I’m a-walking down Nathan Road with a strut in my legs like I’m dancing, the crowds thick as steam off the paving. Cars are pressed cheek to cheek and blowing fury and the neon billboards stretch into the middle of the road ends touching and bouncing fire red and orange; and I’m seeing all this on my toes, alive with the noise rattling in my ears, the clatter of kettle drums and disco beats, and high pitched screams like noodle sucks and slurps and the slice of a gaggling chicken throat.
Tag Archives: East Asia
བཅུ་གསུམ་. No Limits
It would be a long bus journey from Lijiang to get there and it was not clear where I would stay once I was there.
The guidebooks did not show anything, but it was not certain why it was off-limits. Perhaps it was a route, albeit circuitous to Tibet. Perhaps it was because the society who lived there was matriarchal.
Regardless, I had been spending more time with minority groups, both in Burma and Thailand, and this seemed like a new diversion from the Mao-fashioned Han Chinese to see some colour.
This time, with a Tibetan promise and the mother focus there was an added edge.
“So how can I get there?” I asked.
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十四. The Mao Cap
We’d gone to Dali, to a market on the lake, but Ben had fallen ill with dysentery so we hadn’t been able to stay long. In fact it had gotten so bad that we had to get him to Xichang to find help. I too, had run up a fever after we’d been caught on the hills in the rain with only our T-shirts… It was only Darius who was OK.
じゅうろく. One Night in Shibuya
The countdown had begun; music span from the speakers, clubbers jumped up, arms in the air, shouted each number, thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven, music beating each second with its rhythm. Alone in a corner, slumped against the wall, thinking, I was trying to remember the year that was nearly over. How apt it was to be single, now, just as I had been when it had begun.