Just two years after Great Britain handed the island back to mainland China, we went to Hong Kong. We were heading to Indonesia for a month and bracketed the long flights to get there with a stop in Hong Kong at both ends. Those seven days would cost us as much as the four weeks on Java and Lombok and Bali, but man, were they worth it….
I’ve gone back a half-dozen times since. One of my sisters taught at international schools in Hong Kong and the New Territories.* My nephew Nikolai ran two restaurants in Sai Kung and just opened a new bar-bistro named Graceland in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district.** Graceland opened the first week of November 2021.
But let’s go back in time a few decades and return to that first trip to Hong Kong. Uwe and I ate great meals of dim sum and quickly found ourselves dining in spots where we simply pointed at photos of menu dishes that looked familiar (and we hoped didn’t consist of canine or rodent). Hong Kong is and was a fascinating world city, and we explored knowing we’d definitely return.
Along with stocking up on traditional Chinese salves and medicinal oils to use in my own massage practice, I made an appointment for Chinese foot reflexology. This was easily done as soon as we found a street lined with neon lights of foot soles.
I booked a time slot for a few hours later, happy that I was going to get a massage. Long flights are hard on me, and I’d felt pretzled ever since the plane landed in Hong Kong. When I arrived at the clinic my feet were bathed and cleaned, and I was led over to my therapist. He was a delicate looking older gentleman in glasses. He looks like someone’s honorable and slightly fragile grandfather, I thought to myself.
The therapist and I didn’t speak each other’s languages. The clinic manager handed me a sheet of paper with a diagram of a foot and points on it highlighted in Chinese characters, numbers, and the names of the body’s organs in English. I rolled up my jeans, my therapist rolled up his sleeves, and we sat facing one another. He placed my foot on a towel on his knees. He slathered some lotion on my leg. I studied the diagram, wondering how to use it.
Then he went to work on the sole of my foot and the first jolt of pain hit.
I jumped in my chair. “Ouch!” I exclaimed.
“#32,” he commented.
#32 on the information sheet corresponded to kidneys or liver. Now along with the pain, I was horrified that major organs were being bruised.
He moved his hands down my foot looking for the next tender points and immediately found them. He drove his thumbs into the new spots.
“OUCH!!” I repeated. You know that jolt you get if you jab your elbow against a hard surface and your nerves shoot pain all the way up and down your arm? Magnify that pain about 100 times and imagine it blasting up from your foot which is being tortured by an evil sorcerer…
Uwe moved to the side of my chair with his camera out and a fat smile on his face.
“Having a good time? Are you enjoying documenting suffering?” The questions were caustic but I’d turned into a sniveling bundle of inflamed nerve endings. I felt pitiful.
“Like you always say… Relax, Jadi. Plus, don’t you want me to take photos so you can remember this later?”
I wanted to make the perfect sarcastic retort, something like, “Why would I want to relive pain like hot needles being pushed under my nails?” But I was too busy flinching. Every time Grandpa probed a point, I jumped in my chair.
Breathe! I reminded myself over and over.
“#17.” “#23.” He kept calling out numbers and I read along as Grandpa punished my internal organs. Diaphragm. Lungs. Sciatic nerve. Forget a sore back from a long flight; clearly, I was one hot mess.
The gracious grandfather who I now referred to as He-With-the-Steely-Thumbs-of-Death went on inflicting pain and suffering on my left foot.
He inflicted the exact, same, unbelievable pain on my right foot. I twitched in my chair as he calmly called out numbers.
As soon as the torture session was finished I tottered off to the bathroom to pee (funny how torture really clears out all your systems!). But when I came back to the main room where the manager, Uwe, and my therapist waited, I felt surprisingly okay.
Back out on the street I had the strangest impression that I was about to levitate. I felt that good. I slept like a log that night and my back pains vanished. I bet my inner organs benefited from the workover he gave them, too.
Take a look at the third photograph. I am glowing. It had to be from increased blood flow due to shock to the various parts of my body (like, all of them). Or it was the vast tide of the endorphins that followed the experience.
But I’ve never looked at gentle old grandfatherly types again in the same way. Gracious Ancestor? Hah! He-With-the-Steely-Thumbs-of-Death!
NOTES: *See my blog thread Adventures in the New Territories for more pictures and stories. **Graceland’s instagram page is @gracelandmk
© Jadi Campbell 2021. All photos © Uwe Hartmann. To see more of Uwe’s animal photos and pics from our trips go to viewpics.de.
Click here for my author page to learn more about me and purchase my books.
If the road is even there, that is. What follow are photos of a road in north central India that had – vanished.
I am honored, awed, and humbled that my short story anthology just received its third distinction. I was notified that The Trail Back Out was selected as a Finalist for the 2021 IAN Book of the Year Award (Short Story Collection) by the Independent Author Network. Go to this link for the finalists and winners:
I’ve been going for long walks on the trails in the woods and orchards here, trying to absorb the news. The Trail Back Out is available for purchase and download.
Annie Edson Taylor was born on October 24, 1838 in Auburn, New York. On October 24, 1901, her 63rd birthday, she became the first person in history to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive. Ms. Taylor hoped to secure her financial future with the stunt, but aside from some initial speaking engagements and a memoir she didn’t make much money. Her manager stole the barrel, and she had to use up her savings to hire private detectives to track him and the barrel down again. Annie died in Niagara County and her body is interred in the ‘Stunter’s Rest’ section of the Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls on the New York side of the waters. In her honor I am reprinting a post I wrote after visiting the waterfalls of southern Laos. – Jadi
On our last trip to Laos we headed south to the quiet little city of Pakse in the Chapasak province. We wanted to see old ruins – and really spectacular waterfalls!
When the French colonized Laos they came up with a bold (and ultimately quixotic) plan to build a railway through the region. They wanted to go around the waterfalls and create a faster, easier way to travel and ship goods either to the north, or to the southern Vietnam port of Saigon. The result is what a CNN article wryly refered to as “Laos’ first railway: 14 km of rust” [2].
But oh, those waterfalls on the Bolaven Plateau: we hiked in to as many as our young guide was willing to take us to. And we didn’t even need a barrel.
