So I’m writing a novel and have posted three chapters on the HarperCollins Website, Authonomy.com. The book is receiving great reviews and feedback. I give my first ever interview to the kind and generous, Vickie Miller, and talk about my writing and the novel, Alchemy of a Blue Rose.
Here’s the link to the interview: http://www.vickiesmiller.com/blog.html
We were in the grocery store on a recent Sunday and out of nowhere I started thinking about beans and cornbread. It just popped into my head and I almost tasted it on my tongue, this staple from my childhood, pinto beans wafting steam into the air, cornbread baked in a cast iron skillet, the skillet seasoned from years of duty and greased with a generous helping of bacon fat.
You never know when a craving will hit you. Then again, when you’re married all cravings must be inspected before approval for use in the household. Kind of like having your own personal FDA, which usually stands for, Forget D’ Abo’ it.
To the unacquainted ear, “Hey, honey how about some beans and cornbread? ” I have to admit, sounds a little humdrum.
That’s the thing about melding our two backgrounds. Often I must put myself in Bovey’s shoes to understand why something that to me sounds so appealing, to her sounds like an invitation to chew aspirin.
When I was growing up, one of my favorite foods was beans and cornbread. Throw in a pork chop and you got heaven on a plate. Maybe add some potatoes sliced thin as paper and fried in Crisco to block an artery or two.
Done. Wrap it up.
To this, my parents sometimes shared collard greens. When we were kids, collard greens were the one thing we were allowed to pass on. I guess my parents thought it was too grown up, a little too challenging.
Mom fixed the kind that came frozen in a bag, just enough for two, presented on the table in a tiny bowl sitting amongst the large plates of cornbread, pork chops and potatoes and a big bowl of beans.
It was so cute the way they shared this, a nod to their halcyon days of romance before their lives were overrun by their own private leprechaun army.
Yes, they took mercy on us when it came to collard greens, the site of which reminded me of little green worms.
We didn’t get a pass on anything else though. Leave a sprig of broccoli, and we’d be sitting at the table until we either finished the offending vegetable or the skies rained frogs. Whichever came first.
Showdowns like these tested our parents and I can remember a fit or two thrown, but they never backed down, not even when a tear gurgled down our red-hot cheeks. What’s one more tear when you got four kids who all cried a river a piece before they turned six.
Let it rain, child, let it rain.
So with a craving for beans and cornbread searing my brain, I had to find a way to persuade Bovey to try it, overcome her initial resistance, which basically amounted to me saying, “Come on, you’ll love it.”
And me hearing her reply, “Blah blah blah blah blah.”
“It’s awesome!”
“Blah blah blah blah blah.”
“Great. It’s settled. Beans and cornbread tonight. Honey, you’re the best!”
Later Bovey had to admit she really liked it. Which was maybe more exciting for me than her because that means plenty more beans and cornbread for this household.
I’ll play bass, you play tenor.
I was having dinner in a Hong Kong restaurant one night when one of my wife’s friends told her I held my chopsticks wrong. They spoke in Cantonese but I knew by their body language and by the way they watched me eat, they were talking about me.
When we’re at these dinners, Bovey knows without me asking when I want her to translate. So I shot her the look and she whispered, saying her friend thought my chopstick skills were unorthodox.
I looked at my fingers intertwined in the bamboo sticks then looked at Bovey’s friend who politely smiled back at me with an expression that seemed to say, “You poor ruffian.”
That’s when I realized the way you hold your chopsticks says a lot about you.
Up till then, I was proud of my skills and never thought about the way I held them. I knew my style was different but it worked for me.
I’ve even been known to garner the occasional compliment from the staff at various Asian restaurants where Bovey and I dine. But it’s funny how they never compliment me directly.
They sidle up to the table and dote, usually when they’re coming around to fill our tea kettle, making polite chit chat with Bovey in one of the Chinese languages my wife speaks.
A waiter might lavish praise on me, going on and on with Bovey in Chinese, then right before rushing off to the next table, look at me as I’m shoving a load of rice in my mouth and say something like, “Yeah, yeah. See. Very good.”
It’s meant as a compliment but with all the Chinese banter and gushing back and forth, it feels more like the waiter praises Bovey on the great job she did house breaking me.
Chopstick Primer
Use proper form, you should be able to hold your chopsticks with three fingers, the thumb, index and middle fingers. But for me, I need four fingers.
Proper form says you should put the broad end of the first chopstick in the crook of your hand where your thumb and index finger meet. The skinny end of the stick should rest against the side of your middle finger. Then you grip the second stick with your index finger and thumb. This is the stick that moves.
