Nine Months of Servitude: Chapter Two
So here I was, a mother’s helper, “landed” in someone else’s reality, since we’re talking sailing (or I was last post); someone ELSE’S being the operative phrase for the next nine months. A trip to Hong Kong was imminent, as I said. It was actually a business trip, just as the European tour reward at the end of a year’s service was an employment perk offered through the family business. My visa and inoculations were hustled through; I already had a passport since I had traveled to Ghana four years before. The trip had a distinct purpose; Dori was scoping out the Excelsior Hotel for the travel agency.
The hotel was featured in the 1978 Pink Panther film, Revenge of the Pink Panther. A blog on the matter here. The year I traveled is unforgettable in my mind, for we landed in Hong Kong on the afternoon of my 21st birthday; March 7, 1976. Apparently The Excelsior had only been open for 3 years at that time. The whole trip was a super weird experience, for a number of reasons. The main one was probably that I was newly a servant, which was a stretch from my fairly wild life to date. And, in stark contrast to my servant status, we were treated like royalty, since the hotel was sucking up to Dori.
Of course the royal treatment had its limits where I was concerned. But both Dori and I had rooms with chocolates, and roses, and bougie body care products, minibar (don’t recall if it was free,or if I used it), and refrigerator with drinks, all quite posh and absolutely unprecedented in my life experience. The birthday stunner was, that after we got cleaned up, we crossed the street to Victoria Harbor and boarded the hotel’s party boat. Not sure how we would have described it to Mark, but it was a practical sort of yacht, without sails. The boat’s main deck had been loaded up with a couple long buffet tables of high class dishes. The lineup also included a coffee bar, chilled champagne, and the Excelsior hotel management.
In proper Asian style, introductions were made, visions were shared, and champagne was raised in hopes of profitable business deals. The hotel kitchen was excellent; the establishment was four star in its day. Actually there were several restaurants in the hotel. The dishes on the boat buffet tables were approximately half Western and half Chinese, from dim sum and cashew-bedecked Kung Pao Chicken (my fave) to duck a l’orange and petit fours, champagne to excellent teas.
We were not being wined and dined only; we were given a tour of the harbor. Though our boat sported no masts, Chinese junks were still roaming about with their incredibly beautiful rigging, and I was transported to the fairy tales of my childhood, specifically a Golden Books collection (image above) (recommended). There were communities of boat people in the harbor; a cultural oddity to an American. The boat people’s lives were on display, open to anyone’s observation, stunningly different in that regard from my Westernized lifestyle. We passed rows and rows of them, tied up to wharves, their ragged laundry waving in the wind, their lives so humble, such stark contrast to what I considered to be my birthday party.
The beauty of the Chinese junk in Hong Kong was apparently being recorded at the time by a Scottish photographer named Keith Macgregor. Here is a Wall Street International Magazine article on the subject. The boats in the article headline photo above are a junk under full sail, and likely a ferry in the back. Probably Victoria Harbor. Probably the Star Ferry.
If you give the article a look see you will notice the writer says “It was not a place for the faint-hearted”. I suppose I would concur. For one item in line with the subject of Diary of a Chambermaid that prefaced this little memoir exercise, Hong Kong of the day was full of prostitution, like an island whore house, seemingly. On the bedside tables, conveniently located next to the phone, was not a municipal phone book, not a Gideon’s Bible, but a call girl listing. It was actually of a size that approached a bible, if it were just the New Testament. Which is kinda fun, I guess. In the sarcastic sense.
All things considered, I did resort to perusing the pages of this prostitute tome more than once, out of fascination and/or sheer boredom. The hardcover whore menu was obviously de rigueur for high class Hong Kong hotels, since neither Dori (whose room was also accessorized this way) nor I would be very likely to need prostitute services. It seemingly fit into the same category as towels and telephones. It certainly was not considered that we, as women, might find it at all offensive, or someone would have removed it, since butts (technically only one, but by proxy a number of them) were being summarily kissed. But then again, the hotel bedstand Gideon’s Bible isn’t necessarily a considered choice for hotel reading material in regards to social sensitivity, either. Or isn’t any more.
