What am I doing here?

Frazzled brain

It is a dark wood. J-A is kneeling with her eyes closed and hands clasped in prayer by a shallow pond filled with the bright light of the full moon.
J-A : "Mountain spirit, mountain spirit, please return my axe."
A thousands-of-years-old mountain spirit with white hair tied up with a white band and long, flowing robes appears in a puff of smoke, floating above the surface of the water. He coughs to draw J-A's attention as she is still immersed in her prayers.
Mountain Spirit: "Eh hem. I've brought an axe just in case, but I think you're confused. You're not the woodcutter I met five hundred years ago."
J-A: "No, sir. I just couldn't think of any other way to call you and I could only remember that story about the woodcutter."
Mountain Spirit: "Oh. Well, then, I'm just going to toss this, since it's heavy."
He chucks the axe into water with a plonk. It sinks.
Mountain Spirit: "Now, why did you call me?"
J-A: "I need your help. See, I have to get married soon."
Mountain Spirit: "And? Do you want me to help you have a son who will be a famous scholar some day?"
J-A : "Er, famous scholars don't really get that much attention any more, Mountain Spirit. But that's not the point. Let's not discuss children yet, shall we? I want you to clone me."
Mountain Spirit: "Clone you? Or clean you? You don't smell or anything."
J-A: "I mean cloning. The process that Dolly the sheep went through, you know?"
Mountain Spirit: "I may have to consult my spirit encyclopaedia. Why do you need this anyway?"
J-A: "Because I have so much to do, I need to find a way to be at a lot of different places at once."
Mountain Spirit: "Like, you mean, omni-present?"
J-A: "No, not exactly, I mean, I wouldn't dare wish for something that only spirits like you can do."
Mountain Spirit: "What do you need to do, anyway?"
J-A: "Well, my dad wants me to be in Korea so that I can spend more time with my family before the New Year. My boyfriend wants me to be in New York and I want to be there too. My friends in Hong Kong probably wouldn't mind me hanging around for a bit more. And I haven't seen my friends in London for over a year. Plus my friends in Seoul wouldn't mind seeing me too, I'll bet."
Mountain Spirit: "I hear they have this new-fangled thingy called the 'Internet'. Doesn't that work? I saw Spock and Captain Kirk using it."
J-A: "You're confused. That's not the same thing, sir. But anyway, so I just want to be split into several 'me's. Can you do it?"
Mountain Spirit: "Well. I can do it, of course, because I can do everything, but if I did this, it would be against the laws of Heaven. So, no."
J-A: "Not even if I can give you offerings of rice cake and pork?"
Mountain Spirit: "Not even then."
J-A: "But then what am I supposed to do?"
Mountain Spirit: "Drink some kimchi-soup. Read out Kahlil Gibran's 'Children' to your dad. Send your friends cards and letters so that they know you love them. Call your sisters and your mum more often. Aren't you meant to be flying off to New York next week anyway? The fundamental problem is, mortal life is short, and you can't do anything about that."
J-A starts sobbing.
Mountain Spirit: "Cheer up, it's not all that bad. At least you don't have to wear this robe all day and fetch axes that careless woodcutters throw in ponds."
J-A: "I suppose so."
She dries her tears.
Mountain Spirit: "There now. I'd still like those rice cakes and pork, please."
J-A: "Oh all right."

Road trip to see the buddha

Over the weekend, my mother, Liddle Sis, my cousin and I went on a road trip in my mother's battered and dirty car that she'd bought secondhand from one of my aunts. We left the washing up in the sink (much to the chagrin of my father, who, in a fit of rebellion, decided to leave it all in the sink for the next three days) and the dust on the floors to kick up some more on the highway from Seoul to travel down south of the peninsula to Kyong-ju, a UNESCO designated World Heritage Site.

The dust in the car must have been decades old; my cousin sneezed and coughed constantly for the first three hours of the trip. I sat next to my mother, the driver, and we talked about everything - the car, the meaning of the word 'trajectory' versus 'passage', guarantees and the law, renting, house prices and so on. Liddle Sis sat quietly in the back with my cousin listening to songs with shared ear pieces. The grey sky yielded smatterings of icy snow, and we argued about whether it was hail or snow. The hours passed, the sun went down and we debated whether to stop at the upcoming highway stop or the next. My mother and I ended up singing a children's nursery rhyme.
"You guys are crazy," Liddle Sis shook her head in disbelief.

