Hong Konged by Paul Hanstedt

Author:Paul Hanstedt [Hanstedt, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781440541056
Publisher: Adams Media
Published: 2012-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Have I mentioned that the bed at our hotel in Shanghai was very, very big?

“Holy crap,” I say.

“I know,” says Ellen.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

“I know,” says Ellen.

“I feel terrible,” I say.

There’s a pause during which Ellen takes a deep breath, then lets it out again.

“I know,” she says.

Once you go out a few times, dinner in a foreign country with three gweilo kids isn’t nearly the adventure you’d imagine. There are some standard things we can get pretty much anywhere that will keep the kids happy: sweet-and-sour pork, for instance, or barbequed beef or chicken, though in Asia the latter’s usually steamed and sliced through the bone, providing better access to the marrow (um … yum?) but making the whole thing kind of pale and bloody, not really the most appetizing sight in the world as far as kids are concerned.

The beauty of these standard selections, though, is that they free up Ellen and me to explore. Our one evening in Shanghai, for instance, we eschew the relatively safe but boring offerings of the hotel restaurant and ask one of the bellhops if he has a favorite place in the neighborhood. He does, and gives us directions to a seafood restaurant maybe a mile walk from the hotel. Map in hand, we wander out in the fading light, taking a right out the hotel door, then another right two blocks farther. This leads us down a poorly lit street where we pass at least three houses of ill repute—assuming you can call a ground-floor barbershop with a plate-glass window and seventeen scantily clad women sitting on sofas a “house.”

Finally, though, we reach 324, the number the bellhop gave us, and are waved in by a Sikh in a gray turban. We’re in art deco land again, which is just dandy, because it’s fast becoming my favorite design style. The room is brightly lit with high ceilings, half wet market, half hotel lobby. To the left are floor-to-ceiling aquariums filled with brackish water and the night’s offerings: grouper, squid, abalone, and cuttlefish, the large eyes and furrowed brows of the latter looking disturbingly wise as we pass the tanks.

To the right is a pair of low-slung settees, their wooden legs and curled arms resplendent with intricate carving. An old-fashioned elevator with a retractable metal gate stands next to a narrow staircase, and the whole place is set off by a huge aquarium framed into the front wall of the building in lieu of a picture window. Goldfish the size of tea saucers muscle through the crowded water.

The maitre d’ ushers us into the elevator, where we’re shuttled to the second floor at probably half the speed it would have taken us to walk up, even lugging a three-year-old and two surly sub-tweeners.

The restaurant itself occupies a huge room two stories high with a carved balcony surrounding the second, darkened, level. Long opaque lights made of cream-colored strings of glass dangle from the ceiling, and shell-shaped sconces line the walls. Dark wood

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