But when I do it this way, I can’t control the top stick. It falls out of my hand or I press too hard and end up helicoptering it across the table.
I basically need three fingers instead of two to control the top stick. I use my thumb, index and middle finger to secure this one. Using these three fingers to hold the top stick requires me to press the bottom stick against the tip of my ring finger. In proper technique, the ring finger should never even touch the chopstick.
There’s no Forks in Tsuen Wan
When I first started going to Hong Kong, Bovey and her family and I gathered at restaurants near where she grew up in Tsuen Wan. At the first few meals, someone at the table usually asked me if I needed a fork. I politely declined even though I wondered if the staff would be able to scrounge up a fork at all.
Over the years, I’ve made several visits to Bovey’s old neighborhood and I’ve never seen another gwailo on the streets or in any of the restaurants. There is not a great demand for forks in Tsuen Wan.
Perhaps each restaurant squirreled away a few in case of a gwailo emergency. I pictured the confused looks on the faces of the staff when a waiter might walk into the kitchen and ask for one. Everyone would stop and look at each other as if the waiter just asked them where they keep the moon rocks.
Mr. Miyagi Skills
These days, whenever I eat Chinese food I use chopsticks. I like the way chopsticks force me to eat slow. By their very nature, you can pick up only small bits of food at a time. And I sometimes spend a lot of time in between bites harrying the food on my plate, which slows me down even more.
As clumsy as I am with chopsticks, I made my peace with them. To some, my style might make me look like the Western equivalent of the guy that holds his fork with his fist, and I suppose I should be more concerned about this than I am. But I’ve been using chopsticks now for about eighteen years and so far I haven’t found another way to hold them.
If the worse that comes from this is that I look a bit uncultured, so be it. I’m no prince, for sure. I’m not Mr. Miyagi good with my chopsticks, snatching flies out of mid air or anything, but I’m not going hungry either.
When Bovey and I were living in New York, she loved eating at this little sushi restaurant in the East Village. Back then, I did not share her enthusiasm for raw fish.
I’d see a plate of sushi and immediately understand why children burst into tears when you introduce new food to them, like for example, a sinister looking sprig of broccoli.
But for an artist like Bovey, seeing a palette of deep auburn-colored tuna, neon orange salmon and roe, yellow sea urchin, and that little green dab of wasabi, her plate was a visual delight that she savored.
Fortunately, this restaurant offered a variety of cooked foods, too. Of course, when you have one person eating sushi and directly across from them a platter sizzles with teriyaki and chicken, carrots and broccoli, the pungent odors and steam engulfing the table, it’s kind of like going to the movies and listening to your date chatter through the whole film.
I’m sure Bovey wished she had stayed home by herself instead and thawed out a frozen enchilada.
It would be many years of these trips to the East Village and beyond before I ever tried sushi. But that never stopped Bovey from badgering me to try a piece of tuna or maki. To this day she still says I’m a picky eater, even though in my mind, for a Kentuckian raised on meat and potatoes, I believe I’ve taken giant leaps into the great food universe since we’ve been together.
We were long gone from New York, where we lived for four years, and transplanted to Pittsburgh, before I sampled my first piece of sushi. It wasn’t really sushi, though. It was a piece of California roll, Americanized sushi invented in, well, California.
It contained no raw fish, save for little dabs of orange fish roe (raw fish eggs) dotting the rice on the outside. Bovey did not technically lie when she told me there was no raw “fish.” And for some reason it didn’t occur to me to ask what the little orange dots were. They looked harmless enough, almost like sprinkles on a Christmas cookie, not nearly as alarming and intimidating as a fat piece of red, raw tuna.
But to my surprise, the combination of the warm rice, the cool avocado and sweet, imitation crab meat, the saltiness of the dried seaweed and the roe, was a perfect little flavor explosion. As much as I hated to, I had to admit it was tasty.
Bovey grew up in Hong Kong, home to the most adventurous eaters I’ve ever known, and I can tell you from experience, you never know what might show up on Chinese dinner table.
Some of the strangest foods Bovey introduced me to over the years are chicken feet, assorted offering of intestines, hearts, livers, and ears, various roots like lotus and taro, fish sauce, jackfruit, century-old eggs, quail eggs, eggs soaked in tea, dried squid, and fish tofu, lots of meats served with the head still on, like shrimp, fish, lobster, even pigeon and duck.
It’s a bit perplexing when you’re at a Chinese dinner table staring down at the main entree and it stares back at you. Looking into the eyes of a duck or a fish splayed out on the table, I sometimes feel sorry for the little critter.
When I look into their eyes I immediately hear their voices and they say things like, ‘Please don’t eat me’ or ‘Suck my ass’ or ‘I hope you choke on my bones.’
