t minus two weeks and counting...

I just got an email from a friend in Boston. Evidently, they're dealing with a little bit of snow right now. The weather in Hong Kong has been gray, but at least the temperature has been around 20 Celsius (high 60s).

The big news from this part of the world: Chinese New Year's is less than two weeks away. Every day, more decorations go up. (My camera is still malfunctioning, but I'll try to get pictures posted here soon.) In class, we are starting to focus on all the words associated with this holiday. There are over a dozen lucky foods for the new year. There are lucky plants, lucky decorations, lucky sayings, even lucky (and unlucky) colors. Most of these traditions have one aim: to make sure you make lots of money in the coming year! So you can guess how seriously money-centered Hong Kong takes these traditions.

sing. sing a song.

Yes, I have finally done the unthinkable: I went to a karaoke bar in Hong Kong last night.



Mind you, I am not a stranger to the whole idea of karaoke. I used to have a good friend in Boston who, for every birthday, wanted to go out to karaoke. So, every year, we would go to a particular bar near her residence. At the front of the bar was the staging area, with a microphone and a monitor with the lyrics. Before you could sing, you had to fill out a song request and hand it to the MC. He would then decide who would perform and when. You would then be called up to the staging area and perform for the entire bar audience. People would sing as if they were auditioning for roles in certain movies. The best singers (like that friend of mine) could get a whole bar dancing and singing along. I, on the other hand, had a knack for provoking audience members to visit the bathrooms.

So when one of my classmates invited me to celebrate her birthday with her friends, visions of toilet queues danced in my head. But my curiosity about her female friends won out over any fears of overwhelmed plumbing. The setup at this bar was very different from what I was used to in Boston. Instead of one big room for everyone, every group had their own private room. Each room had a TV for the lyrics plus a terminal to input what songs to sing. The rooms were almost as big as a typical HK living room, so the venue definitely felt cozy. Staff members came around frequently to check on things. We were having so much fun that we were upgraded to a bigger room where other customers could see our carousing. (We were also given a free bucket of Budweisers to "encourage" our carousing.)

We were a mixed crowd: two British, one Japanese, two Hong Kong natives, and me as the lone representative of the Western Hemisphere. Everyone except me were big fans of Cantopop. The predominant style of popular music in Hong Kong and much of southeast Asia, Cantopop consists of lots of love ballads and other sugary songs sung in Cantonese. So most of the evening was spent singing along to Cantopop stars like Aaron Kwok, Leon Lai, and Kelly Chan. I'm sure the other customers must have been surprised to see Westerners following the Chinese lyrics! We did sing a few English-language songs, though. No one ran out of the room due to my singing, which is a plus. All in all, a surprisingly fun night.

get this party started

So I'm back in Hong Kong now. It took a week for me to get my laptop connected to the Internet here. But here I am. No pics yet -- I've still got to get my digital camera working again. No, people don't tend to mention my name and "tech-savvy" in the same sentence!

So then why am I, this non-technical person, starting up a blog? To answer, let me give you a quick summary of my current life. I am an American who recently moved from Boston to Hong Kong. I moved here not because of career, but because of a long-standing desire to get in touch with my Chinese roots. I'm studying the local Chinese "dialect", Cantonese, full-time at a local university. I live in a Chinese working-class neighborhood. I live with a grandfather who doesn't speak a word of English. My current life, therefore, is a mix of traditional Chinese customs that are new to me and of modern Western customs I am deeply familiar with. It is this mix of the Chinese and the Western that many people back in America ask me about. Through this blog, in words and pictures, I hope to give my friends and relatives an indication of my life, my experiences here in Hong Kong.