照妖鏡 the other side of the looking-glass

In a hotel here in my birth-town, I feel shocked to be served by an European. The ingrained dynamics and early education from childhood will not change so quickly in my mindset of the "colonisée". It’s as if I have to apologise to him for serving me. And I automatically adopted a haughty superior attitude, to cloak my unease.  Yet in Europe where I've lived for decades, I have no qualms whatsoever being served by white and whiter waiters and waitresses and certainly no hesitation to puff and huff and complain like a French native if the service is not up to par.  

Another phenomenon in a ex-colonial place is to notice that I would automatically feel complicity with white travellers, as if they're "one of us" or "one like me"; I'd easily be drawn by their English or French conversations and not at all see, through their eyes, the person they're perceiving in front of them: a local native, a Chinese grandma who doesn’t resemble them. It's not unusual that they'd start speaking to me, if they do at all, in a slower, more carefully-articulated English.

The white American mother eating breakfast with her little girl next to me, goes out of her way to take a salt and pepper set at a faraway table rather than to simply lean over and ask me to borrow mine. Out of courtesy to not bother me? Out of a moment of hesitation whether I speak English or not? 

Flashback to a bus stop in Cassis in the south of France, a few Nordic European travellers preferred to ask for direction to an old white French guy sitting there rather than to me. They simply assumed that I didn't speak English.  In these moments the mind's selfie-camera would suddenly swing around the way my automatic DJI Osmo Pocket does, and would make me see myself as the way they see me.  Until that very moment I was simply my usual "universal" figure, colourless in my mind, not definable by the name of a country, and certainly even less by a single word denoting a race. Perhaps I've managed my life wrong all these decades after all, going through border controls trying to explain that yes, I'm born in Asia, I'm crossing borders with my Canadian passport but my residential address is in France. Why have a simple life if you can complicate things for yourself?

仿如隔世 Everylife everywhere all in the same dimsum basket

It’s the 21st of April.                                         

Mother went off the grid of our mortal world on this day 48 years ago.

It's near the end of my month-long sojourn in Asia after 3 years of on-and-off planetary lockdowns.  I am sitting in the breakfast buffet room of an expensive hotel which has suffered from its isolated location and somewhat faded in its glory and most of all, its wooden furniture's edges. 

I am doing one of my habitual and highly-comforting “solo disappearance” acts when I’d hide in a place where I’m a total nameless visitor, even if it's in the same city where I may usually live and work.  Here I can freely listen in on my breakfast neighbours’ conversations, and cast my mind back 48 years to wonder how Mother would be doing in the same situation when she was a high- society newcomer, business WonderWoman, romantic masochist and relentless rebel at the same time.

So here I am, honing, in my head, the “meaningful” words that I am going to put in my next film’s voice-over, pondering on the timing of the flurry of sudden recognition on several continents (are they trying to catch me alive rather than posthumously? -chuckle chuckle- ), while submitting to a background mixture of loud rough-and-tumble putonghua conversations and a more hushed exchange in English of “showrooms” “products” “stocks”, all of a sudden I realise how familiar I am on all fronts, “showroom” as much a word I can wield with ease as “jump cut”, and perhaps even more so from childhood resonance.  

                                                                                                       And this is how these resonances and words from our deepest memories derail us, put us on the wrong track, as they are just as attractive as a smell from memories of street food when we were small; there comes a flashback of sojourning in this same chain of expensive hotels in other parts of Asia, in what seems like another lifetime, wearing nice proper silk dresses, decked in diamonds and pearls, talking business and yes, “showroom” “product” “letter of credit”, with a partner that’s purely and simply a photocopy of Father.  Not until this moment staring at my breakfast cereal, did I see with clarity that I was simply re-enacting the role of Mother, no doubt out of a deep sense of loss, drilled into me on that day of 21st of April 1975 when I was a mere 22-year-old and having barely gotten out of my first rebel-style wedding dress only 36 hours before.  Missing her so much that I spent the next year catatonic in bed unable to cope with life that rushed on even though the most-loved one was gone, and the subsequent years playing out all her different personae: the artist, the romantic lover, the business woman, the marital masochist.  There is never a wrong time for self-understanding, but this, coming on a rainy morning in a banal chain hotel breakfast room overlooking its useless pool, surrounded by ugly and unused business buildings cluelessly (these urban architects in Hong Kong be damned) hiding a normally-breathless sea view, is kind of absurd, and at the same time so touching it almost brings tears, so maybe it’s not a bad homage after all, and probably not an accident that I would choose this day to do my annual solo disappearance act.  😻