Wanchai Market: Bugs, Bananas and Bargains

I visit my local market weekly. Luckily, that market just happens to be Wanchai Market, one of the best markets in Hong Kong. Why spend oodles of dough at Great Food Hall when you can pick up the same stuff for much less at Wanchai Market?

A few weeks ago, my partner wanted to make his “famous” ratatouille–his only dish. I wasn’t feeling well so I told him to buy the veggies he needed without me.

“Go to Wanchai Market, ” I said, “because you’ll get screwed if you go to Great Food Hall.”

“But Great Food Hall is closer,” he whined. And this on a beautiful day.

I told him to do what he wished and commented on how stupid and lazy he was. I absolutely hate getting screwed on a good deal. Not so my partner. He’ll sheepishly pay an exorbitant amount of money for something you can get much cheaper elsewhere, come home, look down at his feet and say, “Yeah, well I guess I got screwed.”

Dumbass.

So he returned home carrying a dark brown plastic bag that said Great Food Hall on it and asked me not to look at the receipt.

“There’s one born every minute.” I steamed.

Later, he confessed that he couldn’t believe how much the tomatoes were. I told him I couldn’t believe how stupid he was.

“Then why do you always go to Great Food Hall?” he demanded.

“Don’t you listen to me!? I only go there for the special stuff. Who the fuck else is going to carry corn tortillas, buffalo mozzarella and freshly prepared pesto!? Who!? Only a fucking dumbass would waste their money on those Goddamn tomatoes.”

In order to avoid a replay of that Saturday afternoon, I visit Wanchai Market every Friday afternoon. I arrive with my tan canvas bag that reads Great Food Hall ready to do business. As a vegetarian, but lover of gore flicks, I like staring at the hunks of bloody meat dangling from the metal hooks. Looking at the fish huddled in a holding tank staring out with their mouths open doesn’t make me sad, but seeing one flop around, gasping for air on the butcher block does.

I go to this one food stall for my oranges, another for my broccoli. Walk down the hallway and visit yet another vendor for my squash and peppers. Incidentally the squash here is not what we’re used to in the states. Here it’s hairy like a big, green amoeba with brown cilia. It looks like Tom Selleck if he were a green vegetable, or Chewbacca’s poo. I pay a little more for the “American” squash.

Once I’m done, I go home and Veggie Wash the hell out of everything. You see, the only bad thing about buying produce at Wanchai Market is having to wash it when you get home. You’ve got to give those apples a Silkwood shower, otherwise you’ll have a big, green amoeba with brown cilia inside of you. I once examined a cellophane-wrapped package of corn and found two bugs trying to burrow a hole inside a kernel. I don’t buy corn there anymore. I go to Great Food Hall for that.

Chinese New Year: Tacky Red Traditions

Hong Kong is currently a sea of tacky red trinkets, golden ornaments and brick-red globes. The locals are pushier than normal, the salespeople more helpful than usual. Everyone in the service sector is mustering a smile in anticipation of their upcoming “tip” or Chinese New Year appreciation gift.

Today, even the laziest doorman in my building opened the door for me when he saw me entering with flowers and several bags of produce. He managed a mangled grimace when I said thank you. Poor guy always looks like he’s passing a very hard turd when he tries to smile.

Tacky red traditions always remind me of the daruma doll in Japan. You see, the Japanese celebrate the new year by giving a hideous red doll a black eye. During the new year festivities, you buy the daruma at your local daruma vendor and color one of its ghostly-white, Little Orphan Annie eyes black. Then you place the one-eyed devil doll near the entrance of your home to collect dust for an entire year. If after twelve months, you can look back and say, “Gee, I’ve had a great year!” you then color the other eye black.

Stupid, right? What the hell are you going to do with the tiny red devil doll at the end of the year? It’s already time to buy a new doll and give it another black eye. But then my people like to stuff candy into colorful paper mache donkeys and watch as their blindfolded children then beat them to death.

I like to celebrate the traditions of my host country, so for our first full year in Tokyo, I bought a daruma doll. My partner came home to find the creepy little monster staring at him with the one eye.

“What’s this?” he asked from the foyer.

“What’s what?” I said from the living room playing a little game my partner loves to play called Catch Me if you Can.

“That red doll.”

“YOU don’t know about the daruma? It’s a Japanese tradition. I thought YOU would know.”

My partner started playing this passive-aggressive little game with me soon after we met. It’s a kind of oneupmanship in the how-clever-are-you department. I hate it, but I’m not one to lose a game.

