Wednesday 16 September: Ocean Park

If life ever affords me the opportunity to find out, I hope the experience of drinking a glass of Louis Roederer Cristal champagne is not the relative let down that Dom Perignon was last year. Cristal was created at the behest of a Russian tsar. We also have some 18th century tsar to thank for the notion that food is served in distinct courses. Eating with family tonight in a Shanghaiese restaurant in Aberdeen, or last night’s hot pot meal at the MILs with our extended family remind me that Chinese, and maybe other cultures don’t think of food like that. The western way has an aspect of selfishness to it. In a restaurant you order dish for yourself that satisfies your wants. In Chinese cuisine it is a fundamentally social discussion about ordering a selection of dishes that balances the needs of everyone, with balance of food composition. I prefer it for its selflessness and the fact it is a minor yet pleasant act of social binding and sharing of experience.

It is one of the very many things I like about Chinese culture and Chinese culture in Hong Kong. For all the tourist joy of Star Ferry, the cable car up to the Peak, it is the little ordinary things taken for granted here that I enjoy greatly. It would be wrong to take my previous writing as meaning I am critical or disparaging about HK and its people. I prefer to think I am critiquing it, and invariably in doing so I bring my western values with it. I love the neighbours opening their doors in the morning and letting us here their caged birds singing delightfully. The elderly doing tai chi as a communal act downstairs in the forecourt of the apartment block. Going swimming with my father-in-law and Mr & Mrs Yao at Repulse Bay at the ludicrously early time of 5:30am, the bay being full of locals already, some singing at the top of their voices while waist high in water (they believe it is therapeutic). My father-in-law practising his calligraphy. The throngs of elderly people outside HSBC at 10am and 3:30pm in Wah Kwai to catch the stock market open and close so they can get their day trades in. The sheer unreserved friendliness of people, especially to young children. It is said that you can judge how good a society by how it treats its children. In Hong Kong they are treated very well.

Coffee Darling?
“It is because of coffee?” I asked. “Yes” said Pat.

And so we decided not to get breakfast somewhere convenient and quick like Café de Coral and instead venture up to the MIL’s apartment where the stove-top espresso maker was. I’d been hoping to avoid going to the apartment, for we had all agreed that we were in a hurry. We were going to take Indigo to Ocean Park Theme Park and we needed all the time we could get. My experience was that as soon as we ended up in the MIL’s minutes rapidly into hours. I was used to being in the flat for two hours though it was not planned.

Having established the principle of ‘coffee and go’ we ventured to the MIL’s only a couple of minutes away.

Two hours later we left. Ah-Wen was in but MIL wasn’t, she was at the doctor’s for an appointment delayed due to the typhoon. And now they all wanted to go to Ocean Park. So we waited. I wasn’t annoyed, it is what I’ve come to expect. My visits to Hong Kong go at a different heartbeat to elsewhere and it is I that has to change to accommodate it.

“I warn you” said Pat “it [Ocean Park] is full of Mainlanders.”

It is worth taking a while to analyse this sentence and its foundations.

The analysis is by way of a story that starts with the camillia plant – or at least one of the 30 or so species of it better known as tea. Europeans loved it and it was only known to exist in central China. The Europeans had an insatiable appetite for tea and by the time it had passed through the Chinese middlemen and had been transported it cost a lot. The Europeans were unable to sell much to the Chinese in return. So the Europeans were haemorrhaging money. Rather than observing and considering their next move and learning to find nice things that the Chinese wanted they simply excused themselves by concluding that China was ‘closed’. Any open-minded reading of its history would suggest the total opposite. It is a diabolic lie and the consequences of that conclusion more diabolical still. The west shoved opium in China’s way to make enough money to pay for the tea, and when China resisted being drugged the west took its land instead. One day in the middle of the 19th century when a Dutch botanist turned up in Calcutta with a mystery plant sample he found in northern India all were surprised to discover it was tea – growing wild in India (Indians didn’t drink tea at this point). The colonial British were very happy. They didn’t have to buy tea from the Chinese anymore as they could plant it in their colonial lands. But they could still sell opium to the Chinese. The Chinese treasury collapsed with the one sided exchange and China descended into chaos. End product? Down the line a Communist China and a little enclave of British colonialism called Hong Kong. Admittedly, if you were in that enclave and on the other side of that nearby border you had the Cultural Revolution busily killing 70 million of its own people then you too would feel a little insular and distrustful of what was on the other side.

When Pat left university she worked in Hong Kong as an import/export agent. This involved trips to factories in Guandong Province. Her stories aren’t nice, and are echoed by those from those from her friends.

Ocean Park was indeed full of Mainlanders. Unsurprisingly, the world did not end, and anyone we met were ordinary human beings like you or I. I was glad I didn’t hear anyone that spoke Mandarin with a Beijing accent, as it sounds painful to my ears.

Ocean Park was good fun. There’s a fund ride portion and a zoo/animal show portion. We did animals first. The pandas – both the black and white kind, but also the red panda kind were their. While having reservations about whether they should be in zoos, it was totally amazing to see them. However, I suspect cultural differences affected reactions to the sea lion show, with the westerners in the audience including myself thinking the sea lion was totally degraded. The non-westerners had different notions. I’m not being critical of the non-westerners here. I suspect that if I really analysed my notions on the matter, deconstructed them and the like, they would probably be a mass of contradictory bunk. So I politely clapped at the end to, though I didn’t really enjoy it.

After lunch I reaffirmed my relationship with my testicles.

I’m really quite partial to my testicles. They are mine and are my only pair. I very much prefer them to be 1. attached to my body, and 2. going in the same direction as the rest of my body. Theme park rides challenge the second of those principles and consequently I’ve been suspicious of them all my life.

I did a few, and praised God that Indigo was too young to get on the triple 360 degree turning rollercoaster. I’m partial to the contents of my stomach too.