A Wander Down Dried Seafood Street
My first address in Hong Kong is near Dried Seafood Street in Sai Ying Pun, at the heart of the Western District just off Des Voeux Road. It’s high summer; the Pearl River Delta humidity weighs me down, bloats my face red, and soaks the rest of me slippery with sweat.
I walk down Dried Seafood Street past tiny Chinese medicinal shops packed with locals. Cantonese greetings and curses ricochet between the sellers and buyers who haggle, shout, and snort at a shocking decibel. If I seek sea snakeskin, lizard on a stick, or baskets of dried seahorses with their wee eyes still connected to their shriveled heads, this street is the jackpot. I watch a man place dozens of shark fins on the sidewalk to dry out in the hot sun. It’s a small fortune, those rough fins ridged like classic potato chips and the color of dirty gym socks.
Oceanic scents skip down the road and leap out of baskets and jars to arrest my senses. Healthy has a different smell in Hong Kong. Healthy is a smear of fermented shrimp paste; a bouquet of sundried fish maw; a soup made from boiled abalone. Healthy is brewed, stewed, and bottled to combat illness and also aid in the quest for longevity and luck.
I could take a pickaxe to the smell of this neighborhood. The fragrance of the harbor, earth, and rot is solid. This is an odor that could be quarried. If the temperature suddenly dropped, if a freak spell of cold blasted through Dried Seafood Street, I could pack the frozen fetor into balls and start a snowball fight with my new neighbors.
I breathe it all in: an olfactory cacophony of sour, sweet, mold, and hide meant to promote health and balance. But I still feel out of whack. Discombobulated. If the Chinese philosophy of yin-yang is correct and a healthy body is perfectly poised between hot and cold, light and dark, self and nature – then I’m all akimbo.
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Hong Kong is full of ghost stories and spirits, like the gu wan je gwai: the ghost of a traveler who wandered too far from home and died among strangers. Perhaps the poor adventurer just wanted to see more of the world but ended up doomed to live as a marooned shadow caught in the doorjamb between Death and Life. I learn that the name gu wan je gwai can also apply to a person who is lonely, or been left high and dry, or gotten so lost she disappears.
It would be easy to get lost in Hong Kong. Seven million people are packed into a vertical city that’s a maze of nooks, alleys, and sky bridges. As I walk down Dried Seafood Street, I feel lost. I followed my partner to Hong Kong. He has a new job and speaks Mandarin and can read everything and will do just fine. I am illiterate and understand nothing written in Chinese characters or Romanized text, so I struggle to find purchase in this city and culture. I blink into the August sun, pinioned by heat and humidity, and realize I could dissolve into the cracks in the sidewalk.
But I don’t.
I decide instead to seek the healthy treasures of the sea for a good liver cleanse. Maybe that’s all a discombobulated wandering gu wan je gwai needs after moving six thousand miles to a new city-home.
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What do you recommend, Shopkeeper on Dried Seafood Street, for a new arrival to Hong Kong who feels out of sorts? Do you sell sorts? Surely among all these jars, baskets, and buckets you can whip up something to assist with putting down new home roots. Should I crunch on some dried snow ear mushrooms? Slurp a few century eggs sprinkled with bee pollen? Brew an elixir of wolfberry and ginger? I’m putting myself into your ginseng fragrant hands. Better make the whole cocktail a double. And use extra black fungus. M̀ gōi. Thank you.