On the first day of Christmas, HK meant to me...

On Christmas morning, I am usually – or, at least, have traditionally been – woken up by my younger sister coming to lie on top of me and staring into my face until my eyes open straight into hers. Scary, but as her warm body snuggles under the covers next to mine, or bounces off to check on the progress of tea and toast up from the kitchen, not altogether unpleasant. Of course in recent years, the desire just to sleep has replaced the excitement of getting out of bed and rushing downstairs to open presents and get stuck into a bag of chocolate coins; but this year, without even my sister to answer my Scrooge-like “What day is this?” I woke up to the terrifying thought that surely I must be late for work, swiftly followed by “Where am I?” and the dawning realization that I was home and in bed and very hungover.

Note the clothes strewn on the bed, quick check to make sure my purse had come home with me and into the kitchen to make peanut butter and banana on toast (as I hear this is good for these eventualities) and tea, the memories of the night before start to fall into place.

It had begun sensibly enough when, meeting my friend after work, we'd taken my cold Gingerbread Latte on a walk through IFC mall to see the Christmas displays and get some cheesy photos of ourselves in front of them, only to be met by a huge crowd that had assembled to watch what can only be described as a Toy Story-esqe Christmas Panto, replete with prince and princess, fairy godmother, Santa Clause and a troop of shiny green US army-style soldiers, who would've been actually quite terrifying (think: the PLA wrapped in green cellophane) but that their feet were strapped to boogie-boards, reducing their movements to forward and backward jumps. 

As we watched on from two storeys above discussing dinner options and raging against the machinations of evil (for me, ex-)employers, purple and green lycra leotarded trapeze artists performed balancing, swinging and catching movements and an English and Cantonese commentary blared out, doing really very little to reveal its significance to the plot of the play unfolding before us. But it was amusing. And many photos of the enormous, twinkling Christmas tree later, as the acrobats walked off ‘backstage’ - but seen by us from above - in flip flops, with only the Prince keeping up the illusion by gallantly taking aloft the hand of his Princess to escort her away, we too departed in search of food and that first, oh so good and oh so innocent merry glass of wine.

Two hours later, fed and 'watered' we could be found getting stuck into the mulled wine in the small and intimate SoHo institution that is Joyce is Not Here. The host was, as we found out within minutes of arriving, there in body but very much elsewhere in spirit: ‘homeland’ spirits as it turned out, as shot after shot of highly flammable brew was handed round to the party and downed. By midnight we were ready for dancing – well on our way, as they say. Only, and this is where the record of the evening breaks down, I seem to remember tequila – that oh so traditionally festive of drinks – entering into the equation, followed fairly quickly by the desire to sleep and the conveyance, by the joint efforts of a kindly onlooker and a taxi, of myself to my ferry and then somehow home. Now, I must stress, that oblivion is a state I rarely – if ever in my previous follies – reach. I used to know where the limit was (and it was normally at the sobering thought of paying 9 Great British Pounds for a shot of inebriating cactus juice), and pass my drinks over to less witting subjects while I danced me and my liver back to the realms of sobriety on Evian. Ah, for the return of those good old days, when Joyce was ostensibly not there, and nor were forty-eight hour working weeks to severely reduce an English girl’s tolerance to alcohol or her willpower to say no. Mo-ah.

Now it must be distinctly understood or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate: I didn’t used to drink myself into such a state of unconsciousness. But awaking on Christmas morning, (after apparently attempting to brush my teeth in bed, for how else did the toothpaste get there? and dental hygiene is important...), I felt glad to be alive, glad to have made it home, glad to be still in one-piece (more or less) and in bed, falling in and out of sleep to Radio 4 (Myra Syal playing Shirley Valentine), and enormously glad to finally hear from my friend that no, after I had left she had not jumped off the balcony of Azure (located on approx. the 35-floor) as tempted in her likewise drunken state, or drowned catching a sampan home to her own outlying island, or choked while vomiting, but was - and here I attempted to raise my head and sidle out of bed – on her way over for Christmas dinner, as arranged.

The weather was grey, drizzly and windy. It could almost have been England, except that of course, England is seeing picturesque white snow these days and, at least, if you are one of those phoning in to 'You and Yours', complaining about it bitterly. But the weather in Hong Kong was grey: mild, but with the wind whipping round my building, tempestuous. The perfect weather for the meeting of two morose, slightly shamefaced (though in good company not so for long) ghosts of Christmas Eve party people past: a scene from Withnail, minus the lecherous gay uncle. Needing ingredients for dinner, I dragged my poor, dazed companion into the Park ‘n Shop (a curious name really when you think about it, for no one in Hong Kong ever drives to the supermarket!) – the thought of festive fayre still having the power to turn a delicate stomach and overwhelm a troubled mind - the video store and mercifully back home. It had felt like a Krypton Factor challenge, but I think I started to sober up over the cooking. Thinking carefully about what to chop, wok and boil first, what quantities are required to feed not one but two people, and trying to avoid knocking myself out on the corner of the cupboard door – at first about as perplexing as tackling a rubik's cube – had, in the end, quite an absorbing, therapeutic effect. Either that, or it was the quantities of Perrier being imbibed in between all the laughter; my sous-chef also squeezed into my small kitchen, by this time bobbing around with nervous energy (whether at the thought of my cooking, or coming down off the hangover, I’m not quite sure though).

But what, you will say, were you making? Turkey, roast potatoes and parsnips, carrots, sprouts, peas, and stuffing with maybe a few yorkshire puddings (which, I am proud to say my students now know is not a sweet dish but a large savory kind of puffed up pancake)?? No. Of course not. Are you joking?! As I explained to my friend when she oooed and aahhed over the sight of my oven, we don’t use that. “It’s gas,” as I explained, “and to light it I have to turn the gas on and stick your head in with a match and…”

“Sylvia Plath.”

“Quite. People think she killed herself, but she was in fact just trying to light her oven. If she’d had a Hong Kong one, the result would’ve been worse. She would have blown up in flames. Allow me to demonstrate,” I said, in my best Blue Peter voice. At which I did not stick my head in the oven with a lit match – that would have been stupid – but merely turned the gas on the stove and ignited the ring. At which, as per usual, a god almighty flame erupted large enough to BBQ a large turkey in a matter of minutes. “It’s quite powerful,” I explained.

“So I see,” she replied, "it could have your eyebrows off." 

I sternly reminded her that her job was to stand guard over Health and Safety, and continued with my chopping. With the stove now lit though we were making progress, and slowly, carefully, with much presence of forethought, into my wok went: oil, garlic, ginger, chillies (just three, because I have a habit of making things too hot), eggplant (or aubergines if we are being English about this very unEnglish Christmas dinner), capsicum (or bell-peppers), broccoli and flowering-cabbage, spinach, lentils and pumpkin. The perfect hangover veggie curry! 

Well, okay, it’s very non-traditional for Christmas Day, but it injected some much needed wholesomeness to an abused body and with those three fierce and fiery chillies it certainly was warming! The Woody Allen film meanwhile was sort of lost on us a little, but as the evening drew to a close and I was left alone to Skype with my family, I felt it had not been a bad day all in all. My 21 month old niece was of course the star of the show: terribly happy showing me her new chalks and making herself at home in her Playmobile kitchen (which to be honest I was rather jealous of, being better-equipped and almost larger than my own) while the rest were in the throes of their various dinners, one sister cooking for her own little family, and another treating mum to dinner at the pub. But I, eight hours ahead, I was going to sleep, at what felt like long last. Very content.  

Warming Christmas spirits

Well Christmas is now upon us, and here in Hong Kong the sun is still shining. It did turn cold. For a day. At which quilted jackets came out, heaters went on and half way through the night I found my knees hugged tight to my chest and the thought passing through my head that a trip to Ikea would be necessary to purchase another duvet. Yes, temporary insanity had set in. Thankfully, that passed in a matter of days, and we are (probably, again temporarily) back to something resembling an Indian Summer with Christmas seeming merely a theatrical that everyone is just playing along with. Myself, putting up fairy lights finally this week, included.

Yes, while my compatriots back home are railing against grounded planes, cancelled trains and unseasonably(!) frozen rains, I am finding myself in conversation with other expats and Eurasians that complain of the inconvenience of a sunny Christmas: "It just doesn't feel like Christmas without the cold and the snow!" Quite. What would Christmas be without the coughs and the colds endured though the shopping and the spending and the wrapping? The eating (which, if you're anything like me is more out of a sudden and positive desire just to have a layer of fat between you and the elements that bite!), and the impending doom of post-dinner dieting? Without The Sound of Music for the 25th consecutive year, and the even worse alternative being offered on the other channel? And that feeling when it's all over and someone, clapping their hands together, saying "Well, that's it for another year" that makes you want to cry out "noooo!" Yes, where would we be without the cold and the snow? Where would Christmas be?

Well, I for one would and am right here, wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas, whatever and wherever that may be....

