LONG SAND BEACH, HONG KONG

And when, did this cluster of gold sparkles become visible on the horizon of a black silken sea ?  Was it always there ?  Is it just my eyes which were never attentive enough before on this daily sea route between Pier N° 6 in Central and Mei Wo on Lantau Island ?

The night boat has something magical and menacing at the same time about it.  When the weather is a little windy, the sea forgets to be smooth, I try to forget the tightening inside my stomach and settle in my seat pretending I’m not afraid. I have forgotten how much one has to have « les pieds marins » to be a Hong Konger. 

Water is everywhere, the sea culture is one’s second nature here.  Living on Lantau Island adds to the mystique of my home town and increases my contact with water.  On Thaï-Blue Peter’s Island there are wandering and homeless cattle that the native farmers, long re-settled in some government housing somewhere on the mainland, left behind.  No one cares for them, yet they breed and survive and wander from helicopter landing patch to the yard of the police dormitory to even the beautiful white Long-Sand Beach.

dear You...

Huge storm on the beach last night.... in front of my window on the 3rd floor of the villa, an impressive streak of lightning across the night mountains....

this morning, mist floating down from the luxuriant greens, melancholy...somewhere in time, a long long time ago, mist glides down another mountain towards Deep Water Bay, in front of our home on 19 Repulse Bay Road... I, all 14 years old of me, used to stay out on the balcony on those spring mornings and watch the ballet of the white cashmere covering and uncovering green shoulders.  On some full-mooned nights, all 14 years of me used to stay out a whole night on that same terrace, while the whole household is fast asleep, and watch the trajectory of the bright moon from one end to the other of the night sky.

Dawn.  Waking from dreams of those departed, even of an old French professor, an ex-flirt for a summer, but long passed away or so I heard... wake up feeling sad and restless.

Hong Kong is a very tiring place, a very rich place also.... Because of the intense and humid heat, one has to take refuge in the air-conditioned shopping centers, all built like that one where we went to see the American movies and eat sushi in the rich part of your city, near to your American friends' place.  The whiteness of the architecture, the minimalist chic beauty of the décors, and the fashionable pretty young women and handsome young men with their many shopping bags fill me with some strange feeling of danger and unease.  Melancholy as well.  It's the most terrible melancholia in the world to feel not-belonging in your own home town.  Every time I come back to Hong Kong I feel this after the first excitement.  I feel sad and I feel intensely lonely and sometimes I can hardly stand walking around alone in this city.  I am so much in ‘décalage’ with real here-and-now Hong Kongers, with my bohemian dress that doesn't fit with what they think of as suitable for my age, and with my absence of shopping bags, and the questioning looks or the comments after I pass by “is she Chinese?”, I am reminded again and again that I don't belong here.  I feel like I'm cut off from my roots, cut away from the very essence that makes up my being, alone in the world.  A feeling that I don't get in any other parts of the world, not in Timbuktu, not in Istanbul, not even in the most unlikely places, Gorée or Warsaw.

... 

I keep saying to myself, 'it's time to go home'.  And then feeling even worse, because then I realise that I don't even know where home is, at the moment, no longer feeling that "home" is where my kids are as they are now flying with their own wings everywhere.  Surely home is not where Super Cat Pikachu is (and wondering how he is).  Though I think of home for now as where I take my shower every morning with the sound of the gas fire burning in this foreign city, and where your Super Cat greets us as we return, it also makes me feel homeless as it is obviously not my home.  It is but a temporary refuge which will greet and see another woman loving and kind and nice and soft and caring, for the You my friend who deserves the happy ending that I hope and wish with all my heart,

Could Home be this wonderful melancholy like a mist in which I can cloak myself and during which I can for a brief moment write stuff like this to a You ... stuff sounding terribly like a love letter, to a You who is terribly not a lover, being free and confident enough in our wordless and explanation-less understanding that You will receive this with as much joy and emotion as I have in writing it.  This must be Home.  As we cannot and are not brave enough to call it Love.

( from WHEN THE WANDERING HERD FINDS HOME 07/08/2007)