Super Long Post: Part II

I wrote this post as part of the last super long post, but thought it was too long and too boring...so I decided to cut it into pieces and bore you twice...I'm not gonna bother editing it, because it was like 3 weeks ago, but I thought I should post it.

Reflections

This whole experience has been quite absurd. I remember, quite distinctly, that for my entire childhood and even up through some of college, I always thought that my family was quite wealthy. Or at least solidly “upper middle class.” (If I’m not mistaken, we are actually upper middle class.) And by all measures of being and economic welfare, I do still believe that my family is very well-off and that I could never ask for more than I was given…but I no longer harbor any sort of delusion that we are considered, at least in this world, to be wealthy. Which, of course, I also view to be a positive thing. I couldn’t have grown up in a better environment. Anyhow…

…suddenly here’s this strange life I’ve taken on over the past 2 months. Where I actually consider getting my shoes polished. Where I must engage in conversations about "the market." Where people are used to having certain luxuries and accommodations “expensed.” Where instant gratification is the expectation. And where self-reliance exists in an alien form – because while you may be self-reliant in the professional world, your basic needs of laundry, food preparation, grooming, and transportation are all packaged not as necessity, but as luxury. I think maybe that is, in some small sense, part of what constitutes conspicuous wealth. Turning the everyday moments into pleasure. From a desire for comfort to a satiation of the need for constant pleasure. It’s hedonism, really. Luxury is little but the conversion of the everyday into something extraordinary. (I mean, sure, I like it. But what the fuck?)

Loving Hong Kong

I will say, though, that I am increasingly coming to love Hong Kong. (see above.) The city itself is not nearly as Asian as you might expect. It is sometimes actually difficult to find a nice Chinese restaurant, because there are so many hundreds of Thai, Vietnamese, Italian, Indian, American, Greek, Japanese, Lebanese, or whatever other types of restaurants around the city. It also lacks the dirtiness and cheapness of China. The restaurants don’t have a faux sense of decor and elegance. The elegance is real. This truly is a world class city in many respects. It’s not like China where “French Onion Soup” is a watery onion broth, or where an enchilada will be a horribly compromised mishmash of flavors stuffed into a gummy bready tortilla and served with a package of ketchup. French onion soup is actually French onion soup here. White wine seafood risotto is actually a white wine seafood risotto. It may not strike you as that odd, but after spending time in India and China, it’s very strange to stumble into a foreign restaurant in the city and actually eat food that hasn’t been bastardized into a weird Chinese form.

Of course such a “westernized” style of living has its drawbacks. Hong Kong is fucking expensive. In a city of investment bankers and businessmen, I guess I was naive to believe it could be otherwise…but I am paying out the nose for so many things. Another is that there are white people everywhere (which might be ok if you like such things). A third drawback is simply that Hong Kong doesn’t have any particular culture. It exists somewhere between the US, China, the UK, and the ideal of a capitalistic society. It is its own melting pot, and lacks the richness of a native soul. (Of course, I’m very very new here…but that’s just what I thought.)

It is wonderful though. On the south side of the Island there are gorgeous white sand beaches surrounded by emerald green waters and lush green mountains. There are jungle-like mountain paths to go hiking on the weekends, and lots of little islands surrounding Hong Kong island with hikes ranging from 1 to 12 hours. And it’s tropical, which means that some of the plants leaves are so thick, so juicy, and so prehistorically large that they almost seem like animals. There are quaint villages and skyscrapers. Concrete and wilderness. Mountain biking and dragon boats. The Four Seasons and the shack by the sea. Clearly I’ve been converted.

Speaking of the tropical plants, I’d like to go back to these leaves for just a moment. Do any of you know what I’m talking about? The plants with the leaves the size of a pizza. The type that stegosaurus probably loved. The ones you look at and say “holy crap, did I just take mushrooms? or did I just step into Super Mario Bros.?” I love those huge plants. They just seem so other worldly. Only in these tropical areas could produce plants with such enormous leaves. I bet these things produce a bucket of chlorophyll per day. They just look so healthy. So thick and organic. And enormous.