An English Girl in a Corporate World

When young Jonathan asked what job I was leaving him to go and take up, I did my best to explain: "Well.. you know how I correct your homework? And you know how every week there are the same mistakes all over again? Yes? Well, this is what I'll be doing, only for grown ups." Having just finished my first week in said job, I can say that that was a pretty accurate description. Now, instead of working with one Jonathan and making sure he doesn't swear, I work for about 200 Jonathans making sure they don't make equally heinous crimes. Yes, I am the new and only in-house English Editor for a large property agent. Or, as occasionally introduced by my boss, "the new English teacher." Same difference I guess.

The first week went well, I think. I got up at some unnatural (but apparently not illegal) hour, took the ferry with a million other yawning, coffee-clutching suited people and returned each day some twelve hours later by the same route. On my first day, I was happily met by my new boss, other co-workers and shown my new desk in my new - bright, naturally lit! - office overlooking Victoria Harbour (all good so far); introduced to the kinds of English letters I would be reading: dull and incomprehensible (so no fear of giving away trade secrets: I simply don't understand what I am reading); and taken out for lunch. Twice. Very nice. On this same day I was also given the onerous task of writing the new Who's Who of senior management, and the imminent deadline for that; and told that I had arrived just in time to make the Christmas party and Professional 7s corporate event on Sunday, and that I would need a Las Vegas/Moulin Rouge costume for the former and to 'volunteer' to help with the latter. So, the week passed quickly in giving equal attention to both researching my new big bosses and a suitable outfit for the party.

Once I had sourced some fishnets and a corset (thanks largely to H&M's surprisingly slutty line of clothes for this holiday season), the Christmas party/Annual Dinner, hosted in the grand ballroom of one of HK's finest hotels, was set to be a fun affair; and in true Hong Kong style, the fancy dress was amazing, with pirates, decks of cards, tableau vivant, mafia gangsters, etc, etc. There was glitz and ritz and celebrity oozing from the enormous centre stage as awards and prizes were given out throughout the eight course Chinese banquet, served by an army of dedicated waiters, and - the piece de resistance - a talent show in which, of course, Lady Gaga featured heavily. By this time though - and I don't know whether it was the wine or the steady accumulation of early mornings, or both - I was beginning to feel like I was an audience member to some surreal Japanese quiz show. Was it the gold, sparkling jackets and top hats; the giant lottery tombola and substantial cash prizes; the embarrassed/ bemused/ overwhelmed faces of the 'contestants' and winners smiling for the cameras (oh yes, the whole event was being filmed and projected on to four large screens on each wall of ballroom); the fact that all the above was going on in (just) Cantonese by this time, or was my own very English reserve/ ironic detachment/ wry humour bursting through the corsetry? Well, whatever it was, as the show came to an end and gave way to the awkward dancing of a minority and the exodus of the vast majority I knew, with the fourth Gaga song to be played back-to-back that it was time for this little English person to find her bed.

So, shortly after midnight, there I was, very happily settled with a cup of tea and infinitely pleased that I didn't have to get up for work in the morning - but, as it turned out some 6 hours later, not sufficiently mindful to turn off my alarm. (Aiya!) So off it went, and again this morning when I had to get up and haul myself over to Stanley to stand in a gale of English mist and drizzle (perfect for the rugby, but not for 'nesh' old me!) with my other young, keen-to-impress or just hard-done-by colleagues and do my bit for my new parent company with the sincere, not-a-touch-of-English-ironic hope  that one day - may be not next year, maybe not even the year after - I too will be rewarded, for all my long hours of hard work and sacrifice, with a substantial cash prize, weighty shining plaque and awkward smiling photo with the CEO.

Or, I could just be English and not bother?

The Importance of the Arts. Discuss.

Recently I set a student an essay on 'The Importance of the Arts.' What can I say: it was the 60th minute, I needed to finish and start my next class, she was desperate for homework. "I'm Chinese, come on!" she joked coyly. We'd just finished reviewing an essay she'd written on the stereotype of the straight-A* maths/music genius Chinese student in which she'd argued for its unfairness: "we are hard-working because of that image; we are not all natural geniuses." And I must say, from my experience with a particularly dim-witted 13 year old boy, I had to agree with her; and on the basis of a few 16 year old boys currently established in some of our top English schools, I'd go so far as to say that you are not even all hard-working. While many are both diligent and bright, the majority of my students are simply hard-worked; a concept that is, I think, alien to children in most English schools. I certainly do not remember staying up til 4am to finish an assignment or prepare for a test. In fact, if the homework was 'revise' then this seemed - as the audible sigh that went out from the class suggested - a licence to do nothing at all. But mine is not an example I encourage my students to follow. So in that spirit I'd come up - off the top of my head (of which Freud would probably have a lot to say) - with the homework essay in question. And quickly forgot all about it.

Well, as my mum would say, what you give out only returns to you, as was witnessed when my student returned to class on Saturday bearing the essay. I read it. It was sensible, predictable. It wasn't wrong but yet it managed to stir me out of my "I've only one week left in this job" ennui to come out fighting against the idea that the importance of the arts is that they are educational, instructive, edifying; that music and literature has lessons to teach us and the power to change the world. Is this so very bad, you might ask? Is this a terrible ambition to have as a poet, painter, dancer or musician? That something you might do, say or create should make a difference to the way people and society live their lives? No, I would answer. Not at all. I was once that a young person with ideals and ethics, who would nurse a dormouse back to health or adopt a killer whale to keep it off the streets, to save it from a life prostituting itself in front of crowds at SeaWorld. So demeaning! Once upon a time I would have stridently boycotted Gap because I’d read they used sweatshops and would have forgone buying Shreddies because they are made by Nestle. I used to endure 24 hour famines to raise money for World Vision, lying delirious on the floor at 8pm staring up at the ceiling, trying to resist the urge to break fast on the entire contents of the bread bin. Oh, yes, I once wanted to change the world, make it a better place... But did I ever think that writing a book would do it? No. Gullible as I was, I believed my uncle - not unknown for his jests and pranks but in fact infamous in those there parts for goth-rock and magic tricks - when he told me I'd have to become Supreme Grand Ruler of the Universe (with him as my assistant, of course, in charge of some satellite orbiting my own administrative - not imperial, you understand - planet) if we were to sufficiently change reality to reflect our own childish ideals. That is, if we really wanted a world in which muesli just came with the right quantities of raisins, summer the right amount of sun and water for hosepipes and bees (but no wasps), and Christmas Eve the best falling snow; a world in which you wouldn't be made to eat all your greens before being allowed dessert for the seemingly illogical and insensitive reason that there were children starving in Africa - the image of which is enough to put most sensitive children off their dinner, and perhaps in more wayward young minds to encourage xenophobia and racial hatred; and in which at the back of everyone's wardrobe is a little fawn who'd take you for tea and crumpets when you just needed Out. 

Well, as I was saying, I was once this moralistic, idealistic girl. But now? Well, I still don’t shop at Gap but for the less altruistic and more practical reasons that a) size zero's been eliminated, either out of concern or jealousy I'm not sure, but I don't think making us naked from the waist down is going to help, and b) there are none in Hong Kong despite my now aged blue sweater assuring me – or mocking me, more like – that it was “Made in Macau.” (Is b) because of a)??) My killer whale though is, I believe, still at large out there somewhere, freely swimming the oceans and living off my mum's credit card (I send her a cheque once every now and again to keep things sweet), but as you can see mine is a long-distance style of parenting. I've never visited her straits and she's unlikely to enter mine. And while I would still love to find a forest of magical creatures at the back of my wardrobe, I am less enamoured with the ones I actually find there, fluttering around and eating what is left of my prized, now almost vintage, Topshop clothes (that shop too is not to be found in HK), and install anti-moth devices to try and chase them away, back out into the world where in my view they belong. When the change occurred, I am not certain, but I guess it was quite some time ago and perhaps around the same time that I realized I would not become Supreme Grand Ruler of the Modern Universe. And yes, before you say anything, it was before I entered an Oxford college reknowned for churning out almost as many Prime Ministers as underpaid English teachers.  But – as I say – it was even longer ago than that that I knew I would not change the world by writing a book about it. In fact, honestly, I don’t think the idea ever would have occurred to me even in those terms. It would’ve seemed ridiculous. The point of literature, for my younger self, was not to learn how to bring about existential, physical or societal transformation. I was not reading Einstein, Engels or Oprah after all. It was simply to forget the world, leave it behind. Even reading Little Women, the point had never been educational. As far as my sisters and I were concerned, Meg, Jo/Beth (for we could never agree which one I was - Beth dies after all, so that was hardly fair or nice) and Amy had stolen from us, not visa versa. No, to read a book was precisely and purposefully to have nothing to do reality.

