The Buzz, baby. Nothing but the Buzz.

I was raised in upper midwest, so the concept of self-promotion sits uncomfortably on my shoulders. That said, according to my agent, when your first book comes out you have to suck it up and promote yourself shamelessly or face disappearing in the wash of books coming out every year.

And according to my editor, you need to create a "buzz," which will create sales, which will then create more "buzz," and more sales, and on and on. One way to do this, she says, is to encourage my friends and the various strangers who read my blog to go to Amazon and pre-order copies of my book.

So that's what I'm doing now: if you've read this blog or are now reading this blog and have enjoyed it, please go to the link below and pre-order a copy of Hong Konged in order to be part of the buzz.

If, on the other hand, you'd rather not spend your hard earned money to purchase this book, that's perfectly fine. What I encourage you to do instead, is wait until your children are sound asleep, sneak into their rooms, take their piggy banks, their iPads, their cherished coin collections, etc., and sneak back out again. Then smash the banks, hock the iPads, put the coin collections up on e-bay. Once that's done, go to the link below, and buy the book.

Because it's all about the buzz, baby. Nothing but the buzz. I'm sure your kids will understand.

http://www.amazon.com/Hong-Konged-American-Familys-adventures/dp/144054073X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328881845&sr=1-1

This is just to say . . .

that excerpts from our "White Boy" adventures in Hong Kong will be appearing in book form soon. HONG KONGED will be published in July 2012 by Adams' Media. Stay tuned for more details. And thanks, all, for your support. I'll be back soon with more tales of life in Virginia. I know you're all just dying to hear details about our trips to CVS and Kroger . . .

Confessions of a White-Knuckle Flier

Ten years ago, the first time I went to China, the return flight took something like twenty-four hours.  Aside from one slightly-overdone hamburger at the Detroit airport, my journey was more or less worry free:  no excessive turbulence, no lost baggage, no half-digested meatloaf deposited in my lap by one of my seatmates. 

And then, just as the small prop-plane I was one rose over the last ridge of mountains surrounding the Roanoke Valley--

—it suddenly dropped.  

Like thirty feet.  Or forty feet.  Or a hundred feet.  Or whatever.  Because to tell you the truth, I couldn’t tell you how far it was, though I can say it was enough that it made the flight attendant scream and grab the arms of her little collapsible seat.  And I can tell you that it was far enough that, after we landed, the pilot got on the PA and said, “Well.”  Long pause.  “THAT doesn’t happen very often.”

I hate flying. 

I haven’t always been this way.  I was twenty the first time I got on a plane and flew 33 (count ‘em:  thirty-three) hours to Tanzania, East Africa.  I loved every minute of it.  Between then and 1999, I probably took upward of 100 flights, and was pretty much okay with them.  Then, that year, coming back into Virginia, that plane flew into the Roanoke Valley, dropped . . . and, well:  left most of my guts somewhere at around 3,200 feet.

My wife’s cousin, who’s an aeronautical engineer (like that qualifies him to say anything) just shrugged when I told him my tale of nearly dying in sight of my own threshold after coming halfway around the world.  “The wings on those planes can bend thirty feet,” he said, “no problem.  It’d take more than that to crash a plane.”

To which I have exactly two responses: 

1)  Great.  I’ll be sure to tell that to my bladder the next time it cuts loose on a plane full of screaming people;

And 2) Bite me. 

I’m mean, seriously:  there’s what we “know” on an intellectual level—mathematical equations about tension and friction and bolt strength and joint flexibility and air currents and that sort of crap.

And there’s what we KNOW in a gut-level, testicles-climbing-back into the body-cavity, kind of way.  You can talk to me all day long about wing warp and how they’ve developed special radar for detecting wing sheer.  And I’ll nod and say, “Well, that’s nice to know,” and “Gosh, I hadn’t thought of that.”  And then we’ll be flying together, somewhere over, say, northern Missouri, and the plane will start to buck and rattle and there’ll be that little ping! as the Please Fasten Seatbelts sign comes on, and immediately my head will be filled with visions of the front half of the plane being torn off before my very eyes, and of me plummeting toward the earth, along with 237 other people I barely know but who, I’m sure, very much like not dying after seven full minutes of free falling.   And my heart will start to race and my palms will become clammy and I’ll not unoccasionally find myself crawling into the lap of the seventy-two-year old retired window salesman in the next seat. 

A number of so-called friends have tried to alleviate my dislike of flying in general and turbulence in particular by pointing out that it’s all part of the adventure:  “It’s like being on a roller coaster,” someone I know recently told me.  “And for no additional fee!  WHEEEEE!”

To which I have exactly two responses:

1)  I love it when a roller coaster turns me upside down.  A plane?  Not so much.

And 2)  Bite me. 

It doesn’t help that I’m a writer and a reader, that I pretty much make my living by allowing my brain to create the most vivid images possible.  What this means when I’m on a plane is that I find myself thinking things like, “I wonder if, after the plane goes down, the local paper will refer to me as ‘a beloved professor,’ or if they’ll actually do some research, read the comments on my ratemyprofessor.com page, and skip mentioning me altogether?”  And:  “I wonder if the female weightlifter next to me will hold my hand as we plummet toward the earth?”  And:  “This high up, will I pass out when the plane rattles into a thousand pieces, or will I be awake the whole way down?” 

It also doesn’t help that the Roanoke Valley, where the nearest airport is located, is a notoriously difficult place to fly.  For years I’d heard rumors that Air Force One pilots were taken there to practice taking off and landing in trying circumstances.  It’s a valley after all:  there are mountains on one side, then a runway, then more mountains. Not much room for error.  Or, as I like to think of it:  there are mountains on one side, then a runway, then WHAM!

As if that weren’t bad enough, this particular valley in this particular branch of the Blue Ridge Mountains is known for peculiar wind currents—which perhaps explains my post-Beijing drop.  Just this morning there was a piece in the Roanoke Times (America’s last, best, independent newspaper) discussing a proposal for wind turbines on one of the mountains on the south side of the Valley.  The FAA has yet to approve the plan, and may not, the paper reports, stating that Roanoke’s airport “has long been a nerve-racking place for pilots, who must maneuver the surrounding mountains and tricky weather they can produce.” 

At issue is that pilots must fly 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle, which means that putting a 443-foot turbine on top of an already high mountain might expose planes to greater turbulence.  “It’s already complicated enough to fly into Roanoke,” Matt Broughton, president of the IFR Pilots Club is quoted as saying.  “We don’t want to make it more of a challenge.”   

To be honest, I kind of liked it better when I just suspected flying in Roanoke sucked.  I didn’t really need to hear that the very people responsible for making sure I don’t end up a mangled and bloody pile of pulp and bone fragments are scared to do it as well.  

Now anyone who’s read this blog for more than, say, eleven seconds, knows that if I were any more of a left-wing Chablis sipping liberal I’d be serving caviar in Pyongyang.    Gay marriage?  All for it.  A woman’s right to choose?  Damn straight.  Tax the rich into oblivion?  Now we’re talking!  Green technology and renewable resources? 

Umm . . . well . . . let’s not be hasty or anything . . .