Early in the morning we washed our tired faces with cold water and took to the road. There are so many historical sites in Kyong-ju, they say if you scratch the earth, you would find an antique, in the same way they used to say the stones lying about in the streets of Sri Lanka were in fact emeralds. I wanted to see the stone buddha in Seokgulam more than anything else.

Toham mountain is the highest in the region - from the top we could see the ridges of other mountains folded out underneath our feet like the ruffles in a brocade cloak. It is said that the mountain has special spiritual presence and the Shilla people setting up Seokgulam wanted to use the spirit to enhance the power of the stone buddha. The truth is, for all its reputed spiritual strength, during the Japanese occupation the man-made cave was dismantled and some of the sculptures looted. During the Seventies, the Korean government made great efforts to restore the cave, but no one managed to replicate the original locked stone structure without using cement.

My mother lagged behind us while we climbed the steps to the cave housing the sculpted buddha. When she finally did come up, huffing and puffing with the effort, we saw she'd bought a bag of rice for each of us to offer to the temple's monks.
"At least we'll have done a good deed, feeding the monks," she said. The white stone interior gently reflected the lights installed at the mouth of the cave.
"These are the spirits guarding the cave," my mother said, pointing to the two sculpted figures on each side of the entrance, their bodies heavy with muscles. I have always loved the sculptures in this cave - they are so graceful and light, it is as if the figures might move at any moment. The face of the buddha is smooth and his expression serene, yet somehow stern. Through his closed eyes, you feel he knows you are watching him. We put the rice bags onto the table for such offerings and bowed our heads three times, a salute to the dignified presence within.

Ultra-quick dab at blogging while waiting for the moving company to arrive

"I just can't bring myself to throw away all the furniture," I moaned to my sister in London over the phone. "What a waste! It's perfectly good furniture, it's just that I don't need it."
"Yeah. Think of all the environmental damage," my sister said. I hadn't thought of that, but that did make me fret even more. As someone who is definitely clocking up CO2 levels to a phenomenal amount by flying long-haul frequently, I feel guilty about these things more keenly than most people.
"What shall I do?" I said.
"You could ship your TV and DVD player to me," my sister said.
"I wish I could. It would probably cost a bomb," I said.

"Give it away for free," urged my friend A. "At least that way, someone is using it."
"Yeah, I guess I should," I mused.

In the end, my Filipino maid and her daughter and her daughter's employer ended up buying 90 per cent. of my furniture for throwaway prices - everything was fixed at two hundred Hong Kong dollars.
"You sold your TV for fourteen pounds?" my sister thundered at me when I told her.
"Yes," I said, wondering whether I should have asked for more. But it was old (I'd bought it secondhand in 1999) and I couldn't ask my maid to pay more than that.
"You sold the bookcase for fourteen pounds?" my sister interrogated me again.
"Yes," I said, expecting a lightning bolt to strike any minute. But she was laughing.
"I bought that one from Argos!" she said. I'd unwittingly asked for double the original price and got away with it.

All in all, I felt happier that I was recycling my goods instead of casting them into a landfill.
"Well done, baby, you made some money!" M. said when I called him last night to report my 'profit' of around two hundred U.S. dollars.

Now I need to get back to my flat to try to sell off my wardrobe and bed.

At the hairdresser's

Women, we are surely the stronger sex. Do you know of any man who would willingly subject himself to lethal chemicals and the indignity of rolling one's hair with curlers wrapped with cheesecloth in order to sit under a hot machine like a piece of toast for an hour, and then pay someone for the privilege? Granted, the hairdresser's had Internet terminals for me to freely use during those three hours, but I couldn't help wondering what on earth possessed me to undergo the process of my own free will. Surely it was not sadistic vanity?
"We'll make it look really natural," the hairdresser had said. I looked at his leather pants and goatee and decided he might not be the right person to point out that a perm, by definition, would not be natural looking in any event.
"OK," I said.
"Do you want to have a digitising perm or a setting perm?" he asked. Drat. What on earth could that mean?
"Erm, I think I don't know what you are talking about," I said. He smiled, then explained every thing - only it still didn't really mean much to me. I shrugged and said I wanted a normal perm.