“What are you doing?” was an ordinary and not infrequent question at home as I was growing up, usually shouted from one end of the house to the other. We did have stairs in our house, don’t get me wrong, but the problem was rather that there were too many and we resented having to use them, feeling that the power of our lungs should be better exhausted in shouting. “Where are you and what are you doing?” And the answer might well be: “I’m reading.” That was a permissible answer and it could, sometimes (at least, with more authority than TV), get you off the hook of having to do anything else. Reading, from an early age I realized, was then a thing in itself and not just a means to an end. What was more it was an activity that you engaged in while at the same time being completely inactive and in which you could be both there and not there all at the same time. To me it seemed ideal, the lazy person’s dream, to go somewhere – anywhere you wanted – without actually having to move! And if I was reading I wasn’t obliged to do anything else, be it help tidy the house or change the world, and this only got better as I got older. The bigger the book, the more archaic the language (“Are you sure you’re supposed to read that?” I will forever remember my dear mother saying as she looked in dismay at a book of Middle English verse, “It’s not just a test, you know, to see how stupid you are?” Oh, it was a test alright, but one I would pass by learning to read it, not by concluding it was illegible, not proper English and so nothing to do with me, thank you very much!) and abstruse the content, the more I could be sure I’d be left alone to read it. “Yes, you read your book dear. [Aside] Just don’t make me read it when you’re finished. Please dear god, no.” For it - whether To the Lighthouse or The Faerie Queene -clearly had nothing to do with the world whatsoever, but it seemed to keep me occupied - albeit ungainfully employed - and it didn’t make any noise or mess so I was left to get on with it.

This, however, brings me to the second objection I had to my student’s thesis that literature and the arts are important because they help to change the world. What do we think books are? Shoemaker’s elves and fairy godmothers? The paperback equivalents to the invention of the wheel or the discovery of penicillin? My books seemed to everyone around me to be keeping me engaged in relatively good, safe practices. I may not have been exactly contributing to society by working on a cure for cancer, but I had potential: “Ah, so…you’re gonna be an English teacher?” they would suggest hopefully, to which I would turn a withering look of disdain upon them and reply with the single word “No.” Oh the irony! But I can’t really blame them for getting this idea. To look at me you would not really think me capable of causing much trouble by my sedentary pursuits: so studious, so… specky. Well, while I maintain that the books at least that I read never changed the world – never single-handedly abolished slavery or emancipated women, brought about civil liberties for gays or ended totalitarianism – they did bring about a change in the way I saw the world. I may have been putting my eyes out reading into the wee hours of the morning, but I was having my eyes opened to the personal experiences, visions and language of characters and writers beyond the scope and comprehension of my bedroom window. Can I say that I have learnt about the world from the books I’ve read? Or about human nature? Umm, only that it’s varied. Can I say that I’ve read books that’ve changed the world? 1984, my student suggested. No, are you kidding?! If the literature – which still speaks ‘volumes’ (though in characters that seem like a sick joke to most sensible people) across 700 plus years – is anything to go by, the world seems to continue more or less as it always has. Great works have been written, of course they have, but would the world be any different had they not? Apples and angels fell to earth before Newton figured out why and seem determined to continue to do so now (though if I were them I'd be tempted not to out of spite). But if the world hasn't been changed, can I at least say that literature has changed or shaped my "little world of man": the way that I see, experience and interact with it? Is that a rhetorical question?! As I said to my student, in what I hope was a heart-raising moment of astounding oratorical fireworks and not just literary nihilism: I have learnt little of use about the world from my years of reading. (Or when I did, witness A Journal of the Plague Years - thank you Mr Defoe - it was most disheartening.) I have, however, experienced other worlds, lived through many fictional lives and been audience to, as Austen says, "the greatest powers of the mind... the liveliest effusions of wit and humour," all written in the richest medium, the best chosen language. 

And, if that is not enough, perhaps I have learnt something after all: not to try and write a book that’d change the world. The world, flaws and all, is fine as it is: it necessitates all the other, unreal ones we choose to escape into - gives meaning to the fawn in the wardrobe.

A cold foretold and a humbug for Christmas

You may be forgiven for thinking that this English girl has fallen of the face of the Net and died. The truth is not too far from that.

On Monday last I was struck down in 24* broad sunshine with a cold virus the likes of which only Hong Kong, it seems, can foster. Now, I do not wish to name names, but... I blame Erin. A chatty Common Entrance 13+  who arrived at our 11 o’clock lesson the Saturday before chatting less than usual from behind a green surgical mask. And I tried to keep my distance, but it appears the damage had already been done - had perhaps been written in the stars. For, waking up several hours earlier with nausea-inducing shock at the alarm, I had been fighting the desire to sleep my way through the morning when Erin arrived. The promise of coffee hovered before me like a mirage, seemingly moving ever further away the closer I came to it, until finally 1pm and salvation in a Pret coffee that, mainlined, saw me safely through the afternoon and to the point at which I could crawl back under the duvet, from which slumberous grave I have surfaced only occasionally since and then in fittingly zombie-like mode. Diagnosis: the real-life equivalent of Man Flu; a particularly virulent strain of common cold which mixed in the right doses with panadol, Diet Coke, near fatal quantities of grapes and Stieg Larsson, has seen me day-dreaming deliriously through teaching all week. Oh yes. For, somewhere between Heathrow and HK - at some indeterminate point, possibly while drifting finally into dreamy unconsciousness over Kazakhstan - tolerance to Sick Days is hijacked and every incoming expat is issued with ineffectual prescriptions for over the counter drugs, made to don surgical face masks that leave you resembling an extra from 28 Days Later and told to carry on about your business regardless of wishing just to be left to sleep and sneeze and blow your nose in private instead of, like my student when she returned yesterday (minus the mask) being obliged to excuse yourself, cough up phlegm into the nearest obliging receptacle, while thoughtfully suggesting that "you might not want to look in there." Aiya! So, from behind my own regulation green face mask - which let me tell you does nothing to prevent the spread of germs, rather force you to hyperventilate over your own, but which does act as a very good sign for “Don’t F*ck With Me, I’m Sick” and, adequately pepped up on meds, gives one delusions of ER grandeur – I have spent the week being subjected to interminably long, dark hours creatively writing students' coursework (which I understand is most immoral and which, certainly in this case, may have serious repercussions - namely along the lines of "What on earth were you smoking when you wrote this?!"), tutored on the illusory nature of love and the delusions inspired by literature (subjects that in my drugged up state I felt somehow over-qualified to lecture on) and tried to explain to one charming student why swearing in school entrance exams is inadvisable: "Jonathan, you cannot use 'bull.' It's an abbreviated swear word." "Bullsh*t." "That's right, but don't swear." 

All in a week's malingering work.

It was in among these dreams of walking to and from work, through IFC mall and past the large shining skyscraper housing innumerable offices and my local Pacific Coffee [pron. par-sif-ic Ca-fay] that I noticed the arrival of Christmas. A thousand beautiful white lights adorning the trees and public space in front of The Centre: lights hanging above the entry way and from the vast ceiling, garish poinsettias lining the escalators and, slowly coming into sight like a heaven-sent revelation, a fibre-optic tree the size and scale of which designed to make your heart skip a beat. (Oh, and an enormous plastic replica of a Victorian toy rocking horse which was attracting rather puzzled looks from passers by.) Well, seeing all this my heart certainly did miss a beat, but whether out of pleasure or panic is unclear. As I drifted in a daze through IFC I felt the need to reach out, stop someone and ask "What day is this?" Had I done a Scrooge and missed five whole weeks - the end of November and majority of December - to wake up to find that it was Christmas Day already? This magical wonderland of ....well, no, not quite snow. This is Hong Kong after all and it might be mid November but the sun is still shining, only with (contrary to the wishes of the director in Lost in Translation) a little less intensity than before. I may have been wrapped up like an Eskimo (sorry, Inuit), but this was more in protest to the air conditioning than the outside temperature, which was in fact serving as a pleasant reminder of why, even in my current state, I was glad that I chose - back in those first freezing months of the year amid scenes of snowy chaos - to return to more tropical climes. What was a cold compared to the raging cold of an English bleak midwinter? But herein lies the puzzle. Why does HK seem to 'do' Christmas with more intensity than England where it is a much more important - nay, necessary - and even for some religious, holiday? Is it that the traditions of their some-time colonisers have lived on after they/we did? Is it out of exuberance to embrace all Western holidays that HK welcomes Christmas with the same gusto that it does Halloween and with the same terrifying effect? Or is it more sinister than that? Many have considered the over commericialisation of the holidays to be mere opiates for an over-worked masses. Those eggnog lattes, the intoxicating scent of so many fir-trees (shipped only Mao knows how many miles!) and the mind-numbing holiday muzak that is, as I write, being piped through the palaces and arcades of consumer worship are then purely state-sponsored economic rituals designed to keep businesses booming and the proletariat spending, and then working to pay off their spending. But if this is true, shouldn't we all practise a bit of the old "Bah Humbug" Scrooge? Should we not rise up in political counter point to precisely those values that Scrooge himself stood for - money-making and greed - and say "No, I shall not give in; I shall not spend; I shall not sup at thy red latte cup!"? For if not that, then what does that old tale teach us? Where is the real heart of the holidays?