But the Chinese are a practical lot, and you can tell by the way they devour a steamed fish, what they hear in their heads is nothing like what I hear. I imagine their voices say to them, ‘Yum, yum. I’m going to annihilate you, savor every morsel of your succulent body.’
I remember once dining in Hong Kong and watching someone at my table, near the end of the meal, when the fish was stripped so thoroughly the bones gleamed, take a pair of chopsticks and snap the head off the thing and suck on it.
There’s no feeling sorry for the fish.
But once I got over wanting to place a napkin over the fish’s head so he wouldn’t look at me and chatter on and on with his little fish lips, I found this dish to be quite tasty.
And that’s the thing about a Chinese meal, if you see something disagreeable, don’t worry, because with the parade of food they bring to the table, sooner or later there is bound to be something you like, even if you don’t recognize what it is.
When a Restaurant Table Seems More Like An Island
You cannot comprehend how many vegetables exist in this world until you travel to China. I grew up on peas and carrots, potatoes and corn, green beans, the occasional collard greens cooked to within an inch of their lives, but in China they do perfectly well without nearly all of these veggies.
In China, you get bok choi, napa, bamboo shoots, bitter mellon, Chinese broccoli, which by the way looks nothing like broccoli, and Chinese cabbage, which is tipped with these little yellow flowers and also looks nothing like cabbage.
In order to accommodate all the different veggies and dishes that show up at a Chinese meal, you need a large table and in some restaurants in Hong Kong, the tables are about the size of small islands.
Such a large table presents a problem for someone like me and my inferior chopstick skills. At a Chinese meal, there is a lot of reaching with your chopsticks. All the dishes are scattered across the table and everyone takes turns plucking little bites of food from one of the plates in the center of the table and transferring it to his or her rice bowl.
I do fine with chopsticks when I don’t have to stretch to reach something and not wanting to embarrass myself in front of Bovey’s friends and family, I tend to eat only the dishes that are nearest to me. Which kind of sucks if they stick a plate of bitter mellon right in front of me. They don’t call it bitter mellon for nothing.
I remember once reaching across the table for a piece of shumai, the Chinese version of a dumpling. They’re slippery little devils and I fumbled around and had no luck picking it up. I so wanted to just stab the thing with my chopstick and bring it to my plate, but stabbing your food with your sticks is frowned upon at a Chinese meal.
The dish in front is shumai.
Trying to be on my best behavior in front of Bovey’s family, I kept at it. As I continued and kept dropping the dumpling, everyone’s gwailo radar went up, and I felt all eyes at the table on me as everyone paused to watch and see how this would turn out.
The word gwailo, by the way, more or less translates as ghost dude in Cantonese, the language spoken in Hong Kong. Hong Kongers coined the word during the Opium Wars in the 16th century when Westerners began invading China’s shores, and even though the word no longer is used derogatorily, it is still freighted with this history.
So as sweat began to bead up on my forehead, I forged ahead and finally lifted the dumpling from the steam basket and nearly had it to my plate when I dropped it into one of the dipping sauces on the table. It landed with a splat and sprayed soy sauce across the shirts of the dinner guests nearest to me. I wanted to crawl under the table and die.
Those with the Best Chopstick Skills Get the Most to Eat
When you arrive for a Chinese meal, you immediately notice the place settings, which compared to Western place settings, look a little sparse. At a Chinese meal, you get one spoon and one set of chopsticks. You also get a tiny bowl, about the size of an ice-cream bowl, a saucer about the size of a dessert plate and a little thimble-sized tea cup. Everything is so tiny and cute like something out of Alice in Wonderland.
There’s not eighteen different forks and spoons of various sizes like you get in some Western restaurants, so you never have to worry about embarrassing yourself by using the wrong utensil.
As soon as the first pot of tea arrives at the table, one person will usually scoop up all the bowls, tea cups and chopsticks and begin washing them by pouring the steaming hot tea over everything. With the prevalence of bird flu and whatnot in Hong Kong these days, no one trusts the restaurant to supply clean utensils. Once everything is cleaned, all of the place settings are redistributed.
One thing you learn early on at a Chinese meal is this: the people with the best chopstick skills are the ones who get the most to eat.
At a Chinese meal, all of the entrees are served in the middle of the table and since you don’t have a big dinner plate, you can’t immediately pile up a bunch of food in front of you like we do in America, and bury your head in your plate until it’s clean.
Which for me creates new dilemmas I never have to worry about in an American restaurant. Number one, in America, once the waiter brings your plate, you know exactly what you’re going to eat. It’s all right in front of you.