Twelve months later, the joke was on both of us. That fucking little doll brought nothing but misery. Tears, profanity-laden tirades, anti-depressants and several broken dishes later, I chucked the damn thing down the garbage chute.

Tokyo was not New York. Tokyo was another planet. A place where passive-aggressive games were played for life and death. I kid you not. The losers are scraped off sidewalks and train tracks on a daily basis. I have since made my peace with The Land of the Rising Sun, but that year was one of the worst years of my life.

This morning, as I walked back home from my local fruit and vegetable market, sunflowers in hand, a smile on my face, I looked up at the tacky red globes and golden ornaments and thought, “I love Hong Kong.”

Tiger, you Dog

Tiger Woods could, would and did. Not once, not twice, but several times and with numerous ladies.

Now, I’m not a Tiger Woods fan for the same reason I’m not an Andy Roddick fan. Someone that intense and serious just has to be a prick in real life. And from what I’ve heard and read, Tiger is an enormous penis. Hard to talk to, difficult to read, tough to get to, he’s an intensely private man. Unless, that is, you’re a classic bimbo.

Rachel Uchitel and the other mistresses are classic bimbos in the Hollywood sense. They’re tall, long-haired, collagen-injected walking sticks. They look fake, are fake and act fake.

Last week, my Spanish conversation teacher asked me if I thought the rumors about Tiger Woods were true. I said yes. People tend to have a type. Michael Jackson preferred Latino boys, Jennifer Aniston prefers emotionally unavailable men and Tiger Woods likes “blond” bimbos. I guess that’s OK because Tiger isn’t really “black.” Remember that awful answer he gave Oprah when she asked him how he thought of himself? You ask me that question and I’ll tell you, “Brown, pink and green, Baby!”

But I digress.

This morning after my Spanish lesson, my teacher again brought up the subject of Tiger Woods. I said, “You see! I told you he did it.”

She replied that she thought Tiger might have a sickness. “He’s married, jew no, to hees wife, and zey have two daughters. Ten women in two jeers. Dats like some sickness, no?”

I smiled, sipped my cappuccino and recalled my college years. If Tiger had a sickness, then I needed to be put down back then.

Tiger is just another asshole sports god who likes to get laid. Where’s the news in that?

Carly Simon has Time for the Pain and Starbucks Lawsuit

Carly Simon is broke. Yes, broke. After losing money in unwise investments (Madoff?), and taking on too much debt, the Simon and Schuster heiress finds herself in the poor house–two of them. One a West Village townhouse, the other a beach pad on Cape Cod. We should all be that destitute.

I remember, years ago, the first time I moved to New York, when the then mayor was cracking down on rent-controlled and rent-stabilized abusers. Mia Farrow and Carly Simon cried fowl from their below-market price apartments with fabulous views of the park and hardwood floors.

“We can’t afford to live in New York now!!!” They wailed.

“Really?” I thought in the cramped living room of my illegal sublet. True, it was in Tribeca, but I had to run past the doorman on my way through the lobby. Bitchy queen loved to give me hell. Thankfully, he was Puerto Rican, so I’d just throw him something shiny or point out a studly black man and make a break for the elevators while his attention was diverted.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a big Carly Simon fan (Mia Farrow too–go rent Alice and see why). I have many of her hits and misses on my iPod. Nobody Does it Better is arguably the best Bond song ever. Really sums it up. You’re So Vain? Great song and I’m pretty sure it’s about Warren Beatty. My personal favorite is Loving You is the Right Thing to Do. Such a happy ’70s love ballad.

And while I’d love to have a Simon sighting while walking down Christopher Street, I’m not very sympathetic to her plight. She says Starbucks didn’t promote her album enough. I got news for her. Everyone just listens to whatever CD they’re hawking while sipping their lattes or while waiting in line. If you’re lucky, they’ll pick up the worn headphones and listen to the various tracks.

Poor Ms. Simon says Daddy only gave her a mere pittance, $60,000 in fact, and that she wasn’t an heiress like so many people claim. First of all, I seriously doubt that’s all she got. Secondly, she should talk to Bonnie Franklin of One Day at a Time fame because “Imagine, the price of a cup of coffee can help save a child.”

$60,000 may be a mere pittance when you’re an heiress, but if you’re black or brown and in living in some man-made hell-hole, $60,000 is a lot of dough.

Carly should just ask her ex-husband, James Taylor, for the money she needs to help keep her afloat. Maybe she’s too vain? But if she hasn’t got time for the pain, I’m sure Mr. Taylor will lend a helping hand.