Well, I grant you, the lights are twinkly, the festive red cups adorned with white snowflakes and filled with hot nutmeg and cinnamon milk do make a welcome change to anything iced, and Christmas stockings walking the streets with true Hong Kong sartorial panache are a glad sight. So I guess I don't make a very natural Scrooge, but the music? To encourage children to sing Christmas carols in mid-November: is not this a form of abuse - if not of them then of us who must endure it, must quell our inner grump and put on a smiling face and tell them "very nice" in the dear hope that they will stop? So, Scrooge, yes. A Christmas carol? Please, not yet, no.

But in all seriousness, apart from the off-key singing of precocious lil Britney wannabes, perhaps what saddens me in all this preparatory festivity the most is that - aged and cynical as I am - I know that with such build up to the time of great excitement and unthinkable happiness and joy, the holiday will be over too soon. Those thousands of poinsettias will be taken away and the decorations down, the red cups will gradually fade away and the reindeer jumper pass out of circulation because Christmas has, very distinctly, a sell by date. It is one day, or three days off work (if you are lucky). In taking Christmas out of storage so early, are we not tempting it to go off long before we are? Will not that the excitement - for, yes, I think it was childish excitement that I felt at seeing those first lights - have already dwindled and faded, and will I not wish I was home in England far from the glitzy/kitschy lights of the city? Will not I long simply for real cold weather, snowflakes that actually fall from the sky and the necessity of warming one's hands by an open fire or around a cup stove-mulled wine? Snowed in with nothing but UHT milk and last year's leftover Christmas pudding (the question of who ate the centre of the Terry's Chocolate Orange but a distant memory), wrapped up in one of my mother's hand-knitted scarves and playing scrabble; my dyslexic-poetic family and I? Perhaps this is why Christmas in Hong Kong can have the effect of feeling more hollow than a plastic replica Victorian tin rocking horse. Not simply is there not the bitter, icy cold and long dark days of England, but there lacks the warmth and solidity for me of hearth and home - the reassurance of a tradition that if it saw a life-size horse it'd know what was meant by it.

I say this not to moan or lament though; only to answer those people who ask "Are you going home for the holidays?" that, no, I will be here, wearing my Christmas cardi with a due sense of irony, fondly listening in to King's College carols and sipping my latte in the sun while a Chinese santa and his obscenely dressed tai-tai (the one day of the year she works, apparently) hand out presents to the kids on the beach. And I will think warmly of you all back home unwrapping with delight your tin rocking horses and soldiers, sitting round the fire, chestnuts roasting as you listen to the Queen's speech on the wireless, sip at your sherry and remark on how fast the snow comes down roundabout -

"So deep!"

"So crisp!"

"And even."

And I will be glad that you at least have escaped the hackneyed cliches and tired epithets and can enjoy a very Merry Christmas. Because the rest of it is quite possibly, as Jonathan would say, all a load of bull.

Not always easy (un)being an English teacher

It was a few moments before I noticed today that one of my students was nodding off in class. The reason? I had clearly nearly fallen asleep myself. Not because the reading wasn't good. In fact, it was wonderfully lyrical and magically funny; chosen especially for 'Rainbow,' my bright and sunny sweet sixteen year old student.  No. Rather, it was 3:30pm, the hour at which, after lunch, eyelids frequently nod and blink and the phrase (called up from my own childhood schooling) comes to mind: "Okay, now children, heads on desks." But, alas, no such luck. I dismissed Rainbow - much to her relief - and settled down to the next student: a laconic twelve year old boy who's seen about as much of me as he wishes and no longer feels the imperative to work hard, and who - as I pop a sour cola candy in, in an effort to wake the hell up - I too am losing the energy to motivate.

For, on Tuesday I handed in my notice: the final countdown has begun. Three weeks and three days of work to go.

But this is not all happy making. As I said goodbye to The Boy this afternoon, I welcomed in a favourite thirteen year old - very much this teacher's pet, and in this case a pet chipmunk, named as she is after a famous cartoon one, the only mercy being that her parents deigned to change the ending to feminine: Alvina. So, as I welcomed in the Chipmunk - cheeky, sardonic, dreadfully intelligent but rather bored and weary with the world already - I finally woke up as the memories returned to answer my own questions of "did I give you any homework? to read more of Northanger Abbey? how wonderful! How did you like it? how far did you get? Tilney? really..." and so on. There is nothing like a good ironist - and who better than Austen? - to brighten up ones day, and the Chipmunk enjoying and coming alive at all her jokes... "Novels? Novels! Who reads novels?!" We, darling Chipmunk, do and this is why, because the novel is not only the work of the greatest mind demonstrating the deepest knowledge of human nature, but it is done so with wit and humour and in that shining medium, the English language! No? Yes. Ta da! (Rabbit out of hat moment)

Yep, and now I'm tired again, and hungry and you may go. "Just be sure to do your homework!" as she dawdles out, enthusiasm once again spent for the week; back to being the sardonic chipmunk she is most familiar with. But don't worry my little chipmunk, I won't tell your secret; not if you don't tell mine: I'm leaving teaching. Leaving Austen, Northanger Abbey, Orwell and 1984. Leaving you, and the Rainbow; the boys that say nothing, and the boys that stare blankly as you attempt to penetrate the stoney wall of their passivity or indifference (to poetry?! to literature?!). Leaving the girls that gossip and giggle, and the girls that roll in, roll up their sleeves and bare their hearts and souls on the page and poem. And the little boy who once a week for an hour understands nothing but says "Ok" regardless.

And I am glad to be going, yea glad to leave you all...except you, and you, and possibly you. Because while my bosses may make me miserable, you (and usually a Pacific Coffee flat white) redeem the day with your impromptu swear words ("crap!") - Jonathan!  ("oh, crap!"), and your cheeky grin, and the way you apologise profusely for being late while lamenting that your life is over at the tender age of 9, which if I was really as hard on you as your grammar warranted it would be, but alas...


So, while I am leaving and while, no, (I think to myself) I will not be seeing you at Christmas when you come home from Winchester, Wycombe or Westminster, I hope your next English teacher isn't too hard on you and doesn't berate you too much, or curse me for never giving you quite enough homework but for making you read books and stories and poems instead; to know personification from polysemy, anaphora from asyndeton, and for teaching you the importance of rhyme over rules and the imagination over the imperative. Yes, I hope they are kind on you, that they nod and smile secretly to themselves and acknowledge that you are just children: wonderfully, miraculously "of the Devil's party" without always knowing it.

Student reports: the art of euphemism

As a child I remember enjoying the beginnings of Roald Dahl's books the most. Preferring the prologue to the tale, I suppose, marked me out from earlier on as Chaucerian in my literary tastes. However, it was one book's beginning that I delighted over most, reading and re-reading it many times and marvelling at what I saw even then as its truth. It was Matilda, and the passage in question the expose on teachers' school reports: the moment at which the teachers enact their revenge by revealing just what Mummy's little darling is really like!

Perhaps it was because I considered myself to be a clever child and star pupil that I enjoyed Dahl's devious portraits of those less charming children that populate any and every school classroom. Like Matilda herself, I spent most of my time precociously reading, and could therefore think myself exempt from his, or my teacher's, opprobrium. I was in on the joke, sharing it with Dahl; I was not the butt of his jokes, surely?

Well, now I can look back and say I know better - know, in short, the whole despicably wonderful truth. For while the reports themselves, kept safe by my loving mother (like so many locks of hair, baby teeth, photographs and birthday cards), testify that I was a mature and helpful child, as a teacher myself I now understand their true nature and meaning. No, sadly, they are not oracles sent from Delphi bearing the tragic truth about your child; nor are they (to stay on the Sophocles theme) the key to the riddle of the Sphinx. They do not aim at truth, nor can they administer wise council on how precisely to turn your toad of a child into an Oxbridge-bound angel (or even, incestuous king). Far from it. As I look back simply on my younger self, I can see clearly that the appellation 'mature' - given with such alarming frequency to my six year old self - was really a mask for the whole range, surely, of less comfortable qualities spanning sensible, unsociably shy, and awkward with a sniff of superiority. What is more, as I labour through the writing of countless reports on my own students, I see the necessity for writing such spuriously glowing reports.

And it is not only I who encounter this difficulty. I was recently asked by my friend, a Spanish Tutor, how she could possibly render into nice English "she is all the time not listening." Hum, I replied, thinking for a minute. "Sophia would benefit from paying more attention in class?" "Ooh, I like it," she laughed with mischievous glee, quickly writing it down. "Tell me more." Well, just for you and any other bemused teachers out there needing a quick fix to the troublesome task of not telling the truth in their student reports, here is

The Art of Euphemism: Volume One

1. Omission: avoid comment

Remember the old adage "if you have nothing nice to say do not say anything at all"? This should be the first rule. Focus instead on Hard Facts, for example: This term was spent revising the past tense. Meaning: "Your child failed to understand it the first time, so we were forced to do it again." Vocabulary: "Christ, are you sure your child knows English?"
It does, however, leave a problem: what to put in criticism's place.