At a Chinese meal, you have to compete with everyone else at the table to get some food and sometimes at a large table, you can’t even reach everything.
It’s at times like this that it’s nice having a Chinese wife with excellent chopstick skills. If there’s something I want that I can’t reach or I think is too slippery for me to get onto my plate without slinging it on somebody, I can always ask Bovey to get it for me.
You see this a lot at a Chinese table, everyone helping each other out with reaching for the food. By the way, I’ve also learned you can earn a lot of brownie points with the in-laws and grandmothers when you put food onto your wife’s plate, so I always make a point to flop a piece of fish or some broccoli onto Bovey’s plate.
My technique is not great but the grandmothers think it’s cute when a gwailo demonstrates he can handle himself at a Chinese table.
I’ve also learned by watching the Chinese diners around me that most Chinese fill the little bowl you get with your place setting with rice. Then they use their chopsticks to lift little bites off the entree plates and put them on top of the rice.
With all the rice in your tiny bowl, it leaves only enough room for a couple bites of meat and veggies at a time.
And the locals, with their advanced chopstick skills, take the little bowl in one hand and hold it under their lips and windmill their sticks through the bowl in a scooping motion, sliding the rice and bits of meat and vegetables into their mouths.
Watching the locals eat this way, I understood immediately how much more efficient their methods were, but I was taught never to lift anything off the kitchen table other than my fork or spoon, so I felt uncomfortable holding the bowl in my hand and mostly left it on the table and picked at the rice and other food with my chopsticks.
I always wondered why a society that included so much rice in their diet would want to eat with two long sticks. You ever try eating rice with chopsticks? It’s a very inefficient way of eating, at least if you combine chopsticks with Western etiquette. It takes you all day to eat a bowl of rice unless you’re willing to pick up the bowl and use the sticks to scoop the food.
By watching everyone else at the table, I also quickly realized that the little saucer you get doesn’t seem to have much purpose, other than to pile up bones and discarded bits of fat and grizzle and anything else that is inedible.
Chinese love to serve their meats with the bone still on because the bone is what gives the meat the best flavor, they will tell you. You rarely get any kind of meat served off the bone.
Once at a meal in Hong Kong, the waiter brought a whole chicken to the table only it was chopped up into small, bite sized pieces. For a gwailo like me, who is used to big, long chicken bones, the first time I saw this dish, I didn’t think there were bones because the pieces were so small. It looked boneless.
But what I did not know, in every Chinese kitchen there is an assassin wielding a cleaver the size of New Hampshire, who whacks right through the bones, chopping the entire chicken into little individual chunks that are easily handled with a pair of chopsticks.
So imagine seeing a steaming hot plate of chicken which kind of looked like chicken nuggets but without the breading. I went straight for it and tossed a little chunk into my mouth and bit down hard.
That’s when the bone hidden under the meat nearly punctured a hole in the roof of my mouth.
Once I recovered from the shock of nearly driving a chicken bone into my brain, my instinct was to spit out the bite and carve the meat from the bone, when it occurred to me, ‘How am I going to do that with just these chopsticks?’
Then I noticed everyone at the table put the bites of chicken into their mouths bone and all and kind of rolled it around on their tongues and gnawed on it until they cleaned all the meat off then plucked the bone off their tongue with their chopsticks and put it onto their little saucers.
Everyones’ saucers started to pile high, and I realized it would have been nice to have a plate like this growing up. At the meal, whenever I sampled something I didn’t like, I merely hid it under the bones stacked on the saucer and no one at the table noticed.
When I was a kid, if I thought something was yucky and wanted to spit it out, I had to either put it in my pocket or try and slip it under the table to our dog. With either choice, I risked my father’s wrath or getting a lecture about wasting food when people were starving all over the world.
A Chinese meal also presents another dilemma for a shy person like me. When I’m at a meal with a bunch of people, sometimes I want to stare down at my plate and not worry about making conversation. The giant plate of food in front of me almost becomes a shield I can bury my face in and pretend I’m too absorbed in enjoying the food to participate in chit chat.
Well, eating Chinese style, there’s no burying your face in your plate because you’re constantly looking up trying to find something else to eat, and inevitably you catch someone’s eye and they ask you to tell them something about yourself, or something asinine like that, which can make for lively dinner conversation, but is a total nightmare for a shy person like me.
Walk into any Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong and you immediately notice the level of conversation. It’s like that old television commercial advertising Maxell cassette tapes, where the “Blown Away Guy” is sitting in a chair in front of a speaker listening to Ride of the Valkyries and it’s so loud and clear the wind from the speaker blows his hair back.
It’s like that when you walk into a restaurant just about anywhere in China. The cacophony of voices and banter hits you in the face like this great surge of energy.
