Oddly enough, Pabst Blue Ribbon is one of the cheaper beers here and Budweiser is one of the more expensive. Drinking is simply not part of the culture here, so no one checks for ID since there’s no age limit. There’s a lot of smoking though, mostly for image. People walk around with cigarettes hanging out their mouths, and just have one every now and then, instead of needing cigarette breaks every hour.

I had the chance to visit my paternal grandmother yesterday, whom I haven’t seen in more than a decade. Her face is more sunken now, although she still has the same strength and vitality I’ve always known her to have. Even though she’s 82, she still heads down to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange every day to buy and sell stocks. It’s what she does to keep herself occupied while everyone else is at work, and to earn a little spending/medical money. Even when I called her up before visiting, she was very down-to-business, and never bothered with formalities or small talk.

She’s had a hard, though successful life. Born in Hong Kong, she was the third wife of my grandfather, who died early, but not before gambling most of the family fortune away. Had he not done so the family would have been filthy rich, although I really doubt this would have been a good thing, for myself at least. She has no education, taught herself to read well enough to get by, and was left to raise her seven children by herself. There was enough money left to hire a servant to help her, a woman who lived with the family for more than four decades before succumbing to diabetes, and did all the cooking and cleaning, and was even a wet nurse to my father at one point.

My grandmother earned enough to send most of her kids to study in Canada, and had the guts to bring them there herself to look for appropriate schools, unable even to read most of the airport signs. Now my uncles and aunts have had great careers, and I believe are doing better than she could have imagined. I still wear the jade necklace she gave me more than ten years ago, and have taken it off less than a half dozen times. I usually send her the first paycheck that I earn from any job I take. She has everything she needs now, so there was nothing I could have given her, although I was considering some nice ginseng until I found out that the quality of the ginseng she buys costs more than $1000 CAD a pound.

She told me to find a girl who isn’t white (I don’t think she’s racist, she just wants to look out for my best interests and believes that Chinese girls treat their guys better), although she seemed happy for me when she found out that I was dating a Caucasian girl. The most important thing, she told me, is to find a girl who loves me more than I love her, hee hee.

I can’t tell if she loves me or is proud of me from her body language. She acts like a very strong person and hides her emotions well, so doesn’t even come to greet me at the door when I first walk in. I have a great respect for her, and hope that she’ll end up respecting me as well.

It’s always a delight to hear an older Chinese person say something in English without accent. However, hearing an older Caucasian person speak Cantonese without accent it’s completely fucking scary cause it’s like OMG THEY ARE INFILTRATING AND THEY KNOW WHAT WE ARE SAYING QUICK PRETEND LIKE YOU DON’T NOTICE AND SAY THEY HAVE NICE TEETH. I use the word “older” because nowadays it’s not uncommon for people to speak more than one language fluently, whereas at my parents age the education for such things wasn’t the norm.

Hong Kong used to be an open port to China for trade. Ever since the China takeover in ‘97, China has opened up for trade again, leaving Hong Kong as a middleman. Businesses have generally all stopped trading through Hong Kong, since it costs more to go through such a middleman. As a result, the Hong Kong economy has collapsed, and is now heavily dependent on tourism and information trading. That explains why I see so many commercials on visiting Hong Kong back home.

The shopping is great, due to the large tourism industry. Everything is tax free, and is generally cheaper than the equivalent from back home. I was able to find a red turtleneck for $30 that would have cost me $60 (not including tax) in Canada. The stitching is roughly the same quality, and there was an immediate two-hour 50% off sale on anything red, so I got it for $15 instead. I also bought a Seiko Criteria Kinetic Auto Relay watch, which powers itself on the movement of the wearer. The auto relay function automatically sets the date/time, which is useful for when the watch is taken off and runs out of power, so that the date/time don’t need to be set again. It’s only been five days and I’ve already spent more than I thought I would the entire trip. Going into debt has never been this much fun.

Professor The Honourable Arthur Li Kwok-cheung, Hong Kong Secretary for Education and Manpower, was caught playing games on his PDA yesterday during a meeting of parliament. Now I don’t feel so bad about playing my GBA in class.