong Kong and went straight to the back, to the very last stampable page. He was nice though, so I thanked him.

He asked me if I had anything to declare, so I said that I have to pay customs tax but nothing outright to declare. He asked me what the purpose of my trip was, and I told him study abroad, and then said education, followed by some sightseeing. He’d already marked my Customs and Border Protection Sheet though with a circled numeral one. He waved me on without delay.

What was weird though happened to be what I did. Having gone through tons of Chinese immigration and airport security on this trip (Mainland, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan), I was so used to just blurting out something in Cantonese and or Mandarin, once a disastrous and erroneous combination of both (that led me to say “I want” in Cantonese followed by “computer” in Mandarin to mean that I have a computer). Arriving in San Francisco, I caught my tongue and had to remind myself for a split second to speak English. Feel free to suggest what this means, since in Hong Kong I used English 70% of the time and Cantonese at about 25% of the time, with the other 5% consisting of Mandarin between newly-arrived service workers and French between the off-chance need to communicate something secretive in nature.

After that, I waited for luggage at carousel six along with most of the rest of the 747’s passengers. The bags took forever to come, and as expected I had to wait for them to take through customs then recheck them into the system. Waiting, I saw this unkempt guy in the army-veteran style as opposed to the hippy style who kept whining to anyone who would listen about how slow the bags took to come through. He was particularly poking at the various security checks he was told they send the bags through, which although annoying, also increase national security. This guy seemed to be one to argue in the realist sense for high national security and preemptive attacks upon foreign sovereigns yet he couldn’t see that his waiting was making the country safer in a more micro sense.

I got my bags after waiting for a long time, and remembered just how heavy they were. I was allowed two bags each under fifty pounds or twenty-three kilograms depending on where you checked in. I had my two bags that I managed to fit everything into except my pillow, which I’d have liked to keep, and though I had a hunch that it would go over weight, it was too late to mail stuff back. I resolved to just bring them along and see how things went.

So after calling home, telling them that I was leaving for the airport and that I would see them the next day, I dragged my bags up to the airport bus stop and waited for that bus to come. When it came, I had to toss my bags onto the bus, pay with my Ziploc bag of change pulled (with permission) of my roommate’s desk, and then heave my bags onto the luggage racks. With $48 HKD in the form of mostly ten- and twenty-cent pieces, the driver seemed oddly accepting of my method of payment. To me, that either meant that he didn’t care, didn’t care to show that he cared, or his coin collector had a counting mechanism in it. Whatever the case, I got on the bus and went on my hour-long journey to the airport, during which I accidentally took a nap.

Back to San Francisco, I picked up my bags off the carousel and onto my cart and from there I proceeded onto customs. I wrote down that I bought $1300 USD-worth of merchandise, after the $800 exemption, $500 of which was liable to a 3% tax, or $15 USD. Instead of directing me to some sort of cashier to pay my customs taxes, the woman looking at my ticket said “Thousand Oaks” (reading my United States address), and pointed me past the various luggage inspectors (or luggage unpackers) to find all the Cuban cigars and the like they could find to discard.

I’m glad that I didn’t get unpacked, because my bag was stuffed to the brim. Opening it put you in danger of not being able to close it. I found this out at I dragged my two bulky bags (as well as my carry-on backpack and camera case) to the check-in counter. One weighed seventeen kilograms and the other weighed a whopping forty kilograms (something just under ninety pounds). I was informed that I could pay an extra $150 USD to check in a bag under thirty-two kilograms, and that I couldn’t check in anything heavier (for the carriers’ contracts I suppose).

To that effect, I had to rearrange my two bags to even out the weight. I was directed several meters away to do it, substituting heavy books from the heavier bag with lighter clothes from the lighter bag. For a minute, it looked like I was going to have to abandon my two full-sized umbrellas, but in the end, everything fit back in. The whole thing took around fifteen minutes, the whole time in paranoia that someone was going to take my other bags (each with contents worth a very pretty penny).

Going back up to the check-in counter, I still had a little bit of adjusting to do, but my bags after moving two books into my carry-on luggage came in at about thirty-four kilograms and twenty-four kilograms, which to the checker was over the weight limit but acceptably so (probably as per her guidelines). With those two suckers off my back, I had a lot less to worry about (a main factor in choosing to travel in groups or at least with one other person so as not to leave luggage unattended).

Before packing these bags full though, I removed all the price tags I could find because while I planned to properly declare what I bought, I didn’t want the customs officers to be counting pennies on me.

One of my last friends who hadn’t yet left told me that I shouldn’t declare in excess of what’s tax-exempt, because no one pays customs taxes, implying that I was overly law-abiding and silly in doing so. I told him that it’s not that much, so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t pay it. I had the money to and knew that it would come down to whether or not they believed me when I said that though I’m bringing the box back, I solemnly swear that I bought it in the United States.

I guess when it comes down to it, I follow Socratic philosophy regarding civics. When he was sentenced to death, Crito came to free him, seeing that no one was going to stop him. However, Socrates chose to take his punishment seeing that the society that he lived in decided against him. I suppose I feel that the overwhelming majority of laws are there for a reason, and if not for the sake of the law itself, for something secondary in the least. In my case, paying customs tax (which happens to be much lower than Los Angeles County sales tax) helps my country protect our national security interests.

On the other hand, my roommate, in addition to bring six People’s Liberation Army hats (with a red star square center) and quite a few Quotes of Chairman Mao pocket books for cheap thrills, along with a defiling depiction of President Obama for his right-wing father, bought a small pack of Cuban cigars to bring back. Now if Communist souvenirs provide cheap thrills for Americans, bringing Cuban cigars over to the United States provides just downright ridiculously cheap thrills for Americans.

