A Jew in China
By
Daniel Blas
The first two things you notice upon arriving in the Hong Kong airport are (1) everyone is on their phones and (2) every other person wears a neon-colored facemask. My American SIM card was still lodged inside my iPhone, and I had no idea why I couldn’t see anyone’s nose or lips. Are they the sick ones? Are they trying to avoid some sort of virus? Will punching numbers into my phone keep me safe? I’m about get stricken by an unknown disease, I started worrying, and I won’t even be able to call my parents before I die!
I expected Asia to be different. For example, I had mentally prepared myself for chronic pain between my thumb and first finger due to chopstick overuse. And I had already memorized all of the important Cantonese lines: “bathroom” and “I don’t speak Chinese” and “are you single?”—helpful phrases, no doubt, as long as all I hoped to do was marry a local in the men’s room. But nothing prepared me for the next four months.
It's easy to space out on the MTR. Scenery blurs into broad canvas brushstrokes, thoughts and iPhones shut out the realization that you’re propped upright like cattle in a crammed car, and ambient conversation fades into the background, as in a coffee shop. The good news about spacing out is that I’ve added “please stand back from the doors” to my Chinese repertoire. I’ve also taken to watching the TV screens that are on a five-minute loop, rotating through soccer highlights in an unknown country followed by footage of rioting Asians and a brief infomercial for what I gather to be a five-speed smoothie machine. It’s left me to assume that a very controversial sporting match has caused rioters to alternatively protest and be appeased by kitchen appliances, though I may need to re-watch the footage to know for sure.
I’ll re-watch on my next trip, which will happen an hour or two before sunset next Friday afternoon. How do I know? Because I have a deadline to make.
It is a 45-minute commute from Sha Tin in the New Territories to Central District on Hong Kong Island, plus another fifteen minutes up the MidLevels escalator, the longest such transportation scheme in the world. Aside from the occasional computerized voice interpolating a "haah yat thaam" into my brain indicating a stop—Fo Tan, Sha Tin, Tai Wai—I forget about the hundreds of bodies surrounding me, grasping at poles, at metal bars, at my shoulders.
I snap out of my trance when I inadvertently bang my head into a line of hanging straps that can't be much higher than 5 feet 8 inches off the ground. Without fail, I hit them every time. I get stares. I am by far the tallest around. I am quai loh, white. American. Stupid.
But half the train car doesn't look up from their smartphones.
I check my smartphone, by now with capabilities to make local calls, and as the sun sets, I see that I am down to twenty-five minutes. I’d better hurry, I told myself. No time today to impulse-buy mooncakes at the MTR bakery en route.
Kowloon Tong: I hop off the train, elbow my way through a pack of school-children who are more mad that I broke their concentration in Candy Crush for Android than for shoving them to the side. Excuse me. No one seems to listen. EXCUSE ME. Still nothing. I’m getting desperate—the English is being ignored, and I need to make the connection to the Green Line. I resort to my most nonsensical yet trusty phrase in the book: Ngoh shik jehh! I am a vegetarian! A dozen pairs of baffled eyes stare at me as I scamper around the group and make my way to Central.
It doesn’t matter where I am in the world or what I’m doing. At sundown on Friday evening, it’s Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. Our Sabbath is the seventh day, a day of rest. We don’t use electronics or do work—school or professional—and we go to synagogue. We eat family meals, relax, and spend time together. We unplug. It is a day away from and in respect of the world. But at 5:25pm this week—and 5:20 next week, since the days are becoming shorter—my hard deadline approaches: sunset. I must drop everything and begin the Shabbat.
“Hallo!” my local roommate exclaimed as I walked in after my weekend in MidLevels.
“Hallo!”
“Hi, Matthew, how are you?” I replied, surprised by his over-eagerness to welcome me back. He wasn’t just eager, though, he had a question. A question that had been burning at him for months: what was that funky white box with a Hebrew letter on the right side of the doorframe?
He didn’t know it was a Hebrew letter, but he did know I put it there. It is a traditional sign of a room that houses a Jew, a good-luck charm of sorts, and a tradition that has roots in the Old Testament, the Jewish bible.
“Do you know feng shui?” I began. Of course he did. “This is Jewish feng shui.”
Immediately, his eyes grew large. “Jew?” he asked me. “You is Jew?” Jews, I quickly learned, were revered in Chinese culture for being smart and shrewd businessmen—think Karl Marx or Albert Einstein. Geniuses! My heritage, and not my individual economic aptitude or finance acumen immediately earned me the title of “smart” in his multi-charactered book.
Deciding to come to Hong Kong was not an easy decision. I knew that I’d be far from my friends, family, and Jewish community. I don’t eat pork—one of many Jewish dietary restrictions—and just about everything in China is made with it. I bet that even the vegetarian dishes have pork! I wailed during one of my many pre-trip freakouts. But I decided to push myself out of my comfort zone and follow through on my commitment to go. There was a Jewish community in MidLevels, I was told, a remnant of the British colonial era and over 100 years old. And my Lonely Planet guidebook assured me that Buddhist vegetarian food would be quite good (yes, that means I had to pass on the stingray soup in Peng Chau for $98HKD—a great deal, I am told!).
True, I was going to a far-off place where people care more about their phones than their girlfriends, and where I’m constantly surrounded by a smoggy haze of skyscrapers, mountains, and history. And I still have no idea why people wear those florescent blue facemasks. But here in Hong Kong, remoteness from my Jewish community doesn’t preclude me from partaking in tradition, be it affixing a mezuzah to the inner doorpost of my bedroom, observing the Sabbath away from campus, or making pig noises to get my point across to the canteen staff that no, I really don’t eat pork. The simple traditions, which I routinely perform at home, are no doubt more difficult to keep while 8000 miles away, especially because no one checks up on me to make sure that I observe correctly—or observe at all.
But I don’t feel out-of-place. In a sense, I am in the perfect location to feel torn, pulled in different directions. Hong Kong is a World City, a melting pot of Chinese and British, Mainland and Hongkonger, Buddhist, Confucian, atheist, money-lover, anti-establishment, hippie, teenager, hipster, and all combinations thereof. Adding a little bit of Judaism into the mix is no big deal.
For me, jumping into the melting pot is just another opportunity to remind myself who I am and why I’m here. And who knows—maybe I’m really blending in. After all, I wrote this essay on my touchscreen phone while standing on the MTR.
The author in Peng Chau, where he had to pass on the stingray soup.
The author on a hike at Lion’s Peak. His shirt has an Israeli flag on it.
About the author
Daniel Blas is an exchange student from the Wharton School at the University of
Pennsylvania. Born in New York City, he is studying economics with a concentration in finance and real estate and a minor in creative writing. He is studying at the Chinese University of Hong Kong for the Fall semester 2013.