Personally, I’ve never been interested in visiting places like China or Russia, not because I harbor any political animosity toward them, but simply because I’m afraid to go anywhere where I don’t speak the language AND I can’t make sense of the alphabet, so I can’t even understand the signs. But I could probably do Hong Kong. Based on my digital exploration, there’s a lot of English spoken, or at least written here, because it was once a British colony. Which is lucky for me, but only to a point. I’ve traveled enough to know that just because you see signs in English doesn’t mean the people actually speak it. It just means they speak money, and they know enough English to part you from yours. That’s not always a bad thing. As long as you’re a tourist, that’s really what matters most to you…being able to buy stuff. But if I was going there for business, I’d have to work up my guts. 

I’m a talented linguist, but that’s precisely the reason I fear it. There’s a really crappy period you go through between knowing absolutely nothing at all to being able to hold a simple conversation. It takes time and a buttload or effort, and you will make mistakes, like the time I asked somebody for aspirin because “my tits hurt”. I meant to say my sinuses hurt. That’s why I’ve always been patient with people who are struggling to speak English to me. I know how it feels. It TRULY sucks. It’s hard enough just trying to ask a simple question and getting attitude from strangers. But I’ve got to do all of that while being Black in a foreign country, and trust me…that can weird. But China offers one very important consolation: If I can figure out how to ask for food, I will never be disappointed. I’ve been to Chinese restaurants around the world, and the only place I’ve ever had a bad meal is in America. Because Chinese food for us is rice, with peas and carrots. No eel, no bok choy, nothing we can’t pronounce. We’re happy with crap, so they feed us crap.

Hong Kong is walkable for the simple reason that like many cities its size, there’s nowhere to park a damned car. I had that experience living in downtown Chicago, and New York is that way too. A car is great as long as you’re moving, but the minute you try to park it somewhere, you’ve got to either part with a lot of money, walk a country mile from where you parked, or deal with your car getting towed if you exceed your allotted time in the space…and you do it every time you drive. I got rid of my car after my first couple of years in Chicago because it was a nightmare. When you live in a huge city like this one, you either get comfortable with the idea of walking or you learn how to take public transportation. 

And in a city this vast, you’ll have to learn quickly unless you stick to the tourist traps, because cab fare seriously adds up. But there’s so much to see and do that it’s really okay. The people watching is cool, but what I found more fun about my digital exploration was trying to guess what building does what. Because if you can’t read the signs, you really have no idea what something is by just looking at it. If you ever wanted to know what it feels like to be illiterate, walk around Hong Kong. At least in European countries, I could kind figure out what a great many words meant, and I learned how they’re pronounced by the locals. But when you’re dealing with ideograms, all bets are off. Until you get a grip on the language, they’re just squiggles, and you’re reading them backwards.