A cogent matter for women learned from the call girl book was that here in 1976 Hong Kong, blondes (really just white women) were worth a lot more in the sex department than Asian women. Ninety percent or more of the prostitutes were Asian, but there was a section of Caucasian ladies whose price superseded the Asians by a very noticeable margin. They commanded more room on a page; they were like the fancy banana splits on an ice cream parlor menu, while the Asian women were just yummy cones, double dip or sprinkles notwithstanding.
As I remember it, the top call girls were all blonde. I am sure they were not all BORN blonde. But, just as some Japanese guys find women wearing school uniforms hot, or (as I proposed in the last post with Diary of a Chambermaid)) guys might be excited by domestic help, men in Hong Kong apparently prized blondes. This was in part because, in case you didn’t guess, many of the men who would be calling were of European descent, and/or what we in my culture call white.
Hong Kong was then (probably still is, I don’t know) an international trade mecca. It was duty free; can’t easily verify if it still is. It was British property when I was there. Anyway, lots of guys staying at The Excelsior were there for business purposes. Many were temporary residents, there for a few months, until the deal was closed, or for a year or two to see it get off the ground. And they might have women at home, but then again, maybe not.
To extend this matter of the bedside prostitute directory, part of the Hong Kong excitement which might cause metaphorical fainting was its being commercial in a crazy sense (prostitution is, of course, commercialized sexual activity). It was like the market in a sci-fi film, where telepathic people come from across the galaxy on space ships to sell their spherical healing light-emitting rainbow plant-bots right next to the stall of a grunting blood-encrusted one-eyed butcher of long-haired mammoth pigs.
On the one hand, you had a stunning crapload of party-party neon, disco bars, and the latest pop fashion. Hong Kong manufactured a huge percentage of American mid-to-upper-middle-class trendy clothing in their sweat shops, where Asian whores probably labored by day (that is a just a fact, not part of my positive side), and some of that trendy merch was available at stores duty free and cheap as heck. You had some of the most famous tailors in the world, beautiful people and various other high rollers, and places like The Excelsior to accommodate them.
On the other hand were the shops with creepy brown withered duck parts hanging in the window, rude screechy proprietors thereof, people spitting all over the place, lame beggars, street sweepers that dreamed of having a shop to screech in, rickshaws that were obvious relics of slavery, and the otherwise poverty-stricken and desperate. And let’s not forget the whore directory. Which in itself could have inspired a good white person faint under the right conditions, such as an imaginary meeting between the directory and Queen Victoria, for whom the harbor was named. But actually she seems to have been very hip.
I saw less of Hong Kong than you might imagine; but perhaps not if you have ever been a mother’s helper. Or any caretaker of small children, for that matter. For the first few days, Dori and I and the children all went a-voyaging, mostly in the ‘hood. There were the local streets that transformed into instant markets from dawn to dinner; vendors lining the sidewalks, hawking their respective wares. And behind them, the brick-and-mortar shops as we have come to call them, with incense and curios and windows hung with desiccated duck parts and cranky old ladies and all.
Being a consummate hedonist, all I recall about street shopping is going to a dim sum restaurant a number of times. Dim sum being a cosmic situation where you point to something delicious obviously made quite recently, and then you get to eat it right away. It was sort of like an Asian-themed live vending machine with a foreign language sound track, devoid of phlegm and screeching.
I was also more than stunned, actually permanently flabbergasted, by a craft museum that was ideologically socialistic. I went there on my own. It featured Chinese (a designation many were forced to accept) traditional crafts. There were whole floors featuring amazingly intricate paper cutting, floors featuring three dimensional “paintings” made of jade and other semiprecious stone, floors of wood carving, of silk embroidered hangings, of pottery, porcelain and otherwise. And much more, a word that can’t possibly do justice. I bought a length of dragon-themed brocade silk of green and gold from the museum shop with most of my monetary resources, the only purchase I recall making on the trip. I still have some of this precious purchase in my fabric stash. A bit on a Hong Kong lantern master here.