It’s not like the cigars are particularly good that makes them so fun to bring over, nor is it being bad for your health to smoke the reason why they’re illegal to import. It’s because of our long-running trade embargo upon Cuba set during the Kennedy years that first Cuban cigars are illegal to bring it and second that people like my roommate find it deviantly fun to sneak in. * Snicker, snicker.

Well I’m back in the States now, definitively so, having come in without having been asked to pay customs tax, yet following the law to the T. It just goes to show that people get by perfectly well by doing things the proper ways as well—just saying.

Phuket: Pad Thai and Elephants

As of late, I’ve had to focus my time and effort into my studies, so my blogging has unfortunately not been as frequent as I like. As a result, I’ve begun to fall behind again.

Now two weekends ago, we managed to make our way over to Phuket, Thailand (ภูเก็ต). The name isn’t pronounced as crudely as it looks. As I was enlightened, the “h” in Phuket (as well as in “Thai”) denotes aspiration, think puff of air, rather than an “f” (or “th”) sound in conjunction with the “p” (or “t”). As such the “Ph” at the beginning as “p” like at the beginning of the word “pin.” Glad we got that one straightened out.

Secondly, Phuket is an island, according to my research. Telling my friends though was an uphill battle, as I had to contend with faulty logic in convincing them—example of which include: “I don’t think it’s an island because I don’t think it’s an island;” “But there’s buses going to Phuket”—ever heard of bridges?; and my favorite, “It doesn’t look like it on the flight map”—well I’m sorry, but small islands aren’t worth drawing as separate from the mainland when covered by a dot and lines—does Singapore look like an island on the flight map? As I would later find out, that friend didn’t know Singapore’s land mass consists of one main island and a number of smaller ones. And Australia is smaller than China, but only by about two million square kilometers. Cool.

Well we landed after four hours of flying from Hong Kong (I remember five hours from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.), and went through immigration. Like in Taiwan, the officers stapled our departure cards to our passports, but we went through without a hitch.

On the other side, I pointed out the stand of tourist maps saying “Welcome to Phuket Island” in English and when we went up to the taxi counter to get transportation to our hotel about an hour away at Patong Beach (หาดป่าตอง), there was a map clear as day showing the island formation. Without rubbing it too much into their faces, I gave them haughty looks for fun as they looked away in shame, realizing that their (faulty) logic had been to no avail.

We ended up in a minibus (smaller than Hong Kong minibuses) to Patong Beach and our lodging, the Patong Swiss Hotel. The whole ride was in the dark, but from what I could see (mostly buildings), it became obvious that we weren’t in China anymore. The funny thing was that this was the first time on the whole trip that we (myself included) had been outside Greater China. As I’ve just recently figured out, this was to be my last trip outside Greater China before going back to California.

The thing is, though, that despite the fact that we were in a foreign foreign country, there was more English on signs and in general than Thai (which by the way is quite aesthetically pleasing). Our minibus stopped midway at a storefront to collect our tickets, and after politely refusing their tours and excursions, I got back onto the bus.

Arriving at the Patong Swiss Hotel, I was exhausted. By this time, it was about 1:00 a.m. Hong Kong Time and about midnight local time. Ready to lie down, we checked in to find that they had given us just two beds for our five-person reservation.  One person got sick though before the trip, so we arrived as four. So the first night we ended up sharing beds, though the next morning we were given two bigger rooms (and me my own bed). Like in Guilin, the showers were without curtains, which only meant to me that the cleaners would have more work (though I tried hard not to get water everywhere).

That first night, I studied for my Fine Arts final, which was to take place the day after we got back to Hong Kong. The rest of them went out exploring Patong Beach nightlife.

The first morning, I woke up in a rut. It was quite hot and humid (though admittedly not as bad as my first weeks in Hong Kong), and we had just come from sub-75 degree temperatures back in the SAR.

After getting ready, we went out the front door, and much to my amazement, the beach lay right across the (two-lane) street from the hotel. I hadn’t noticed it at all the night before! I guess I forgot that my friend booked us a beachfront hotel.

We walked a couple blocks along that street. What was expected were the large volumes of shops selling merchandise, particularly knock-off brands. What wasn’t expected was the large number of expats there—and I say expats rather than tourists because most men were hand in hand with Thai women (though I remain open to the interpretation that many of them could just be escort). It was odd to see such a large expat population, but on the other hand it wasn’t unreasonable since they, along with the large numbers of European and Australian tourists present, were the reason for all the English signage.

Walking by, the hawkers try to grab your attention—and they do it much better than in Mainland China and definitely better than in Hong Kong, where they don’t even attempt. There, they understood the value of the relationship in business. Rather than pulling you in by listing off their merchandise, they’d start by “Hello, where are you from?” or “My you’re handsome,” or something to that effect. I personally got a lot of “你好s.” One of my American friends who speaks Cantonese answered back: “I speak Cantonese” in English, to which I laughed.

We got breakfast at one of the many done-up venues. I got some authentic Pad Thai, which was delicious, and some (real?) Thai Tea, which tasted more like cold milk than anything else.

This is the only trip that I took this term that I didn’t really take to get any historical culture out of—no sightseeing, more fun I suppose (though I enjoy sightseeing).

So that day we actually got to ride (Asian) elephants. It cost ฿500 Thai Baht for a half hour (฿33 Baht = $1 USD), so that was like $15 USD. The experience wasn’t really like I’d imagined. I’ve ridden on horseback on multiple occasions (and my fair share of carnival ponies when I was under three feet tall), but never an elephant.

There was a platform to mount them that was a good ten feet in the air. Getting on was intimidating, as you were to step onto the elephant’s back to get into the seat secured on the elephant. The guide sat right behind its head, on its neck with his feet touching the elephant’s ears. To move left, the guide would shake the elephant’s left ear with his left foot, and to move right, the guide would shake the elephant’s right year with his right foot.

