And then there was Buster, three—Bill Clinton in a diaper. He’s an almost pathologically friendly child and terribly upbeat but, at three, still in a diaper all day. Airplane toilet changing tables are not built for sturdy three-year-olds or their ham-handed fathers who’ve had a drink or two. What with getting the changing table down and Buster up and the bulky diaper bag open, Buster and I could spend the whole sixteen-hours wedged inside the airplane toilet.
I tried to have a talk with Buster about being too grownup to be in a diaper. I said, “Now, how old are you?”
Buster—Clinton-like in his free-and-easy way with his past—said, “I’m five.”
“No,” I said, “You can’t be five. Five-year-olds don’t wear diapers.”
Buster gave his lip a Clintonian bite, thought for a moment, and said, “I’m six.”
The lecture invitation had come by way of our Hong Kong friends Tom and Mai. They race horses and it was International Race Week, with the Hong Kong Jockey Club hosting the best turf-racing horses from all over the world. The Jockey Club runs the horse racing in Hong Kong, and all the betting proceeds go to charity, making the Jockey Club the largest charitable organization in the Special Administrative Region and—thanks to Hong Kong’s mania for betting on horses—one of the largest in the world. Various affiliated organizations also hold charity functions during race week. Tom got me to talk to something we’ll call “The .50 Caliber Club,” an all-male group of 400 of the most prominent and drunkest race horse owners in Asia. Every year they put on an epic five-hour lunch with numberless courses and bottles to match. What little I know about horses I left, with a fair amount of hind-end skin, in Kyrgyzstan. But I know a lot about drinking in the daytime. (The speech apparently was well received, although nobody, me in particular, seems to remember much about it.)
Cathay Pacific Airways was the principal sponsor of International Race Week. Cathay offered to fly me over, and gave us a deal on additional seats. For purposes of economization we got two seats in business class and a three-seat row in economy. Muffin and Poppet grabbed business class and surrendered themselves to the joy of chairs and footrests that can assume hundreds of positions and an entertainment system chock-full of stuff they aren’t allowed to watch at home, not to mention a magic button that you push and a nice lady brings you things to eat. Each of our daughters was as happy as a newly hired CEO in the corporation’s Gulfstream G-5. And I have great expectations for Muffin in this respect. Her egotism, unwarranted self-assurance, and continual exercise of pointless willfulness make her into pretty much every boss I’ve ever had. Poppet will need to find a different route to private luxury jet travel. Perhaps her disordered imagination and romantic notions about actuality can be channeled toward derivative swaps and collateralized debt obligations.
Poppet can be quite convincing, if you make the mistake of listening to her. Our flight took us over the north pole. Poppet went straight to the window, looking for lights from Santa’s house. Never mind that she wasn’t in a window seat. This caused some inconvenience to the person across the aisle. I went forward to check on the girls and found Poppet and the businesswomen to whom the window seat had been assigned both earnestly searching the ice pack for evidence of Saint Nick. I tried to extract Poppet.
“No, no,” said the businesswoman, “I think I just saw the glimmer from an elf lantern.”
As it got toward midnight our time (three drinks and a New York Times past the girls’ usual march to bed), Muffin and Poppet discovered the lie-flat feature on their seats. This, combined with Cathay’s privacy cubicle seat layout, gave the kids ample boudoirs with space for the Serengeti migrations of stuffed animals with which they travel. (Muffin considers herself too old for stuffed animals, but if she gave them up Poppet might enjoy them and that would spoil things for Muffin.) They went to sleep, or what passes for sleep with traveling children, meaning they got up every twenty minutes to make sure their parents weren’t enjoying three drinks or getting to read the New York Times.
Those parents had Buster between them. Buster distains stuffed animals and (again like Bill Clinton in Bill’s salad days) goes everywhere with a motorcade. He had at least fifty toy cars and trucks in his Speed Racer backpack. I’m glad he’s a boy’s boy and all, but when I tried to doze off with a semi-tractor trailer stuck in my backrest I did wish he’d get in touch with his feminine side and collect Beanie Babies.
