Catherine Daly
 
 

The moon is a searchlight
over the Bering Strait.
 

Asia's finger lazily points
to the outstretched land.
 

Like so many colored lights through a black velvet soji
painted by so many Chinese Starving Artists,
sold in so many Ramada Inn banquet rooms,
the approach to Kai Tak, over the harbor and through the city,
is an impossibly beautiful thing.
 

Roads and alleys look lacy.
Clouds cling to the snow-topped peak
lit pink by neon.
Little mountain -- pines poke through.
The river has only sketched its final channel.
Here -- basted --
 

The ticket counter for the A3 Airbus is everything I wanted
in Hong Kong, a ticking revolution-era fan teasing
ribbons knotted to its grille,
two ticket takers wearing missized uniforms and too-large hats
in a hot plywood box filled with dusty timetables
being blown a bit by the fan, but mostly its sound.
An inscrutable ticket.
 

The bus passes tenements darkened except for the top stories
faced with different material, added later, and shacks built on top of
    buildings.
Laundry hangs at windows.
In square windows, fans spin, cutting light.
In rectangular windows, two fans turn side by side.
 

The fans' circles negotiate squares to geomancers' octagons.
This is the Chinese past I imagined; Feng Shui's its imaginary
    science.
 

I'm staying in the Regal Hong Kong, an expensive hotel.
The lobby is new indeterminate Louis.
It takes me time in the dark to figure out the room lighting;
there's a master control panel
requiring my room key be placed in a slot by the door.
I say, "Bond, James Bond," and turn on Cantonese MTV.
 

I have a jacuzzi, a glassed-in shower, and more sundries
in purple glossy boxes stamped with gold
than I've seen before.  I have special Q-Tips
(I think the generic name is cotton swabs,
but I wouldn't know what cotton swabs were
unless I saw "Q-Tips" near the phrase).
Still, this is four stars, not five;
there's no dry towel in reach of the shower.
 

South China Morning Post
 

I've gotten a carefully-worded English Chinese paper.
Poetry listings.  There has been a red tide.
I know of the South China Morning Post from Corporate Information
Systems Management:  Text and Cases, which reprinted articles
about the extreme slowness
of Hong Kong harbor's adoption of Electronic Data Interchange.
"Hong Kong lacked a centralised body…"
and China wanted Chinese-language EDI.
Banks went ahead and made their own systems.
 

Money
 

    money was on parade and money was talking

        David Bromige, "The Harbormaster of Hong Kong"
 

Bank appearance is more important than it might seem,
even if you know millions of dollars are spent on
their "wind and water" design.
 

The currency is drawn from multiple banks.
Each bill has a picture of the bank it's drawn from.
You can collect a set by
withdrawing money from different bank ATMs.
 

Red wedding dresses are so embroidered with gold and silver
they cease to be red, yet they must be red for good luck,
metallic for prosperity.
 

Alleys
 

In the alleys, life is allowed to take place without gloss,
but is still commerce. Fish is cleaned.
A battered or bent chair sits outside an open screen door.
 

Scaffolds are bamboo and covered
with striped red, white, and blue plastic cloth,
the same stuff used for cheap tote bags.
Makeshift plastic awnings on the scaffolds prevent things
from falling into the alleys:  paint chips, building bricks,
 

laundry which, as it has dried,
has grown lighter and slips
off its hangers,
 

drips from watered houseplants,
from air conditioners working overtime.
I saw a hose draining an air conditioner leading to a plastic bucket
where there swam fish.
 

Street of Stationers
 

Overcrowding and the smallest thing is refined like poetry.
 

Shop windows filled with wedding invitations,
traditional red and gold,
or modern, purple, cartoons, yellow, lacy,
 

devastatingly unlike blue-bound Crane's books
with fusty engraving and one bearable Georgian pineapple or bee
slipped in like an idea or a suitable past.
 

Everything associated with weddings costs more,
even if that's not the reason you want it.
 

This is not far from the English island around the governor's house,
a SoHo-like area surrounding the Press Club, gwilo restaurants,
    Anglican church,
at the base of the mid-levels.
 

At the army barracks, army uniforms hang out the windows.
 