The whole thing made us feel oddly sad for the elephants, and remembering back the horses, I remember having similar sentiments, only to cast them off by saying that we aren’t the first to do this.

We were taking all over a muddy trail. The barefooted guide dismounted the elephant halfway and took pictures of us, this led the elephant back to the base with voice commands. At one point, the elephant began to make a wrong turn, and the guide hit its right leg hard with a sickle-looking rod, making a vicious sound and making us wonder what was going on.

I guess we couldn’t help but to feel sorry for the elephants. I guess you could hope that at least they are well taken care of and fed properly. As we dismounted the elephants, one put its trunk up on the platform. My friends petted it, thanking him (or her) for his (or her) service. I guess I was too busy taking photos, because as I reached my hand out after putting my camera away, it retracted its trunk and went on its way.

The rest of the day we went around the shops and played a modified (and more intense) form of Jenga at a bar. At night, we got Mexican food. Right after, I went back to the hotel to keep studying for my Asian Art History class.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

The Prince and the Pauper

I am now convinced that nationality is so fickle and so fake. While I still see merit people identifying themselves with their country, which individuals a country identifies itself with is another story.

In no way would the People’s Republic of China grant me citizenship and or nationality (two distinct concepts in United States law). For one, my parents’ parents were the ones with Chinese nationality and since those born outside China who receive a different nationality upon birth are not entitled to Chinese nationality, there was no way I could become a member of another country—or so I thought.

Dual nationality or citizenship though can be a messy thing if you don’t fully know what you’re doing. Countries like the United States levy taxes on all their citizens regardless of what country the money is earned in. Countries like Singapore have conscripted military service that can more often than not put other citizenships into danger.

If you enter one country on one passport, you may not be afforded another state’s consular services guaranteed by another passport. If you’re from certain countries, you don’t need visas to certain countries. For countries with exit customs, you cannot leave if you never entered. It’s all very artificial.

It’s great for me, though, because as an American I can easily get into most countries and since the United States has relations with most countries, it’s easy to get consular assistance if need be.

I’ve got a friend here who’s originally from China, born in Taishan, Guangdong, to Chinese parents. As such he was afforded Chinese nationality and enjoyed it even after immigrating to the United States. This last year though he decided to become an American citizen, having met all the criteria for a while but finally doing it to make it easier to apply for EAP (the same UC program that’s facilitating my study abroad).

After the tests and oaths, he became a naturalized United States citizen. As part of the oath, one renounces all other allegiances, citizenships, and nationalities prior to becoming American, which in reality is not enforced. As such, the United States, as of late, has recognized dual nationality.

My friend went after that though to the Chinese consulate in San Francisco as he was advised to in order to tell them of his new nationality. There, he was asked to present his Chinese passport. In front of him, the clerk cut off the corner of the identification data page (I’d imagine dramatically). Forwardly, his Chinese passport had just been invalidated. I believe personally that he had then effectively renounced Chinese nationality. I imagine that the clerk had also documented this in some form of a Chinese national database.

I know for Americans, you have to present your old passport when you apply for a renewal. So for though he says it’s really quite easy to get a passport in China, if it’s anything like in the United States, they verify and verify that you are qualified to receive that passport. So if it’s anything like in the United States, he’s not easily getting another Chinese passport.

My friend seemed to me to have fallen to nationality laws. I myself had also fallen to nationality laws, except in my case, they were applied to me in theory before I was even born. There was no way I could become naturalized as a Chinese national without giving up my United States citizenship—or so I thought.

I have no intentions of naturalizing myself as a Chinese national—mainly because, I  found out just a week ago that I’ve been one my whole life and just never knew it. It’s not like this was due to some secret my parents had been keeping from me until I was exactly seven thousand, eighty-five years days after birth.

And this is how it worked.  My mother was born in British Hong Kong to Chinese parents. As such, she had British National Overseas citizenship (that does not transfer to one’s offspring). Upon naturalizing herself as an American citizen well before I was born and as such well before the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong to China, she probably didn’t see any reason to maintain her BNO status.

When Hong Kong became part of China again, all BNOs of Chinese descent became Chinese nationals. Under terms of the one country, two systems framework, Hong Kong was permitted to keep its own immigration controls. As such, rules regarding who has the right to live and work in Hong Kong (right of abode) were established. It fits in with Chinese nationality as such:

The first clause states that all Chinese nationals born in Hong Kong SAR are Hong Kong permanent residents with right of abode. All Chinese nationals living documented in Hong Kong for seven years are eligible for permanent residency and right of abode. Chinese nationals born to either of the above also become Hong Kong permanent residents with the right of abode. I’m going to stop there, but more provisions exist for non-Chinese nationals as well for permanent residency and right of abode as well.

I read these clauses over and over, in addition to the laws regarding what is makes a Chinese national to see if I was eligible. I guess many would ask why I would care to have another nationality. Dual nationality is messy and can create problems when you’re not careful. But then again there are plenty of dual nationals in the world and in the United States, so would it really be so bad to have it?

So since Hong Kong controls its own immigration, many of its people are Chinese nationals. In a misnomer of a term, Hong Kong nationality, Hong Kong controls Hong Kong Chinese nationality separately from Mainland China as well. In Hong Kong, and not in China, there are provisions for Chinese nationals by descent that allow for dual nationality when that Chinese national is given another nationality upon birth. As such, I am eligible for Hong Kong Chinese citizenship. As I also found out Hong Kong and the United States have special provisions allowing dual Hong Kong Chinese-American nationals access U.S. consular services and protection, even when entering as a Hong Kong Chinese national.

I figure that having the protection of two governments can’t be a bad thing, and if say, one country or the other were to implode, without legal issues there would be another place to live. In addition, if I ever want to work in Hong Kong, it would be my right to move here and do so. And if in the farther future I would ever want to move to China to work, it would be a lot easier (as a Hong Kong Chinese national) to do so.