A little girl came in with her primly dressed mother. She climbed on to the chair opposite mine with much anticipation. Through strands of my own hair I saw that her long black hair was being pinned up into huge curlers. She pouted her lips for her mother to apply lip gloss. Do little girls have to dress up these days too? I hoped she wasn't going to a friend's birthday party - the thought of many little girls like her getting their hair curled for the day was too much for an anti-dressing up person like me to bear. Her mother carefully curled her eyelashes as the girl pushed her face forward towards her.

Next to me, a bride was sullenly flipping through the latest edition of Vogue while waiting for her hairdresser to finish tying her hair up in a bun for the veil. This was the most laborious process - first her hair was curled with big rollers, then they smoothed it out to tie it at the nape of her neck while braiding the sides. She sneezed as her hairdresser covered her hair with hair spray. I suddenly had an image of my hair looking as big as hers had been after they'd undone the rollers.
"I don't want my hair to look big," I said to my hairdresser. He smiled again.
"Trust us, we're professionals. We don't do big hair," he said. The assistant yelled to someone down her microphone that she wanted a setting machine. Two young girls brought in what looked like something salvaged from the original Star Trek series set - I was sitting under two huge hula hoops with lights on them.
"You can sleep under this," the assistant said. But the hula hoops were emanating heat, and I did not want to accidentally touch them. I was glad when they brought a different machine for the second part of setting my hair - it was the more typical hooded shape suspended above me which made me feel less vulnerable. Even hairdresser's are too high-tech for me to deal with these days, it seems.

"I've got curly hair now!" I nearly shouted at M. down the phone. "I'll bet you can't wait to see it!"
"How curly is it?" M. asked. Maybe he thought I'd gone and got myself a 'fro.
"It's fairly curly," I said. "But everyone likes it. Even my sister."
Actually, my dad had clucked his tongue when I'd told him how much it had cost.
"If you were to pay that much anywhere in the world you'd get a good hair style," he had said.

It's time for farewells: Adieu to J-A 2003/2004 on D-2

M. told me that the classic sign of an extrovert is that one has lots of different groups of friends for different purposes. I thought about that, and decided that is true - I have girl friends for those pour-your-heart-out moments, male friends for teasing, girl friends for drinking, male friends for drinking, uni friends for those pour-your-heart-out moments, uni friends for drinking, and so on. And I'm definitely not a wallflower type.

I sent out an email yesterday telling most of these friends that next Monday would be my last day at work. It took me over half an hour this morning to write responses back to the sixty per cent. of people who asked where I was going next, what I was going to be doing, can we meet up before you leave et cetera. My emotions were on a rollercoaster - people who wrote back saying how excited they were for me made me feel perky and happy, while those who wrote back asking for one last drink made me wonder whether I was foregoing a thriving social life for that of self-inflicted hermitdom.

The procession of farewells will not cease until I leave Hong Kong. There will be a lunch with colleagues today, and a next-next-to-last dinner with some great girl friends later. I feel as though parts of my brain are falling out - doesn't your social circle act as your second memory, reminding you of all the silly/clever/funny/usual things you do? Don't you reflect on how your social circle treats you, and think about how you must reflect on them and vice versa? Don't you have a common ground for thinking about the past, present and future - either as part of a group of single people in their late twenties, a friend of someone in their thirties married with young children, or as a friend of a divorcee in their fifties? All those discussions - however drunken or rhetorical they were - and all those ridiculous moments of laughter and tears are now going to have to be regenerated with someone else, a whole new cast of people I do not yet know. I feel anxious that without these people from my current life around to remind me of who I am, I may become someone else without even realising it.

My furniture is being sold off for castaway prices - piece by piece, someone else will claim them as their own and use them just like I did, only perhaps without abusing them as much. Watching the messages claiming the furniture, it is as if someone is dissecting the person that was 'J-A in Hong Kong, 2003 to 2004' and taking away the parts to some place unknown.

Of course, I've been through this before. How many times have I moved from one country to another in my life? I know I will be re-constructing myself again. Things will eventually make sense again. The little roots I've put down in Hong Kong, though, hurt a little to tear up.