Located in China’s Fujian province across the strait from Taiwan, Xiamen is a bustling coastal city offering all the usual amenities for travelers with Western sensibilities (aside from the blistering hot summer weather) as well as a rich plethora of traditional Chinese culture and customs.

The Weather

90°F 90% humidity = unbearable feeling of constantly living in a sauna or breathing through a rag. A short walk to the nearest MTR subway station gives me the pleasant feeling of bathing in my own perspiration.

I’m racking my brains over what to say about the Animation-Comic-Game Hong Kong 2009 convention because I have never before found myself immersed in something so utterly foreign and bizarre. The manga fans I know in the States are mere wannabes compared to the 600,000 plus enthusiasts who flocked to this year’s ACGHK sporting imitation M41 carbines, full sets of samurai armor with matching katanas, and hair of every conceivable unnatural color under the sun.

Those are big magazines, if you know what I mean

“Cosplay,” short for costume roleplay, is the term for decking yourself out in otherworldly attire and behave like your favorite animated character. It’s not at all dissimilar from the Star Wars aficionados who dress up as Jedis and storm troopers and Sith lords while waiting hours in line at the box office. Or the legions of students who, under the spell of Ms. Rowling and the silver screen, transform themselves from muggles into wizards by donning robes and picking up Nimbus 2000s.

There’s a digging machine at a construction site near my workplace in Hong Kong Central. Enormous, cylindrical, and piston-shaped, it prepares the foundation of a new building on Pedder Street by driving a sheer metal shaft at least two feet in diameter into hard, raw concrete. When steel collides with stone, the ground shakes and an ear-splitting clangor pulsates through the air as the threatening piston trembles and rises to strike again. An auditory manifestation of the city’s pace of development, the piston slams into the ground again and again – a metronome beating out the urban tempo.

“It’s like all the Mexicans in New York City just stopped working one day,” said CEO Intern D as I was walking with him in HK Central one Sunday afternoon.

His comparison seems apt, so just suspend your PC-sense for a minute while I run with the analogy. Imagine every Sunday all the Mexicans in NYC with low-skilled jobs (We don’t have to pick on only the Mexicans. Take the Pakistani cabbies, Chinese restaurant owners, insert your favorite ethnic stereotype here) stop working, go to Wall Street or Times Square, and just throw one big street party. Imagine they hawk goods, snack on Mexican food, play cards with friends, sit on picnic blankets on shaded sidewalk areas, and just generally have a rockin’ fun time without giving a shit about the disapproving stares and upturned noses of white passersby.

Living for a month in any one place really lets you discover its little idiosyncracies and oddities. I present to you some of HK’s below.

Ivy Ball is a social extravaganza for Ivy League alumni¹ who live in Hong Kong. Every summer, hundreds of men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns enter the Grand Hyatt ballroom² for professional networking and auditory/gustatory entertainment. Centerpieces of freshly-cut flowers and seven-armed candelabra holding two-foot long candles tower over guests. A chandelier of glass spheres sparkles above a hardwood dance floor. This year’s theme was “Take a Chance.”³

Many people were quick to point out that MIT did not, in fact, belong to the Ivy League.

HK’s Central district is the analogue of NYC’s Wall Street. It is here that multi-billion dollar banking giants like Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) and Standard Chartered Bank stake out their territories. Garden Road and Cotton Tree Drive are mere slivers of pavement wedged between the towering high-rises of Bank of China and Citibank. Between these two buildings lies the oldest Anglican church in the Far East. Even though St. John’s Cathedral has been here since 1849, it’s dwarfed by the neighboring financial skyscrapers and looks strangely out of place. Its stone frame, rose window, lancet arches, and trifoils contrast jarringly with the surrounding urban jungle made of glass and steel.