As for conflict between the two nationalities, I would always have to pay taxes to the U.S. government. But as far as I know, Hong Kong does not have similar tax laws. In addition, nationality is one thing that’s easy to renounce. If someone doesn’t want to be part of a country, it would not benefit that country to force that person to stay a part, so if it ever becomes more of a disadvantage than an advantage to be a dual national, it would not be difficult to go into the local Chinese consulate and renounce my nationality.

The process by which I would substantiate my claims of permanent residency with an appropriate Hong Kong Identification Card is a different story, and it’s a convoluted process, something I hope to start in a few years.

What strikes me though is that my being a Chinese national is still so foreign to me. Still, I would call myself an American long before Chinese. Whereas I was born, raised, and educated in California, the first time I stepped foot in China was in 2007, when I was 17 years old.

It’s so fictitious the fact that I’m Chinese in this regard—and it’s all because of luck. If my mother had been born anywhere in China instead of Hong Kong, I would have no chance of being a Chinese national.

On the other hand, my friend who spent the first ten years of his life in China, and is, as such, much more culturally Chinese than me, has less rights than I do. It’s easier to go from Hong Kong or Macau (being the other special administrative region) to Mainland China than the other way around. Whereas I have recently discovered my right to live and work in Hong Kong, though this is the first time I’ve ever been to the south of China, he, despite having grown up partly near here, has no such rights, and would need to live here for seven full years before being given the same permanent residency that I, when the paperwork gets pushed through, have the potential to enjoy. And even if he were to live here for seven years, it would not be as an American, and as such not covered by the second clause of Hong Kong immigration law.

On the macro level, rules are rules, and laws are there for a reason. Hong Kong would be flooded with Mainland Chinese if there were greater freedom of movement in China. This would create plenty of problems, as Hong Kong has very little usable land without additional flattening and reclaiming.

On the micro level, why should I, never having even been outside North America, let alone to China until I was nearly an adult, have the right to live and work in Hong Kong when people who are from China, just over the border, have to make much more effort to get a permit to first go to China, then live there for seven years before being allowed to stay for good.

My friend wants to move to and work in Hong Kong much more than I want to, and he’s have to get a visa to do so.

Is it really fair? I was lucky enough to be born into it. My friend was not.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author. 

The Fame

The last time I traveled to Shenzhen, it was poorly orchestrated and we didn't end up seeing that much. I wanted to go back. So the Monday before last, I hoped on the MTR East Rail Line and did just that. With the tickets costing less than $10 USD each way, I figured it would definitely be worth it to go back and check out the place better since last time we ran out of daylight to fully see the place.

Just as a refresher, Shenzhen is the Special Economic Zone (city) in Mainland China that borders Hong Kong to the north. As I remembered through this trip there, Shenzhen is a very new city, set up to take advantage of Hong Kong's special status. My aunt and uncle recounted to me months ago how it used to be a nice, relatively quiet place until its designation as a SEZ in 1980. At that time the city boomed as the mountains were gutted to reclaim the sea. Today, Shenzhen serves as a reminder to how fast development can occur in China. Though it lacks the same level of recognition of Hong Kong, it has at least one million more residents (officially) than Hong Kong.

Admittedly, this trip to Shenzhen was not entirely about sightseeing. I needed a haircut. My uncle told me that it cost him more to cut his hair at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Clearwater Bay, Kowloon than at the local barber in Fremont, California. From this, and in addition to asking my friends here how much they cut their hair for in Hong Kong, I figured it might be worth it to venture out into Mainland China, hereonout in the post referred to as China.

China is known for being cheaper than Hong Kong, as most people would presume. As I would find out later on, some parts are (way) cheaper than others--but that's for later. Shenzhen is famous for its massages--so I figured why not put the two together and and make an experience out of it. As I would later calculate, the haircut and massage (which were inseparable services) plus the round-trip journey on the MTR cost just a little more than a simple haircut in Hong Kong--so I justified this extra expense (less than $5 USD) in the experience to be beheld, or in my case relaxed. A friend of mine felt the same way, so I didn't go alone.

After a couple hours in Hong Kong (bus and subway), we got up to Shenzhen before 11:00 a.m. and proceeded into China. Border control was standard and expected, though this last passing gave me just four pages left in my passport for visas and entry/exit stamps (out of the original fourteen).

Right on the other side sits Shenzhen's main train station, so to prepare for Guilin the coming weekend, we bought tickets to lessen what had to be done later, as well as to save our seats (or in our case beds) in both directions. A friend of mine asked for them in Mandarin, which I later found out I had a lot of trouble doing, but more on that later.

After that we got food and headed off to get our hair cut. The particular place that we went to had to services available: haircut plus Thai massage, and haircut plus Chinese massage. The Thai-style one was longer in duration and more expensive at ¥50 CNY while the Chinese-style one was ¥40 CNY. Not being a huge fan of massages, viewing them more as painful than relaxing, I went for the Chinese-style one and my friend went for the Thai-style one.

I swear they washed my hair at least three times (because I lost count). When that was said and done they wrapped a towel around my head and proceeded to give me the massage. Parts were painful and others were soothing, though in the end I can't say I felt calmer or anything like that. While my masseuse was massaging my left arm, she received a phone call and ended up distracted, massaging that one arm for like ten minutes. Because of the lack of barbers (or for my elitist friends "hair-stylists"), I was told I was going to have to wait for a while before getting my hair cut, so they recommended I just upgrade to the Thai one, so I did--hey, it's all part of the experience, right?

When it was time, I sat in the chair and watched as my hair fell to the floor. As this was the first time cutting my hair since I left California, there was plenty being removed to go around. For the first time in months I could feel the air hovering around my now naked ears. The thing is though that the barber was cutting my hair kind of funny. I felt like it was becoming a mushroom.