Everyone who really reads the South China Morning Post
knows the poetry reading's not on.
The bankers not in a "bit of home" pub
but a sleek art bar sit smoking,
rows of empty beer bottles or pint glasses before them.
 

The Fong Lee shrine is in the nearby fabric district.
Shops carry European-style home decorating fabrics
with intense color -- citron, neon blue -- modern patterns
twisted into the same indeterminate Louis swags and valances in the
    Regal,
except those are wild pastels, and so revealed to be dated
or more reserved than I had believed.
 

Any boards from a construction site would do
for an American calligraphy hanging;
we don't know what they say; "Hard Hats" might be great.
 

The abandoned cottage at the Peak Tram
is like the house under the abandoned roller coaster at Coney Island.
The Peak Tram is like Angel's Flight, except the mall
at the top is more interesting, though museumless.
 

There is a temperature difference between classes.
Who lives up the Peak (cooler) and air conditioned.
 

Trip to Stanley Market
 

On Saturday, Philippine maids near Exchange Square,
inside the Star Ferry Terminal,
lay down sheets or newspapers anywhere,
near the potted ficus placed under the overpasses
to take away the "totally paved" aura of the totally paved areas.
 

This is the only public space.
They picnic, sell Philippine food and small fashion items
to each other for extra cash.
 

A red umbrella shields the bride.
The umbrella opening symbolizes
her bringing descendants to the groom's family.
What about the rain?
 

A truckload of live pigs goes over the roadway.
It begins to drizzle.  I get on a bus to Stanley.
 

Scarves
 

The silk is patterned with a faux Hermes motif
for the western taste
and the shop girls are displeased I am displeased.
 

The traditional patterns are in new variegated browns.
They were made in Italy on polyester.  They are on sale.
I expect their failure will be ascribed to pattern,
not color or fabric or place of manufacture.
 

Stanley is a refuge of Cantonese surfers and Australian
    banker-surfers.
The view on the way to Stanley is first high-rise cemetery,
then paved hillsides with openings in the concrete for trees,
after that an amusement park on the opposite hillside
so steep the skyway seems practical.
 

In Stanley, fisherman's cottages are ten feet from the bay,
have half-barrel tile roofs, two rooms.
An older, barefoot man is standing outside one selling pedicure
    products
from The Body Shop on a tin tv tray, but inside --
computers, Windows 98.
 

China is not restocking the fish after the red tide.
These fisherman must surely go soon.
 

The fishermen, when they stopped fishing,
put their boats on stilts and lived in them, founding Hong Kong.
 

Easter Monday in Macau
 

Macau seems everything Hong Kong may have once been,
tropical colonial architecture, crumbling plaster,
faded green paint, rusted painted-metal signs,
clear, round marquee lights, mostly busted,
the smell of burning oil and joss sticks.
Spanish Moss thick and long like an affectation.
The same bougainvillea, sago palm, Indian paintbrush as California.
 

At the shrines you can buy paper anything
to burn:  paper shoes,
paper toilette sets (combs and hand mirrors and barrettes in gold foil
    paper).
These sets of burnable items are like cheap plastic toys
little girls beg in the supermarket -- I begged for them --
and for sarcastic young women to exchange.
I got an engagement set when I got engaged.
 

I would like a paper scarf
with a traditional Chinese brocade pattern,
so light it would float as it burned
 

into the water, so polluted and filled with tankers
it would flash, afire to Canton.
 

The alleys look like a clean Calcutta or maybe just New Delhi.
Here is meats' reek.
Tiny Chinese grandmothers push freight on trolleys
or carry babies tied to them with sheets.
 

Shark Fin
 

Nothing particular I'm looking for:  well, retrospection, but where?
The stands and stores have nothing I want or dare:
mystery items in glass apothecary jars,
birds' nests,
 

strong smell of ammonia near birds' nest stores.
The most valuable are oldest and complete.
Then new whole ones vs. partial old ones.
Old ones are translucent and darker brown.
 
 

Freshly scalded shark fin, scraped and skinned in the alleys,
restaurants consisting of two crates and a board,
a pot of soup on a hot plate,
next to hip little cafes just off the main square,
something drying in uncovered trays
next to a new VW minivan.
 