When Buster isn’t acting like a politician, he’s acting like a large wheeled vehicle. He guns his engine, grinds his gears, and beeps when he backs up. Having Buster in the next seat is like trying to snooze on a highway yellow line. Finally, Mrs. O. and I lost our supervisory will, and Buster took the off-ramp over my knees. I heard his fire engine siren heading to first class and his ambulance wail coming back toward the galley. Then I fell asleep.
I awoke, I don’t know how much later, with no sign of Buster and a cold fear that Cathay Pacific was headed for an emergency landing in the Aleutians, where our family would be arrested for violating the TSA rule against being a pain in the neck. I went on a hasty search. Buster was chatting away to the prettiest of the stewardesses.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Has he been causing a ruckus?”
“Oh, no,” the stewardess said. “We told him that the airplane captain ordered no fire engines or ambulances allowed in the aisles, and he quieted right down. Then he went around and introduced himself to everybody, but only to the people who were awake. He didn’t bother anyone who was sleeping. He’d ask if they wanted to play with his toy trucks. And, before he wore out his welcome, he’d move on to the next person.”
In the due course of a damn long time we landed in Hong Kong. We proceeded down the aisle with two sleepy little girls and the Night Mayor of Cathay Flight 318. Everyone waved to Buster.
“Bye, Buster!”
“So long, Buster!”
“See you later, Buster!”
As soon as jet lag had sufficiently abated, Muffin began lecturing us—and all the Chinese within earshot—about China. “In China they don’t have the alphabet,” said Muffin. “They have pictures instead. And every picture is a word instead of a lot of letters. For instance that picture.” She pointed to a character on a billboard. “You can see that that’s the word for snakes and worms fighting over a cabbage.”
Poppet began to sniffle. “What if the cabbage gets hurt?”
When I was a foreign correspondent I regarded Hong Kong as “starter Asia,” perfect for introducing the Orient to neophytes. Everyone is impressed by how colorful and exotic it is, except it’s clean, safe, and it works. However, there is no telling what will impress a family. If any of the kids noticed that they’d gone from rural New Hampshire to a metropolis teeming with millions, they didn’t think was worth mentioning. And Mrs. O. didn’t notice that the place is cleaner than our kitchen at home. She began her program of applying antibacterial wipes to every surface on the Asian continent.
Buster was wowed that he could take a taxi without being strapped and buckled into a child seat as if he were going on a doomed Challenger mission. And then, to his immense delight, we encountered his idea of paradise—a traffic jam. “Truck! Car! Truck! Bus! Car! Car! Truck!” noted the observant little fellow.
An ad for Hong Kong Disneyland caught Poppet’s eye. She gasped with excitement.
“No!” I said. “We went to Disney World back home. You didn’t even like it.”
“I felt sorry for the mouse and the duck,” Poppet said.
“Why?”
“Because they had people sewn up inside them.”
“But, Dad,” said Muffin, “this time would be different. See, we fly a million miles, all the way around to the other side of the world. And then we go to someplace that’s exactly the same. That would be so cool.” The entire travel and tourism industry explained in three sentences.
I knew what would catch my wife’s eye. On a trip to the shopping capital of the world she had “accidentally left at home?
?? a suitcase full of the clothes she “needed most” so she “had to” go shopping. Gucci, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Coach, Louis Vuitton, Bulgari—each has a gleaming flagship store in Central. I tried to distract Mrs. O.
“Honey, look up in the sky!” Oops. There was a huge neon Ralph Lauren logo there. “No, look down. The kids might get pushed off the sidewalk! Traffic in Hong Kong is . . .” Screech . . . honk!!!
“Funny Daddy,” said Buster as I was almost run over by a bus. My wife slipped from my grasp and ran into Shanghai Tang’s, taking all of our credit cards.
With Muffin and Poppet holding onto my blazer pockets I pushed Buster’s stroller uphill past the Lau Kwai Fong bar fronts. Mainland China legislates family planning. Hong Kong just lets the impossibility of using a stroller to do the trick. I’ll never allow anyone to criticize the Americans with Disabilities Act again. There isn’t a curb cut anywhere in the Special Administrative Region. And Hong Kong’s steepest side streets, such as the one I was on, are, in fact, staircases. Some of the steps are as tall as Hu Jintao. I’d hoist Poppet, prod Muffin, and do a weight lifter’s snatch and jerk with Buster in the stroller. Sweat-soaked, winded, and probably (given Shanghai Tang’s prices) broke, I reached Ice House Road and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. I had been anchoring the right, rear corner of the bar there intermittently since the late 1980s. I ordered the usual. One of the waiters approached. He asked if the children would like something to eat. The FCC serves food? Who knew?