2. Embellish

Find a small detail and elaborate: Daisy participates in class. The definition of "participates" might be "to show up less than half an hour late," but it's a start. Likewise: Edgar responds well to the reading passages, meaning "he reads them aloud when forced." Then:

3. Make helpful suggestions

Daisy could benefit if she participated more actively in class: "If she just said something - anything at all! - it would at least break up the hour's silence."
Ling Ling should revise the work done in class to make effective progress: "One hour a week will never be enough to penetrate the depths of her ignorance."
Edgar should now work on putting emphasis into his spoken English: "His monotone reading frequently sends me into a coma from which I fear I will one day never emerge."

However, Daisy's case is perhaps better than the alternative,  which leads us on to the next point:

3. Give praise

Flora shows much confidence in speaking in class. In other words, "Flora can't keep her mouth shut."
Sing Sing gives insightful readings of the poetry studied: "How he arrives at these interpretations is a mystery. It cannot be from understanding the actual words."
Easter takes careful notes in class: "I am worried she has OCD. Have you seen the size of her handwriting? It takes her hours to form a sentence, and even then its so small I can't read it!"

4. Make more helpful suggestions

Flora should seek to channel her abundant thoughts into her writing i.e. "keep them to herself."
Watching English-American films could help advance Apple's vocabulary: "I really can't be the one to keep explaining the Facts of Life to her."

5. If all else fails, resort to 1.

Ah me, sad hours seem long!

It has been a particularly long and slow week, not least as I waited on news from various job interviews and for myself to finally make up my mind on that pros/cons list. But I can now reveal conclusively that [fanfare]: The List does not help one decide. No. It only makes clear what the choices are, but the difficulty of Decision remains. To demonstrate this, let me refer you to the maxim of my dear beloved mother, which is as equally unhelpful as my List(s): "Well," she will sigh wisely, "there are Two Choices: you either Do or you Don't."

Quite.

Well, I Do. Or, I Did. Or, rather, I have decided to take an offer of employment and shall, as soon as the paperwork is done, be handing in my resignation. And it cannot come too soon. For today, like yesterday and the day before that, and all those dusty days preceding, have left me weary - bored, nay, intellectually starved, but nonetheless weary. Even Queen Mab could hardly raise my spirits today: I gave up trying to explain love's illusions, telling myself he's 16, he'll find out soon enough; and even my young student's impromptu expletives held less of a shock than they used. In short: my work-life lacks lustre.

Indeed, I find myself, as I stand at the water-cooler refilling my cup (which, ostensibly, does not runneth over) for the tenth time, gazing forlornly at the packet of dried baby crabs that have been sitting for a week now on the reception desk for the benefit of peckish passers-by, and feel a strange sense of sympathy. I look at them with their little limbs cracking and breaking off like crisps at the bottom of the bag and see so many lives stopped still: no longer scuttling forward, or even sideways or backwards, they have been rendered lame, awaiting a final annihilation when they will be made a snack to a hungry student. For I too am their snack - a water trough at which they drink, quenching their thirst but draining the source - and I too feel just as lifeless, just as broken and hollow inside.

Well, I am of course, melodramatising! (Or, at least, (she sobs dramatically) I wish I was.) My students are all as delightful as ever. They have not changed: one comes in telling me of his success in Tonbridge and Oundle interviews; another laments the typhoon's failure to reek destruction on the city and give him a day off school; and they are bright, sparky and interested young things, and I shall miss them. But, ah, the chance - some days - to miss teaching them! But now that day is soon approaching. I am waiting with bated breath for the go ahead from my new employers to kiss my old ones goodbye, to hand in my resignation and enter pastures new. No longer will I be English teacher extraordinaire - tiny crusty crab to so many hungry mouths - but... Ah, no: I shall hold out on you yet. Call it superstition - call it absolute fear of everything going bosoms up and me having to remain in my halogen prison forever: glossing "If the assassination could trammel up the consequence and catch with surcease success..." til I know not where the murderous-minded Macbeth ends and I begin, or defending his lady-wife once again from the charge of monstrosity, all the while rubbing my own boss'-bloodspotted hands and fearing that any day they will uncover his dewy corpse where it lies (under his desk, covered in dried seaweed)...

Yes, call it fear, but I shall not tell. Not just yet anyway. Soon enough, this tired teacher shall be saying goodbye, escaping (hopefully, still - just about) with what is left of her sanity in tact and using her powers for good, not evil.

Though, of course, she is preparing herself for all hell to break loose the moment that she announces that she is. Eek. Better watch this space.

Public holidays and personal journeys

Yesterday saw another public holiday. In my view they are both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, Hong Kong has significantly more public holidays than the UK but, on the other, this is in an effort to compensate for longer working hours. While in England it is almost guaranteed to rain on a bank hol', here at least the sun may shine but it is the inundation of people that one has to cope with. So either way, it seems, it is best to stay indoors, safely and soundly sleeping the day away in bed. However, I generally end up working. For two reasons. First, that I never seem to know when a public holiday is coming up. This is, perhaps, due to their relative frequency. It is not, like Christmas on the Western calendar, a singular, one time event, a holiday that, coming only once a year, casts its long shadow over the over 51 weeks. Inescapable. No, public holidays in Hong Kong are rather like the esoteric minibuses that hurtle single-mindedly through the streets: identifiable only by those initiated into the meaning of their mystical numbers, while their destinations and stops remain a mystery to all else. A form of life not to be trifled with. So I feel about public holidays. They are a local phenomenon that, as an expat, I had best ignore and, as a tutor, (Reason Number Two) I can always rely on at least one eager student (or normal their eager parents) wishing to continue their studies through the holidays. (I have taught on Boxing Day before now, and let me tell you, the attempt to completely erase it from one's consciousness doesn't particularly succeed in making that drab day feel much better. Though, sunshine and 12* does!) So, when I find myself ambushed by the sudden arrival of public holiday, like a portal springing open before me into another world tingling with the promise of liberation and unknown adventure yet mixed with a mild anxiety and apathy of what to do with it and where to go, I lay down my arms. But with the promise held out that the time will come when these accumulated public holidays will be spent consecutively lounging on an empty beach in Bali on my own private hoiday with no bugger about.

It is a dream that is yet to materialise.

So, yesterday was a holiday. It was also a Saturday, so I'm not sure how that works (except that the 11 o'clock search for coffee was rendered more than usually desperate by the closure of all the Pacific Coffee shops in the area, thus forcing a caffeine-deprived teacher to trek further abroad to the nearest accommodating Starbucks - the only time in which the latter has trumped the former, in my humble opinion), and I found myself being rudely awoken by the alarm clock and taking the ferry to Central amidst groups of ecstatically happy-campers all off to start their adventures for the half-term week. I told myself not to complain: only two poor students to teach and then, come 1 o'clock, freedom. And today, as evidence that I am after all becoming a seasoned expat, I had prepared myself, knowing that this moment would come when I would step out of work and into the yawning gulf of Time Off and even looking forward to it (though, perhaps more a symptom of the ennui setting in at work, as I stare down the barrel of the coming two week inundation of returning students and think longingly of the moment - now imminent - when I shall hand in my resignation and leave my small white booth forever!). So, with a slight skip in my step, I headed straight off in the direction of the MTR to Admiralty to join the crowds in the shopping mall and cinema to see a film that I was alone among my friends of wanting to see: Elizabeth Gilbert's book turned movie Eat, Pray, Love, or as one of its detractors described it, the one in which Julia Roberts 'flounces' around Italy. Well, it was all and everything I wanted: the original Pretty Woman (still managing to get away with dating 20-somethings in films without looking like a cougar), glimpses of Europe and sumptuous, carbohydratious (which really should be a correct adjective) Italian cuisine, a lot of soul-searching and a dubious happy-romantic ending. And it got me thinking ...

Do you remember the beginning of Middlemarch? The prelude in which she talks about the young St. Theresa of Avila, walking out hand-in-hand with her brother, to seek martyrdom? Where she speaks of Theresa's "passionate, ideal nature" not being content merely with the stuff of romance novels and "social conquests" but demanding "an epic life" of its own: "..some illimitable satisfaction, some object that would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self"? Yes, I knew you'd remember it. Well, this is what the film (forgive me, I haven't read Gilbert's book) led me to think about: why the story of a woman forced on a painful (and of course, cinematically picturesque!) journey of self-discovery seems to speak (at least to other women) universal? Is it, as Eliot says, that there have been many such Theresas who have felt and wanted so much and "with dim lights and tangled circumstance tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement"? Who like Julia Roberts' character, Liz, have poured themselves into their relationships, children or work, but who despite their efforts never yet seemed to have found their object - their epic: only "a life of mistakes" in which "their struggles seem," not least to themselves, "mere inconsistency and formlessness"? I know I have witnessed this sense of failure and lack of fulfilment in the women around me: sisters, friends, myself. Is Theresa's epic longing, then, the archetype of female experience? Is the frustration and sense of loss that Eliot describes an inevitable consequence of women's desire to, in modern parlance, "have it all"? A somewhat depressing picture, but it is certainly the crisis point at which Gilbert's self/character finds herself.