Comrade Oscar the Grouch and the Sesame Street Collective

Come and play! Everything’s A-OK!!!

Harmony among the monsters and people. Neighbors looking after (and spying on) one another, Oscar the Grouch as a lovable homeless “person” living in a trashcan. Of course Sesame Street is populated by lefties and their POX News hating monsters. There is no question the program promotes fairness, tolerance and a homosexual agenda. Ernie and Burt for Christ’s sake! You even know who the bottom is in that relationship.

Can you imagine if Sesame Street had been conceived by the religious right? Conservatives? Sarah Palin!!??

First of all, it would be set in the suburbs of some second-tier Southern city. Big Bird would wear Brooks Brothers and drive an SUV. Oscar the Grouch would be his illegal Mexican gardener. Elmo would have Down Syndrome (which would explain a lot actually) and Grover would take him to church and sit righteously with him up front, basking in the glow of his selflessness while the Cookie Monster looked on in admiration and thought, “He could have had Mrs. Grover abort him, but no. He had the little guy.”

Elmo would be slobbering into a high Mrs. Grover’s Sunday best. She would be smashed on the Oxycontin she takes to deaden herself to the pain of an abusive spouse and a dead-end life. Grover drinks, you know. Beats his poor wife near and far.

Ernie and Burt would be married, but not to each other. They would exchange knowing glances at the gym, toweling off vigorously before going home to their “loving” muppets. Sure, Burt would take his own life after The Count threatened to go public with their affair. But Ernie wouldn’t be so lucky, enduring a lifetime of ice cream socials and company picnics until the day, Rolf, a drunken pianist from a visiting town, plows his sedan into Ernie’s Corolla. At least the end was quick.

No, my friends. A right-wing Sesame street would be no picnic indeed. A Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Ellen DeGeneres Demoted

I love Ellen DeGeneres. Who doesn’t? True, I love my gay gals. But Ellen ranks on top.

While Jodie was still living an open secret of suburban bliss and playing house, Ellen jumped out of the closet and said, “Yep, I’m gay.” While Lang was trolling up the bars and breaking hearts, Ellen tried to make it work publicly with that zany media whore, Heche. While Queen coyly parties with her peeps in Manhattan, Ellen takes Portia out for a night on the town in Hollywood. Let’s face it, Ellen is right up there with Etheridge when it comes to gay saints.

So I was sad to read that Ellen has followed Rosie O’Donnell’s lead and demoted herself from openly gay talk show host to one of a panel of judges. And don’t be fooled, those ladies on The View do nothing but judge. God love ‘em. Except that skinny, ultra right-wing Survivor contestant (Barbara, just fire her already. We all know you hate her from the way you look at her).

What was Ellen thinking? Going on American Idol is a lose-lose situation.

No matter how nicey nice and goofy you are, you have put yourself in the roll of judge. If you give a free pass to poor performers and do some shtick, the audience is going to deride you for not being honest. Even Paula could come down hard when necessary.

If you do say something negative about a performance and joke about it, people are going to blast you for not just being a meanie, but a meanie who pokes fun of a performer when he’s down. Your aw shucks likability is going to come off as cruel and dismissive.

Everyone in the gay community (you should see our rec center!) knew Rosie was aggressive, short-tempered and out-spoken before she had her talk show. That’s why we all rolled our eyes when the soccer mom set sat down to watch this hollow persona called Rosie. That we got the tough-talking Rosie “we” all loved when she joined The View is one thing. Ellen has never been known for being aggressive, short-tempered and out-spoken. She has nothing to gain and everything to lose by joining American Idol.

Ellen, Baby, rip up the contract and say, “I’m just playin’ guys!” Or you’re going to end up a “mean” lesbian. And mean lesbians don’t keep their day jobs.

A Nightmare in Hong Kong

First I was a late 70’s James Bond villain lounging in my serene, minimalist lair, eating grapes and marveling at the perfect symmetry of my monochromatic surroundings. Then I was a tourist in rural Portugal with a group of foreigners on what I can only guess was a tour of wineries.

We had all just bellied up to this ice cream counter/bar where we were staring at the Portuguese menus, none of us speaking a word of the local language. It bothered me that no one was taking the initiative. I mean, can’t I relax for just one second? Can’t anyone else take the lead once in a while? Especially when I’m on vacation in rural Portugal traveling alone with a bunch of European winos?