In my primary- and secondary-school days, I would hate having my hair cut, and as a result it would grow out. While most wouldn't really care, because it would just get long, my hair happens to be really quite thick, and as such, it would grow more out than down. No matter what style haircut I would get, it would always become mushroom-shaped.

And now my hair was being cut mushroom-shaped.Though I write as if I was doing all the communication, I wasn't. My friend was helping me communicate all the way through alternation between Mandarin and Cantonese that was making my head turn round as I was being asked where I was from and proceeded by something to the effect of "you're Chinese descent." So in this process, My friend helped me ask the barber to make it smaller, and slowly it became so. When he thought it was done, I was sent back to the bed-sink complex for a rinse-off. He then cut it shorter, which required another rinse-off.

After that, to my surprise, he began spiking my hair. Sometimes I push up the front, but that was the only day that I've ever walked around in public with a head full of spiked hair, but whatever. I experienced first-hand what Shenzhen is famous for.

We finished off that day by doing some more sightseeing (which was highly uneventful) followed by street food (which was highly delicious and incredibly cheap). On the journey back to Hong Kong Island, I looked through my passport and realized just how extensively I've traveled. Before coming, I thought I might not even be allowed to exit the SAR without being able to come back to resume my studies as a student based on the wording of my immigration visa. Now all the entrances and exits (plus my Chinese visa) have filled up my pages, and now I have no choice but to say "yes" when people ask, "Are you well traveled?".

Back to my passport, it was advised that some states don't let you into the country without at least four empty passport pages. So this morning, I went to the United States Consulate-General here in Hong Kong and got additional pages added to my passport. They fit kind of funny, but they get the job done.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.  

Hong Kong

For Hong Kong and the World, I have the same professor as the one who recognized me by this blog in Humanity in Globalization. Now that I know he recognizes me, I’ll admit that it is a little frightening to go to (either class), though of course I do. As a matter of fact, actually, I have not even been late to a class yet, much less been absent from a lecture or a tutorial. This is not to say that I’ve never known a professor who lectures a class I'm in before. It’s happened before—the only difference is that I became acquainted with that professor through contact face-to-face so to speak, not through this cyber world, which I’ll admit I do not feel the safest in—but enough of that.

As I write this blog, I’m wrapping up from my term paper of sorts for this class and currently taking a break. This assignment for this class is not long at all—about 800 to 1,000 words as a guideline—but as the syllabus says, “don’t let the length of this assignment lull you into complacency.” So much to the delight of people who care about my academic well being (namely my parents and myself), I’m almost done with this paper, a full week before it’s due.

Not that this is a hard paper—as the professor is a (former) journalist now doing consultant work, he assigned us to write an editorial of sorts. Never in my formal academic education in English classes had I properly taught how to write an editorial. But for me, that’s okay, because I was part of the Journalism class throughout my four years in high school, culminating in my being editor-in-chief for the monthly publication.

In Beginning Journalism, we were told the basics of how to write well-structured, concise-yet-adequately-descriptive piece, later specifying the specifics of news writing, opinion-editorial, sports, feature, etc. So, while I never became the best of the best while I was in that class, I definitely became a good writer in self-development after high school.

Part of it was the fact that my high school actually had a good writing program. When I arrived at UCSD, I found that many people had no idea how to form a thesis and that many more could not make their papers flow smoothly in both the stylistic and logical senses. (Though I have no idea how my blog posts read since I don’t take the time any more to go read them over again before publishing. I like to say that it makes it more real, since a lot of what I write is in stream-of-consciousness, but ultimately, when, and not if, I read this entire endeavor again, I might have to reevaluate that past statement.)

Editorials have never been my high point though, and in the syllabus, the lecturer expressly states that the paper should read like an editorial and not a research paper. Cool; not a problem—I went to latimes.com and read a few to get me back in editorial writing mode, and the style flew back in.

The topic of the editorial itself is up to us. The criteria are that it has to be about Hong Kong and that it has to be about Hong Kong in the world. Fair enough. So far in class, we’ve only been talking about Hong Kong’s role in the world mostly in economic terms and less in political terms. Weekly topics range over several aspects of Hong Kong, each one being put into terms of Hong Kong’s economic future and viability into the future or Hong Kong’s relations with world sovereigns, including China.

Because of this weighting, guest speakers for the class have been businessmen except for two members of the Hong Kong Government Legislative Council, one of whom a (former) journalist. All have been very insightful, though the businessmen not so much into political matters. All were prompted about what makes Hong Kong special, to which they answered our weekly topic, like Rule of Law or Free Flow of Information slash Freedom of Speech. They were also all asked about Hong Kong’s future, to which they replied positively and almost whole-heartedly optimistic. The problem is that big CEOs are paid to be optimistic—it keeps their share prices up.

Needless to say, I did my topic on Hong Kong’s viability economically as Asia’s World City in the light of growing Chinese cities and an increasingly favorable climate as contrasted with Hong Kong’s disadvantages. I make my case for Hong Kong needing more creative industries, sponsored by the government if need be, to create a identity for Hong Kong that goes beyond former British Colony and international financial center.

But more about my term paper later. Right now I have to send a birthday card to my brother so that it’ll get there before next Wednesday. Tomorrow I get to go to the United States Consulate-General in Hong Kong to add more visa/entry/exit pages, since I’m running low and planning to travel several more times before I fly back home right before Christmas.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Taipei: Monuments and Memorials

Friday, we saw stuff on the north side of Taipei; Saturday was for the south side.
We started out walking to the MRT station again and worked our way over to the Presidential Palace. The nearest station was at Red House West Gate (which has a much different name in Chinese than in English). The building itself was not eventful. The shell housed a restaurant and a small exhibit on the building’s history accompanied by a bookstore.

