Brian Eckert

A Canadian friend whom I’m to meet the next day in mainland China describes Hong Kong as “rock and roll.”

My first impression of the place is that’s it’s a cleaner, better-organized version of the Middle Kingdom where nobody spits and everybody speaks English.

And then there’s the heat. In my all-black travel fatigues I gush sweat while waiting for the bus that will take me to Kowloon and the Chunking Mansions. The beads of perspiration streaming down my side feel like crawling insects.

To get to the mainland from the island where the airport is located I catch Airbus 21A. The double decker bus crosses a large bridge that offers views of steep, green hills and emerald blue water. Boats glide through below, leaving white trails behind. The pale sands of beaches stand out prominently where land meets sea.

Within 10 minutes of departure towering steel and glass officetels rise up in the foreground, pushing the pleasant, tropical scenery out of mind and revealing the rock and roll Hong Kong that my friend promised. Five minutes after that the high rises surround me and, save for a brief flash of sky and distant hills, there are scant assurances that nature still exists.

Stepping off the air conditioned bus the heat is quick to overtake me, as are a pair of Middle Eastern guys who flash business cards and say, “Hey, you need a room my friend? I have some very good deals for you today.”

“I have a room,” I say dismissively.

“I can get you other things too, my friend. A fine tailored suit? Or some hash? Cocaine?”

Chunking Mansions stands not just at the crossroads of East and West, but at the crossroads of Earthly civilizations. Chinese, Africans, Indians, Middle Easterners, Pacific Islanders, Uyghurs, Anglos, and countless others buzz through the Mansions lobby among the currency exchange booths, money wire services, international SIM card displays, electronic gadget shops, and Halal food stalls.

Two lines form in front of the pair of elevators marked “B Lobby.” A short man in uniform controls the flow of people into the lift. A double monitor displays a video feed of the elevators’ jam-packed interiors.

The man ahead of me in line has two clear garbage bags full of meat. He sets them down on the elevator floor and cold, dead flesh presses into my right calf. My nose is inches from a thick-necked African’s right ear.

The elevator stops at the 10^th floor and I squeeze my way through the other guests. Inside the lobby a short, pudgy woman greets me, confirms my reservation and shows me to my room.

The door clears the bed by a mere centimeter. An all-in-one bathroom with a sink, toilet, and shower spigot lies beyond the foot of the bed. There is also is a flat panel TV mounted on the wall and a pot for boiling water.

The A/C is on full blast, making the tiny room feel like a meat locker.

I strip off my clothes to be free of my own moistness.

It only takes a few minutes for the crushingly small space to assert itself.

Squashing a mosquito on the wall leaves a smear of somebody else’s blood on the white paint.

A glance out my window reveals bamboo scaffolding framing a dark cement utility shaft that plunges into the depths of Chunking. I hack a wad of phlegm into the void.

Hunger directs me back out of doors. In the hostel lobby I squash a large cockroach. It sounds like a peanut being deshelled.

I opt to take the stairs this time. The series of downward right turns leads me through an olfactory wonderland generally suggestive of ethnic restaurants and carnivore excrement.

Men labor up the stairs with parcels, their dollies thudding on the concrete. Exiting on the ground floor, a dark-skinned, mustachioed man sitting in front of a shop looks up and says, “Want some hash?”

On the streets the propositions continue.

“I have new iPads, MacBooks, digital cameras.”

“Hello my friend, you want pretty girl? Good price.”

The conditioned air from inside shops causes me to step slowly past their doors. I wander down a back alley, away from the touristy stuff, and choose a place with only a couple of other foreigners in it.

I place my order and watch the lips of a reporter move on a muted television. Footage of Libya crops up, of blackened tanks and men raising automatic weapons over their heads. I seem to be the only one watching. Everyone else is lost in their food and conversations. The air conditioning is so strong I’m actually cold.

Next stop: internet café.

I choose a computer next to an old hippy-looking dude who’s bald/ponytailed, with a bushy beard and wire-rimmed glasses. He resembles a Santa Claus who dropped out of the altruism racket and spent the last few years smoking meth in Tobago.

