Listen to Sean Carlson read this excerpt.

During her childhood in southwest Ireland, my mother’s aunt and uncle ran a shop in the front room of their house a short walk up the lane. Sometimes her aunt gave her a penny candy when she went for “the messages,” as her family called the act of shopping for groceries like packaged bread, tea, and sugar. On Christmas mornings, my mom awakened from the bed she shared with her sisters to the surprise of an orange along with hair-ribbons and a few sweets in the stocking she had hung in the parlor for Santa. She helped her mother stir the sultanas, mixed peel, and Guinness that went into the porter cakes they baked as gifts during the holidays. Any fruit, whether canned, dried, or fresh, was a rarity.

When my mother was a teenager in a convent school in Killorglin, boarding forty miles from her home, the nuns once served her a fruit cocktail with chopped pieces of pineapple after a meal in the dining hall. She remembers how, with her first taste of pineapple, she savored the sweetness and the tang of the treat—a touch of the tropical, a taste of the world at large. Eventually, however, my mom came to believe that she was dangerously allergic to pineapple. Shortly after turning forty in the early 1990s, she observed how she often suffered a sore throat after eating the fruit. Then she wondered whether pineapple had caused her throat irritations and bouts of tonsillitis after she left Ireland a few weeks before turning seventeen to join her sister and find work in London, and again after she arrived in New York at the age of twenty-one. A doctor warned her that allergies tend to accelerate with frequency of contact to the allergen. A simple sore throat or flourish of hives could give way to anaphylaxis and possible death. As a precaution, my mom once told me that I might have to inject a needle of epinephrine
into one of her legs, or in a worst-case scenario, directly into her heart, all due to the seemingly innocent fruit she loved.

—

Around the time my mom identified what she understood to be a pineapple allergy, the Cranberries released their debut, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? Outside my fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms, I lined up for the school bus in the afternoons with a yellow Sony Walkman tucked into the pocket of my Starter jacket. Alongside the likes of Def Leppard and Pearl Jam, my headphones pumped the Cranberries’ radio singles “Linger” and “Dreams,” recordings I madeon a bedroom tape deck, courtesy of the wonders of a blank cassette. A classmate introduced me to some of his brother’s music collection—Pixies, R.E.M., and Sugar—and I regularly browsed the latest CDs for sale at a local record store. With the Cranberries I could share songs with my parents, who appreciated the band’s origins in Ireland.

I remember being in art class one autumn day when the school principal broke in over the internal public address system at an unusual hour. The Berlin Wall had fallen, she announced. The Cold War was over. It’s hard to say exactly what I knew about global geopolitics as a seven-year-old, but art class was situated between the seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms, and the older kids seemed to understand the moment’s significance. I heard applause through the closed door. Somebody chanted, “U.S.A., U.S.A.”

My family discussed Time Magazine at the dinner table, so I thumbed through the briefs and features, trying to make sense of the news each week: the beating of Rodney King, the Clinton election, the Olympic Dream Team, Yugoslavia’s breakup, the shelling of Sarajevo, the Waco standoff; a bombing at the World Trade Center; a bombing in Oklahoma City; the Unabomber’s bombings; flooding along the Missouri River; the rise of grunge music; and the super-unknowns of the information superhighway. Our subscription must have lapsed by the summer of 1997, as I missed having a primer on the handover of Hong Kong.

My parents had traveled there together, in March 1980, before my sister and I were born. My mom had been to Hong Kong once previously, four years earlier, with a friend with whom she worked at the New York office of Aer Lingus.

“I understood Hong Kong was under British rule but I really didn’t think much about its past,” she told me. “We were in our twenties and more interested in the night life, scenery, and shopping.”

My parents’ subsequent visit followed a week together in Taiwan. Her passport from the time features pages of ink stamps, a collage of dated memories from around the world. What stands out to me now is how the reminder of her own country—imprinted as Éire, Ireland, and Irelande in Irish, English, and French—sits directly beneath her Hong Kong entry stamps featuring the royal British crown at the top right and left. At the center of each passport page is an image of the harp, adopted as an official symbol by the nascent Irish Free State in 1922 after the War for Independence from Britain. My mom’s father had fought in the conflict, volunteering with a local flying column and hiding out by night during the worst of the struggles.

Hong Kong and Ireland. Ireland and Hong Kong. Were they linked somehow, or did they act more like false cognates in the political language of the postcolonial Anglosphere? Whatever the case might be, the official seals on my mom’s passport, from the British Isles to Chek Lap Kok, the island gateway to Hong Kong International Airport, stood as a visible reminder of everywhere that the British Empire’s sun was never supposed to set.

—

When I arrived in Hong Kong for the first time, shortly before turning twenty-five, in September 2007, the temperature hit 28 degrees Celsius by 5:30 am, a measure I, acclimated to New York humidity, converted into an American 82 Fahrenheit. But Hong Kong already felt hotter. I emailed my parents shortly after my arrival, thinking of their visit almost thirty years prior: “The city is beginning to wake up . . . amazing quietness in the midst of enormous buildings . . . I’m a little in awe of it all . . .”

On a Sunday, the business and government buildings of the Central district were much quieter than I’d anticipated. I wandered through an urban architecture I’d never before imagined and crisscrossed the hilly terrain. A network of stairwells linked up with roadway overpasses as buses and taxis careened unimpeded below, and outdoor elevators connected the central corridor with the more residential Mid-Levels. At one point I found myself amongst a crowd of young women I thought were queuing for a concert, only to discover not a music venue but a money transfer shop where they were waiting to wire their remittances, mostly back to rural China or the Philippines.

I booked a hostel for the night, expecting a dormitory-style introduction to other travelers. Instead of a gathering place, however, I found an empty elevator up a nondescript residential tower and settled with jetlag into a single mattress on a metal frame in the corner of a humid room with a mounted fan struggling from the ceiling. The following day, I emerged from the subway at Tsim Sha Tsui in Kowloon on the other side of Victoria Harbor into dense and transitory crowds coming and going from the Chungking Mansions, which my guidebook noted for affordable meals and accommodation. It also encouraged caution, detailing the 1988 fire in the area that killed a tourist.

When my wife Cathlin and I met in New York a few years after my travels to Hong Kong, she suggested a date night out to a New York Public Library screening of Chungking Express. She remembered the film as being like nothing she’d ever seen before. We never made it to the screening, but still Wong Kar Wai’s dream-city called to us . . .

To read the rest of this essay, order your copy of NER 45.4.

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