Fortunately, I don’t speak a lot of Cantonese, so all I have to do is laugh when everyone else laughs and nod my head yes or no from time to time. Not knowing the language gives me a free pass from participating in the conversation.
But I also miss out on a lot and sometimes I can tell by the laughter, or tell by the passion, or the guess-what-I-heard tone in someone’s voice, that I’m missing some pretty juicy bits. I always elbow Bovey and ask her what’s going on but she’s usually so caught up in the conversation, she has no time to explain and will say something like, “Oh, we’re just talking about so and so.”
Of course, I realize she’s skipping all the good parts, leaving me wondering what all the hullabaloo is about until I can get her alone after the meal and she fills me in on all the details.
Usually at one of these meals, I’ll get my thirty seconds to add to the conversation. Everyone will stop talking and look at me with expressions that say, ‘Okay, let the gwailo say something so we can get back to our conversation.’ Then immediately after I finish, they all pick up the thread of gossip they left off earlier, as if to say, ‘Thank you. If we require anymore of your input, we’ll let you know.’
I get the feeling sometimes I’m like a child. In Chinese culture, they say children are better seen not heard. Maybe it’s the same way for the gwailo in the family.
There’s a definite pecking order at the table and with all the catching up everyone has to do, it’s more or less understood that what the elders and the locals have to say is much more important.
So I stare at the bounty of food in front of me feeling a bit hungry and I listen to all the chatter. I watch Bovey and when she stands up and excuses herself to go to the bathroom, I have a little panic attack, and the voice in my head says, ‘Please, don’t leave. I can’t reach that plate of pig ears I’m dying to try.’
Whenever I tell people my wife doesn’t drive, some folks assume that since Bovey is Asian, she can’t pass the driver’s test.
She has a driver’s license (and once bragged to me that she scored a ninety-two on her road exam). She just refuses to drive.
Now and again I encourage Bovey to take the wheel, for selfish and for practical reasons. If Bovey could drive, I’d be spared the zombie apocalypse otherwise known as the grocery store.
The monotony of inching through a crowded grocery store makes me feel like I’m in a zombie movie, walking dead everywhere, bumping up against me and crashing their carts into mine. I immediately get claustrophobic and short of breath just walking into a grocery store.
And inevitably I see zombies I know. It’s so awkward.
I try not to look in their carts but it’s hard not to and of course they snoop my cart, too.
“Yes, I’m a grown man and those are Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, okay. And yes, those are Guittard semisweet chocolate chips, not Nestle’s Toll House, and yes, I buy Seattle’s Best Coffee, too.”
What I really want to say is, “Life is way too short for cheap coffee and chocolate, okay, you got a problem with that?”
Instead I play nice. Exchange pleasant chit chat about the weather as I discreetly hide my Preparation H under a sirloin.
There’s also practical reasons I want Bovey to drive.
One of these days all the sugary cereal I eat and all the chocolate I stuff in my face is going to make me a diabetic with a heart condition.
So some morning when I’m indulging my frosted flakes weakness and turning blue in the face, it’d be nice if she could drive me to the nearest emergency room before my heart explodes.
This actually happened once. My heart didn’t explode. I needed a ride to the hospital.
I was writing for a local newspaper when some of us reporters decided to blow off some steam playing some three on three basketball.
About 30 seconds into the game I jammed my index finger catching a pass and broke it. Maybe five minutes later, I went up for a rebound and came down on someone’s shoe. Bam! Just like that, snapped the fifth metatarsal on my right foot.
Neither injury felt that bad so I didn’t go to the hospital right away. The next morning when I woke up, my foot felt like someone snuck into our bedroom overnight and encased it in cement. I tried to stand but did a face plant into the wall and woke Bovey up.
She offered to call us a taxi but on a reporter’s salary, that seemed extravagant, so I drove us. Put my right foot over the console and worked the pedals with my left. Came within inches of singing soprano in the Vienna Boys’ Choir.
Later one of my fellow reporters drove me to and from my operation and then for a month, as our car sat in the driveway and until I got my cast off, I bummed rides to and from the news room with my editor and a revolving line up of reporters, whoever was available.
The doctor told me not to drive, which I thought was ridiculous until I got behind the wheel. I immediately understood why he advised against driving. My foot throbbed inside the cast so hard it made me nauseous.
And when I tried to work the pedals, my foot kept slipping off the brake and landing hard on the gas. When your foot is in a thick, heavy cast, you have no feel at all for the pedals. Once my cast even got jammed under the brake pedal while I was pressing the gas. I barely freed it in time to avoid rear-ending another car.
