Letting the world in

After a rather blunt reminder that demon summer is on its way, Hong Kong has had a run of rather glorious weather. (Well, at least on the days I’m working. Naturally, it pours on my days off.) Last year at this time, I remember it already being uncomfortably sticky, though not yet blazing hot. But these days? They feel like November.

And so, to celebrate, I turned off the air conditioner and opened the windows wide.

The first few nights, it wasn’t bad. The air was deliciously cool. Perfect sleeping-with-the-windows-open weather.

I’m lucky in that my neighborhood is relatively quiet for Hong Kong. I live directly across from a school, which is dark long before I get home from work. There’s a hospital up the road, and, because of that, there are few apartment buildings on my street. (It’s considered very bad luck to live near a hospital.) There’s a park up the street where several rowdy Chinese teenagers like to play basketball, but they’re long gone by bedtime. Other than the occasional car or delivery truck, there’s very little noise outside.

At least, there’s very little noise outside until I decide to leave the windows open.

The building is surrounded by a pack of feral cats. There are at least nine that I recognize. Normally, I don’t mind them. But three nights ago, a couple get into a roaring fight sometime around 4 a.m. I’m a hard sleeper. Once I’m out, I’m out. I once slept through an earthquake.

These cats woke me up.

After what felt like an hour, I thought about closing the windows, hoping that would cut down on the noise. But that required getting out of bed and stumbling around the apartment, something I’m not generally willing to do before 10 a.m. Instead, I fumbled around for my iPod and shoved the headphones in my ears. Back to sleep I went.

My mom would probably say that the cats sounded better than the music.

The next night, while brushing my teeth, I think about closing the windows and turning on the air conditioning. But it’s cool outside, so I leave them open.

Again, sometime in the wee small hours of the morning, I’m yanked out of sleep by some (presumably drunk) man yelling at a taxi driver on the street in a strange mixture of French and Chinese. This goes on for several minutes. By the time the elevator starts creaking, I’ve brought out the trusty iPod and drifted back to sleep.

Last night, I left nothing to chance. I left the windows open, but I fell asleep with the iPod.

There were no strange noises, but I woke up this morning to discover that Hong Kong mosquitoes find me extra tasty. I am covered in bites. (There were 25 at last count, including one between two toes. How does this happen?)

Hong Kong windows do not have screens, and I don’t live up high enough to escape the bugs. Every once in a while, something will find its way into my apartment – I once woke up to find a bee the size of a small car trying to escape by flying over and over into the unopened windows – but the mosquitoes have pretty much stayed away.

This is what I get for letting the world in? Tonight, I’m closing the freakin’ windows.

On boredom and buses and a mild obsession with Molly Wizenberg

A friend recently called me out for not writing enough on this blog. A slacker, she called me. (It was meant lovingly, I know, dear.)

Well, that friend was right. I am slacking off. Considerably.

But I'm not lazy. Not really.

I'm afraid.

I'm afraid of being boring. Despite my love of food blogs, I do not particularly want to read about what someone had for breakfast this morning. People don't come here for recipes, so I assume that my readers – all five of you – don’t really want to know what I ate this morning, either. (Besides, all of you should know me well enough to know that I’m not really a breakfast person. In all likelihood, I turned off my alarm and overslept and rushed to leave the apartment at 12:40 to make it to the office on time and somewhat put together.) And so, instead of writing something boring, I write nothing at all. It's easier that way.

I'm afraid of being boring.

My life is out there for all the world to see. And I want people who come to this blog -- whether they're loved ones who come here on purpose to check up on me or people who stumble here accidentally -- to like what they read. I want them to be entertained. And, because it's my name up there in lights, I'm the entertainment -- if not with my day-to-day life, then certainly with my perspective of Hong Kong. After all, it's a wildly exotic place for some girl named Anna.

Isn't it?

I’ve spent more than a year waiting for culture shock to hit me in the back of a head with a 2x4, but it hasn’t happened. I expected Hong Kong to be wildly different from anything I’d seen before. In some ways, it is, but mostly, the patterns of my daily life are largely the same in Hong Kong as they were in the U.S. My work is the same. The people are different, but the ones who have a major role in my life here are, for the most part, American. Every once in a while, I’ll see something strange and snap a picture, thinking I’ll maybe write something on it later. But most days, the only sign I live in Asia is the presence of a lot of Chinese people.