My father, who also hates flying (thanks, Dad; as if inheriting your hairline wasn’t bad enough) says that sometimes when he gets on a plane, he’ll count babies.  The more babies, he figures, the better, because of course God wouldn’t kill a plane-full of innocent little children.   

Last night, though, as I climbed onto the little fifteen row, four seats across puddle jumper that makes an almost hourly run from Charlotte, North Carolina to Roanoke, I did a quick count of cherubic beings under the age of twenty-four months, and came up with a nice round number:  exactly 0.

Feeling desperate and slightly light headed, I did another scan, looking for priests maybe, or nuns, or Tibetan monks, or anyone with a direct line to whatever higher power controls the fate of three-ton cans of metal roaring through the sky at twenty-seven thousand feet.  But I didn’t see a single clerical collar, no orange robes, and nary a wimple in sight.  Damn. 

Taking my seat, I noticed the elderly, grandmotherly-looking woman sitting across the aisle from me.  For a second I considered craning my neck for another glance around the plane, searching out others like her.  After all, God wouldn’t kill a sweet little grandmother, would he? 

But then it occurred to me that of course he would, that octogenarians and septaugenarians are fair game, that those who’ve lived long and fulfilling lives are probably at the top of the list of folks God is perfectly fine with whacking, second only perhaps to violent dictators and the current governors of Wisconsin and Ohio (and yes, I know those are redundant terms).  And thinking of this and my own relatively rich and pleasurable life, I suddenly regretted all the things that I’d been able to do in my forty-five years, a list that is easily long enough to make keeping me around another decade or two sort of negotiable.   

It was right about then that I considered climbing out of my seat, strolling down the aisle, reclaiming my suitcase and hopping in a rental car for a four hour drive back to Virginia.  But just as I’m about to unbuckle myself, I glance at the seat in front of me and noticed an elderly Indian man with strands of snow-white hair across a brown forehead and a sheaf of papers clutched in one hand.  Leaning forward a bit, I can hear him chatting with his seatmate, catching just enough to understand that he’s an environmental engineer and that what he’s holding is a scholarly study of a new method of removing copper from air pollutants. 

I lean back in my seat.  I take a deep breath and consider.  Yes, I eventually conclude.  Yes, this may just work.  For if God has no qualms about smiting the elderly or Jimmy Hoffa or those with relatively short bucket lists, I’m nevertheless fairly confident that he’s probably got a vested interest in keeping alive as many as possible of those scientists who are seeking to sustain the earth’s fragile eco-system. 

Which is good.  Seriously good.  Because if old baldy save-the-tree-hugging-eagles up there is going to survive, then more than likely so am I, sitting a mere thirty-six inches from his goody-two shoes, copper-straining hide. 

Falling back into my seat again, I close my eyes and breath easy. 

Only then a thought strikes me.  I sit up, think for a minute, then reach between the seats and tap the man on his boney shoulder. 

He turns, startled, looks at me with deep brown eyes. 

“Do you believe in God?” I ask him. 

He stares at me for a long moment, trying to decide if I’m crazy or not.  He must figure I am, because he gives a crooked smile and tries a joke:  “I’m an engineer,” he says.  “I believe in science.”

I consider for a second, then say, “So this plane will stay up?  I mean, science dictates that it will, right?”

He pulls a face, his lower lip climbing toward his nose.  “You’re asking the wrong man, I’m afraid,” he says.  “I hate flying.  Every time I get on a plane, I imagine it hurtling into the side of a mountain and bursting into flames.”

I stare at him for a long moment.  He returns my gaze, half-smiling, half-apologetic.  Finally, I shrug, nod a thank you, and lean back into my seat, feeling oddly satisfied. 

At least I won't die alone. 

Blog Widow

It’s April and we’re at Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, just outside Li Jiang in southwestern China. Jade Dragon is at the very eastern tip of the Himalayans, and it looks like it: stark, black rock dusted with snow, alternately hidden by clouds and glaring in bright sunlight. Even from a distance, it’s forboding.

But we’re not looking at it from a distance. No. We’re up on the mountain, all five of us, in the clouds, shivering in our fleece as we walk through a pine woods to a clearing where we should—if the clouds lift—be able to get a close up look at the rocky peaks. It’s snowing, which is something of a shock after a year in Hong Kong—but it’s also gloriously refreshing: the air on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is pure as water, the smell of pine just strong enough to clear your head, the snowflakes just heavy enough that you can hear them pat-pat as they hit the ground. Ellen and I are loving it.

The kids, on the other hand . . .

The annoying thing is that we did this—chose this activity, coming up this mountain—from a list of possible ways to spend the day specifically because we thought the kids would enjoy it. Two months earlier, we’d visited Ping’an in the Giongxi province, and as we’d hiked through the terraced rice paddies stretching up the karst mountains, Will had turned to me and said, “You know what, Dad? This is the best thing we’ve done this whole year.”

Well okay then: if it worked in February, why not it in April? “Take a cable car to a mountain meadow to see locals performing regional dances,” is what the brochure said. What could be better than that?

Well, a lot. Or so it appeared. Almost from the moment we’d started walking, Will had complained about the cold. Jamie had wanted to be held. And Lucy had just been—well, not her usual chipper self (turned out she would spend most of the night puking—as would I—but we didn’t know that, then).

“Come on, you guys!” Ellen or I call every eleven seconds or so, like speed-smoking cheerleaders. “Isn’t this great? Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Ehh,” Will says.

“Carry me!” Jamie demands.

“Urp,” Lucy, um, urps.

“Little turds,” I say to Ellen.

“Maybe it’s the altitude.”

“More like the attitude.”

But she’s probably right: LiJiang itself is well over a 1,000 feet, and we’ve climbed at least twice that first in the bus and then in the cable car.

But never mind. We trudge on. Eventually we see a clearing through the trees and feel a fresh breeze blowing across our foreheads. To the right are a number of small buildings—a food kiosk, bathrooms, and a long wooden walkway made of pine beams stripped of their bark. Hanging from every square centimeter of this last structure are woven prayer tokens—bell-shaped baskets with wooden tags dangling below, inscribed with the wishes of the person who’d bought it and hung it there. Dongba, the script of the Na’xi people, is one of the last hieroglyphic languages still in use, and many of the tokens are inscribed with simple characters: water, sun, children.

“Is this a natural meadow?” I say to our guide.

He’s a young man, a Pumi, with a nose like a dorsal fin, and he gives a small blush when I ask this question.

“No,” he says, “it used to be a lake. But they drained it.”

“Really? Why?”

A bit of a smile, a bit of a shrug. “It used to be for suicide. Couples would come here, you know—when they were forbidden to marry? And they would throw themselves in.”

Oh.

I glance at Ellen. Neither of us says anything for a minute as we walk on, dragging the three kids along. Then I see her shoulders begin to shake, just a little bit. And then mine are too, just tremors at first, but in a matter of seconds I’m trying so hard not to laugh that I actually hiccup.