From there we walked to the Presidential Office, which took a leisurely ten minutes by foot. We approached the backside of the building and noticed all the guards around the building were armed with automatics (they looked like AK-47s). On the front side, we took pictures. The layout was quite western I now realized because a large road goes right to the front of the building and Ts off in an intersection. In comparison, the Forbidden City in Beijing is surrounded by water and is flanked with lakes on its west side. At its front gate sits Tiananmen Square, and not a major road.

From there we went to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial. Though by this time it was absolutely pouring, approaching the memorial from the front and seeing the iconic blue-roofed building at the back was breathtaking; it was one of the few monuments that amazed me by its sheer size and imposition. Dodging the rain, we went to the National Theater and Concert Hall, which was halfway to the memorial itself.

At the base of the memorial, we ascended the steps and saw Chiang Kai-shek’s statue. Before seeing it, I’d imagined it would be something like Abraham Lincoln’s memorial in Washington, D.C.—and for the most part, it really was. There was some writing on the walls (headed by “Ethics,” “Democracy,” and “Science”) and the white sun in the “rotunda” area.

On the ground floor of the memorial with its entrance on either side, was a museum including little about Chiang Kai-shek. Instead, there was a ceramics exhibit and a contemporary calligraphy exhibit (in which you signed the visitor log with a brush—though I had a bit of training on the matter, my (Chinese) name turned out pretty bad). Exiting, there was a post office from which I sent off a postcard back to the United States.

From there, we took the MRT to another cluster of sites. We got out looking at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial. It was a yellow-roofed building that impressed much less than Chang Kai-shek’s. That day, there was an exhibition, probably interactive, for children, and as such there were tons of families with young children crowding the halls.

After taking photos in front of it, we walked a few city blocks to Taipei 101. Along the way, there was a fair-type setup in front of Taipei City Hall that we got snacks at. The setup also contained plenty of advertisers as well as a stage being used by advertisers to showcase their products.

On a side note, I’d like to expose the partial lack of common sense of my traveling buddies for this trip. Taipei 101 stands at one hundred one stories tall. From our hotel, Taipei 101 stood at the southeast, whereas our window looked to the southwest. At night, they insisted they could see Taipei 101 out the window. The logic behind this was that the building was pink at night and that Taipei 101 was the only skyscraper in Taipei. My reasoning for it not being Taipei 101 was that it was noticeably shorter than one hundred one stories and bore little resemblance to Taipei 101 (namely they both are smaller at the very top than at the bottom and they are both skyscrapers). In addition, the direction was totally wrong. That building turned out to be Shin Kong Life Tower, and ever after we referred to it as “Fake Taipei 101.”

Walking towards skyscrapers I guess is like walking towards a mountain—it just gets more imposing. At 1,474 feet from ground to roof (and its namesake one hundred one floors), it stood until just recently as the tallest building in the world. The bottom several floors are mall space, with the rest being standard skyscraper office space. Trying to find the elevator to the observation deck, we got lost going through the mall (designed in a more western style with a modern and confusing layout).

Finally we found the express elevator to the top on the fifth floor. The twin elevators, costing $2.4 million USD each, propel passengers up to the observation deck in around thirty seconds and descend back down in a little bit more time. In the elevator, the lights dimmed to a futuristic LED light experience conducted to distract the crowd from the fact that they were squished into the tight space like sardines.

At the top, the view was amazing. The elevator ticket came with an audio guide (I asked in Chinese for mine in English) explaining was being seen, which was basically most of Taipei. Going through the path set up, we saw the damper, which is basically a big ball in the center of the building used to stabilize the building during storms and such. There was an upper viewing floor and a lower viewing floor.

Also on the lower viewing floor was a coral art exhibition followed by coral art vending shops, which we quickly slipped by. At ground level, there was a free shuttle bus (which happened to literally be one bus) to the neared MRT station. Light turned to dark waiting and we ended that day in the hotel, ready to go back home in the evening the next day.

Early the next morning, we went to the central station (appropriately named Taipei Station) to buy High-Speed Rail tickets as part of the journey to get to the airport. After doing that, we ventured over to the Miramar Entertainment Complex and decided to ride on the Ferris wheel, since the area turned out be no more than cheapish shopping. The views from it were okay, though definitely not as good as those from Taipei 101. After having our final lunch in Taipei, we headed back to the central station to catch our train to Taoyuan.

I’d been on trains and high-speed rail before, but my fellow travelers had not. One expected to be pushed against the back of his seat by the shear physics of traveling at high speeds (a fact, which, if true, would render airplanes illogical). The entire high-speed rail line cost a bundle to build for such a moderately populated island, but from what I’ve read the venture has been a success. It took 20 minutes to make the journey to Taoyuan (where Taipei’s international airport is) and two hours to get all the way to the last station three hundred thirty-five kilometers away at Kaohsiung.

From the train station we took a short bus ride to the airport in which we arrived. As airports go, it was as dingy as Los Angeles International Airport, and super empty, which made it creepy to walk around while waiting for our flight. The time to leave though came eventually. Before going through exit immigration, we removed the staples in our passports ourselves so that the immigration officers wouldn’t tear pages or what have you.

In case you weren’t clued in, this post ends my trip in Taipei. Two weeks later (from which I just got back from yesterday) was Guilin. Stay tuned and thanks for reading!

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Beijing: A Question of Scale

Going back to Beijing and when we arrived, the gigantic airport was imposing but not impressive. As we scuttled through the terminal in an attempt to leave the airport it was noticeably empty. Don’t get me wrong; empty airports are good airports, and any day I’d take a flight in or out of the closer and smaller Burbank Airport over the larger and more crowded Los Angeles International Airport.

Designed and built by the same company that did my one of my favorite airports, Hong Kong International Airport, it shared much of the same features. The airport was noticeably efficient—we got our luggage quickly and lines at immigration were relatively short.