Anyhow, that must have been, by far, the worst passage I’ve ever posted on this thing. A rambling talk about large leaves. Well too bad. It continues. I talk about them only because I took an amazing run last night on the side of a mountain. This is more or less the view from the path on the left. I began at 8 o’clock, when the night had already gone dark and the primarily illumination came from the forest of skyscrapers and their Hong Kong neon lights…and after I somehow, painfully, but persistently managed to pound out a 6K…it began raining…and I heard the sound of a thousand raindrops hitting a thousand (giant) leaves. The thing is, this was not the sizzling sound of drizzle on maple leaves. This was something much more substantial. Something corporeal. The sound of fat, heavy drops of cool tropical rains pounding into fleshy enormo-above-ground-lily-pads. The sort of satisfaction you can get out of a bass amp when it’s tweaked just right, or when a bass drum has been properly mic’d up and sends a thump through your chest. Just awesome. It’s a sure sign of being away from home when I see leaves like this. But it always carries its own sense of home as I flash on memories of India and my awe the first time I ever saw one of these large plants. (I am quite possibly the most boring motherfucker who has ever walked the earth.)

...and that's the end of the post. I'll be back soon with something more interesting.

Here's some pictures and commentary:

This is a picture from Thailand, which I had nothing to do with. But I thought it would give you all the flavor you would need to understand Bangkok.
This is a beachfront public barbecue...
This is the haircut I adopted for our "let's be absurd" night. (Notice how fucking lame her "absurd" hairstyle is. And look how pissed I am that she did that.)
And as a symbolic demonstration of how transformative my influence and the influence of Hong Kong were on those around us...we managed to turn THIS Kid....

Into THIS at 5am Karaoke. (Bow.)

Test of Coolness.

If you have an immediate gut reaction to this. A familiarity you would feel as if you just met your long lost brother. Or a feeling of completion, contentment, and satisfaction as if, somehow, miraculously, you were given a new lease on life... or thirty...

Then you are cool.

Compensation.

Ok. Admittedly that was lame.

I actually do have like 6 pages of posts from Hong Kong I never put up because my internet was all fuzzed out. I will attempt to do so soon.

More importantly, however, is your compensation for the Woody Woodpecker shit. Which is that...

....I got a Wii.


Now how does that benefit you? It really depends.
1) You can come to NYC, Boston, or the Beach House in North Carolina (to which you are all invited, as there are up to 10 spots still open for anyone who is a friend) (no really, you can come. with your friend. or wife. or significant other.) (August 17-22, and it's going to be awesome. some of you have already agreed to come.)
2) You can feel good because I feel good.
3) You can suck it, because I got a Wii. (which benefits you because you'll finally have the opportunity to suck it.)

Boner.

Has anyone else ever suddenly realized that the name Woody Woodpecker is both stupidly uncreative and extremely (un)funny in the most adolescent way?

(more to come.)

Super Long Post: Part I

The past week has been an absolute whirlwind. I can barely keep pace. I haven’t posted for a variety of reasons…some of it has been exhaustion. Some of it has been work-related. Some of it has been spazzy internet in my room. And a lot of it has just been the occurrence of a few very upsetting issues that I don’t really feel like talking about…so I’m just gonna write to pass the time.

So…I’ll do what I can. We start with the boring. I’ll break this into pieces, because I’m sure no one wants to read all of this at once, if you read it at all.

My Life at Work.

I was ushered into a big M&A deal this week. Chinese company. UK financiers. Weeklong negotiations to be wrangled over in our conference room. Titans. Locking horns. Fierce battles over millions of dollars...

…let’s just say not quite.

I did spend approximately 30 hours locked in a tiny room with a company executive, a private equity manager, 2 Chinese counsel, my boss, an associate I worked with, and a few other various characters who came in and out. That much is factually true. Except for a few moments where our client was turning red and on the verge of jumping over the table and strangling the little Chinese man who was suddenly asking for an additional hundred million dollars after a year of negotiations…the entire fiasco was actually quite boring, and more frequently infuriating. The infuriating part was that the Chinese PRC lawyer who was on our team was an absolute waste of oxygen.

