Roaming, The City's Got Six Million
The Youth Hostel on Mt. Davis Overlooking Hong Kong has got Six.

Have I an enviable life? This is what I wondered as I wandered up 30 minutes of Mt. Davis Path on the western side of the island, avoiding snails, dodging the occasional Mercedes and stopping to peer at the anchored vessels in near the harbors. Is my freedom to jaunt about, update my blog and look for the address of a certain pre-revolutionary Shanghainese pop music anthology author's house something I've earned, or have I just lucked out? Or do you think I'm crazy for giving up most of my possessions to live from my backpack? It doesn't matter. I'm happy and, at least some of the time, I'm helping people.

I discovered the site of the pop music anthology author/publisher's home right along the path to this Hostel from which I write. It had been demolished to make way for more skyscrapers.

The airport here is all landfill with a bit of topsoil. Disney is doing the same to build their latest theme park. Takes me back to the Development Zone.

Like in Thailand--even more than in America--people live out of disposable plastic containers. And we wonder why ocean levels are rising.

What long, pointless sentences I'm writing. My mobile phone was making the monitor flicker as it searched for its mainland connection just across the bay in GuangDong. The screen has since stopped flashing because the phone has given up. That's sorta how I feel about GuangDong Hua (Cantonese). I feel like I should be able to understand some of it, but I don't. It's like Dutch to German or--what? Finnish?--to English. Funny talk. But at least the people speak some Mandarine and almost everyone speaks English.

I too have stopped flickering for some way of understanding what's going on here and how people can live in this isle of commerce. Santorum couldn't clean the messes here. But where else in Chinese territory would I be able to find Mark Twain's Roughing It?

I'm only "free" now in Hong Kong, pursuing the unexpected--visiting my father in Shanghai--because terrible, scary things transpired in Dhaka. All is fine now (with me, anyway)--no worries--and it's the same story that I can't write publicly about what happened. My stories would put people at risk.

Oh, my minutes are up anyway. The last two days in Hong Kong (I leave tomorrow) have been, as one Bangladeshi put it when I was searching for words to describe American culture, the mechanical life. Organic me is in the pinball machine of hyper-developed capitalism, about to return to the strange and exciting world of hyper-developing capitalism (differences are theoretical, of course. Development never stops. There's no plateau. Development is a mindset). I'm ready to return to the Middle Kingdom. There's a sense of the zany in their development, a sense of new hope. Or something. I just think that somehow getting there is half the fun.