One thing that Mrs. O. and I have learned about traveling with children is to avoid hotels. There’s a cage-like atmosphere to hotel rooms, which brings out the zoo animal and not just in the Allman Brothers Band. You do not want to get to the point where the room service waiter ditches his tray outside the door and runs down the hall heedless of his tip rather than face your kids.
So we rented an apartment in Hong Kong, in a good neighborhood, Happy Valley. The worry was that we’d rented it sight unseen. I have been in Hong Kong apartments so small that you had to open the door to burp. Fortunately, apartment 15A in the Ovoid Tower had two adequate bedrooms and a reasonably spacious living/dining/stuffed animal corralling/toy truck parking area. Unfortunately, owing to the building’s namesake shape, the apartment had a Cessna fuselage form and the only place left to install the kitchen was where the nosewheel ought to be. We could always send out for Chinese.
Being fifteen stories up and in a nose cone pleased the kids. “We can play airplane!” said Poppet. You’d think that after our flight to Hong Kong, playing airplane would be like getting a combat veteran just back from Kandahar to go out for a game of paintball. The apartment also had a view of the Happy Valley racetrack. This was a great tear-saver, since both girls are crazy for horses, and Hong Kong bans children from attending horse races. We could see almost the entire course, with only part of the backstretch obscured by the apartment block next door.
“It’s Alpo in the lead coming out of the second turn with Rival gaining on the rail and Purina falling to third. Now they’re under Mrs. Woo’s clothesline, into the Wong family’s front hall, and through Mr. Chung’s bedroom. Kibbles and Bits is coming from behind. Gravy Train on the outside into the stretch. And . . . it’s Meow Mix by a nose!”
* * *
I went to the real races at Happy Valley, and courtesy of Tom, I was ensconced in the luxury of the owner’s suite with fitted carpet as deep as gambling debts, a buffet that was a veritable thesaurus entry for good and dictionary definition of plenty, and drink that flowed like . . . simile fails me due to drink . . . drink. I was wearing my loud tweeds and the world-famously ugly FCC club tie and was feeling quite the sport, aided by the Hong Kong dollar’s eight-to-one exchange rate. I could puff myself up with the pronouncement, “I’m putting a thousand on this race.”
I picked the odds-on favorite to show, a bet that, as I recall, paid out HK $1,002. Then I put my winnings on Tom’s horse, which came in . . . um . . . somewhat ahead of the start of the next race.
Meanwhile, Mrs. O., Mai, and the kids went to the Po Lin monastery on Lan Tau Island to see the Tian Tan Buddha, the largest bronze casting of its kind in the world. Mai, who doesn’t have kids and hasn’t traveled with three of them who act like miniature Americans, came back looking, shall we say, sympathetic. Mrs. O. was what she calls “intact.” And the children returned glowing from the intense aesthetic experience.
“We had ice cream!” said Poppet.
“Double dip!” said Muffin.
“On my pants!” said Buster, displaying proof that his deed was a good as his word.
“But what about the Buddha?” I asked.
“The what?” said Muffin.
“You know,” I said, “Buddha, the Indian holy man who founded Buddhism. You went to a Buddhist monastery.” (I thought we were supposed to be worried that American kids were being exposed to too much multiculturalism.) “They had a statue of Buddha. It’s really big. What was it like?”
“Really big?” said Muffin.
“We had ice cream!” said Poppet.
“On my pants!” said Buster.
I held out against Hong Kong Disneyland but gave in to the longer-established, less product-placement-infested Ocean Park. It’s sort of Six Flags Over Hong Kong. And—considering the Qing dynasty, British, Japanese, British again, Special Administrative District, and, pretenses aside, Communists—six flags is about right. This gave me the opportunity to bore Muffin with some history. And bored she was. The preteen mind has two modes: astounding know-it-all and amazing ignorance. Muffin responded to my pocket lecture on Hong Kong with, “I knew that. I knew that. I knew that. Are Communists the good guys or the bad guys?”