Don’t get me wrong. The guy was a real sweetheart. A lovely older gentleman with a sunny disposition. Unfortunately, he had the type of voice that lacked any crispness or clarity. Sort of a human foghorn-like irritating bleat. And he refused to enunciate. And his accent was atrocious (apparently even after 20 years in the US.) And he seemed to have a real talent for saying irrelevant things, or repeating exactly what he had said two sentences ago. Over and over again. I am certain, and I mean certain that we spent an extra 6 hours locked into that conference room because that guy consistently, persistently, and unceasingly tried to interject himself into conversations, make stupid jokes, in the midst of the most fruitful moments of negotiations, and endlessly mistranslate from Mandarin to English, and back again. As a result, instead of asking a question and receiving a response, a question would be asked in Chinese, the attorney (we’ll call him Jackass) would misunderstand the question, mistranslate the question (even though he wasn’t the translator…), receive a confused clarification from his (rightfully) bewildered client, and then he would promptly mistranslate the response, releasing free radicals of confusion and misunderstandings and mistaken issues for the next hour. Of course, when the question would finally be reclarified after 30 minutes of careful explanation…Jackass would promptly say exactly the confusing thing he said the first time. And another hour would lapse.

…And my anger would slowly grow. I refuse to work with Chinese lawyers until this older crop of dinosaurs disappears…

…And that was my week. A long week of endless meetings. And because I was surrounded by big dogs. I was one tired pup who sat around all week having no idea what was going on…I will say that I learned a lot, that the experience was valuable, and that I was very impressed by the other attorneys on our team. But Jackass’s presence alone was enough to make me boil.

…and so we move to the slightly less boring.

My Life (because of) Work.

Being a summer associate in a branch office is a very different experience than being one in the main office. Besides the fact that the entire branch is contained in a tiny office space half the size of a single floor of the home office, the “summer events” are also much more informal and much more personal, and in some cases, much more extravagant. There were two events this week. The first, was a day-long trip to Macau. The second, was the Hong Kong Handover Anniversary celebration. We begin with Macau.

This is the 5th year (in front), the 1st year (in back) and his girlfriend (right)

Macau is an island off the coast of China. I always knew there was such a thing as Macau, which was vaguely Chinese, but I never knew what it was. As I understand it, Macau was a Portuguese colony since a very very long time ago, and returned to China in 1999, much like the way Hong Kong did in ’97. As a result, though, Macau has a very pervasive Portuguese influence. The architecture of the old city is very European, the central attraction is a large cathedral facade, and the Portuguese language is pervasive. And the island is beautiful. The contingent consisted of Me, another summer (guy), the other summer (girl) and her boyfriend, a 5^th year associate and his fiancee and mother in law, and a first year associate and his girlfriend. We hopped on the Turbojet ferry from the Hong Kong docks, and an hour later arrived on the shores of Macau. We immediately jetted across the island to a fantastic restaurant that served Macanese food, which is an interesting hybrid between Portuguese and Chinese cooking. Deep aromatic sauces, pervasive use of garlic, wine, butter, spices, fresh meats and fishes, crispy hot bread, bottles of white wine, and fantastically Chinese ingredients with more European influences. So I ended up gorging myself. (Part 1.)

We then set off for a long walk through Macau’s older city, which as pictured below, is actually a European-looking area with tons of tourists and tons of people. It was interesting, and an absolutely beautiful day…but nothing really interesting enough to report. (Except the fact that I made my fellow summer do this to a cannon…merely by declaring “Frat boy Photo time!”, to which he immediately complied.) We spent some time roaming around the old city, eating random deserts (chilled milk jello, Portuguese Egg Custard tarts which are ohmigodsomuchbetterthanIcouldhaveeverexpected, and, of course, egg rolls), and really just passed our time in the city.

This is the chilled milk desert and eggrolls.

