A Tale of Two Kitties

According to Google Maps, the length of my block, from intersection to intersection, is 200 feet. It's on a harsh incline. The kind that Ivan Drago loves.

 I've made two friends on my block. They understand about as much Cantonese as I do. In the wee hours of the morning following Valentine's Day, they listened to my resolutions. "No more carbs!" I proclaimed. They meow in approval as another french fry from my lazily wrapped kebab drops to the floor. I continue to find myself very interesting. Their eyelids go into screensaver mode in unison, in the same way that human married people's collusively do when they just want me to leave. "No, wait, wait, did I ever tell you about Paris?"

I wake up with that "oh-fuck" feeling and go to get a coffee and apologize to the cats. But someone has already torn down their house and they are gone.


No cars will pass through my block for the rest of the day. The road has been taken over by street vendors - some legal, some not - just like any other day. They are all women. And they are all about 90 years old. Some of them are under four feet tall. I'm still trying to figure them out. Each one has this palette of stuff. Sometimes, there is consistency: lettuces, potatoes, garlics. Fine. But other stands have this weird mix of a dollar store selection - Chinese slippers, Dale Carnegie in paperback, combination locks inside an open wooden case labeled "Chateau La Tour Carnet." I left for the gym one time, and this one old lady was playing with a wooden plank as if she were a child dreaming about an imaginary boat from a faraway land. She smiled like one too. When I got back from jockeying the elliptical, she was still holding the plank under her arm, and was playing with a newly found treasure: a shiny watch. "What time is it?" she asks me. "It's one." This seems to make her happy. 

 The Pakistani guys who run an actual carpet store have carpeted the sidewalk in front of and around their property. An old lady sits on one of them and starts to spread out her own makeshift shop 'o' scarves. The same cop comes every day to enforce the law, but he can't do anything about it because she moves so slowly that it takes an hour to pack everything up. Of course each day she's back and lays out her goods in 30 seconds.

In the evenings, a couple of versatile old ladies (only in their 70's!) operate a fly-by-night operation on the elevated end of the block. A large white van - the kind that you own if you either deliver plutonium or snatch women off the street - pulls up to the curb - and some low-end middle-aged thugs come out and make deliveries of pirated DVDs, phone cards of questionable provenance, and the most random crap in the world, like a cardboard box of restaurant-takeout-tupperware. Presumably, they also collect money. Perhaps they also say, "Thanks, Mom."

 A lonely old man peers out from a large storefront – the kind of square footage that rents for over a million a month – and goes back to tending to his single shelf of soy sauce bottles.  I like to believe that beneath the layers of dust, there is a trap door or a false wall that leads to a cellar of vintage soy sauces the Japanese soldiers never found; or any other romantic narrative that can sedate the befuddlement of my inner-economist.  

 This is a Hong Kong that has refused to move on. Or cannot move on. As I prepare to enter my peculiarly placed corporate apartment, I turn around, see an empty space, and hope that my feline friends have found a newer world. But of course, I hear a "meow."