Life and the Village Banana

I live in a village. It is and is not what you might imagine. Villages in Hong Kong (and China, I'm sure) are small micro-communities. Essentially, a small bunch of village houses built on a plot of land in the middle of nowhere. Houses, apartments, and larger "apartments" that could be considered condos are all called "village houses" when they are located in villages. Regardless of what kind, they almost always have their own individual courtyards. These can be either enclosed with a short fence and gated door or a low cement "wall" (rarely over a few feet tall) with an opening through which to walk. If it were not for these walls, you wouldn't be able to tell where one neighbor's courtyard ends and another neighbor's begins. Thanks to over population and development, most villages now are fairly accessible; they're located near major roads, have their own bus stops, and even have parking spaces for those villagers that have cars. It is a scant 10 minute bike ride from my village to the nearest McDonald's.

Having grown up in modern, middle-class, suburban America, I find myself quite out-of-sorts even just saying the words "I live in a village." For me, the word "village" conjures up images of chickens running about (with their necks wagging to and fro in that strange way that chickens walk), straw thatched roofs, dried meats hung up to cure, and bare-footed children fetching water from the well with wooden buckets. At least, this is what I imagine people think when I tell them where I live. Often, I expect them to compliment me on having discovered the sun blocking advantages of Oakleys over wide-brimmed straw hats.

For me, village life is an amusing juxtaposition of old vs. new. Some of my neighbors don't have front doors. At least, it seems that way. They almost never shut their doors except on the coldest winter days or during the heaviest rains. So I get a short glimpse into their lives whenever I walk past. An old man watches a DVD on a big screen television. His living room floor is cement, and looks just as dirty as a busy sidewalk. His wife, an old granny with skin as brown and dry as parchment, washes dishes outside at a spigot. Her peppered gray hair, streaked black with strands of hair that refuse to give in to age, reminds me of the white bristles of an old Chinese calligraphy brush, stiff and ink-stained from pages and pages of brushed strokes. She places the cleanly washed (or dirty?) rice bowls and chopsticks on the cement just as naturally as we'd stack them in our kitchen cupboards. Moments later, she might be chatting away on a cell phone in some strange dialect that I can't understand.

The family that lives in the house next to me has three generations sharing its roof. They eat dinner outside at a table in their courtyard through which I have to walk to get to my building. No matter how often I do this, no matter how comfortable my neighbors are with it, I never fail to feel both like a voyeur and an uninvited guest. The children sit at the table in the early evenings studying English. After dinner, the adults sit around and chat and play mahjong if the mood strikes them (which, for Cantonese people, occurs just about as often as the urge to eat and sleep). Sometimes, when I come home from work late, the older sister is out in the courtyard spinning a hula hoop around her waist while playing a Game Boy.

This dichotomy, this perpetual dance of notions old and new occurs from both within my own home and the outside world of the village. I have a Timex alarm clock that has a bluish Indiglo nightlight. Very high-tech for something so simple, although I've been using it since 1998. Even though I set it every morning, I rarely need it, as I wake up to the sounds of the village and the countryside coming to life. A distant rooster sounds his daily revely. My neighbors next door (the family of three generations) owns a small flock of geese. They are usually squawking away at each other (often, the geese and the children) only moments, it seems, after sunrise.

From my kitchen window, I can look down into the courtyard of another neighbor who runs a small catering business from his home. He specializes in box lunches. Three other chaps, probably his brothers and/or cousins, are there to help him out. Two take care of kitchen duties while the third delivers the food. I often see him ride off on his rickety bike with four or more orders in plastic bags dangling from his handle bars and another bunch stacked in a basket at the back. They're up well before the sun, chopping away at meat and vegetables and cooking up a storm. I have the distinct pleasure (a bit of sarcasm here) of waking up to the rap of a knife tapping away at a chopping block and the fantastic aroma of sauted ginger and scallions wafting through my open windows. They're so busy (must be decent cooks; I should give them a ring sometime) that I've grown accustomed to the din of their morning routine and can even tell what they're cooking. A crisp staccato means chopping vegetables. A slower, more controlled rhythm means meat. They're gone now; their door and windows are shut tight, the bicycles parked and locked up in their courtyard. The big Styrofoam boxes that they use to wash meat, huge bunches of vegetables and whole fish haven't seen any water in weeks and sit stacked, upside-down, by the front door. Must be on holiday, perhaps back in China visiting relatives and regaling them with stories about life in fast-paced Hong Kong.