We make a lap around the meadow. There’s a couple there in traditional western wedding attire, having their pictures taken in middle of the field. The boy is heavy, mildly spoiled looking in that one-child policy way you often see in male youths. The girl is gorgeous: tall, with black-blue hair and a regal air that intimidates me, even a moment later when, as she lifts her skirts to trek back to the muddy trail, I catch a glimpse of Nike trainers.

The kids race ahead, anxious to complete the circuit, get back to the cable cars, get the heck out of here.

Ellen and I, though, we linger: above us, a broad face of the mountain, deep and black as water, keeps flashing its sharp face our way, taunting us, promising to show us something really spectacular if only we’ll stick around long enough to see these clouds lift.

So we drag our feet. Enjoying the crisp cold, the wet air that seems to promise more snow, the sense of being someplace we’ll never be again, someplace that most westerners never get to—or at least, most westerners hailing from semi-rural Virginia. At one point we stop, lean our shoulders together, hold a camera at arm’s length, snap a photo of the two of us laughing. I can smell Ellen’s hair in the cool air, the sharp scent of her shampoo, the slight smell of incense from a museum we’d visited earlier that day. It’s nice, and I squeeze her a bit closer, feeling her presence through our two layers of fleece.

This is not like us. In no way is this like us: we don’t usually take those kinds of cuddly pictures—hell, we don’t usually cuddle, period. And we don’t usually laugh and linger and get all smoochy-faced when our kids are tired and grumpy, racing on ahead and threatening to disappear into the woods where we might never see them again.

I can’t emphasize this enough: we don’t do this. We have never, that I can think of in the ten years that we’ve had children, placed our own pleasures as a couple ahead of their desires.

Never.

Back when I was a kid, my parents used to drag me along to confirmation retreats for ninth-grade students. This is a concept, I know, that may be unfamiliar to some of you, so allow me to explain: twice each year—once in October and once in March—my Lutheran minister dad and several of his church staff drove a busload of 15-year-olds to a Bible camp in northern Wisconsin where there was a huge retreat center. We’d spend the whole weekend there, my brother and I and the other staff brats, basically screwing around, playing ping-pong in the cinderblock basement, stealing Cokes when our mom's weren't looking, and hiking down to the lake to skip stones.

The ninth-graders, though, they would have discussions and mini-bible studies and sing camp songs and pop popcorn and play Frisbee and sled down the hill and go on treasure hunts and listen to records and munch Cheetohs and watch whatever crappy movie the staff had rented for the weekend (I remember, and I’m not making this up, at least one showing of The Corpse Grinders, detailing the exploits of a cat-food company that took corpses and . . . well, I’m sure you can fill in the rest).

For some of you, I know, this sounds like pure hell, and fair enough—there are plenty of churches and plenty of religions that could turn a warm, fun, community-building weekend in an amazing rural setting into a nightmare. My sense, though, from my ten years as a tag-a-long and my two stints when I was myself a ninth grader—was that these were pretty amazing weekends. Up north and in the woods, everyone got away from the usual middle-school cliques, the posturing, the constant low-grade Columbinesque bullying that goes on most of the time when folks are in that not-quite-kids but not-quite-adults stage. I remember very clearly coming away from those weekends feeling both better about myself and my place in the world, and about my classmates, even the ones who usually drove me nuts.

The problem, of course, was that it only took a few hours wandering the halls of Woodrow Wilson Junior High to make this feeling go away. My father referred to this phenomenon as “Coming down from the mountain.” He was referring, I’ve no doubt, to some biblical thing—Moses or the Easter Bunny or some such business—but even if I didn’t fully get the allusion, I understood what he meant. It's like in the movie Breakfast Club (my generation's The Graduate) where the geeky guy played by Anthony Michael Hall gets all snotty-faced ad teary-eyed, asking his new-found friends what’ll happen on Monday—will they acknowledge him at all, or just walk on by? (Hmmm . . . that sounds vaguely like a song . . . )

Molly Ringwald’s character is blunt in her reply, directed mainly at Emilio Estevez: “If Ryan came walking up to you in the hall on Monday, what would you do? I mean, picture this, you’re there with all the sports . . . you know exactly what you’d do. You’d say hi to him, and when he left you’d cut him up so that you’re friends didn’t think that you really liked him.”

In other words, it’s one thing to be on the mountain, up there with God or Buddha or Ally Sheedy before she got kind of freaky: on the mountain, everything is holy, everything is pure, and we’re at our best, our most divine.

Coming down from the mountain, on the other hand . . .

There are some things you should know. Actually, you shouldn't know them, because they're none of you're damn business, but they help this story make sense, so I'm going to tell them to you anyway, just as long as you promise never to mention to Ellen that I told you, okay?

Okay then:

We've had some bad years.

A little background: Ellen and I met in 1989, on the first day of TA training in the English MA program at Iowa State. We spent two years in glorious Ames, Iowa, struggling daily not to kiss ourselves for sheer boredom, then moved together to Columbus, Ohio—another dazzling Midwestern city—where I started a Ph.D. program.

That last bit is important: where I started a Ph.D. program. Ellen liked grad school well enough. She wasn't crazy about the teaching part, but thrived on the ideas part. But five to seven years more of grad school, followed by a career in academia? It just wasn't part of her long-term plan.

So she followed me. This is key. Because five years later, newly-minted Ph.D. in hand, I was offered a job in sexy Salem, Virginia, home of, well . . .nothing really, other than a minor-league baseball team, a handful of mediocre pizza joints, and the college that hired me.

And a funny thing happened: given the choice between following me yet again to an amazingly peculiarly non-descript place that definitely wasn't Paris, and . . . well, not following me to not-Paris, Ellen chose the latter, deciding to go to New York and work for a large university press there. Part of her decision was purely practical: she's a university press editor, and there weren't any university presses in Roanoke so why move somewhere with me that she couldn't work?

Part of her decision was romantic, in the non-lovey-dovey meaning of the word: I mean, who wouldn't want to live in New York City, given the chance?

And part of it was principle: she'd already followed me once to a city where she knew no one; she hadn't been raised by adventurous parents, she hadn't gone to an extremely progressive college, she hadn't studied feminist theory and literature and drama, she hadn't done any of these things so that she could become the sort of person who just followed someone else from place to place for absolutely no reason.

Which is fair enough.

I know that.

Know. Meaning, "to be cognizant or aware of a fact or a specific piece of information."

Which, of course, if different from understand, meaning "to comprehend the nature and significance of." Not to mention different from feel, which means "undergo an emotional sensation or be in a particular state of mind."

So this is the part I'm going to gloss over, because: a) it wasn't really the best part of our relationship; b) it really wasn't the best part of my life; and c) like I said, it's not really any of your business.

Suffice to say it sucked. Oh sure, it was cool in some ways: we got to roam the streets of New York together every sixth week or so, alternating with visits to the Blue Ridge Mountains. But basically? Seriously? It sucked.

For me, at least.

I can't remember if it's something I read somewhere or something someone told me or just something I've always intuited, but pretty much from the day I was born I've known that, frankly and despite all the Hollywood stereotypes to the contrary, women are very often happier—and arguably better off—not being stuck in some house with some man.