Traditional wedding banquet foods:
Shark's Fin Soup indicates wealth because it is expensive.
Birds' Nest Soup.
 

In two room, two floor houses,
Girls sit next to rattling fans on cot beds
on damp, not clean tile floors
filing their nails by the light of a single florescent tube.
 

A beer in an Art Nouveau outdoor café.
Second beer?  Better not, alone in Macau.
Every Euro in town seems to pass on the way to the post office.
 

I see a bordello, bored teenagers milling around a dingy hotel lobby.
Two buildings from the Lonely Planet guide:
one yellow, one ochre, next to each other.
The same colors as our living room walls.
 

What makes these scenes Chinese?  They are everywhere.
I go to Instituto Portugues do Oriente.
There are a few English books.  I buy one with "Pessoa" on it.
The cover is ochre, like the building on the square.
 

I hop on a bus and a Cantonese cover of "My Way" is playing.
I end up at the Temple of AMA, goddess of fishermen.
There's the hum of a fan?  A generator for the halogen lights?
Chanting's another low hum.
Devout-seeming tourists and even beggars are chanting.
 

Old temple ladies are keeping sandalwood incense burning.
A disused bell and drum are above an empty incense crate.
A boat model in a corner seems an afterthought.
Two shrines are shaped like a boat in cross-section.
 

I'm amazed the temple is real,
despite the incense ladies cadging for cash.
They are doing the work of this shrine.
 

I mess up ferry return, so
take all the buses with a ferry terminal terminus
and end up at a Luis de Camoes memorial.
 

Casa Garden Fundacao Oriente
Camoes Grotto and Garden
 

Sonnet to Macao
Dr. Bowring
poems carved in stone --
OS LUSIADAS
    Canto #1
    As Armas e os Baroes
        assina la dos
    Que da occidental praye
        lusitana
 

Mangroves around the shrine, tropical and perfect,
look like multiple trees, but from the same roots.
 

The fortunetellers outside the park pack up at sundown.
They are thinking about packing up.
One Anglo busies himself being a writer in exile.
 

I find something with Camoes in the title in my new book.
 

It starts, "You can steal all that's mine" and ends,
 

    So that other thieves, just
    like you, can kneel and place flowers on my tomb.

         Jorge de Sena, "Camoes Addresses His Contemporaries"
 

He's not buried here.
I go across the street to buy some bottled water.
The woman I think would rather have Hong Kong money
than the Macavian stuff.
Finally, someone who doesn't speak English.
She writes the price on a piece of paper.
 

Street frontage is commercial -- even in back alleys.
Red-embroidered sheets and blankets.
 

About five hours to go and I'm near the ferry terminal's Italian
    restaurant.
I didn't see any of the much-ballyhooed Portuguese restaurants.
No stereotypical American Italian restaurants like this one
have we seen in LA.  Miceli's, I know.  I haven't been there.
We thought it was the distance from Italy.
 

I wonder how amazingly romantic it might be to live here.
I managed living with decay longer than expected, but
sketchy hot water supply, mosquitoes, and rodents did me in.
Peeling paint peels with reason.
Books molder exactly where you touch them.
It's urban camping under that mosquito net.
Actually, I slept on a table
with mouse traps and boric acid around it in a ring
and boiling water in a pan 24 x 7,
I suppose my version of the burning ring of fire.
 

This is possibly the worst red wine I have ever attempted to drink.
It's like bitter port.  Well, I guess that would be appropriate.
 

The Chinese border seemed cheerful
painted yellow with postmodern red and blue grids.
Everyone in line wore a suit to seem prosperous already.
 

At high rise apartments overlooking the border, tenants
can enclose balconies or put up awnings, anything
so long as in primary colors.  Down along the streets,
scooter repair garages, dim not-even delis, not much light at all.
 

    Not light

    but paint.  The word spoken.
    For, the experience.  The port,

    the restaurant, they sat in,
    the frontier.  The ferry, late.

    As usual.

        David Bromige, "Couplets"
 

The other cases in  Corporate Information Systems Management
are slightly unfamiliar, with disguised locations.
Maybe they're Macau, not China,
filmed in Vancouver, not New York.
The motor pool is like that:
undisguised details seem surreal,
but they might just seem second or third rate
with changed names.
 