Villages tend to have lots of dogs. Some are probably feral but most are people's pets. There are a few German Shepherds, some Golden Retrievers, and even a couple Lhasa Apsos but generally they're of an unidentifiable breed and of the large, wolfish utility or hunting-dog kind of build. I imagine they look much like their ancestors did back when they roamed the wilder parts of South China, hunting rats and shitting in rice paddies. More often than not, they're neither leashed nor confined to yards but rather left out to run free and leave turds anywhere they please. Sort of like Paris but without the cheese and cafes.

I think the Chinese have different standards with which they determine whether a dog is properly trained. In the West, we consider a properly trained dog one that sits and fetches balls on command, and only barks at appropriate times, those being either when given the command to "Speak" or when a burglar tries to break into the house. Here in Hong Kong, the standards are much, much lower. The only requirement for a dog to be "properly trained" is that it doesn't eat your small children. As it were, the dogs bark ALL bloody hours of the day. Incessantly. At anything. At nothing at all. Even the supposed "good-natured" dogs such as the Retrievers. One of my neighbors has two large ones (yes, I'm still talking dogs here). I've lived here for months already; they see/smell me walk back and forth from the parking lot to my apartment building on a daily basis and yet they still bark at me as if I was a complete stranger or a stray cat. The more viscous ones bark and growl at me as if they want to dip me in soy sauce and eat me (no doubt, some of them are probably waiting for that one perfect night when I come stumbling home drunk off my ass.)

What's worse is that if there isn't anything going on in my village to set the dogs off, then the dogs from neighboring villages set them off. These other villages might be miles away. It's as if they're talking to each other; an inter-village canine network. If only I could understand dog-speak, I'd imagine a conversation at around 2 AM to sound something like this:


Dogs in Village A:

"Hey, guess what? When the wind blows, the leaves on the trees rustle like mad! It sounds just like the mating call of a large hoofed animal. And for some reason, now we've got this uncontrollable, visceral desire to bark our heads off and go kill something! Isn't that some crazy shit?!"

Reply from Dogs in Village B:

"Get the fuck outta here! Dude, that's whacked. But strangely enough now we've got the same urge too! Let's all bark together! And let's not stop for the next hour or so, at least! Just to make sure it's all out of our systems!"


Another perk that comes with living in the country (read: jungle) is the wildlife. For instance, I have geckos. One in particular likes to hang out near my mailbox and scare the living bejeezus out of me when I walk up to check my mail. There are also legions of stray cats and kittens roaming about. Every once in a while, I see tropical birds flitting in and out of the trees on the mountain behind the village. I can hear their musical calls in the mornings. And, although I've yet to see one, I'm sure that there are monkeys living on that mountain as well. Throw in the rooster, the chickens, those damn geese, and the never-ending cacophony of raucous dogs, and you have a regular zoo. Orwell must have lived in a Hong Kong village when he got the idea for Animal Farm.

Historically, I believe villages were originally comprised of family members and relatives. Essentially, no matter how distant or close, you could say you were related to everyone in your village. You probably knew everyone as well. Of course, these days, outside of one's home, few people if any are actually related, but everyone (or most everyone) knows everyone else. Such is the charm of my village. You are friends with your neighbor, your neighbor's neighbor, your neighbor's neighbor's neighbor, etc, etc.

I didn't realize it, but it was big news when I moved into my apartment. It seemed that my landlord took it upon herself to notify the other tenants in my building that a foreigner had come into their midst. Apparently, she also felt it her civic duty to notify the neighbors as well. Thus the word spread. There's a guy living in our village that looks Chinese but speaks only English, dresses funny, rides a fancy mountain bike, rollerblades to and from work instead of taking the bus, and doesn't hang his laundry out on clotheslines to dry. Needless to say, when I met my neighbors for the first time, they all knew I was from America. Whenever I speak Cantonese to my neighbors, they speak (or try to speak) English back to me. They laugh when they see me riding to and from the office in tights (hey, it does get cold in Hong Kong in the winter) and a helmet, or coming back from town with grocery bags tied to my back pack.

Unfortunately, just when I started to feel like a celebrity, I discovered that, in fact, there is another foreigner living in my village. Just two buildings away from mine. And he's Caucasian, to boot. I've never met him nor have I even seen him outside. But I have to pass his building every time I walk out of the village to the bus stop and I see him in there every night, eyes glued to his laptop. Probably watching South Park Season Three on DVD or blogging about how cool village life is in Hong Kong. It's both strange and yet not surprising that the only person that I either haven't seen face to face or that I know, is another expat. Well, despite having lost the novelty and title of being the sole foreigner in my village, I can safely say that I am the only "banana" in my village.