December

I sit in the sunshine on the court yard steps this morning after I've finished opening the restaurant. The weather is fair and cool, but this Asian sun still relays considerble heat when you sit in just the right, breezeless spot. I am alone. I close my eyes and, in one brief moment, the bustle of Hong Kong slips away. For one moment this city of millions is silent but for the call of a bird, hiding on a quiet ledge overlooking this human world. I listen to the call. It is piercing, tropical, dense and bored. I immagine what it must have been like for the early explorers to wander through this land with the calls of the wild thundering down upon them. Explorers who, when they first set foot on this island, were swallowed by a jungle of thick underbrush and towering forest rather than by the dense undergrowth of pedestrians and traffic congestion and a jungle of concrete high rises as exists today. I decide to myself that those explorers wouldn't have had any idea of how to process what Hong Kong Island is today. They would have run off in terror at the alien society of modern Hong Kong and never spoken a word of it to anyone. My thoughts return to the present as the dishwasher at the small Cantonese restaurant upstairs begins his work and the clink and clatter of plates meeting metal chopsticks in the washbin echo between the buildings that have created this little haven. A diesel delivery truck grinds its way up the street outside and sends off a blow of its horn to indicate his dissatisfaction with the traffic preceding him. Its a whole new jungle now.