I also recall going to a zoo, where the flamingos were as brilliant as any black light poster I had drooled in front of while tripping on acid. However, about four days into the stay, the three year old boy, I’ll call him Sam, lost a shoe. From that day on, according to motherly dictate, Sam could not venture forth outside the hotel. And, until the sun set on the China Sea (that’s made up, I don’t want to research what the sea is really called in English, or Han, or Taiwanese for that matter), and Dori took over Sam’s care, neither could I. This was before the days of the folding stroller, for one thing. Technology changes lives.
Sam and I then spent our days like Madeleine in Paris, roaming the many floors of the hotel, passing the various bars and shops. He oblivious in his little white cotton socks, me spending the hours teaching him to speak English and planning the one hasty cappuccino at the hotel coffee shop, like a convict ruminating on what they would do when they exercised in the prison yard.
Believe me, I wondered why Dori did not promptly buy him a pair of shoes; I am sure I even alluded to the possibility, since the house arrest situation was driving me bonkers. But as a new hire, on the other side of the world from my peeps and all, I was exceeding insecure and anxious. There were many, many shoes for sale; we were not stationed at a desert oasis where folks typically went barefoot. But Dori never did buy him a pair that I remember. Mine was not to wonder why. Perhaps she knew where her advantages lay. I don’t think preschool was her favorite age.
The matter of not enough white women did affect my visit, since I am indeed white, and at the time, even somewhat blonde. Dori kept telling me that men were asking about me, the hotel management dudes. “Oh, so-and-so asked me if you might be interested in such-and-such.” She was no dummy, and we both knew the hotel was looking for a contract, so we assumed that if I dated, it would be done discreetly, and in good taste.
Well we were wrong. The first date I went on, with a British guy, was a date rape. He took me to dinner, and then was supposedly taking me back to the hotel, but things outside the car window started looking unfamiliar. I inquired politely, politeness being perhaps a drawback in such situations, but one never knows if the guy is a crazy rapist with a gun or something. It turned out he was taking me to his apartment. Of course I said, politely, that I needed to get back to the hotel, but no dice. He just really really wanted to show me his etchings. Or make me pay for my expensive dinner. That last is called subtext.
Once at his apartment he followed through on the plan any idiot knew he had. Though I kept protesting, he seemed to think he was an amateur actor in a film that was a cross between a porn flick and a 40’s British drawing room romance. “Daaahling. Oh, Daaahling!” he kept saying in wildly extravagant fashion, as he jumped me persistently, covering me with yucky predator smooches. If I wanted to get a ride back to the hotel, guess what was required. The “Oh, Daaaahling!” was really loud at the end. Not the first or last of those dates I endured.
I am pretty sure he did not keep his degrading conquest to himself; he probably thought he was a pretty smooth operator, and let certain people know of his prowess, but who knows. He is one of a cadre of wonderful men who one by one disabused me of any romantic notions I once might have held about a number of things, including film-associated items, such as being addressed as “darling”. Especially with a British accent. But who the f**k else says that, anyway. Did Ashley say it in Gone With the Wind? Well he was a British actor.
I also went on a date the night before we all left, shod or no, for Boston, USA. This date was with a Japanese manager, owner of such a beautiful face. There were the usual dinner and drinks, and then we drove to an overlook of the harbor and made out in his car; he was a good kisser. He made a point of being the opposite of the Brit; gentle and respectful, never pushy. That was wonderful in itself. Maybe the management dudes heard the Brit bragging and felt sorry for me, so they voted my Japanese date as most likely to redeem their collective reputation.
He handed me a box cradling a tiny jade frog pendant. “In my culture, the jade frog means good luck and abundance”, he told me. For a first and last date, how touching. I thought to myself for days, of course, what if I actually married this gentle man and escaped from my servitude, to Asian shores? I put the frog-prince on a chain over my newly twenty-one-year-old heart, and we held hands while we watched the moon arc in imperceptible increments over Victoria Harbor. I have since lost the pendant, but the sweetness remains.