I told Bovey it was either drive us to the grocery or gather worms and acorns from the backyard before we starved. She agreed to drive us but only if I went with her. So I propped my foot up on the dashboard and sat in the car while she shopped.
At least I didn’t have to go inside with all the zombies.
That’s the only time Bovey has ever driven in the seventeen year’s we’ve been together.
Bovey says she worries too much about crashing our car or running down a pedestrian, that there’s too much going on all at once, cars everywhere, stop lights, people on sidewalks or crossing the road, that it’s all a kind of sensory overload she just can’t handle.
I think there’s also a tiny part of her that fears being labeled the stereotypical Asian driver.
Personally, I never gave much thought to the stereotype that Asians are bad drivers until one day Bovey cracked a joke about it.
There’s even entries in the Urban Dictionary for Asian driver. They read something like: the driver who drives on the freeway at a lightning fast 23.2 mph in the fast lane. The reason airbags were invented. They seem to have immunity to the middle finger.
I don’t have any scientific studies to disprove this stereotype, but I can tell you from my experience with Hong Kong traffic, despite driving on the wrong side of the road, they manage quite capably.
Hong Kong drivers deal with a plethora of obstacles, too, not only voluminous traffic, but buses, from mini buses to double deckers, cable cars, pedestrians, scooters, and deliverymen who pile their dollies impossibly high with boxes and dart in and out of traffic.
There’s also the Hong Kong taxi drivers speeding through the streets at the same heart palpitating rates as New York City taxi drivers, weaving in and out of traffic and doing everything short of driving on the sidewalks to get to their fare’s destination fast and in one piece.
The biggest difference between the taxi drivers here and in Hong Kong is the Hong Kong driver opens the door for you and helps put your luggage in the trunk. In Hong Kong, the driver even uses a lever to open the back door for you while he remains seated. How brilliant is that?
The only way to get a New York City taxi driver to open the door of a taxi is to dash from one without paying (I have no firsthand knowledge of this; it’s merely a hunch).
Some Hong Kong taxi drivers even cajole you to fasten your seatbelt before they pull away from the curb. In New York, the taxi is going 50 mph before you can even close your door.
And I love how taxi drivers personalize their cars with a picture or two of wives and children, maybe a Jesus bobblehead or rosary beads dangling from the rearview mirror.
Yet, in Hong Kong, many drivers take this whole personalizing thing to an entirely different level.
They clutter their dashboards with Buddhas, Power Ninjas, Transformers, assorted cartoon characters, hang lanterns from the rearview and mount cellphones across the dash.
It’s a wonder they can see out of the windshield at all, not to mention how distracting it must be with their phones buzzing and chirping and playing cheesy Chinese love songs.
Yet, even with all these accoutrements on the dashboard, they still get you to your destination fast and unscathed.
And crash statistics in Hong Kong and New York are comparable if you account for the number of cars on the roads in these cities.
In 2011, there were 15,541 accidents in Hong Kong, resulting in 13,214 injuries and 104 deaths (Hong Kong Transportation Department). In New York the same year, there were 73,060 accidents, resulting in 49,634 injuries and 250 deaths (New York State Department of Motor Vehicles).
In the New York metropolitan area, there are about 2 million cars on the road, while in Hong Kong, that number is somewhere around half a million, which makes the ratio of accidents to cars about even.
There was also a recent study in Ontario, Canada revealing that newly-arrived immigrant drivers were 45 times less likely to be in an accident as compared to Canadian-born drivers.
A similar study in Australia also showed Asian immigrants were far less likely to crash their cars than native-born Aussies.
Unless I buy a BMW, I don’t worry about Bovey becoming one of these statistics (she says she’ll learn to drive if I buy her a Beemer. She’s pretty and smart.)
But buying a BMW seems like an expensive solution. I’m thinking more along the lines of having our groceries delivered. I’m sure it’s cheaper than a Beemer. But I fear a zombie might show up on my doorstep, wheezing and glassy-eyed and smelling like … like … well, death, right? He’s a zombie. And what if his arm falls off on our porch? Who cleans that up?
This is a piece I wrote for our neighborhood magazine about my lessons in the art of feng shui and house hunting. http://lebomag.com/14826/wrapped-in-good-qi/
This September, with the Pirates on the verge of making the playoffs for the first time in twenty years, I came home and announced to Bovey I bought tickets for a game.
What she heard: …tickets… blah blah blah blah.
“The Reds and the Pirates. Division championship and playoff birth on the line.”
What she heard: Blah blah blah blah blah.
I knew Bovey might respond this way, so I carefully selected this game.
“There’s going to be fireworks….”
No Chinese woman would reject fireworks, right?
