There and back again, a forlorn job seekers tale…..
I kept putting off the next journal entry ‘I’ll write when I have some news’ I thought to myself, expecting at any moment some life changing, earth shattering opportunity to miraculously spring forth like a desert oasis, which I could then boast fully proclaim to the world. Naturally, It never happened. Leaving tiny Yangshuo for the big bad city of Hong Kong, and looking for a ‘proper job’ seemed a sensible and responsible thing to do a couple of months ago. In retrospect, after two months of penny pinching, illegal working and slowly but steadily dwindling funds it looks more like an exercise in self-delusion. Of course you can get jobs in Hong Kong, but mostly only if you’re in London, which makes perfect sense. I mean, I can’t blame the good firms of that East Asian metropolis really, who would want to employ some smelly backpacker who turns up and demands work, even if he is Nigel Harrison (clearly the implications of this were completely lost on my potential employees). Unfortunately, I was hampered by what I call a ‘vicious suit-less circle’. No job-no money-no suit, no suit-no job-no money, clearly a downward spiral in anyone’s book. That isn’t to say I turned up at interviews in my Thai fisherman’s trousers, an Indian peasent smock and sporting an eclectic array of traveler’s bangles from a variety of admittedly exotic locations. Nor did I wax lyrical, in the frustratingly self satisfied manner of many travelers, about all the places I had had the good fortune to visit and that the poor desk bound interviewer probably would never get around to. I leave that variety of life reassurance to these pages. All I mean is that my M&S trousers, shirt and tie combo weren’t quite doing it for me. I can place myself in the interviewers shoes, having had the pleasure of wearing them myself in the past and no doubt some of what was in their mind was ‘is this guy really going to stay here? He hasn’t even bothered to buy a suit in a city where you can’t walk down the street without being accosted by countless tape measure wielding south Asian tailors’. Guilty as charged. Sometimes you get the (self defeating) feeling that something is just not going to happen and invariably (inevitably) you’re right.Hong Kong of course is a city of many delights, the greatest of which is quite the opposite of living in Chungking mansions my HK home from home. No one who has not lived there can quite understand this infamously shabby concrete tower block placed incomprehensibly in the center of Kowloon’s golden mile ‘shoppers paradise’. As an aside what on earth does ‘shoppers paradise’ mean anyway? Other than Nigel’s personal vision of hell. I don’t recall Dante mentioning Kowloon in the Inferno but just maybe Chungking mansions made it in there. I definitely think there is something in the honeycomb of airless, windowless, furniture-less, strip lighted box rooms crammed with immigrant families that would have appealed to the poet. They say that you can find every nationality on earth living in Chungking. I can vouch, that if you step into one of the shuddering-oh-so-slow-please-god-don’t-break-when-I’m-in-here lifts and you are not joined by ex-residents of at least 4 continents then you have a rather unusual group. In this block (unlike in the rest of HK) Liz and I could consider ourselves practically royalty, possessing not only a window but air-con. They have actually made a movie about this place. To allow some natural light into the interior of this Dark Continent, skylights are bored into the monolithic slab. Looking down from the window in the toilet of my top floor guesthouse into one of these was like looking into some mine shaft that in a Hollywood post apocalyptic epic (probably inadvisably and expensively made at the urging of Kevin Costner) has become the last refuge of a dejected and degraded version of humanity. So the Hong Kong section of this story came to a slow and painful end and I retreated dejected and rejected to the safety of China. Liz stayed an extra couple of weeks to finish her work and meet a friend who was visiting. Returning to Yangshuo was like putting on a favorite outfit that has been worn in over many years and now although comfortable gives you the sneaking suspicion that really you ought to get a new one. Just when it seemed that things couldn’t get much worse that desert oasis turned up in the form of two free round trip flights from Hong Kong to Chicago (face value about 1500 quid). We won them by entering a competition in a Hong Kong restaurant, good thing Liz didn’t listen to me when I was said we should spend the evening in our tiled cell in Chungking to save money. So that made our decision pretty easy, Chicago being within touching distance (8 hours by road apparently – remember this is America where everything is bigger) of Liz’s parents in Wisconsin. This means an extra and completely unforeseen addition to my trip and the welcome opportunity to examine the land of the free in detail and of course meet the future in laws, (will have to remember to pack my devastating charm). So Asia ends on September the 9th aboard the earliest free flight available and until then we are working out our time in beautiful Yangshuo, not a bad purgatory. So life consists of teaching English, reading and studying tai chi in the local park with the tai chi shi fu (teacher), a very Zen type whose English only extends as far as ‘relaaaaax’, ‘slooooowly’. Hope everyone is having a good day.
posted by justplainnigel @ 1:49 PM
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