Men, on the other hand, at least in my experience and again contrary to societal impressions—are really pretty dependent upon other people. Simply put, we just don't like being alone. We're too stupid, too shallow, and too scared of our own thoughts to be comfortable with an empty house and nothing to distract us.

Ellen and I were married by a man named Lowell Erdahl, who, years before, had confirmed Ellen and was one of the few clergy she trusted, which is kind of funny given that both her father and mine are ordained ministers. Lowell wanted to spend some time with us before the wedding, so one rainy day in the fall of 1992 we traipsed to his office in St. Paul and sat down for a conversation. One of the things I remember from that meeting was Lowell’s theory that there isn’t a single honeymoon—that, to the contrary, marriages wax and wane, that there are lots of okay times, yeah, and lots of bad times, but there are also times in a marriage—even, say, 18 years into it—when a couple will almost be back in that giddy, happy, just fresh off the hay-wagon kind of love.

Why do I mention this?

Not because Hong Kong was one long honeymoon, that’s for sure. It wasn’t. It was great, yes, and adventurous, yes, and scintillating on an hourly basis, yes. But it was also hard. Besides the basic logistical things—getting the kids to school, getting the groceries, wading chin deep through a language that’s way too complicated—there were emotional things: short-tempered moments, intense negotiations about who gets to exercise when, or who gets to go out and wander while the other stays home with Jamie, or who should do the dishes.

And I’ll be honest with you: I wasn’t the best partner a lot of the time. Partially this was work related: Hong Kong faculty are government employees. What this means, in practical terms, is that they keep very careful track of their hours: on the left side of my institutional home page was a small meter that kept track of exactly how many personal days I had accumulated thus far during the year. Halfway through the year, my institution asked me to take on additional, non-consultative responsibilities, essentially becoming an employee of the university. Once I did that, I felt obliged to act like a real employee, being more careful about my hours—going earlier, staying longer, taking fewer days off.

Additionally, though, I wasn’t the best partner because I also spent a lot of time writing. A LOT of time: every night after the kids went to bed—and this includes many Fridays and Saturdays—I would pour myself a glass of wine, grab a handful of chocolates, and go and sit on the couch with my laptop. And write. And write. And write—sometimes as many as nine or ten pages in a single evening. Writing was my way of coping with everything that was going on around me, with all of the new experiences, with the challenges at work, with the fact that every time I walked out the door—EVERY SINGLE TIME—I saw something or did something or ate something that was completely new and unexpected. Writing helped me make sense of all of this, helped me keep my head on more or less straight.

Ellen, meanwhile, would slog away at the family blog, posting the hundreds of pictures that she’d taken to let our families know what we were up to. And she’d do the laundry (something, in my defense, that she refuses to let me help with), and she’d do the dishes. This last was the worst: we only had six bowls, six plates, six forks and six knives. So if we wanted to eat breakfast the next day, one or the other of us would have to wash and dry dishes every night. I intended to help with this, really I did. But sometimes I offered, then got caught in a particularly difficult passage and wouldn’t get around to it soon enough so Ellen would just do it. And other times I’d get the dishes done, then get distracted with some idea, rushing into the living room to get it down before I forgot—and Ellen would go in and dry the damn things.

We have a “Birthday Club” in Virginia, a group of four couples that celebrates each of our birthdays, going out for dinner and giving each other gifts. One of our number is a genius at finding or having made message shirts that capture perfectly our personalities (one of mine says “Just shut the hell up!”). When we got back, we all gathered for a belated celebration of Ellen’s and my birthdays. Ellen’s gift from Ross? A black T-shirt with the white logo “Blog Widow.”

But, of course, there were amazing times as well. And one of the amazing times was up on that mountain, the cold wet flakes brushing our faces, that black wet face of rock towering over us, that feeling of being somewhere special, of seeing something amazing, of just—I dunno—being alive.

And there was this:

Early in June, a Fulbright colleague at another university mentioned to me that a German university outside of Hamburg was looking for an experienced general education coordinator.

“Really?” I said.

He nodded. "And it looks good. They seem to know what they're talking about."

That next morning, back at the flat, I logged into the Chronicle of Higher Education and punched in “Germany” and “General Education.”

And there it was: XYZ university in northern Europe had received a grant from the European Union to experiment with an alternative to Germany’s fairly strict, career-oriented educational system. And yes, they were hiring. In fact, not only did they need someone to oversee the GE program—something I’d been doing for years—they also needed someone to work with writing and general education—bringing my area of specialty into play.

Now I don’t want you to think this was a slam dunk decision for me, one of those easy “But of course!” moments. Just applying for a job like this would mean a ton of work at the very time we were trying to relish our last days in Hong Kong. And if I got an offer (and in the end, I didn’t, not even close) then moving to Germany would mean giving up a lot of security, tenure and a good job and good friends in one of the nicest small towns in America.

But even so . . . Germany!

“Ellen?” I called, my voice cracking. “Can you come here for a second?”

I heard her coming down the hall, talking to Lucy as she passed the kids' bedroom. Outside the office, she paused for a second, peering in at me. The last time I’d called her to my computer, my voice wavering, it was to announce that her father had died.

“Yes?” she said.

“Look at this.”

She came to the desk, glanced over my shoulder.

“Holy crap,” she said after a second, substituting an old, much-beloved Anglo-Saxon word for “crap.”

I looked at her. She leaned in closer, peering at the screen. Then she bent over, fingers clicking over the keyboard. Opening a new tab, she Googled the town, then hit image. Pictures of an old-style German city cluttered the screen: narrow cobblestone streets with brick houses pressed against the walkway; an open square surrounded by brick-arched building and narrow turrets with flags flapping overhead; a strange kind of castle-looking thing with two fat towers, one on each side.

“Wow,” she said.

“I know.” I was actually shaking. “What do you think?”

She read the ad again. “It fits you perfectly.”

“Yes.”

Straightening, she gave me a look. “It would devastate the kids.”

I nodded. It was true: they were more than ready to get back to Virginia, more than ready to be back in their own rooms, play with their own friends.

Neither of us spoke for a long moment. Then I said again, “What do you think?”

“We have to try.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. A chance like this—you can’t let it go by.”

I looked back at the computer, considered, nodded my head.

“Right?” she said.

“Absolutely.”

“Okay then!" She gave me a quick pat on the shoulder, then a little squeeze, a ripple of electricity passing through my shirt. "Hop to it, buddy! You’ve got a lot of work to do.”

I grunted, swung my chair back to the computer, reached for a pen. She gave me that little squeeze again, then left the room, calling to Jamie as she went back down the hall.

God I love her.

My Three Tailors, prt. 3

Fortunately, there’s Rosie. 

I first heard about Rosie from our friends Chris and Valerie who lived upstairs from us and who had a strange habit of saying, in the middle of, for example, an Indian dinner, “Oh, you really must go and see Rosie.” 

For the longest time I assumed Rosie was just another one of their imaginary friends (don’t ask), but eventually I clued in that Rosie was a real person who actually existed—and what’s more, that she was a tailor.

