TODAY in HONG KONG I appreciate that there is a lot of "china" here too, and this is what makes Hong Kong Hong Kong. My street is lined with elderly people selling who knows what: fish for your aquarium, aluminum hand-pounded into trays, dried snakes and puffer fish turned inside out (really!), clothes from someone's closet… sometimes you can find them selling knick-knacks with pictures of the royal family on them! One street over is the open air vegetable and fruit market and perpendicularly they sell meat, fish still jumping around. The fish monger keeps up his constant call for customers “YU” “FISH.” He has some big fish heads there- they are still gasping for air, slowly closing and opening, although there is no body to breathe life into!
On the corner is a famous, very old (been there forever) Chinese medicine shop with its skinny patron looking out at you wondering why you're looking at him! And amongst the chi-chi restaurants you can find the best wonton noodle place, or a place famous for its Beijing style dumplings, or a noodle shop that has been there forever with the same décor and maybe some of the same staff! And of course there is the famous, very old, been-there-forever tea house with a line out the front door. They are waiting to seat themselves at one of the ever bustling noisy tables to eat old-fashioned dim sum. On several corners you can get a cup of medicinal tea for 50 cents. And on any street at any given time you can see skinny old men or unkempt old women or sinewy young guys pushing carts laden down with who knows what, waiting patiently for impatient cars to push by, people to cross the street, an opening so that they can swing the cart around the corner. One evening I saw an old woman pushing such a cart across the road, head down, full force of her body behind the cart, only to have to stop to let the red taxis and the black Mercedes go by before she could make that final push up and over the hump of the street.
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