Her ears perked up but she remained focused on her iPad. So I used all my ammo.
“…. and a concert.”
“Ooooh,” she said, her eyes lighting up.
When game day rolled around, we headed for the door and Bovey stopped, wondered out loud if she should bring a book.
What I heard: I loathe baseball and will turn to stone during the game if I don’t have something to do.
When she saw my wounded expression, she quickly gave up the idea of reading during the game, but I could tell she feared what seemed to her, a looming, endless stretch of time between the game and the fireworks and the music.
I grew up with baseball, played it, watched Pete Rose (yes, I’m a Reds fan at heart) beat out infield hits, bought baseball cards with the gum, thin as a wood shavings, tucked in the packets.
Bovey grew up in Hong Kong. Unlike some parts of Asia, the game is not played there. The only diamonds near Victoria Harbor are in shops under glass display cases, waiting to be dangled from the necks of wives and lovers.
At the field, we settled into our seats and it wasn’t long before Bovey wondered why so many Americans love baseball.
“It doesn’t seem very American. Not like football with all it’s action and violence. Why do Americans like baseball so much?”
When I didn’t offer an immediate explanation, she pushed me for one.
Bovey’s forever asking me these kinds of questions, plumbing the mysteries of America, hoping that I, by virtue of birth, can explain them to her.
“You must know.”
She believes so wholeheartedly that I must know, it makes me doubt myself. So I root through the corners of my mind trying to find an explanation, like lifting up sofa cushions trying to find my car keys. I almost feel like I need to prove I’m American.
“Every kid plays baseball. It’s a simple game. You grow up tossing baseball with your father, you play it in the backyard with your friends. It’s accessible,” I say, unsure of my answer but my confidence growing.
“It’s not like football where you need a lot of equipment. And you don’t have to be the biggest, strongest guy to be good.”
I hold my breath.
“You want to get some ice-cream?” she asks.
I notice while I’m explaining the mystery of baseball to her, she’s eyeing a kid in front of us, devouring his cone on this muggy evening, rivulets of white cream streaming down and across his fingers.
At first Bovey makes an attempt to watch the game, but every two seconds she asks me what happened. Have you ever tried to watch a baseball game, eat a hot dog, and drink a beer while explaining the concept of balls and strikes, the elusive strike zone, to someone who’s never watched baseball?
I’m starting to think we should have gone for sushi and ditched the game.
It rained all day before this evening, but soon large swaths of red and orange splash the horizon, all the seats fill, there’s an energy in the air, completely separate from the game; the threat of rain lifts and everyone relaxes, settles in, and Bovey loses interest in the action on the field.
The magic of baseball, of seeing a game in person with all the sights and sounds and aromas, gradually lures Bovey in and I can see her attitude changing.
A Reds fan standing on the stairs three flights above our heads yelps, “Who let the dogs out?” and his buddies sitting behind us crack up laughing and Bovey cracks up, too.
Watching the people and the scoreboard and the pierogi race, listening to the music and the banter, entertains Bovey. Then she gets positively giddy when we participate in the wave.
It starts in our section and floats around the stadium a few times before dying out. We share a high five, get back to watching the game.
Of course, we haven’t missed much. After all, there’s only about eighteen minutes of actual action in the average three-hour baseball game.
Soon the Pirates take the lead and Bovey gets excited, even scolds me for cheering for the Reds.
When I see Bovey enjoying herself, I’m set free from all the inertia that once blocked us from this moment.
The bribery it took to get her here, the endless questions, her lack of enthusiasm, it all ebbs away like a boat floating down the Allegheny River, flowing silently on the current, illuminated by the park’s lights, rolling out beyond The Point, into the darkness.
Today, fellow writer and blogger Robbie Cox graciously allows me to post my latest musing on his blog, The Mess That Is Me. Please jump over to The Mess to learn more about my own private apocalypse or why Bovey doesn’t drive. Look at the posting on September 28.
So my parents visited Bovey and me in Pittsburgh this summer and the four of us are driving down this country road listening to Mumford & Sons.
I’m thinking to myself, I’ll introduce Mom and Dad to some new music, show them how hip I am, as if parents think of their children as hip.
I’m feeling proud as we listen to Marcus Mumford belt out the song, Broken Crown.
I tell Mom and Dad how progressive this band is, how they fuse Bluegrass and rock, making a unique sound, and then Marcus drops the f-bomb.
I’ve listened to this tune a billion times and the f-bomb never bothered me. I completely forgot there was even one in it at all.
It’s only when I listen with my parents that I become acutely aware, like someone dropped a banjo on my head and said, “Look idiot, there’s an f-bomb in this song.”