It’s architectural merits were there, with large and simple imposing columns with red being the main color of the place (with a slotted white ceiling). I personally didn’t like it looked, and from a glance it was evident that the terminal, built in preparation for the Olympics, was designed to impress. With a big country comes a polished capital airport. I could feel the might of China above my shoulders.

In contrast, flying into Washington Dulles Airport (which I’ve done once), I can’t say I felt the same. The airport was dingy and if I remember correctly we had to do an avoidance maneuver before landing which required us to ascend, loop around, and descend again. The terminals, while not shabby, were in no way impressive. It was designed for utility and though I have no idea how efficient it is, no one had in mind the wish to make an architectural statement or anything.

And therein lies one of the biggest changes I saw in Beijing in going back after two years. Starting at the way-too-big airport and ending at the way-to-big airport (where we spent hours bored because of a lack of decent coffee and a surplus of closed stores), Beijing was noticeably more secure than just a few years ago, and whereas some would cite Communism and extreme maintenance of the peace as the reasons behind this very apparent security, I, having been there before the Olympics, can say that this is not the way it’s always been.

After the Olympics and also due recently to National Day, security has been ever higher. Whereas I’ve met people who couldn’t point to China on the map (as they tried), now China’s has the world’s attention. I guess with great fame comes great responsibility. With China’s human rights record in question and the recent ethnic conflict in the west, China understands that it has enemies and understands that it has more real threats than before.

Two years ago, we went through airports in a snap. We walked through metal detectors without hesitation and even if one us beeped, rarely were we asked to stand for wand-waving or what have you. Mind you, that trip two years ago sent my family and I through four Chinese airports.

This time around, on leaving from Beijing, I beeped the metal detector because they didn’t require belts to be removed. Fine, whatever. A female officer did the whole wand-waving business and then proceeded to frisk me thoroughly. Through exit immigration, the officer alternated his focus between my passport picture and my face about five times. A friend of mine got whisked into a side room for potential questioning because her British passport looked suspicious somehow, though she was let go after six officers eyed it with a magnifying scope.

And that’s not the only place security is tight. China knows about domestic terrorism as well, don’t worry. The entire subway line, which expanded from two lines before the Olympics to God knows how many now and expanding still, has security personnel with x-rays to have you scan bags before entering the system. China’s vigilant and it shows.

But not everything was bigger this time. For one I would like to make a point now validated to me because of this trip. If you can do it, explore and sightsee yourself rather than with a tour group.

Two years ago, my family and I went to China in a tour group. It was super convenient. They loaded us onto a bus and shuttled us around and provided us with food for a real decent price. The thing is though, going to new places is not all about sightseeing, I’m convinced.

Yeah, I still see the sights and then some like the average tourist. The thing is though that when you get whisked away in a tour bus, you lose the opportunity to see real life—something that really doesn’t take more time to see.

This time around, we rode the subway to get to most places. We took a tour bus with Mainland Chinese people to see the Great Wall and Ming Tombs. In addition to the subway, we had to take a bus to see the Summer Palace.

Just being on the subway, you get to see the people. Mixing in with the locals and commuting with the businessmen, you really see some of the more innate aspects of culture—what is different and what is the same. I can’t even begin to describe how much I learned about Beijing this time around than the last time.

One thing that we did that was way off the tourist path though, I’m glad we did. The hotel was just a few subway stops away from the Temple of Heaven, so we decided to walk back to the hotel rather than take the subway. Along the way walking back alongside the main road, we peered into a side street. Feeling in the mood to explore, we ventured back into there. It was like a street full of vendors catering to locals. There were home supply storefronts as well as a guy selling lamb skewers to mention just a few. Walking even further we walked by the home fronts in one of the many hutong not mentioned or marked on maps. There was nothing the average tourist would want to see, but in my opinion it was all part of the experience.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Beijing: The Northern Capital

Reading week here in Hong Kong is similar to many universities’ fall break back in the States and Revision week here in Hong Kong is similar to many (though declining) universities’ reading week. Reading week was last week, with school resuming just this past Monday, and for about half of that week, I was in Beijing, some 1200 miles north of Hong Kong in Mainland China.

For those of you who don’t know (don’t be ashamed), Beijing (北京) is the capital city of the People’s Republic of China and literally means “Northern Capital” in Chinese. According to my reading, Beijing was named when it was fashionable for capitals in East Asia to be named literally as such. Kyoto (京都) means “Capital City” and Tokyo (东京) means “Eastern Capital” in Japanese. Nanjing/Nanking (南京) in the southern half of China means “Southern Capital” (and functioned as such for some dynasties). Seoul and Hanoi both have previous names that mean capital in some capacity.

My journey in the Northern Capital started in Hong Kong, of course. It was to be my second, the first having taken place in the summer of 2007, when my family and I had a China highlights tour. That was my first time out of North America. Now I was heading back, and while excited, I was of course wondering what to expect.

Having been there before, I expected I would see the normal tourist sites: the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, the Forbidden City, and Tiananmen Square, to name a few. I wanted to make a point to see some new sites as well. Overall I hoped to get an understanding of Beijing more profound and more refined to surpass my first.

And I knew what I was expecting. Pollution, in a word, I thought—gray skies and spitting people, to name some more. When I went there in 2007, they were preparing for the Olympics by building venues such as the Bird’s Nest, improving and expanding the metro, and relaying many sidewalks around the city.

What I expected and what I saw overlapped to less an extent that what I thought as well. Buildings went from being unfinished concrete to painted; pollution, while still present, didn’t embed myself into my clothes. The lake-side hutong (胡同) that I saw over two years ago turned into a well-appointed bar-side lake district—but more on that later.