You would have thought that by May, the first time I met Rosie, I would have given up on this whole tailor thing.  Sure, I’d come to love the suit and trousers I’d bought from the Chinese tailor in central, but even so, all of it was such a hassle, so stressful, the measuring, the money, just getting from our remote corner of the New Territories to wherever the tailor was.  Easier just to go back to the States, wait for the first of our 17 weekly editions of Eddie Bauer, and pick out some boring piece of crap sown in some factory in India.

But no, I had one more thing I was questing for, and I was hoping Rosie was just the person to help out.  I have this shirt, you see, a black, short-sleeved cotton-linen number that I’d picked up at a mall years ago.  It was an amazing shirt:  light, comfortable, loose on my frame and slow to wrinkle.  Short of a Packer logo and someplace to store a Cosmopolitan, what more could I ask for? 

Well, how’s about four more like it for starters?

My plan, then, was to take this shirt up to Shenzhen, just across the border into China, and show it to Rosie, asking her if she could make more just like it for me.  And that’s just what I did.  One Sunday morning late in May, Chris and I got up early and took a taxi up to Tai Wo, the MTR station just north of where we lived.  In a matter of minutes we were at the Chinese border and through customs.  We spent a couple hours getting body, foot, and head massages, then had a good stiff lunch of turnip cakes in XO sauce (which tastes much better than it sounds—not that that would take much) before going in search of Rosie. 

I’m at a loss as to how to describe the Shenzhen mall.  Think about your local shopping center:  a Starbucks on every floor; an Ambercrombie and Fitch with its pedophilic pornography in the entryway; Bed, Bath, and Body Works leaking the scent of sarsaparilla-grapefruit toe scrub into the Insta-Sushi shop next door.   Mothers and daughters, teenage couples, and old men with walkers and fire-engine red Chuck Taylors stroll along wide well-lit walkways between shops.  Babies gurgle.  Doves coo.

Now take that picture and scribble over it with a black magic marker dipped in dog crap.  Add a dash or two of insane dystopia (think, Blade Runner on acid), throw in pickpockets, hookers, hustlers who’d sell you the shirt off their grandma’s back, mix well, and you’re about halfway to what the Lo Wu mall looks like. 

For one thing, it’s maybe six stories high, low-railed balconies circling a narrow open space.  Shenzhen has been in the Hong Kong news a lot lately, because of a spate of suicides at a Taiwanese plant that makes iPods and iPads.  Conditions there are so bad that employees—some as young as 18 or 19—have been hurling themselves out of windows, preferring death to 14-hour work days.  Standing there, at the foot of the Shenzhen mall, all I can think is . . . well, let’s just say I wished I had a hardhat.

For another thing, everywhere you go in this mall folks are trying to hustle you, calling out to you, asking if you want sun glasses, shirts, shoes, a girl, some food, “What you want?’  What you want?”  The only way to get through it without getting suckered into buying, say, a 6-trillion dollar rug, is to put your head down and plow on, avoiding eye contact, shrugging off offered hands, shoving old ladies cuddling infants out of your way. 

We go first to the third floor, where Rosie has her shop, a three-walled, white shelved space maybe 8 foot by 10.  She’s busy with another customer, so Chris leads me one floor higher, to the material center. 

Like the mall as a whole, it’s hard to describe this room.  It’s maybe 100 yards by 100 yards and packed, floor to ceiling, with bolts of every kind of material imaginable: tweeds, linens, cottons, silks, wools, stripes, checks, plaids, seersucker, mesh, 60’s psychedelia.  All of it is packed into individually-owned booths stacked 10 feet high with the stuff.  Pause for ten seconds to run your fingers over this or that fabric, and some pretty young thing will pluck your sleeve and lead you down alleyways nine inches wide, insisting you must see this linen or that wool, that it’s the best they have, that they’ll give you a good price. 

That most of the salespeople are women—and noticeably attractive at that—is more than a coincidence, I think, not unlike the conference book dealers in the US who hire mostly skinny women in their twenties to walk the floor. 

Here you find the usual wheeling and dealing you’d expect in China:  they start high (super high, if you’re a gweilo), you start low, they act offended, you refuse to budge, they cut their price in half, you come up maybe 5%, they lower their price some, you add another 5%, they refuse to go down anymore, saying, “No money, no money,” meaning, “At these prices my children will starve!”  You shrug, start to walk away, they knock another 50% off the price, and the two of you shake hands, grinning at each other, both satisfied. 

On this particular day, I find a man who sells linens almost exclusively and pick up a few that I like: one dark blue, one olive green, and one salmon-pink-orange-sherbet color that makes my eyes water just looking at it.  Chris gets a khaki and a dark blue for trousers, then finds a nice linen color he wants for a long-sleeved shirt.  I like it too, so buy a couple yards for my own shirt, which I know sounds a little creepy, I know, but the fact is I’m a foot taller than Chris and he’s got this decidedly un-midwestern Italian-Irish-Czech-Portuguese type thing going, so there’s very little chance anyone will mistake us for twins.

Then we go back downstairs to Rosie.  

It is impossible not to love Rosie.  This is not because, as you may be thinking, Rosie is a buxom larger-than-life bleach-blonde, cheery, smiley, loving woman like you’d see tending bar in some World War II-era film.  No, in many ways—indeed, in almost every way—Rosie defies her name:  she is not immensely, overwhelmingly cheerful.  She’s not particularly buxom or particularly pretty or particularly—I don’t know—rosie in anyway, shape or form.  And she’s definitely not blonde.

What she is, though, is calm.  I’ve seen snotty white women in Rosie’s shop rage away because they actually had to wait a whole seven minutes while Rosie took care of another customer, and Rosie has just nodded and looked straight at them, as if to say, “And what would you have me do?”  And I’ve seen those same women back down almost immediately.

And what Rosie is, is honest.  The first time we were there, I ordered four shirts and a sports coat.  She took my measurements, listened patiently as I explained my irrational fear of overly snug armpit seams, then set everything aside on a shelf over a sewing machine. 

I reached for my wallet.  “How much deposit?”

She waved her hand.  “No deposit.”

“Are you sure?”

She laughed.  “It’s your fabric.  You already paid for it.”

And what Rosie is, is a good tailor.  When Chris and I came back two weeks later (spending the morning, again, getting our admittedly ample bodies rubbed down tip to toe), Rosie handed me my weird salmon/pink/orange shirt to try on, smiling a little as its glow blinded three old men passing in the hall. 

I was wearing a t-shirt, so didn’t bother with the changing room, just slipping the linen over my head.

And here again I find myself at a loss for words.  Have you ever walked out of doors and felt as though the air and your body were exactly the same temperature, as though the air could pass right through your skin and into your bones, and you’d be perfectly fine?  Or have you ever risen from bed in the morning and gone downstairs to find a pot of hour-old coffee waiting for you, and taken a sip and just felt—I don’t know:  as though this cup of this coffee with this cream in it, was meant for you? 

That’s exactly how this shirt felt, slipping over my shoulders:  my arms passed through the sleeves as though they’d been there a thousand times before, my chest and pits felt nice and roomy, it hung comfortably around my waist, hugging my belly a little but not too much.

It was, in short, the perfect shirt. 