Afterwards, we immediately went for another meal at a famous ol’ place called Fernandos. In the cab ride over, in typical form, I had a heart to heart with the cab driver. Apparently, the guy had swam across the ocean to Macau in 1979 to escape the poverty and Communism. It took 3 hours, in the middle of the night, to avoid being shot by the Chinese shore guards. Unreal. Besides the sheer danger of swimming for 3 hours through the ocean, once you leave the harbor it’s just open water on all sides. I don’t see how it would be possible to swim in a straight line across the ocean and actually not stray off by a couple of degrees and end up swimming to your death into the open water. I’m so impressed.

Anyhow, we had a phenomenal, incredible Macanese meal at Fernandos, which is some sort of super famous (again, rightfully so) restaurant, which had the feel of like a barbecue restaurant with checkered red tableclothes and huge pitchers of sangria (gorging myself Part 2)…and then the event was over. As we left the restaurant we all split up, and the 5^th year, his fiancee, and the mother in law called it a night, and hopped on the ferry back to Hong Kong. The rest of us stayed.

What I didn’t mention about Macau, is that it is in the process of becoming Asia’s Las Vegas. Yes. There are casinos. Tons of casinos. Enormous casinos like the Venetian, the Sands, the Wynn, and other staples of any huge casino strip have started to consume the skyline, and the glamour and luxury of Vegas exists within the four walls of these casinos. So, since it was Saturday night, we figured we should give the place a whirl. We gave our best shot to slots, blackjack, roulette, and eventually several types of Scotch in celebration of the guy summer’s birthday, which he quietly announced after midnight. And so we had to make the night more special. If only with MacAllan’s 18. (and me betting nearly 80 dollars on the 2 to 1 column in Roulette as a birthday gift to the kid. Which we promptly lost. And I promptly regretted. Magnanimity’s a bitch.)

(There isn’t a whole lot to describe about the night. We won. We lost. We lost some more. We lost a little bit more. We won. And then we lost. And then we caught the 3 am ferry back to Hong Kong.) And thus, was Macau.

And so we move onto the 10-year Handover Celebration.

I admit I did not take this picture. Mine didn't turn out so well.

So the basic History of Hong Kong is this (which I assume you already know.) Hong Kong was a British colony. Blah blah blah, there was a flurry of wars over opium trade, trade with China, and other economic issues, and Hong Kong was essentially the British gateway to China. And in 1898, Britain and China signed an agreement that Hong Kong would be handed back to the Chinese in 1997. (I find it crazy that countries make agreements with such long timeframes…and that they are actually upheld.) And so, in 1997, amidst enormous fear, trepidation, and concern for what the future held, Hong Kong was returned to China. On July 1, 1997.

Fast-forward to July 1, 2007. Hu Jintao flies down to Hong Kong. 18 million HK dollars (>2 million USD) are spent on the firework show. Boats absolutely fill the harbor to watch the firework show to celebrate the 10-year anniversary. The event, not technically a summer event, was our participation in the festivities of the night. The firm had rented one of the most famous “junks” in Hong Kong: An enormous wooden sailboat, fully equipped with silken sails of deep maroon lashed to enormous bamboo frames. This boat was by far the largest junk in the harbor. The night was to consist of hor d’oeuvres, dinner, and unlimited quantities of wine, beer, liquor, babies, children, families, music, fireworks, and celebration. Oh, and Cuban cigars. (I had 2. 1 Partagas and 1 Romeo y Julieta)

The weather was beautiful. The night was clear. The fireworks were spectacular, ending with a jarring barrage of mortars. The beer was plentiful. The talks were pleasant. The boat was amazing. And the night was, altogether, quite nice. The boat rocked gently in the water as the older children (6-8 years old?) let off huge party poppers, and the babies (and there were like 10 babies) were rocked to sleep…as the adults had their own version of playtime. I remember eating excessively, drinking excessively, smoking cigars excessively, and having long talks with a partner and counsel. ) I had to remind myself what everyone always said about partners and summers…which is that they will never be this nice to you again. The moment you step into the office as a junior associate, the wall goes up, and you can’t be friends for 8 years. Which actually, I think I prefer.)

But all in all, was an amazing night to sail around Hong Kong Island and have some of the best seats in the house for the 10 year celebration…even if we were, on other days, not entirely Hong Kongers ourselves.