When we meet Liz at the beginning of the film her friend has just had a baby and we are led to think that it is this that she wants, that her sense of dissatisfaction and her misgivings about her husband are biological and maternal: will he be a good father? does he even want children? However, it soon becomes apparent that the box that Liz keeps under her bed harbours not illicitly bought baby clothes for that anticipated happy arrival but travels books on Bali. Hers, then, is not the commonly conceived yearning of clock-ticking, broody womanhood, not the desire to participate in Life by giving birth to it, but something more abstract, something nameless and unknown - perhaps it is what Eliot refers to as a "vague ideal." An ideal perhaps of happiness, completion and fulfilment and something which many women, happy mothers or wives, may too find themselves at a loss for. For, as her friend points out, having children is like getting a tattoo on your face: "you have to be committed," for it is going to change you outwardly, and inwardly, but is not necessarily going to beautify what was already there. To have a tattoo on your face, in my experience, like piercings, you have to be pretty damn attractive in the first place to carry it off. In the absence of (certainly, children as) a solution and in her desperation to know what this unknown thing is, Liz - not unlike Theresa and, no doubt, the many other Theresas that have come after her - turns, to God and prayer. 


But, if it is not babies that women are all secretly yearning for, is the St. Theresa phenomenon - what  Eliot describes as a passion alternating between "a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood" - truly an issue of gender? I know there are men have felt lost or at some point or another have reached a point of crisis. Eliot's portrayal of the poor plight of women can after all be reasonably explained by the pre-emancipation society in which she was writing. Women, such as herself, might aspire to do good work but were circumscribed by their status as dependant daughters and wives, intellectually and morally inferior, to be only helps (or hinderances) to their men or by channelling their creativity through motherhood. In Gilbert's modern tale, meanwhile, the women are stronger, more independent; it is Liz's ex-husband who is emotionally dependent on her, and the men who are at a loss for the lack of their children. Yet, I cannot help see the single-mindedness with which the men in my life pursue their work: the cliche that men can only think of one thing at a time sometimes appears, sadly, to be only too true. And is what those men who do drift through life experience what Eliot is speaking of here: the vague yet common yearning for something cannot be attained? Is there such a thing a modern male Saint Theresa, "foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed"? Or does Eliot, and Gilbert's book/film speak of such a subject or, at least, state of experience that is essentially female?


Well, before I have Margaret Atwood screaming about a generational feminist backlash, let me say that I grew up firmly in doubt that the common yearning of womanhood existed within me, so repelled was I - and still can be - by the fact of small children and babies; and I was rather secretly scornful of those school friends that went from one relationship straight into the next as if their life depended on the daily mouth to mouth resuscitation of their boyfriends. On the contrary, I grew up on Little Women, with many quite clear and strong ideas about the rights and roles of women: that they should not be reduced to merely sexual or biological objects, but seen as the intellectual and social equals of men. Along with Eliot I would have taken exception to the suggestion that "the blundering lives," of women so described "are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women," that we are too frail-minded to know our wants and work methodically and systematically to achieve them. That we cannot even decide on what to wear, or to know without asking whether our bums look big in this! I would still argue vehemently, along with Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot), that (with the exception of myself, who is far and away the most indecisive specimen ever to have stood in the cereal aisle trying to decide between Fruit and Fibre and Weetabix) this is not so. We may appear by the "sameness" of our clothes and coiffure (a word not used nearly enough in modern English speech in my opinion), over which we are constantly lingering and changing our minds, to be generally silly and trifling, but (as the chivalrous Eliot leaps to our defence) women are chock full of more infinite variety than they would outwardly appear. "Feminine incompetence" cannot be gauged by testing whether or not we can count to three, damn it! But, despite our limitless variation, the indefiniteness remains: unseen - within. It is not something that can be measured - perhaps not anything rational (heaven forbid it might be!) - but, rather, it is something felt.


I myself felt - no, in feeling knew - at the tender age of 17, that far from wishing to settle down to life in a small town, I wanted out. However, here already, I can feel my adolescent militant feminism (again) coming unstuck: I wanted 'out' but what did I think I was opting 'in' to? I wanted more, I told myself, but more of what? I would have replied in frustration, something different still without precisely knowing what that meant. And so, I studied and went to university and there acquired a lot more vague ideals and a few concrete ones about what life could - and therefore necessarily would - be. However, in the years since, I admit to having Dorotheaed: to having suffered the same intensity of an abstract desire that Eliot's (and Gilbert's) protagonist does to do or make something of this Life, to participate and almost be absorbed into it, and the attendant frustrations and bitternesses of feeling that I have failed, that it is, perhaps, a task that is doomed to fail because it comes not from a place of reason but emotion. That it is something visceral, something felt, and barely expressible. And it is this fact that has led me, much against feminist ideals and popular thinking, to surmise whether this is not then the experience of the "common yearning of womanhood" - not for babies, but for something that also cries out from the centre of oneself; a place of viscera, the emotions and spirit: a whole world inside of ourselves. And whether therefore Eliot is not, despite writing 150 years ago, entirely right. Is the modern woman search to have it all failing because it is not even about jobs and children, handbags and husbands? Is it not something else entirely that we are reaching for, and in that case what is that? Can it even be found or it is a search without end: unattainable?


Elizabeth Gilbert's message may at first sight seem more optimistic than George Eliot's. However, both heroines, after a first failed marriage into which they poured all their resources of love, hope, kindness, patience, generosity..., find fulfilment first in and through themselves and then with another. Perhaps this is what that yearning desire is for: union - a sense of oneness or completion. Maybe we go wrong by thinking the answer is to love others first, something we in the West are taught is generous and selfless: to give of ourselves to others, like the sacrifice of Christ or the young Theresa of Avila setting out for martyrdom. But, martyrdom. Perhaps it is as a Chinese husband and father told me lately of his most earnest wish for his daughter, that the most important thing is not to seek to love others but to hope to be loved by them, to work to be the kind of person people love. If the lack of agency seems selfish, indulgent, arrogant, (and I confess it did to me at first) let me suggest that loving others can be a selfish act: we love them that they might love us; we say it that they will say it back. But the quest to be loved must surely start with ourselves, not in a calculated or manipulative way, but in the earnest desire to be the person you would love to be and love to love. That you do love. Perhaps it is in the self that we find the everything else that we were searching for, when we realise that we had it - it was right here - all along. It was us.


Well, that is just a little something I'm working on anyway.

Books you may or may not have read by the time you are 21

The Times' list of 'The Books You Must Read Before You're 21' arrived in the post today and as expected it was most disappointing. I mean, The Tale of Tom Kitten? Well, sure, I think most of us can hold our hands up and admit that we have (probably) read or been read this delightful story, but as a 'must read before you're 21'?!! More like, before you are old enough to be beaten up at school for reading stories of animals dressed in jerkins and petticoats and mop-caps, surely?! On the other end of the scale, of course, were great novels such as Catch 22. But while I would definitely recommend this to anyone, and currently have one of my caustic teenagers delighting in it, I would not assume to debar those of age from a thorough enjoyment of it. So why, dear The Times, the tender age of 21? Is is just to make your readers feel old and past it before their time? Well, Sebastian Faulks, that literary object of idolatry to my former adolescent self - I mean, who has read Birdsong and not wanted to go to bed with the author? (though, of course, I did not say that to my own English teacher at the time who'd recommended it to our class. No, I was still far too deeply blushed by its awakening to countenance admitting to that!) - answered for the choice when he said his entry, Orwell's essays I believe, marked an important step in his coming of to maturity. And yes, I am sure we all have books that we read at one time or another and which seemed to speak just to us, or through which we fell from innocence and grew into the wise and wonderful (bitter and bitten) beings we are today, so that we cannot but look back on those books with the fondness and gratitude of nostalgia. But why, oh why, does The Times imagine that our beloved authors' choices are going to fit with our own or should be laid down for the edification of a young Great Britain? Surely, if anything such a list shows it is the subjectivity with which we - particularly as adolescents - enter the covers of a book, as between the sheets of a some-time lover. So, while I rather hate to have to admit it, I think that Nigella Lawson (that genius of, not so much the art of cooking as of eating - or, as in her last show, of opening jars from Waitrose ...and eating) was right: the books we read before we are 21 are not books that cannot be read at any time thereafter by the common reader, but books which cannot be read again by ourselves. For then those first blushes have already faded and died - that first awakening to a new knowledge or vision of ourselves and the world already dozed off into a middle age ennui - and to go back and read it again would be, to paraphrase Larkin, to cry, lamely admitting how they had touched you then but could not now.