And it remains that way.  Even now, two months after our return to the States, I let out a near-silent moan of satisfaction every time I slip on this shirt—or one of its three brethren.  They are not just my favorite shirts right now, but arguably my favorite shirts ever, surpassing, even, the black shirt that they were meant to copy. 

And if this sounds over-the-top, well then, so be it.  The fact of the matter is that I love Rosie, love her deeply and truly and in a way that I’ve loved very few women in my life. 

And if that, in turn, sounds disloyal to Ellen, well then you need to know that after I returned to Tai Po with my first—note that word—completed order of custom-tailored Rosie originals, babbling incoherently about Cinderella rainbows and pink unicorns licking my earlobes, Ellen grabbed a skirt or two that she really liked and headed north for her own visit to the incomparable Rosie—and returned as smitten as me. 

Ah,  love . . . . ain't life grand?

Especially in this shirt. 

My Three Tailors, prt. 2

I met my second tailor on the street on day, waiting for Ellen to arrive for a doctor’s appointment on Hong Kong Island.  She had the kids with her, and I must have been poorly dressed, because a young Indian man strolled up to me.

“Need a tailor?” he said.

“No.”

“A very good tailor.”

“I have one.”

This got his attention.  He grinned.  “You have one?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?” he said, still grinning.  “Where’s your tailor?”

I pointed west down Queensway Road.  “I don’t know:  79, 85, something like that.”

He obviously didn’t believe me.  “I can get you a good suit.  For 300.”

Now it was my turn to stare:  “300 dollars?”

He nodded.

“No way,” I said.  “No one can do a suit for 300 dollars.”

He gestured with a thumb.  “Come on.  I’ll show you.”

“No,” I said.  “I’m meeting my wife.”  Pause.  “And I already have a tailor.”

“Come on,” he said again.  He was a good-looking guy with that easy-going attitude of the salesman who knows he’s got you.  Walk down Nathan Road on any day, at any time, and you’ll see 50 or 60 guys just like him, all asking if you want a tailor.  According to Martin Booth in Gweilo, Chinese tailors consider this demeaning—standing on the street, hawking your wares—and look down on Indians for doing it.

“Seriously,” said the guy now.  “It’s my brother.  He’s a good tailor.”

“Seriously,” I said back at him.  “I just bought a suit.  I don’t need another one.”

“How much you pay?”

“No,” I said, looking away.  I wasn’t about to tell him $900. 

Again that grin, confident, conspiratorial:  “How much?”

“It’s okay,” I said, “thanks anyway.”  And then I walked away.

 

Half an hour later, having met Ellen and sent her off to her doctor’s appointment, I take the kids up the escalator of an indoor market to a free, unlocked bathroom I’d discovered there some weeks earlier.  After seeing Lucy safely into the women’s, I escort James and Willinto the men’s.  And who should we see there, standing daintily at the urinals, but our young Indian friend.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hey.”  I took care of Jamie first, then myself.  Then I went over to the sinks, where the man was washing his hands. 

“You meant US, didn’t you,” I say. 

He looked at me politely. 

“When you were talking about the suit.  You said you could do it for $300.  You meant US dollars, didn’t you.”

“Oh.”  And then he nodded.

“Because I was thinking, ‘Man, no one could make a suit for 300 Hong Kong.’”

He laughed and wiped his hands on a paper towel.  “You should check it out.”

“Tell you what:  give me a card.  I’ll stop by sometime.”

He tilted his head toward the door.  “It’s just down the hall.  Come look.”

Every once in a while it’s easier just to give in.  So after gathering the three kids, I pushed Jamie’s stroller down the hall and around the corner to a glass-fronted shop with a number of nice looking shirts in the window.  It was, I was startled to realize, a place that I’d glanced at a few times before—what’s more, I’d always admired the shelves of tightly-wound shirt material stretching floor to ceiling along one wall.  I know it sounds bizarre, but I love dress shirts and nice silk ties.  I’m a bald, middle-aged man, you have to understand.  Short of adding one of those bald-guy pony tails or getting another earring (or six), there’s very little I can do to accessorize my life and change my appearance.  I can’t even grow a beard, not so much because I’m a white guy with Norwegian ancestry, but because, man, those whiskers itch. 

Dress shirts, then—and lovely matching ties—are about as close as I can come to, well,  looking pretty.  Never mind that I never wear the ties, and only use the shirts once or twice a week during the months of December and January:  I like having a closet full of fancy button downs and brilliant, gem-like ties.  What can I say?  Everyone needs a hobby.

Or a fetish.  Whatever. 

Anyhow, I’d seen this shop before, passing by on my occasional morning outings with Jamie.  I’d even stopped and glanced in a few times, though I’d never entered.  And now, here I was, being ushered in like some kind of fat, bald, pasty-white royalty. 

And what’s more, as I maneuvered Jamie’s stroller through the door, I noticed a rectangular sign in the front window.  It read:  “Shirts:  Six for $1,500.”

For those of you a little slow with your math—or who just don’t care that the HK to US dollar conversion rate is roughly 7.8—$1,500 Hong Kong means roughly $190 US.  Divide that by 6, and you’re looking at more-or-less thirty-two bucks per shirt 

Per dress shirt.

Per custom-made dress shirt.  

Long-sleeved, no less.

I tried hard not to giggle. 

Our man from the street introduced me to another Indian fellow, this one bald-headed with a bear and sideburns—a look, I’ll admit, I’ve always found a little disconcerting, the coiffeuristic equivalent of going to work wearing a shirt and no pants. 

The second Indian man made a big deal about the kids, offering them cookies and candy and urging all of us to take a seat.

“I’m actually in a bit of a hurry,” I said.  “My wife is at the doctor’s, and we’re meeting friends soon.”

“No problem,” said the second man.  “You want a suit?”

“No.  No suit.”  I pointed to the sign in the window.  “I might be interested in some shirts, though.”

“No problem,” he said.  “We can do shirts.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I don’t know your work.  I’ve never been here before, no one has recommended the place to me.  How about I only buy three shirts for $750, and then if I like them, I’ll get three more.”

The man smiled so broadly his eyes almost disappeared.  He shook his head.

“But how do I know,” I said, “that they’ll be good shirts?  I’m not some tourist.  I live in Tai Po.  I’ve seen some bad shirts.”  It was true.  Hong Kong is well-known for its tailors, and notorious for its crappy tailors—think shirts that are single-stitched, that literally fall apart at the seams, that are so thin of thread that you can see a man’s chest-hair through the cloth. 

“I’m serious,” I said.  “If I like the first three I’ll buy more.  I’m going back to America soon.  I need lots of shirts.”

He nodded slightly, no quite committing, but not not committing either.  Leading me to the wall of narrow shelves, he chose two or three bolts of cloth he thought I might like.  We went back and forth, him choosing, me rejecting, me pointing, asking for similar fabric in different colors.  Everything I chose, I made a point of holding my hand behind the cloth and holding it up to the light.  Like most bald men, I’m annoyingly hirsute in other places—though I have managed to avoid the guerilla back thus far.  And the only thing more annoying than getting a crappily made shirt, is getting a great shirt that you can’t wear because it makes you look like you’ve pulled it over a wool sweater. 