It’s not like Dave and Zola never heard the f-bomb. I think my dad’s even dropped one or two, although I’m not positive about this. Funny how memory works.
If he did, it was probably over something stupid like smashing his thumb with a hammer or hooking a five iron out of bounds.
My mom though, I’m sure I never heard her drop one. You’d have to rile my mother to within an inch of committing homicide before she might let a shit or a damn slip, but I’m certain I never heard her say the big one.
Lord knows I’m no stranger to the big one, but I’d rather twist my own fingers out of their sockets than let one fly in front of my parents.
Anyway, so we’re driving along and I’m thinking Dave and Zola must believe their son’s grown into some kind of heathen. I hope they don’t notice, and try to start a conversation, “Hey, did you know the Pirates might have their first winning season in twenty years?”
Inside I’m dying but I can’t tell if my parents are bothered. They’re not the type to tell me to turn off the music or lecture me about manners.
Why is it though, that no matter what your age, as soon as you’re in the same room with your parents you feel fourteen again, young and stupid and awkward and lost?
And then the coup de gras. In this Mumford song near the end, the music stops and Marcus spits out the last verse, speaking slowly, driving home every syllable, so when he hits the f-bomb here, it sounds like a three story pile driver smashing into bedrock.
As soon as the song ends I immediately switch to another album. I’m doing this while driving and it’s not like I remember all the songs that have the f-bomb.
So wouldn’t you know, I next play Amy Winehouse’s Me and Mr. Jones. It’s barely started when she drops the first f-bomb. Of course, those Brits have a way of elevating the f-bomb to proper, everyday speech, but for me it’s another dagger in my ear.
Here we go. As I’m driving along taking another beating, I think to myself, f*%k! f*%k! f*%k! They ought to invent a rating system to help guys like me, a system to warn grown children about profane language in music, and that if you want to maintain what little dignity you have left, avoid playing this f*%cking song in the presence of your parents.
Sometimes when people ask me, “How did you meet your wife?” I sense what they really want to know, “Is your wife a mail order bride?”
Taking a mail order bride doesn’t offend me.
What offends me is that people believe I would take a mail order bride.
Do people see me as one of those dudes with a shaggy back and duct tape holding together his glasses, browsing online bride sites?
I’m sure I’ll get plenty of hate mail from mail order bride business owners swearing they get tons of business from hipsters.
And I’ll probably hear from scores of cool dudes who found mail order bliss and swear they could have picked up a bride in person down at their local watering hole if they weren’t so busy and successful.
Actually, Bovey and I met through work while we were both living in New York, but sometimes when I tell people this, I see that glimmer of doubt in their eyes.
In their mind, I’m sure they are picturing me wandering around Concourse A of LaGuardia Airport with a sign around my neck that says Wilcox, waiting for Bovey to walk up to me.
Bovey worked for the China Institute and I for the American Forum for Global Education. The two organizations collaborated on The China Project, a teacher training initiative. Bovey and I did all the grunt work.
We talked on the phone a lot before actually meeting in person. During our collaboration, I sometimes made up excuses to call her.
“Hey. You think we have enough cheese for the reception?”
“What?”
“Do we have enough cheese? These teachers will loot the place if we run out of cheese.”
“Who is this?”
After a while, I had to see Bovey in person, so I made up an excuse to visit her.
I told her that for the upcoming series of lectures to be held at the China Institute, we needed a proper map of China and volunteered that I possessed just such a map and could drop it off.
Mind you we’re talking about the China Institute here. They probably had enough maps of China to paper the entire Great Wall.
Oh, yeah, I was smooth.
There’s a circular staircase just inside the Upper East Side building, and that was the first time I saw Bovey, coming down the stairs in heels and a navy pinstripe dress.
I remember smiling like an idiot and not knowing what to say, feeling a little light-headed. I don’t remember much after that.
Weeks later, during a lecture at the Institute, I screwed up the courage to ask Bovey out for a drink afterward.
We went to an internet cafe in the East Village.
I know what you’re thinking. Internet cafe. Total nerd. In my defense, the place was Bovey’s idea. Besides, it was late and the place was convenient, just a half a block from Bovey’s apartment. And we didn’t even use a computer.
We each had a drink and I walked Bovey home then caught the subway back to my place in Brooklyn. I’m lucky I didn’t get mugged on the train because I sat lost in my thoughts, completely unaware of the world around me.
I might not be the coolest guy around, but at that moment, going back over our time in the cafe, picturing Bovey’s smile, feeling the warmth of those brown eyes that held my gaze all night, I felt sure and carefree, bulletproof, like some kind of Johnny Depp.
Where Is King's Road? 