LIEN HONG CAFE, HONG KONG (updated)

                   

“When I left at 15, the City Hall was the tallest building in the harbour.  A series of “rose-watered” young-girl’s-heart-confessions articles published in the Chinese Students’ Weekly got special editing notes from the studious, conscientious, and inspired English-page Editor.  It is almost 40 years later.  She arrives slightly late, at the very crowded and noisy restaurant where one has to shout to be heard, with a mask over her face and clear plastic gloves on her hands.  SARS is finished... or is it? For some of us, a scare is a scar for good.  For me, leaving at 15 is a scar for good.  I was filled with longing for Home for 15 years, before I would return to this beautiful town surrounded by water.  15 years before I was brought back by the very same Thaï-blue Peter, before the Lantau villa, for the première of his film shot in the desert long before it was for the fashionable “Terre d’aventure”-type group travels.

Tonight, everyone is together.  ThaÏ-blue Peter leaves the table early already happy or unhappy with morning and afternoon drink,  Editor who set me on a path of writing and who taught me that expressing girlish feeling with panache was an okay thing to do, is here with mask and glove, and with her film critic husband who keeps making faces like a young boy.  I forget that we are all 50 and 60-somethings around the table, with the other master of the filmic word in the old Chinese Students’ Weekly, the Film Page Editor who set me on my way lusting after European films, whose passionate introductions to Truffaut and Godard and Antonioni set me running after a Parisian bohemian dream, so unlikely in those hot summer days for a True Light Middle School A-student.  Film Page Editor and his wife, English Page Editor and her husband.... we savour strange dishes in this « Garden of the Fragrant Lotus » restaurant in Central... fish intestines omelette, pork fat with BBQ meat, stewed Pamelos skin.... only to find, at the end of the meal, that Peter has settled the bill before leaving with some excuse about urgent family problems to be resolved.

Without these angels at this table, I would never be here, nor there, nor any of the places I have been.  And yet, with them, I would never have left this hometown… I would have been a scholar, an engineer (?), an account, a social worker, a teacher maybe, a journalist if I'm lucky.  They cracked a whip on the floor and set me galloping into the wilds.  I’ve had a most unlikely destiny.  They put me on the map.

Tonight, together, we eat stuffed duck and stuffed fish and shout at each other at the top of our lungs to communicate, and to push away the underlying thought that, before we sit together again at the same table, will it be days, months, or too many years and will it still be a full table or will one or more of us be gone?

I said to my daughter the other day, if I keep coming back every five years, it won’t do at all because I don’t have that many 5-years left.

The wandering herd has to head home sometimes, even though Home is nowhere, where is Home?” 

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

(originally published on Tumblr 21 Nov 2018)