My journey, as I said, started in Hong Kong, and a three-hour flight. We took the airport bus from in front of Queen Mary Hospital (whose canteen I frequent). The bus ride took about an hour, ending at Terminal 1. Going through the airport and experiencing the clean design coupled with efficiency that is HKG, I was reminded of the false impressions that the airport gave me when I arrived two months ago on August 21 (that fateful night).

Going through immigration, we used the “Hong Kong Residents” line and proceeded through smoothly. Security was simple and didn’t require us to take off our shoes (as we do in U.S. airports), though everyone’s belts set off the metal detector.

After waiting a couple hours in the airport, accompanied by coffee and expensive duty-free stores filled with elitist junk, we boarded our plane, flying direct to Beijing. The security video was double the length (once in English, the international language of air travel, and Mandarin). We had in-flight entertainment consisting of “The Brothers Bloom,” a recent movie with Adriane Brody and Rachel Weiss (with her good acting but bad accent).

Landing at the new Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport, we found ourselves walking for ages, passing through temperature checkpoint after temperature checkpoint (Swine flu/H1N1 alert still noticeably present), followed by Chinese immigrations, who let us through without a hitch.

We then had to take light rail to the exit of Terminal 3. The entire terminal was decorated with high red-and-white paneled ceilings supported by tall, cylindrical white columns. I personally like the design of Hong Kong International Airport better.

On the way to the airport express train, I picked up some renminbi (人民币)/Chinese yuan (元) from the HSBC ATM and we were on our way.

The airport express train was partially subterranean, but the parts of Beijing that I saw I didn’t recognize. Admittedly, it was dark, but the only thing that told me I was out of Hong Kong was the use of simplified Chinese characters (which I feel more comfortable with).

After transferring lines and getting off at the appropriate station, we had a bit of trouble finding our hotel. One of my friends speaks better Mandarin than I, but being more inclined to ask for directions that most men, I found myself asking everyone, including a different hotel’s bellhop where our hotel was. Finally, we found it on the backside of a building, still in Chongwenmen (崇文门) district.

Over several posts following this I hope to elaborate on and reflect upon my adventures in Beijing.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Shenzhen Shenanigans

The day after Mid-Autumn Festival, we went up to Shenzhen. Admittedly, it was a spur-of-the moment decision, but for $20 HKD to get there, it was worth the daytrip.

Shenzhen is the first of China’s Special Economic Zones, sharing its southern border with Hong Kong’s northern border. From what I can gather, it was set up right around when China began opening up to the world. Back then Hong Kong was still a British Crown Colony and these zones were meant to stimulate international trade and investment.

My aunt and uncle, who are familiar with Hong Kong as of recent, told me of Shenzhen’s amazing transition. I couldn’t gather whether they thought it positive or negative, but they talked about gutting the mountains to reclaim the sea, skyscrapers popping up from the small fishing village that it used to be. Today, Shenzhen has an official population larger than Hong Kong SAR (8.6 million over 7 million), with many more unlisted and commuting people contributing to its makeup.

In just one of the many examples of China’s massive and impressive economic growth, Shenzhen has two subway lines crossing each other with about thirty stations total. Before 2011, there will be three times that many stations open on five lines.

Heading from Central District on Hong Kong Island, the journey to the border at Lo Wu took about an hour, transferring lines thrice. Alternatives to Shenzhen (that we did not take) were ferries from Sheung Wan and Central Piers, some of which conveniently go directly to Shenzhen Airport. From Hong Kong Airport, there are ferries direct to Shenzhen Airport as well for transfers free of additional security checkpoints.

At the border, we went through Hong Kong exit immigration (which I now know I can use the “Residents” line at) and Chinese immigration, where the woman thoroughly checked my passport and shifted her eyes between my face on my passport and my face in person.

Through customs, Shenzhen Railway Station is immediately to the left. A shopping mall is to the right. We went into the shopping mall, where they persistently kept trying to sell us fake Rolexes and the like. They went so far as grabbing arms to try to drag you into their shop.

From there, we took a bus to this beach area that a local recommended to us. There was pretty much nothing there but some street shops and a theme park that we could see the other side of without entering. We took the bus back shortly thereafter.

On the bus ride both ways, it was apparent that we were no longer in Hong Kong. The streets were three lanes wide in each direction and ran straight as arrows. Each light post on either side of the road had two Chinese flags all the way down each avenue (possibly because of National Day).

The buses themselves were operated differently. There were no money-collecting machines that I am so used to. The buses cost about ¥6 CNY and instead of paying a machine (or metal box), you paid the ticket collector, who in turn kept an eye on who entered the bus, announcing stops as crowds came and went.

Back to where we started, we took the Shenzhen Metro to a park called Window of the World, which I feel turned out to be kind of a waste of time.

Exiting the subway station, you come out of a glass pyramid (hey, that’s the Louvre!) and proceed towards the entrance. While corny, some would say that’s part of the appeal. Entering the park the first thing you see is the Eiffel Tower, which dominates the curb appeal of the property. After buying tickets, you ascend to the park and enter to the main stage, surrounded by different style columns.

Going around the park, it’s divided into different continents. The biggest section of the park is Europe (big surprise). That’s in the center where the Eiffel Tower stands opposed to the Arc du Triomphe as well as Venice, with St. Mark’s Square and Holland with a bunch of windmills. Elsewhere in the park were sites in Thailand as well as the Taj Mahal and a garden representative of Japan. I posed in front of the Sydney Opera House, flanked by “traditional” Maori dwellings. For America, there was a model of the main sites of Washington, D.C., as well as Niagara Falls incorporated into the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore. For Africa there was an elephant and the Pyramids of Giza.

Leaving the park, we crossed the road to a mall in search of food. We found some average food and walked outside and saw the street vendors (who kept having to move their carts to avoid the police). With a friend’s assistance, I learned sort of how to eat sugar cane that cost me just ¥1 CNY.

After that it was back to the border and back to Hong Kong Island.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.