So, in short: no, there was no Catcher in the Rye on this list, no Little Women, Jane Eyre... I am being slightly ironic (in case it wasn't apparent), mainly at myself for these are, as far as I can remember, about all I was reading around the age of 16 - apart of course from all of Sebastian Faulks (until I saw this photograph and learnt that he had a wife and kids, which spoilt the fantasy somewhat). So, what are the stereotypical bildungsroman of Western Literature? The great formation novels in which the character moves from childhood through adversity to adulthood? David Copperfield, Wikipedia suggests. Sure. Great Expectations. Yes. Dickens would feature a lot, wouldn't he? But then there's Anne of Green Gables and Lord of the Rings? Even hobbitsies go through adversity, so Tolkein tells us; and terribly annoying little Polly Annas, though their suffering is less our own than Frodo's and Sam's as it turns out. (I tried to read Anne again recently, for a student you understand, and it managed to quite crush my nostalgic attachment to it, thus proving Nigella right.) And there are the books that in all likelihood we all made to grow up with at school, such as To Kill a Mockingbird - possibly killed by a former pupil's inane annotations or another's rebellious graffiti. But then there are truly great coming of age novels we discover some time later or by ourselves, such as - for me - Sons and Lovers, and even I would hazard to say Jacob's Room (though its less coming of age than a coming to death, without meaning to spoil it for the as yet unacquainted reader). You may, however, beg to differ, or decide that I cannot nearly have grown up enough yet with such a dearth of reading material. In which case I make a plea for you to add your own choices to the list that we may grow wonderful and wise and short-sighted through too much night-reading together.

However, when all is said and done, it must be admitted that lists - and particularly book lists, as Austen's Emma knows only too well - may be rather exciting in theory but can be pretty hopeless in practise. I am a great list maker myself: shopping lists, to do lists (I have one hideous one at the moment telling me the names of all 40 students I must write reports for and, which having diligently compiled and thoroughly depressed myself with the inauguration of the existence of The List, remains very much in the imperative), bills-to-pay lists.... and most recently pros-and-cons-in-my-continued-search-for-a-new-job-list. Pro: more money. Con: longer hours. Pro: more responsibility. Con: less freedom. Pro: swanky office. Con: commercial sell-out. Pro: nice people. Con: Americans. And so it goes on. Utterly hopeless. Or at, least, my lists are. Other people's lists, on the other hand, however objectionable at least force your opinionated (and, yes, my literarily snobbish) hand (but..): The Tale of Tom Kitten?! Why not go all out and plumb for Where's Wally?!!!

I am, though, at least grateful to my friend for sending the Saturday Review pages of The Times all the way out to Hong Kong, which is something of a critical literary, and literary critical, desert where the South China Morning Post top ten bestsellers list (comprising mainly books-to-screen) compares shamefully with the New York Times', making one wonder how they can even face to draw the comparison. Ah, sigh. No, it's no good: Sunday Review newspapers are a thing of my English past when the morning unfolded into the afternoon broadsheet and glossy supplement at a time. But in the absence of a healthy supply of reading fodder - for it is not just the Review sections that seem a distant memory but also bookshops and libraries in which people are not slumped asleep or merely picking up management self-help books between meetings - in the absence of these, the list of books to read gets happily longer and longer. And long may it do so.

How (probably not) to become an English teacher

I first came to Hong Kong four years ago, straight after finishing my undergraduate degree, and for the same reason, I suppose, that most 18-21 year olds find themselves doing so: I had no idea what else to do, and desperately wanted a break and an adventure after being cooped up in education for so long. So I signed up to teach English to kindergarten children in the New Territories. And consequently hated it.

Well, no, that is not entirely true. From this vantage I can look back with some fondness and a degree of partiality at the times spent singing, clapping and playing games with two-year olds; at living on the 27th floor of a 40 story building in a shoe box with barred windows, overlooking a fishing village turned concrete jungle; and the live frogs, fowl and seafood in the wet market below, the nonchalant butcher taking his cleaver to them with one hand while drawing on his cigarette with another. I can recall calmly the complete sense of conspicuousness and alienation at being the only gweilos (literally translated as 'white ghosts' ) in that sprawling mass of tower blocks; the first week in the kindergarten, making the children cry and being touched and stroked as if to make sure I was real, and ever after being stared at on buses and trains and misunderstood in the supermarket, or just ignored in the 7/11, while in McDonalds always being given Chicken Nuggets when asking, in your best Cantonese, for Iced Lemon Tea; and never being able to find your way back out of the shopping plaza as the increasing sense of panic sets in that, like Hansel and Gretel, you'll never find your way home out of the forest alive.

So, now when I hear people blithely speak of 'culture shock' I nod and smile and think 'you have no idea.'

Truly having had enough, I left after four months, went home, got several, various jobs and was about to embark on postgraduate studies when I realised, as so often happens, that I didn't have a penny to pay for it; and so, ironically (I guess), found myself coming all he way back to take up a job in Central, Hong Kong, teaching English Literature and Language to international school students. A far cry from my previous teaching experience, but (strangely) the same problem remained of trying to order cold lemony beverages in MacDonalds and always being given something else. Something about that drink they just don't want - or expect you to want - to have.

Now, I remember the day that I arrived in HK (again) vividly. It happened shortly after BA tried to poison me with one of their revolting breakfast omelettes, dripping with condensation and which, at 4pm local time, was never going to sit right, that I stepped off the plane and straight into a wall of August heat. But if that made it difficult to breathe, like wading through a warm bath, it was nothing compared to the slow-burning furnace of latent hostility that was awaiting me. For, apparently moments prior to my arrival, my new employers had just broken up, thus ending a four year romance and putting their business relationship too firmly on the rocks. And, as if this - obviously not quite spelled out to me by either of them until some days, or possibly weeks (I forget quite), in - as if this wasn't bad enough, I was staying with the male half of that once-upon-a-time partnership and could not for the life of me understand why I seemed to be the object of the female's jealousy and rage. Was it just me? Was I making it up? But she seems so nice and they keep saying - over the many dinners we endured together during those first few weeks as I flat hunted and settled into new life, new job -  how pleased they are to have me there.

Well, looking back it can't have been a bundle of laughs for them; but if she had her reasons to resent me sleeping every night on the sofa of her only-just ex-boyfriend, then I can't say I was too pleased about it either. Sharing a sofa with two pug dogs in hot and humid weather in a room in which the A/C is timed to go off just as jet-lag is kicking in, and waking up sweaty and covered in hair not your own is, needless to say, not much fun. But one person, I know, had real reason to be grateful for my arrival and that was my male boss, host and owner of pugs: Don Quixote, who had, up until I was drafted in, been English teacher to the poor unfortunate students in his care. And I say poor unfortunates, for The Don, you see, did - or I should say, does, for it is not a fact that has undergone much change over the years - not read. I do not doubt that he can read, though there is no actual evidence to prove this conclusively, but just that.... as he says, when there has been a film made of it, and someone's kindly Sparknoted it, why would you want to waste your time on the book? Well, as an English student who was made to read Spenser's The Faerie Queene one summer and all of Shakespeare the next, I can quite sympathise that reading takes time. Unless you're Stephen Fry, it does not happen by osmosis and usually requires slightly more than 90 minutes concentration over popcorn and diet coke. For example, if one Shakespeare play takes a company of actors three hours to enact, how long would 37 plays take one person to read? But I leave the maths to you. As to the rest...Never to have read Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House ... Not even to have heard of Marlowe? It is best not to go there. Anger boils, rage seethes....The thought of teaching a book you've never read....! Deep breaths. Well, it'll be okay. You're here now.

