(no subject)
For most of the people I know Hong Kong is a glorified glitzy shopping mall, all big shiny buildings where you shop, eat, and sleep, waking only to do it all over again; this is perhaps punctuated by complaints about feet worn sore from citizens used to a much less pedestrian friendly city. Visiting Hong Kong as often as I have however has since led me to thinking if one couldn't one suffer podiatic pain in the service of some greater goal than repeating the mass consumerist grind on a larger international scale. Also Disneyland was a big letdown, and Ocean Terminal was getting old when I was still in high school.
It was in that quest to really travel in a city that I'd thought I'd grown overly familiar with (when even the sight of the Hong Kong harbor at night seemed blase') that I ended up in places like the laid back outlying Lamma Island (so small they don't allow cars) or the Dragon's Back mountain trail.
Yesterday it took me to the University of Hong Kong to take in a lecture by a visiting Yale professor on the politics of translational linguistics in post-revolutionary Chinese literature, where I learned that Lin Yutang's entire literary career was to him a small sideshow with which to fund his quest to build a working Chinese typewriter (in the 50's!). This amazing steampunky contraption later went on to be sneakily bought (or stolen) by IBM as a basis for their cold war cryptographic research against the Reds, and the principles that enabled that same machine translation eventually let to the development of cybernetics and artificial intelligence as we know it today! There was a side story about how to the inventor he only ever saw the west's attempts to appropriate it as a form of colonialism by trying to take away the Chinese language from the modern world of communication, but this was fuzzier to me as said Yale professor was also strikingly attractive.
What little humility I do possess aside, I'm not used to being the dumbest person in the room, but surrounded by linguists and literary scholars and quintilingual speakers, then finding myself with nothing significant to say to that professor until some uppity humanities doctorate went to chat her up, I think one of my new year's resolutions is the acquisition of that master's degree in History.
Today with erstwhile and open minded travel companions Mario, Shark and my sister, we went off to NoHo, purportedly this city's equivalent of Cubao Ex. It did not disappoint- the place was indeed like that beloved little corner of Manila, only scaled up to an appropriate sprawl, though the shop sizes were no bigger than the ones back home! There were only more of them, spread through about six streets. The place had that inimical artsy vibe to it, with all the shops being manned by their owners, all of whom knew each other and would have dinner together at the area's cafes after their workdays, which would end whenever they damn well felt like it. The restaurants were owned by former hotel chefs in energetic semi retirement, and the galleries by the appropriate eccentrics. The main difference was how much more money the market could bring into their products, with gallery pieces easily going for half a million pesos. There was even a chinese Vintage Pop, down to the really friendly owner who'd refuse to sell the pieces that people most wanted to buy.
I'm glad I got to scratch this city's surface, and that after all the times I've been here I can still find a journey to travel through.
It was in that quest to really travel in a city that I'd thought I'd grown overly familiar with (when even the sight of the Hong Kong harbor at night seemed blase') that I ended up in places like the laid back outlying Lamma Island (so small they don't allow cars) or the Dragon's Back mountain trail.
Yesterday it took me to the University of Hong Kong to take in a lecture by a visiting Yale professor on the politics of translational linguistics in post-revolutionary Chinese literature, where I learned that Lin Yutang's entire literary career was to him a small sideshow with which to fund his quest to build a working Chinese typewriter (in the 50's!). This amazing steampunky contraption later went on to be sneakily bought (or stolen) by IBM as a basis for their cold war cryptographic research against the Reds, and the principles that enabled that same machine translation eventually let to the development of cybernetics and artificial intelligence as we know it today! There was a side story about how to the inventor he only ever saw the west's attempts to appropriate it as a form of colonialism by trying to take away the Chinese language from the modern world of communication, but this was fuzzier to me as said Yale professor was also strikingly attractive.
What little humility I do possess aside, I'm not used to being the dumbest person in the room, but surrounded by linguists and literary scholars and quintilingual speakers, then finding myself with nothing significant to say to that professor until some uppity humanities doctorate went to chat her up, I think one of my new year's resolutions is the acquisition of that master's degree in History.
Today with erstwhile and open minded travel companions Mario, Shark and my sister, we went off to NoHo, purportedly this city's equivalent of Cubao Ex. It did not disappoint- the place was indeed like that beloved little corner of Manila, only scaled up to an appropriate sprawl, though the shop sizes were no bigger than the ones back home! There were only more of them, spread through about six streets. The place had that inimical artsy vibe to it, with all the shops being manned by their owners, all of whom knew each other and would have dinner together at the area's cafes after their workdays, which would end whenever they damn well felt like it. The restaurants were owned by former hotel chefs in energetic semi retirement, and the galleries by the appropriate eccentrics. The main difference was how much more money the market could bring into their products, with gallery pieces easily going for half a million pesos. There was even a chinese Vintage Pop, down to the really friendly owner who'd refuse to sell the pieces that people most wanted to buy.
I'm glad I got to scratch this city's surface, and that after all the times I've been here I can still find a journey to travel through.