Friday, August 27, 2010

Humiliation in Hong Kong

During my year in Hong Kong, I experienced my moment of deepest humiliation at a Watson’s Pharmacy. I sensed it coming as soon as I realized that I’d never find the hemorrhoid cream on my own. Every aisle looked the same, and all the boxes of medicine were printed in Chinese. To make matters worse, I lived out in the New Territories, a spread of hills and suburbs north of Kowloon – an area where the shopkeepers rarely speak English.

If I have one word of wisdom for you, it’s this: to live happily in a foreign country, you have to be able to think of yourself as a likable idiot. The hemorrhoids episode happened several months into my stay, so humiliation of the culturally illiterate kind was not new to me. Already I had launched a prawn over a formal banquet with my chopsticks. On another occasion, I had learned that when the buffet line is forming, always the oldest person in the room, not the greediest one, dishes up first. I had learned more or less the hard way that, in a Chinese setting, when the boss is speaking, everyone else shuts up. I had survived so many minor cultural adjustments, telling myself along the way that humiliation is the price you pay for the fun adventure of being a foreigner.

Watson’s Pharmacy is in the quintessentially-Hong Kong New Town Plaza shopping mall. From the atrium, you can scan seven levels of glass-faced shops and restaurants linked by steel escalators. Only the major airports of Asia are more cathedral-like than the malls of Hong Kong. But you can’t pause to admire the setting, because the concourse is as crowded as a stockyard. You enter the stream and keep moving, steering your way toward an escalator. Millions of people a year travel from all over Asia to shop in Hong Kong. But such people, I imagine, remembered to pack their hemorrhoidal ointment.

Like everywhere else in the mall, Watson’s is full of shoppers. And in every aisle (this is typical, too) you’ll see at least one floor clerk, usually a young woman who smiles and stares in unnerving silence as you pass. In one aisle after another, I was on my knees surveying the shelves for a word or image to guide me; but this was not an ailment that lends itself to advertising imagery. I would have to seek assistance.

But I did have a strategy. I would look for an older woman, if I could find one. And there she was, three aisles away, the one uniformed lady who most resembled my mother, someone who would have no sense of humor when it comes to certain kinds of suffering. I calmly asked where I might find the hemorrhoid cream, but then I had to repeat myself several times, to no effect. And this is when the nightmare began to unfurl. Of course, like all elderly Chinese in Hong Kong, she’d seek the help of someone younger with a fresher schoolbook knowledge of English.

While I prepared to be even more embarrassed, she conferred with her co-worker, a woman in her thirties. But the second woman declined to attempt the leap across the language chasm and instead set off to fetch one of the recent high school grads working cosmetics on the other side of the store. Although I had been repeating my mantra, “likable idiot, likable idiot,” religiously, I felt an urge to rush from the store and never return.

But the older woman hadn’t given up. She couldn’t understand my English, but she could speak a little. Inspired by a thought, she turned to me and asked, “What is it used for?”

Now she had me stumped. If it had been a topic for charades, I’m not sure I would have known how to demonstrate it. I know she was thinking, headache, stomachache … but unfortunately, there’s no universal sign language for hemorrhoidal itch. So, what I did was to make a sour face and sort of point to the area in question, and thank God, she understood and didn’t laugh, located my hard-earned remedy before the younger clerk’s threatened arrival, and probably even considered me, when all was said and done, just another likable idiot, an American in Hong Kong.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on August 27, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Customs & Rituals • Education • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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