Back in Hong Kong
 

There was a half-world of half anything, creole.  Again, New Orleans.
 

The same dollar stores as anywhere
but with bin food weighed in scales:  dried shrimp,
misshapen fruit and vegetables past their prime.
 

Shrines lined with tinfoil and one red Christmas bulb.
Red, stacked wedding gift boxes.
 

Heard these outdoor slaughterhouses in the city
are because Cantonese love very fresh food.
In the market are unearthed eggs,
black scraped off one side in stripes.
 

Hong Kong's constant development means wading through construction zones, rebar suppliers, chickens, uncovered food in bins, cement mixers.
 

Crickets seem to sound different.
Maybe it's so many plastic "cricket sound" boxes.
Fans in temples, fans everywhere,
is it what the blades do to words?
 

There's a Shark Fin column in the English Yellow Pages.
It seems to be a texture food, like an al dente noodle.
 

    .. shapes less nameable

    Coastlines, continents
    Cullenders, jellyfish

        David Bromige, "And again"
 

These hanging sandalwood incense spirals
(they untwist into cones, the way a mosquito coil might)
hanging from the ceiling are astronomical in SoHo.
You need them if you buy new Asian furniture
made of unseasoned wood stained to look old,
because the furniture smells of mothballs and mold.
 

Chungking Mansions
 

Residents own the exterior of apartments,
can put up their own signs, paint, etc.
Several groups of rooms establish a guest house identity,
paint a sign on the outside.
Chungking Mansions is turning into a low rent commercial building,
room by room, like the hotel above Al's Bar in LA.
 

My expectations were nostalgia for earlier Chinese westernization,
goods produced for western markets.
 

Chinese Room
 

It is a room of a 30's Shanghai restaurant
I can't remember.  It never existed.
 

It's five o'clock as the sun starts to cross
the white linen stained since noon,
the black-and-white tile floor.
The first tray of cocktails arrives, since
our rules have been decoded outside the room.
 

Searle's Chinese Room experiment
involves you pretending to be a computer.
You don't know Chinese.
You are given instructions
and a sheet of Chinese writing.
 

Sale and kidnapping of Chinese girls a recognised custom,
not illegal until 1929.
 

    but in the way a wordswerve could turn a century's prose for a
        second or two away
    from history first from property then ideas then property as idea
        then idea as property

        Joan Retallack, "The Woman in the Chinese Room"
 

There IS a harbormaster of Hong Kong.
 

Farming is being eliminated with subsidy elimination.
Hong Kong will be more like Shanghai under the Chinese.
The distinction between city and country will be clearer.
The city will not be self-sufficient.
Deliberate discontinuity or
failure to fund a falsely continuous history
-- including the all-English history museum in the Kowloon Central Park --
 

Brides follow Western custom and wear white gowns for the
    ceremony.
They change into a red wedding dress for the meal.
The mysterious red Chinese wedding dress --
this time with red sequined phoenixes and white sequined dragons.
 

Directions for lining up
in the grocery store at rush hour.
 

In a Japanese department store,
a fashion shoot from my corner in LA --
Johnnie's, once the Times Square Diner,
across from the Petersen Auto Museum, which is
only for little boys.
 

The diner chaser lights are only on for shoots, as it's closed at night.
 

In City of Quartz, in a picture, a caption claims
its billboard is integral, structural,
but it's not, it's on a separate post; its post is outside the diner
    wall (not shown in picture)
 

near Sun and Moon
 

-- now with Milla Jovavich.
 

A Disney little mermaid toy in the duty free shop with no legs
has a plastic wedding dress.  It's a squeaky toy, a dog's chew toy.
 
 
 
 
 

Bibliography
 

Bromige, David.  Davis, The Harbormaster of Hong Kong, Los Angeles: Sun &
Moon, 1993. http://www.sonic.net/layne/bromige.html

Davis, Mike.  City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles,
The Haymarket Series. London and New York: Verso, 1990.

Retallack, Joan.  How To Do Things With Words, Los Angeles: Sun &
Moon, 1998. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/retallack

Zenith, Richard, Trans., Ed., Portuguese Poetry After Pessoa, Lisbon:
Contexto.