Eventually we settled on three nice materials—one a plain gray and two white with stripes.  I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing, when a third man strolled in.  He’s older, heavier, better dressed, with a thick head of black hair.  Clearly he’s the boss. 

Introductions all around, and a word or two exchanged in a dialect I didn’t recognize regarding the particulars of my situation.  He nodded at the materials I’d picked out.  “Very nice.”  Then he gestured toward the back wall of the shop, toward set of shelves we haven’t examined.  “You might consider this,” he said, taking down two more bolts that were very nice. 

Very nice. 

Really very nice. 

Crap.

So of course I ended up ordering six shirts.  He took my measurements courteously, the antithesis of my Chinese tailor.  “What kind of fit?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

He gestured toward his young assistant, a thin, handsome man with a slightly crooked nose.  “You want close fit like him?”  Then he gestured down at his own, voluminous shirt.  “Or looser fit like me?”

“Looser,” I said.  “You and me, we can’t do what he does.”

He laughed, jotted a few notes, then strolled over to the counter where he began making up a receipt. 

“How much down?” I asked, reaching for my wallet.

“Twenty percent.”  He tapped two of the fabrics, a bluish-gray one and a white and red pattern that looked almost pink.  “These two, though, these are nicer fabrics, so it will be $1,800.”

“No,” I said.  “The sign says $1,500.”

He tapped the clothes again.  “But these two—“

“No,” I said.  Six months ago I would have caved, I’m sure, thinking I was out of my depth, that there was something going on that I didn’t understand, some nuance of culture where I was clearly in the wrong.  But multiple trips to the mainland in the last few months had toughed me up.  “First it was come in just to look around.  Then it was three for $750, then six for $1,500.  And now it’s $1,800.  You know what?  I think I’ll just skip it.”

I shoved my wallet back into my pocket, honestly determined to walk out. 

“On no,” he said, and waved his hand.  “Okay.  It’s okay.”  Then he gave me a smile like, It was worth a try, and went back to writing the bill. 

 

I wish the rest of this story were happier.  I was really excited about those shirts.  Pretty, you know?  Jewel like.  Bald dude accessories. 

I came back a week later.  The shirts looked fine in the package.  They even looked fine out of the wrapper.  It was only when I got into the dressing room and pulled the first one on that I began to see problems. 

For one, it was short.  Like, it came down over my waist, sure, and I could tuck it into my pants okay—after that, though, I’d need to staple the tails to my underwear to keep them from coming untucked. 

And then it was tight.  Or tightish.  I’m a big man, and not exactly what you’d call buff, so I tend to like my clothing loose, both to hide the fat and to keep the fat from getting pinched or chaffed.  This shirt wasn’t exactly lose-a-limb tight, but it was more snug than I’d hoped for, and nothing like what the owner had been wearing the week before.  It rode up into my armpits, and restricted my movements whenever I pulled—or tried to pull—an arm across my chest. 

And it was thin.  Not I-can-see-your-nipples thin, but thin enough that I spent two or three minutes standing there in the dressing room, thinking back to the week before and asking myself if I had, indeed, tested each fabric up against bright light.  I had, I was certain of it.  Staring at myself in the mirror and seeing the foreboding outline of my chest hair move like a thunderstorm beneath that white and red  pinstriped fabric, all I could conclude was that the store had two sets of material—a thicker one that they showed customers, and a thinner one that they actually used to sew the shirts.

 

And now, I have a confession:  I talk tough, I know, swagger a lot and act like I’m never afraid to speak my mind. 

The truth of the matter, though, is that I’m a wimp.  It’s not so much that I want people to like me—it’s that I’m terrified they won’t.  I just can’t handle the thought of looking deep into someone’s eyes and seeing nothing there but disdain—though, I’ll have to admit, I’ve seen this look more than once in my career. 

In the end, I think I’m just terrified of confrontation.  I’m no good at it, not good at having people yell at me, not good at standing my ground, firm in the knowledge that I’m right—or more right then the idiot across from me with spittle flying off his lips and a crease the size of the Mississippi flood plain in the middle of his forehead. 

All of which is a roundabout way of saying this:  I knew I was being ripped off.  I knew they were selling me shirts that were cut short, where the material probably wasn’t what I’d paid for.  I knew that chances were slim to none—barring a crash diet where I lost 30 pounds and six inches in height—that I’d ever be able to wear any of these shirts once I returned to the States. 

I knew all this, yes.  I knew it all.  And even so, I paid for those shirts and left the shop with a broken heart.  

My Three Tailors, prt. 1

Lexington, Virginia has very few faults, but one that’s glaring is the lack of places for a guy like me to buy clothes.   To be fair, I’m big, unusually big even, with both height and girth, and, well and if you must know the truth, kind of stumpy legs and a weirdly flat butt.  So it would make sense that it’s difficult to find clothes in my size.  But that’s not really the issue in Lexington.  No, in Lexington the issue is that, if you’re a man and you want to wear clothes, there’s Walmart and, well . . . not much.

And let’s be frank folks:  excepting Fruit of the Loom and sweat socks, there ain’t much I’m buying at Walmart.

So you can imagine my joy when I learned that Hong Kong is to shopping what Mecca, Heaven, and Disney World are to religious fanatics who love helium-sipping mice.  No more on-line ordering for me!  No more shoes that were half a size too small or shirts that looked great on the screen but hung like a door frame off my chest.  No more funky fabrics that tried to pass as cotton or pukey greens that make you eyes ache.  No more trips to the post office to return all of this junk to L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer.

Eddie Bauer.  Brrrggghhh.    

No.  Now I would buy at Armani and Versace and Gucci and bunch of other really fancy places that I’m not even sure sell men’s clothes—or any clothes at all, for that matter.  But never mind:  I was going to be a clothes horse.

Except for the part where I wasn’t.  Because when I got to Hong Kong, I discovered that what they call “Large” we call “Pre-teen,” and what we call “XL” they call “tents.” 

Seriously, nothing fit me.  Even on the rare occasions I was able to track down XXL, I’d have to get someone to help pull the damn thing off after I’d gotten it stuck half-way over my nose.  So I was screwed:  pretty much a year in one of the most fashionable places on earth, and I was going to have to wear the same three pairs of khakis and four L.L. Bean polos over and over again.   

And then in January, one of the other Fulbrighters, a native Hong Konger, sent the rest of us an e-mail offering to introduce us to his tailor.   “It depends on your size,” David wrote, “but a good summer weight suit will usually run about $900, Hong Kong.”

“But you don’t wear suits,” Ellen said when I told her I was going to Central to pick out material.

“Who cares,” I said.  “That’s, like, 115 bucks, US.  For that price, I can buy it and use it for a handkerchief.”

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from a Hong Kong tailor—or any tailor, for that matter, since I’d never been to one before, unless you count the guy who tried to force me into the baby blue tuxedo before my senior prom.  I suppose I pictured a pretty civilized affair:  myself standing in the middle of a room lined with mirrors and paneled oak.  A gentile Chinese man in shirt sleeves and a vest would take down my measurements, barking out figures to a bespectacled assistant scribbling in a notebook.  Nearby, two or three other customers would be milling about, sipping tea maybe as they fingered bolts of pin-striped material.

