Self-Portrait Abroad

hong kong

We’d landed in Hong Kong a few minutes earlier, flying over the city at a ridiculously low altitude, thirty or so feet at most, the immense mass of the Boeing slamming down onto the runway after barely scraping over the rooftops and flying over a last shop-lined street where you could see men in white shirts, cigarettes in their mouths, crossing the road without paying the least attention to the insane spectacle that this gigantic airplane must have presented overhead, or else standing tranquilly on their doorsteps, arms crossed, taking in the fresh air of this bustling Hong Kong street where thousands of multicolored ideograms blinked continuously in the night. Not long beforehand, when the plane was still much higher in the sky and turning slowly in the air to commence its descent, the entire bay of Hong Kong had suddenly appeared through my window in a twinkling of luminous blue and white points, revealing farther off the presence of other urban concentrations, Macao or Kowloon, whose illuminated agglomerations shone out against a background of bluish mountains barely visible as shadowy profiles in the night. Meanwhile, on the surface of the water below us, among the silhouettes of the cruise ships and barges, cargo and container ships, floating casinos and nightclubs where you could dance the salsa or mambo-mambo under dotted strings of lamps, the navigation lights of thousands of solitary junks rocked slowly to and fro, dotting the bay like so many fireflies.

Seated on one of those anonymous plastic seats in an immense hall at Hong Kong International Airport, I looked at the dirty linoleum floor between my legs, thoughtful, my hands joined and my body inclined, a little lost and disoriented (I’d taken off from Osaka some five hours earlier and was headed for Frankfurt where I was due to land in twelve more hours). I didn’t know where I was and no longer really knew where I was going. I’d already had a similar feeling of the momentary loss of temporal and spatial landmarks a few days earlier in the plane that had taken me to Japan when, sitting drowsily in my seat, I suddenly became aware looking out the window that it was neither day nor night outside, but simultaneously day and night, and that to the right of the plane I could see the moon, shining in the sky in-line with the wing, as well as the sun, far out in front of us, which for the moment was still just a blurred pink and orange glow similar to the cottony contours of a Rothko, lighting up the horizon of this immense sky divided evenly into day and night, into Europe and Asia. The silent cabin of my sleepy seven-forty-seven was still convinced of its being night, however, as it flew in perfect stillness toward Tokyo to the hushed droning of its motors, my watch showing one o’clock in the morning, the other passengers dozing around me in the feeble light, the small plastic blinds on the windows carefully lowered, to say nothing of my own fatigue after seven or eight hours of flight, my eyes heavy and closing softly, yes, everything seemed to indicate that it was night — apart from one important detail: it was now broad daylight outside.

My watch now showed something like eleven o’clock in the evening, a Japanese time that was no longer relevant anywhere, neither in Berlin where I was headed nor in Hong Kong where I still was. Because I was in Hong Kong, yes, though I might as well have been in a novel. But enough of verisimilitude.