I speak Spanish, so I take everyone’s order and relate it to the pudgy boy in the red and white striped hat. Everyone’s drinking cognac or bourbon but I’m drinking a Campari and soda even though we’re all on a wine tour and it’s late at night. I’m in one of my antisocial moods, refusing to make small talk and avoiding eye contact.

When I go to pay, the pudgy boy’s mom clearly overcharges me. I smile and tell her that I believe she made a mistake. My fellow winos are lined up behind me and want to pay so that we can go. Not to be rude, I pay but study the receipt so that I can point out her error, which I do once the last foreigner has paid. But the mom refuses to return my money. Again, I ask nicely a third time (as I do in real life), but again she refuses.

This is when I get all Mexican on her ass. Mexican as in psychotic homosexual on a rampage in rural Portugal. I throw the napkin dispenser at the wall and slam my fists into the partition separating the ice cream from the customers. I kick the cheap aluminum chairs and overturn a scratched and faded table. I call her the worst names I can think of in English and Spanish, ugly cunt and puta pendeja.

I wake up, my heart racing, still pissed that I was screwed out of twenty-five U.S. dollars, my partner sleeping quietly beside me. I don’t like to tell him when I’m feeling tense or trapped or sad. He’s too busy at work to hear the rantings of a trailing partner. Hong Kong is much easier than Tokyo was, but still I feel that clawing, that pressure, that tightening. It’s as if I want someone to assure me that it–whatever it is–is going to be all right. Don’t worry be happy. Easier said than done.

Are Japanese Babies Born Quiet?

A couple of days ago, my partner and I found ourselves reading the FT and playing gin rummy at a soulless chain restaurant in the most sterile neighborhood in Hong Kong. Next to us, a small group of Japanese women were splitting a side salad and sharing a cola while they occupied the best table in the house. So Japanese. One of the women had the cutest baby I’d seen in a long time. The pudgy bundle was strapped into a stroller and outfitted in a pink-rimmed summer hat and matching sun dress. So Japanese. The baby was content to sit and do nothing, glancing about the room and smiling at anyone who caught her eye. So not Japanese.

The baby was also quiet. No screaming. No whining. No crying. No discernible baby-like behavior, except for the occasional coo or giggle. It’s as if the baby somehow knew instinctively that making a nuisance of herself would disturb the Wa, disrupt the harmony.

I was tempted to engage the table in conversation, to show off a little of my third language and bombard them with the Japanese I learned to navigate their capital city for four years. My partner gave me a look that said, “Please don’t.”

And so I didn’t. Which is fine given how much the baby seemed to like me making faces at her. It’s not hard to go from gushy gaijin who loves babies to creepy foreigner downing his second margarita.

My partner and I immediately started discussing how strange it was that Japanese babies could be so quiet while Western babies–hell, babies in general– could be such terrors. My parents couldn’t even take me to restaurants until I was 13. Seriously, by the time I knew how to use my hands, I was throwing knives and making threats like any other normal Mexican baby.

Maybe the self-imposed isolation that Japan experienced for generations isolated the Wa gene. Screaming babies were left to fend for themselves in the wild. Quiet babies were allowed to stay home and thrive. “Bad” babies died out, and the “good” ones grew up.

An American friend in Tokyo once told me that she was ushered into a special room to nurse her baby after the line she was waiting in to nurse her son grew too long. There she was, the sole Westerner among Japanese women and their hungry babies. The Japanese babies fed quietly and without incident while her baby cried, ripped at her blouse, nursed loudly, belched, and then for good measure, farted. She was mortified.

Before we left the restaurant, I lifted my empty glass and quietly toasted the bright-eyed baby. If all babies behaved like Japanese babies, I might even want one someday.

Hong Kong: Where everybody knows your name

Tokyo is Mama Cass to Hong Kong’s Karen Carpenter. Tokyo is massive, sprawling and endless. Hong Kong is sinewy, narrow and bony. Tokyo spreads out over a vast valley, its back to the bay, the mountains in the distance. Hong Kong is perched nervously between countless peaks and the harbor, the South China Sea a stones throw away.

Depending on which statistics you choose to believe, Tokyo overtook Mexico City to become the most populous city in the world a few years ago. Around 22 million people call the greater metropolitan area of Tokyo home. Hong Kong has barely seven million citizens. And it shows.

Don’t let the massive skyscrapers, gridlocked streets and bustling sidewalks fool you. Hong Kong throbs restlessly because there is nowhere left to go. The city periodically reclaims land from the sea in order to build all those glass towers and shopping centers. And while it’s true seven million people is a lot of pork fried dumplings, the city has an earlier bed time than Tokyo. When my partner and I first arrived from Japan one evening in November, I said, “Where the hell did everyone go? What kind of 28 Days Later hellhole have we moved to!?”