So I came on board, moved out of Quixote's as quickly as I could into my own apartment over-looking the sea, joined the gym and became heavily invested in all forms of yogic breathing to counter-act the daily doses of attention deficient and hyper activity to be found in our office, not to mention inanity - and that was just my boss. Favourite Donnisms, of just those first few weeks, include the day he introduced me to his gym, Fitness First, gave me a guided tour and was just about to leave me to relax over my first workout when I felt him lingering outside the female changing room doors, not quite wanting, it seemed, to move off. So I lingered too for those awkward few seconds until he must have finally summoned up the courage or found the right words to say in a leaned in whisper: "Just to warn you: There might be naked ladies in there." And with that, left me standing there speechless, hardly daring to laugh. Was he being serious? Was he joking? Was he getting off on the idea or showing real concern about an English girl's modesty? Well, I guess I will never know for sure, but evidence collated in the months and years since point to the former. But, if that was funny, it was nothing compared to the time he offered to bring into work an old pair of swimming goggles for me to use at the plush rooftop pool of the Sheraton Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui. I thought it was very kind and generous of him and was looking forward greatly to getting my stroke back up to speed under the water, when I came into work to find an enormous snorkelling mask on my desk. Bright florescent green rubber and thick, barely see-through lens. I held them aloft with a loud laugh, exclaiming something along the lines of 'what the f*ck are these?' To which my female boss turned round and replied in dead-pan, matter of fact earnestness, 'Don said you wanted goggles for swimming.'  Err, well, yes, but.... did he really think they were what I'd had in mind? and was I really going to offend him by giving them back? Well, give them back I certainly did. I could not with a straight face even pretend that they were anything but ridiculous, even though I appeared to be the only one to think so. After that curious incident, I never did get around to buying proper goggles - nor have I to this date - but I do occasionally look with interest at the eyewear of those other bathers in The Sheraton pool and I can assure you I have seen some strange sights, including most recently a man in wetsuit and rubber gloves resembling Toad of Toad Hall doing aquatic exercises while perving on my sister; but never have I seen any of those fit, burnished, athletic Hong Kong species swimming breast stroke while wearing snorkelling gear. I just don't think, even amongst the most earnest of swimmers, it would be done. Enormous frog-type gloves, perhaps. Snorkelling masks, no.

But despite this, and a host of ever-increasingly bizarre and inane encounters, I found myself arriving back in Hong Kong for the third time earlier this year to, once again, take up residence at their school, but this time as English Teacher Number Two. I must say the presence of just one other quiet, book-reading, ever so slightly eye-brow raising English accomplice - a fellow conspirator, not least in detecting and drawing out irony wherever it lurks - makes life a little more bearable. But not so much so that I have not been casting about for other jobs. I tell this to you now, of course, in the strictest of secrecy: I am an English teacher on a great escape, planning a jail-break. My success or failure, however, is yet to be seen... but herein lies, in my experience, how best to be an English teacher: harbour rebellion in the bosom of your soul and nurture it in others - wherever you may find it.

An English Girl in a Chinese World??

Two objections could be made to the title of this blog. As with most titles, it is only a working title. A working title for a work in progress. But lest I be accused of being deceitful or delusion, let me be the first to raise and, I hope, answer them now.

Firstly, let me introduce where I live. I live in Discovery Bay, an expat enclave on the outlaying island of Lantau - one of the largest islands and where, as anyone who's landed here recently will know, the new airport was built to the north, directly in the sea. Well, Discovery Bay is to be found on the south east of Lantau, a mere 20-30 minute ferry ride from Central but - in all other senses - about as far away from China as you can get. Yes, I may work in, as I have heard it disparagingly referred to as, the 'ghetto' of Hong Kong (though I hardly think it qualifies as that!), but I live in its strict antithesis. Not a birdcage or temple in sight, barely even a cockroach (though when they do appear they seem all the more threatening and alien for that). No. Instead, we have electric powered golf buggies on the traffic-free roads, a beach whose sand was imported some time back in the 70s and which has since been mostly washed back to wherever it started, and Western coffee shops, bars and restaurants serving pizza, beer and frozen yoghurt. Palm trees line our streets, ghekos remain largely (though not entirely) outside, and children and very tiny dogs the size of rats (but generally as well-dressed as the children) roam free. In fact, our expat commune - a veritable Babel, it's host to so many languages! - is so child-friendly it is often referred to as Delivery Bay, the idea being that people come here to spawn and rear their darling delinquents.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like it just fine. When people ask why on earth a single young female as myself lives here I can honestly reply that the air is within World Health Organisation accepted levels; that I can see sea and mountains and sky out of my windows (and yes, I reply, as they coo in wonder, I actually have windows - floor to ceiling no less!); that I am blessed with a bath I can lie down in (rather than merely a shower over my lavatory); and what is for the impecunious teacher very important, the rent is really quite low. So I have a number of reasons to be grateful for not living totally in a Chinese world, for being allowed to come home at night to walk under the Narnia-esque street lamps lining pedestrian pavements under the (rarely in Hong Kong glimpsed) stars and watch the airplanes take off from behind the mountains as I fall asleep in bed. However, that is not to say that I have not encountered the occasional twinge of unreality that attends such a place: the Wisteria Lane-Stepford Wives-Twilight Zone effect. But, once I realised what DB (to give it its term of endearment) reminded me of, this feeling of latent anxiety magically subsided. It was that it took me back to my days as a college student working in a theme park in my home county of Staffordshire; of the long hot summer as a 17 year old when I spent day after day there without a care in the world, hanging out with friends and boyfriend, earning more money than I had time or inclination to spend, and never thinking life would ever get any more complicated than that. Well, clearly I was wrong (as just returning to A-Levels that September revealed!), but that sense of theme park wonderland is what Discovery Bay exudes: all the fun and fantasy of the fair without any of the substance. More or less.

So that, I hope, is the first disclaimer explained. The second refers not to me being English for, while my accent and intonation changes with the proverbial wind - whether I am talking to my Aussie neighbours, or HK students, or Oxford-English friends - I can assure you I am White British and have the passport to prove it. No, it refers more to that quaint use of 'girl.' For while it is most uncouth to ask a woman's age and most undignified ever to answer, I do confess that when a friend recently told me about The Times' list of 'Books you should have read before you're 21' he was quite right to point out that it is 'a bit late for you,' but rather obliging in offering to send it anyway. (Tact isn't his strongest point, but generosity I suppose is.) So, we shall see when it finally gets here just how behind in my age I really am. But, guessing from the number of times, while on holiday in the UK last year with my mother, I kept getting taken for a child and charged entrance fees accordingly (if only my mother had gone along with it quietly we could've saved a fortune!) and the fact that I still now (left to my own more dishonest devices) manage to get away with a child's ticket to work every day on the ferry (thus leaving me with some money for alcohol each month out of my measly wages), I am guessing about ten years. I mean, sure it could be to do with the fact that I am usually to be seen with GCSE textbooks or children's books tucked under my arm, or the fact that the hemline of my skirts has sufficiently shortened since moving to a warmer climate; or it could be to do with the amount of time I spend with my head somewhere between my legs - backward bends, according to my yoga teacher, being particularly good for extending one's life expectancy and youthful good looks - I don't know. But when they say that you are as old as you feel, I often think that it must be this because for better or worse, I cannot feel how old I really am, by which I mean I cannot actually believe it when I tell others. As when I first went for coffee with my new neighbour and she, clearly uncertain, asked. The silence that followed could've added a few years to both our lives before I would've been able to tell her the answer. I simply did not know off the top of my head and had to revert to calculating it. And now you will think that I am ancient - such an age as cannot be arrived at but by the most complex mathematical workings. So I shall tell you I am 25: old enough to know my age, but not quite old enough to feel it.

So maybe not exactly an English girl in a totally Chinese world, but not too far from the truth either, as I shall uncover.

Hello Missie-ah

"Hello Missie-ah," comes the welcome call from the Saint Honore bakery as I stop off on my way to, from or in between work. Since I left and, then, returned they've moved shops, from near our old office to now near to our new one. Were they following us? Perhaps. Well, lucky for me, as their raisin buns are about the only food to be had in the vacinity that an English speaking vegetarian can trust. Otherwise its a plate of green vegetables (big enough for a whole family to share), and that is rather hard to eat on the run.

I am an English teacher, or rather, tutor. And our office is a small school in a tall thin office building in, what is just about, Sheung Wan. Hong Kong. You could pretend that we were in Central, as the street name suggests, but really - by proximity to the MTR station and the presence of street hawkers, infrequency of coffee shops and number of minibus stops (whose destinations are only fathomable to those patrons of the city) - we are Sheung Wan. For that, however, I am glad. No longer are we located above McDonalds under the shadow of IFC; no longer do I have to bear with my students bringing burgers, fries and milkshakes to their lessons - or rather, having them brought up to them by their helpers. No. The only food consumed in lessons these days is the occasional piece of seaweed obligingly handed out by my sycophantic boss, Sir Don. Or Don Quixote, as I like to think of him.

So, I frequent these streets regularly, passing by the alleyways that harbour food, clothes and antique market vendors; I buy freshly squeezed juice on the street for $10, and pay $50 to get my heels fixed from frequently getting caught in the cracks in the paving. Yet I get approached by the same guys trying to sell women's tailoring, copy handbags and fake watches, and (as the other day) I get bumped by surprising hard shouldered, aged Chinese men starring accusingly at you for being in their way. Their street. Their city. And of course, they are right, so I apologise - in English, and thus do nothing to lessen their disdain.

But up in my hallogenous booth - a tiny desk in an open-sided white cube - I discourse (on a good day) on Montaigne, Orwell, Atwood and Heaney with fresh faced, open-eyed youngsters who seem more Western than I am (their accents being somewhat geographically left of UK, but where in the US it would be hard to pin down: somewhere between CSI and Hannah Montana one supposes) - and, for a short while at least, I am at home.