Ocean Park is set atop the coastal cliffs of Aberdeen, on the south side of Hong Kong Island. The amusement complex is reached via a scary Alpine gondola ride with naked rocks and nasty surf beneath it instead of the illusion of cushioning snow. This alarmed us all—enough, I hoped, to quench the children’s desire to go on alarming rides. Children do not, however, learn from experience. It may be their best trait. It keeps you from feeling obliged to hang around providing them with experiences all day and lets you send them off to school instead, in the hope they’ll learn something that way. And it allows you to be a remarkably grumpy parent, while dragging them around Hong Kong, for example, and still get a good-night hug.
The kids and their parents rode on . . .
“Forget it,” said Mrs. O. “I drive them to school every day. That’s enough of a thrill ride for me.”
The kids and their dad rode on . . . the Vomit Rocket, Coma Comet, Puke Chute, Spin-N-Spew, Nosebleed Express, and Loop-De-La-Defibrillator. In vain I hoped that height restrictions might spare me some of this, at least with Poppet and Buster, but I was on a continent where “You Must Be Taller Than the Clown to Ride” is a profound insult to half the population.
Ocean Park, in the earnest, self-improving Asian manner, has an instructional side to it. Interspersed among the rides were various exhibits focused on ocean life and full of icky undersea creatures, as if I didn’t have mal de mer already.
Poppet claimed she could understand what the sharks were saying.
“They’re saying they’re going to eat you,” said Muffin.
“I told them they couldn’t,” said Poppet complacently. “We’re in Hong Kong and they don’t know how to use chopsticks.”
The particular feature of Ocean Park that the kids liked best was mainland Chinese. There were tour groups full of them, mostly in late middle age and easy to spot with their off-brand clothing and out-of-town haircuts. Mainland Chinese are the midwesterners of Asia. But these were midwesterners who’d never seen a blond child. The older female tourists descended on our two towheads, Poppet and Buster. They hugged them, posed for pictures with them, ran their fingers through their hair. The kids accepted instant celebrity with composure.
I kept waiting for the Lindsay Lohan behavioral blow-back. It never came. Adult celebrities are people who wis
h they were the center of the universe. This is a wish the child mind has already granted to itself. And I’d expected Muffin to be jealous while the mainlanders fussed over her siblings. Instead, she pulled her Ocean Park cap down over her eyes and hung back demurely. So much the center of the universe is Muffin that she skipped the fame-seeking part and went directly to paparazzi avoidance. Children are actually very interesting. They’d probably be worth reporting on if they got their own country or something.
I took Muffin and Poppet on the tram to Victoria Peak. But they’re country kids. They’ve got a mountain out the back window, and a train runs through the local town. A train going up a mountain is too conceivable. They were fascinated instead by the escalator that runs between Central and Mid-Levels. Where we live it’s an hour’s drive to an escalator of any kind. And the Mid-Levels escalator is half a mile long. “We should get an escalator instead of a car,” said Muffin. “It would help save the planet from having greenhouse gas.”
Mrs. O. and Mai went to Mai’s dressmaker near the Western Market in the Sheung Wan neighborhood. I was sent off with the kids to get them and my suggestions out of the tailor’s shop. Now I had a chance to introduce the children to the real city, engage them with the genuine spirit of the place, get them to understand the idea of Hong Kong. We went shopping.
We went to a “wet market” selling parts of animals that even country kids didn’t know existed. We inspected seafood so fresh it seemed—given some chopsticks—at least as likely to eat us as we were to eat it. And we examined vegetable oddities that looked like remains taken from a Roswell, New Mexico, flying saucer crash. We went down alleyways full of thingmajiggers, dofunnies, and jingumbobs. Buster got a toy taxi and, by way of charades, persuaded the shop owner to let her finger serve as the passenger and be transported all over the countertop. I gave the girls a handful of Hong Kong dollars and sent them into the stores to make their own bargains. Mai had been coaching them in Cantonese.