Through New Eyes

Dad stumbles again. He's busy looking at China for the first time and not watching where his feet are going.

My parents arrive in Hong Kong, the first stop of a trip to visit their youngest son on the mainland. The first stop ever in Asia; they will see a different world. My plan to loiter here and visit friends coincides with their vacation and Justin decides to join us from Guangzhou for a day, so we have a mini-family gathering across the world from Canada.

Except that this isn't an ordinary family gathering. At home, parents are the venerable and wise hosts, to be respected. They invite us to their house and have us around their dinner table. Here, Justin and I are the ones with experience and the roles are reversed (except for the food. Mum and dad pay for dinner on their first night in town).

I notice the difference between us right away. I get off the escalators and start walking, part the crowd. The parents move at a snail's pace, turn their heads upwards, get stuck behind the masses.

"I'll always remember this street as my first glimpse of Asia," says my dad. The street is Lockhart Road in Causeway Bay, all lit up with signs and storefronts and crowded with vendors, an anywhere street in urban Asia.

Later, he stops my mum on the Mid-Level Escalators and says, "Look at those roof-tops." He points to the overlapping, haphazard, seemingly temporary shelters erected over the noodle stalls below us - a standard sight throughout the continent.

We take a bus to Stanley on the south side of the island and dad complains about the air conditioning.

"It's freezing!"

"Of course," I reply. "It's Asia." Bus drivers here take a perverse pleasure in blasting cold air onto the heads of their passengers. I've just learned to ignore it.

"Oh don't be so...!" and he smacks my arm. He doesn't appreciate my dismissive tone, which has been common for me in the past few days. Five months in Asia and I don't think about how culture and business and infrastructure are different from North America. I have just gotten used to how things work.

But my parents' insistence on being new gets me thinking. I shouldn't be dismissive. I shouldn't be jaded. I should walk off the escalator with my head up, looking.

So I stroll the streets, not with wonder - I've been here too long for that - but with an appreciation for what's there. From the southern hills, I see the majesty of the lights in a nighttime city. I see the sweat of a man holding a loaded-down push cart from rolling down the hill, one slip from certain disaster. I see the hysteria of a food stall.

I see marvellous Hong Kong, and all I need to do is look through the new eyes that my parents brought with them.