Expat life in Hong Kong centers around Central, the aptly named business district. The neighborhoods popular with the gweilo crowd (or expats) radiate in three directions, the fourth direction being the harbor–no one lives there. You’ll find the majority of expats living in burgeoning Sheung Wan in the west to crowded Causeway Bay in the east, and up against The Peak in the very residential Mid-levels neighborhood on top. As a whole, it’s the white, gooey center in the middle of the Twinkie.

You see friends crossing the street while you’re in back of an idling cab, acquaintances staring at a window display while you whiz by on a bus. Walk into an expat heavy restaurant, coffee shop or bar and you’ll run into every Tom, Dick and Harriet you know. “Hey! What are you guys doing here!?”

A few months after we arrived, I even ran into the only person I have ever defriended on Facebook. She still lives in Tokyo, and was with her husband and toddler when I saw her–her lazy eye laying about listlessly as usual. They were riding up the escalator, while I was riding down. The husband spoke loudly and nervously as I stared at them blankly before looking away.

The problem with a smaller community is that you have to play nice. And while I play nice and am always fair, I’m a bitch when scorned. Thankfully, the fellow gweilo and locals I’ve met here are sweet and sincere. And I’d rather have sweet and sincere than bitter and two-faced any day. Who wouldn’t? Especially when they know you by name.

A Fag’s Stag: The Straight Man

I hate the phrase fag hag. It trivializes friendships and marginalizes both the gay man and the straight woman. I haven’t heard people use it recently (granted I live on the other side of the world), so hopefully it’s fallen out of vogue, like duh or dude. Let’s hope retard and so gay go away soon too. The last thing I want to see is a gay retard saying, “Dude!” I mean, like duh. That’s so gay.

Most of my partner’s colleagues are men, as are the majority of the people we meet through his job. And, surprisingly, most of my fellow teachers in Asia have been men too. I say surprisingly because as a teacher and later a university counselor, most of my colleagues were women, gay men, or gay men who pretended to be straight so we all had to play along. Not a fun game.

Here in Asia, I’ve been thrown to the wolves, forced to make friends with straight men. It’s not that I didn’t have straight male friends back in the U.S. It’s that I tended not to have many male friends at all. Gay men make terrible friends. Think about a hyper-competitive, catty bitch who either secretly despises, or loves you and you get the picture. I’d rather not deal with the drama.

I grew up in the South. There, straight men were afraid to make friends with an openly gay guy. What would their buddies think? In New York, straight men wanted to be friends with a gay guy to up their cool factor. “Hey! Look at me hanging out with a Mary! I’m so cool.”

Traditionally, most of my closest friends were gay women. Is there drama among them? Of course. Don’t let me get started on lesbian drama. My God. You think gay men are bad. I’ve seen it from the inside. It ain’t pretty. The American military should study lesbian strategy and tactics, that way, if push comes to shove, we’ll blow our enemies away, secretly, seductively and with a venom so lethal, so toxic, they won’t know what hit them. But I digress.

Straight men are great friends to have. You never have to worry what you look like, or how you’re dressed, or what you say, or how you say it. They’re not looking for hidden meaning or searching for secret emotional treasure. My Latino chivalry goes completely out the window–no cheek kissing, hugs or “Let me get that for you.” They’re men after all. They can get it their own damn selves. Except beer. Men always buy each other beer. It’s a bonding thing I guess. Now I’m not a real beer drinker, but I learned quickly that vodka sodas don’t go down so well with the stags.

Straight men are even better when they’re single or mostly single. No wife or girlfriend to deal with. I know how this sounds. But hear me out. Women and the half of gay men in touch with their feminine side, are the mommies. We are the meter maids, the final authority, the judgment queens. We can be such a drag. Who wants mommy’s stern glare when you’re out drinking or partying with the boys? Straight, single men can be stupid all night without fearing for their lives when they get home.

I’ve learned to take it easy on my partner when he has a work thing that we both know will turn into a booze fest. I used to call him if he wasn’t home when he said he was going to be. I used to leave crap by the front door to alarm or scare him when he did finally enter, drunk and wreaking of Stella or Sapporo. I used to tell him that his breath stank like a cow shit in his mouth when he woke up. I used to say, “Coffee? Coffee? You can make that yourself. Good luck at work today. You look like shit.”

I don’t do that anymore. My stags have taught me well.