Hong Kong is funny like that. The best description of this city I’ve ever heard is “The world’s largest Chinatown.” It looks like China and sounds like China and feels like China – in the right neighborhoods – but it’s not China. China is easy to find here, but it’s just as easy to get away from. My daily life mostly happens in those non-China-like areas. And I've been happy with that, content with the pattern and the routine and ease of using English.

Because of that, I haven’t really made much of an effort to get to know the other Hong Kong. I haven’t even made a serious effort with the language. I’m a creature of habit and routine. Why learn more than basic Cantonese when English works just fine? Why would I want to wander around some other neighborhood when I know mine so well?

I know. Slacker.

Excluding trips to the airport, I can’t remember the last time I made it off Hong Kong Island. And that’s a shame. Hong Kong is a vibrant, exotic city, and I should make more of an effort to get to know it.

I was thinking about that on the bus tonight. I know the route well; I take it home from work every single night. But there’s more than one bus that runs that way. There’s also a minibus. I have yet to ride a minibus here. (See? Slacking again. Mostly, I’m afraid I’ll die in one. But if I live, what a great tale I’ll have for the blog!)

Mostly, I was thinking about Orangette. I’ve been reading the archives lately and loving them. They’re fun because of the subject matter (which often centers on what Molly ate for breakfast. Or dinner. But, since hers is a food blog, I feel like she can get away with that…). But going through the archives this way is even more fun because, after reading several months’ worth of entries, I’m seeing Molly discover her voice and begin to develop as a writer. (A very, very lovely writer she is, too.) I thought about Orangette’s evolution as the bus began to chug up the hill toward Midlevels, and I began to wonder if someday, far, far into the future, some half-crazed fan of mine would be trolling the archives of this blog, noticing the same thing. (If I say hello here to that half-crazed future fan, does that mean I’ve been watching too much “LOST”?)

Of course, for that to happen, this blog needs some, shall we say, um, more substantial archives. And there’s a whole city out there, just waiting to be turned into blog posts.

I’ll try to get on that.

Maybe I should start by taking a minibus.

An ode to Orangette

Lately, I've been reading the archives of one of my favorite blogs, Orangette. I discovered the delightful Molly Wizenberg a couple of years ago, through my dear friend Helen, who had read about Molly's blog (and her then-upcoming column in Bon Appétit) in her kindergarten-class newsletter. (Does your kindergarten class have a newsletter? Mine does not. I have no trouble imagining Mrs. Dobbs lovingly compiling one, however. Once, when home on a break from college, I ran into her in the grocery store. She recognized me instantly. I had no idea who she was.)

Well, it's only lately one of my favorite blogs. Shortly after Helen sent me the link, I bookmarked it (I was on deadline, after all), then proceeded to mostly ignore it, pulling it up only once in a while and reading only the latest entry. I'm not sure what sent me back to Orangette, but I'm thankful for whatever it was. I'm now reading her blog from the beginning, since her new book is not yet available in Hong Kong and I'm not in the States for another month. Visiting a bookstore to buy my very own copy of Molly's book is, oh, No. 3 on "Things to do if I make it through customs," after "Savoring a chile relleno and a margarita at Matt's" and "Going to a store that carries MORE THAN THREE SHOES in my size!" (And that's three actual shoes, not three pairs of them. No guarantee that any of the three will have a mate, either.)

But I digress.

Orangette is mostly a food blog, and many of her current posts involve sharing recipes and stories about them. But it wasn't always so. There's lots of food back in the 2004 posts, like this one that involves roast lamb and a recipe for "evil flan" (that I really, really must try!) but there are occasional gems like this one, with vignettes from her weekend "in reverse chronological order" that have very little to do with food. If only my weekends were as interesting... (Of course, they're really only one day long, and that cuts into the fun.)

I just love Molly's writing. It inspires me to do a bit myself. All good writing inspires me to write. What else should I be reading?