He clears his throat often and spits into a napkin. Out of the corner of my eye I note that he is reading stuff like “How to Experience Full Consciousness,” and “The Key to Unlocking Your True Spirit Nature.”

An hour of surfing the web for information about how to get to Lianhua Shan PanYu, where I’m headed to the next day, is mostly fruitless, and I don’t feel like paying another 8 Hong Kong Dollars right now to sit next to burnt-out Santa with his pulmonary refuse and his cheesy self-help videos.

I stop in an Irish pub for a couple of beers then retreat to my pod for a nap.

Awakening in darkness I sense the tightness of the space around me and the pulsations of the busy world beyond. I read a bit of Murakami, which doesn’t help to provide any footing in the world.

Needing to sort out tomorrow’s travel, I return to the internet café.

“Oh, hello again, you have some drink, a little rest, then you come back, huh?” says the proprietor.

The little bastard has my number.

A single computer—the same one I used earlier—is available. Emphysema Claus hasn’t budged. Sitting back down I say to him, “You’re still here, huh?”

He looks at me like I’m a child rapist. A few moments later he breaks wind loudly. From his computer speakers a female voice says, “Most people have no idea that obtaining lasting happiness is as easy as flipping a switch—that it’s just a matter of a change in perspective.”

To my right an Irish man downs tall cans of alcoholic cider and chats to a friend on Skype. “It’s fantastic here mate—the women are brilliant, the restaurants are clean—everyone speaks English. It’s like China done right.”

From all around come the sounds of machine gun fire as young Chinese guys play 1^st person shoot ‘em ups. They chain smoke and extinguish the butts into overflowing ashtrays.

“Hey, hey, you.”

The voice comes from behind me. I turn around.

“Are you speaking to me?”

“No. Your friend. But you OK.”

The stereotype that all Asians look alike also works in reverse. To them, we all look the same.

“How can I help you?”

“I am Beijing people. My friend on webcam. You say hello please.”

It is not I, but my westernness, that he is soliciting. He wishes to show me off like a Nike swoosh emblazoned jacket, as a status symbol.

I rise, walk over to the Beijing man’s computer, give a half-hearted wave into the webcam, and then sit back down.

After a little more browsing I at last find a place to buy online ferry tickets for Lianhua Shan PanYu, book one, and leave with 43 minutes to spare on my purchased hour of internet access.

Back on the streets I walk in simple square blocks to avoid becoming lost in the sprawling neon and florescent metroplex.

The people move like clockwork in rhythm with colored lights and ticking hands. The city controls their movements. They are unable to escape its gravity.

The billboards here, as everywhere, imply that it is perfectly natural for beautiful people to hang around shirtless and in bikini tops. That it is commonplace for well-dressed, spade-jawed men to lean over a dock railing with a prominent wristwatch on, staring wistfully out to sea. That outrageously tall, skinny women wearing haute couture regularly strike suggestive poses in bucolic settings.

And the fashionistas in Hong Kong, as everywhere, swarm the streets seeking out the items the billboards tell them to buy.

They are junkies. Because fashion is a drug.

Calvin Klein is a drug baron.

Retailers are pushers.

“Tailored suit, sir? Good prices. Also I have marijuana, cocaine…everything…”

No sir, not everything. Not a pill to stop the city dead in its tracks, allowing me to gain some perspective in this hyperreality.

I go for coffee at Starbucks and while sipping a latte I reflect upon how we destroy worlds and build new ones in their place. Out of the mind leap forms and into them we retreat.

Back in my room I read some Murakami and imagine myself as a character in one of his novels whose entire life consists of circling the streets of Kowloon around the Chunking Mansions, forever being offered tailored clothing and drugs by dark-skinned men, ducking in and out of restaurants, eating and drinking in air-conditioned rooms, staring at a computer monitor in smoky internet cafés, watching the faces of the people in the elevator CCTV monitors, ascending and descending towers of shared interests and personal agony, forever living and sleeping and dreaming and shitting in a room barely large enough to house his body and a small collection of items.