In the end, I was at least right about one thing:  my tailor was indeed Chinese. 

Other than that, the experience was pretty much exactly what I hadn’t imagined:  taking an elevator to the fifth floor of a non-descript marble building off of Queensway Road East, I stepped across a hall that looked as though it were designed for the easy removal of bloodstains, and into a windowless room roughly the size of a fat man’s coffin.  Two of the four vinyl-paneled walls were covered with aluminum shelves bearing dusty bolts of cloth.  Above them, hanging from an exposed steam pipe, were suits and shirts and trousers waiting to be picked up.  In one corner, a customer with receding hair and glasses was trying on a suit behind a waist-high wall. 

Two harried looking Chinese men pushed their way through the 9 or 15 customers crowded into the small space.  Along the far wall was a low counter holding an ancient cash register and twelve thousand photograph-sized books full of wools and pin-stripes, linens and seer suckers.

I froze in the doorway, unsure of how to proceed.  Eventually one of the tailors—a stooped, dark-haired man with big ears—paused as he stuck pins into a spotty-faced Chinese youth, glared at me and said, “What?”

“I—um—“ I glanced around.  I could see my friend David and two or three others from the group, but all of them were busy picking out materials.

“Pick up or measure?” the tailor barked.

“Pick up,” I said, then realized what he meant.  “I mean—measure!”

He gave a grunt, rightly figuring me for some high-maintenance moron who was going to eat up his time and profits.  Gesturing with his head, he led me to the counter covered with samples books.  “Look!” he said, and walked away.

I looked. 

It was overwhelming.  I mean, there must have been 100,000 samples on that counter, organized in not ascertainable manner.  I flipped through a few of the catalogues, fingering materials, trying to find some colors that I liked.  Already I missed the simplicity of Eddie Bauer, the four predictable choices on each page, the friendly associate at the other end of the line waiting to answer all of my stupid questions.  Eventually, though, I managed to find a charcoal gray mid-weight that I sort of liked.  Holding my place with one finger, I went over to where the tailor who loved me so much was holding a yellow-tape up to a college-aged Malaysian dude with long shiny hair that he couldn’t stop touching.

“Um,” I said, holding up the book like Oliver asking for more.

Tailor man glanced at it.  “Out,” he said.  “No more.”  Then he went back to his tape measure. 

Shuffling back to the stack of samples, I turned more pages, pinched more materials.  Eventually I came up with two or three I didn’t hate completely, and waited until my man was free to measure me.  He seemed to approve of my choices—or at least not hate them completely—and demonstrated his approval by jamming his tape measure up my groin as though I were a goose being placed on a spit.

I kept my mouth shut as he measured me, afraid he knew of even more creative ways to torture me.  When he got to my shoulders, though, I managed to stutter out a request that he not make the area around the arms too tight.

He stopped what he was doing and peered at me through his glasses.  “What?” he barked.

“The-the-the shoulders,” I said.  “If they’re—I won’t—too tight and I can’t wear them . . . “

“Hmmmpf!” he said, and went back to his measuring.  Four more minutes and a few questions more—“Pleats?  Three?  Side pockets?  You sure?—and I was back on Queensway Road, blinking in the sunlight.

 

This is the point, of course, where more likely than not, you’re waiting for me to say something like, “It was all worth it, though, once I went back and tried on the first custom-tailored suit of my young life,” or, “I’ve never had pants that fit that well, before, or since, and I don’t expect ever to,” or at the very least, “I went back in, punched that guy in the face, and torched the place.” 

But alas, such was not the case. 

I went back a few weeks later for a fitting, leaving again slightly dazed and confused.  And when I returned finally to pick up my one suit and two pairs of pants, I just wanted to grab the clothes, pay, and flee.  He and his assistant, though, insisted that I go into the “changing room”—e.g., the cupboard in the corner—and try on my new suit.  I did, coming out in my stocking feet to stand in front of a floor-length mirror.

I looked—how can I say this?  Old. 

It wasn’t the bald head, mind you, or the increasing abundance of gray in what little hair remained.  Or even my ever-growing dim sum belly. 

No, it wasn’t any of those things.  It was the rise. 

Now for those of you who have know idea what I mean, “rise,” is the length of material between your, um, groinal region and where-ever it is you situate your belt.  Why they call it “rise” is something I’d rather not discuss at the moment, so suffice to say that on some pants—say, trendy jeans—the rise is rather short, while on other pants—say, those worn by immensely fat men whose bellies need their own seats and an extra-large popcorn at the movie theatre—the rise is roughly the size of, say, Wyoming.   

Anyhow, the pants I was wearing now, standing in front of the mirror at the tailor in Central had a rise that was, shall we say, rather nostalgic.  Think Charlie Chaplin, perhaps. Or Johnny Cash way back in the 50s, dressed smartly in black with a cowboy shirt and the top of his trousers somewhere just under his armpits.  Or any of the lead characters from Revenge of the Nerds.

I mean, these pants had Rise, with a capital “R” and italics.  I could have pulled those suckers over my head, unzipped, and eaten pizza through the crotch, that’s how much rise these bad boys had. 

My tailor stood beside me, hands on his hips.  He met my eyes.  “Okay?”

I glanced back at the mirror.  I looked like Harold Lloyd, with less hair.  Then I looked back at the short, large-eared Chinese man standing beside me.  He was small, yes, and old, yes, and kind of scary in a way that men who know what they’re doing always are.  But right now, he was also smiling a little, proud of his work.    

“Yes,” I said.  “Okay.”

 

Back at our flat in Tai Po, I went into the bedroom and tried the suit on again.  Strolling out into the living room, I held my arms out for Ellen to see.  “What do you think?”

She glanced up from the floor where she was playing with Jamie.  Her eyes roamed over the gray flannel, following the lines from cuff to cuff, crease to ankle.  Ellen cares deeply about many things—her kids, her family, her work, books, art, politics, even me sometimes.  But clothes, to her, are generally little more than a nuisance, something to be acquired as quickly as possible and washed as seldom as acceptable.

“That,” she said, “is a beautiful suit.”

It took me a minute to get my breath back.  “Really.”

She nodded.  “Really.”

I stepped back.  “What do you think of the pants?”

She glanced down.  “They look great.”

“You don’t think they’re old man pants?”

She looked again.  “They look comfortable.”

I did one of those dorky, lean back and suck in your gut moves, trying to get a look at my own outfit from a distant perspective.  “Huh,” I said. 

Padding back down the hall, I considered this.  Back in the room, I took off the jacket and stood before the mirror, giving the trousers another look.  Ellen was right:  they did look comfortable.  What’s more, their lines were classic, the pleats graceful, the creases sharp, the cuffs perfectly sized.  I took a few steps, back and forth, watching myself from the side.  The pants moved easily with me, nowhere too tight, nowhere catching or sagging or twisting unpredictably. 

“Huh,” I said again, still looking in the mirror. 

And then I did what any reasonable man would do:  I took those trousers off, packed them up, put on my blue jeans, and headed back down to Central to order three more pairs.