I arrived in Hong Kong in the summer of 2006, the day before the annual Dragon Boat Festival. I had just graduated from college, and, without knowing exactly how, had found myself on the long flight, on my way to teach English for a month. Just a month. This is not one of those stories that ends with me falling in love with the place and staying longer, or falling in love with the place and returning year after year, or falling in love with the place and all of its contradictions and difficulties – which in Hong Kong are myriad – and coming to a unique understanding of the country and its people.

Mostly, what I remember from the first few days in Hong Kong was that it was hot. I remember the sweat. I remember the paddles of the dragon boat racers dropping into the water in unison. I remember the tram ride up through the mist of Victoria Peak and the Madame Tussauds Wax Museum at the top. I had never been to a wax museum, and my hosts insisted on taking my picture with statue after statue, celebrity after celebrity: Marilyn Monroe, Bill Clinton, Hugh Grant, Madonna. The figures were all either too familiar – too strangely American, as if they’d stepped off the page of one of those celebrity magazines in the supermarket checkout line – or too foreign for me to even recognize, Asian pop stars like Jay Chou and Teresa Teng, people who I still would not be able to identify, despite the fact that they rule an entire continent with a greater reach even than a Justin Bieber or a Taylor Swift.

I remember that I was housed, temporarily, in a beautiful guest apartment on the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s New Asia College campus, which – I didn’t realize yet – but was most of the way to mainland China, many metro stops away from the skyscrapers of central Hong Kong. I remember, in those first few days, being taken out to dim sum at the Jockey Club by my hosts and the little egg tarts that we picked off the shiny metal carts at the end of the meal. I had had dim sum before, but never an egg tart, and I remember the feel of the crust shattering under my teeth, the rich custard oozing out onto my tongue. I remember the brightness of the yellow filling, as if an entire egg yolk had been plopped whole into the tiny tart shell.

—

My job, for the month, was to teach English at an after school program for underprivileged youth. To get to the after school center, I got on the metro at the University stop – far north on the blue line – then switched to the green line at Kowloon Tong in central Hong Kong, and then switched again to the purple line at Tiu Keng Leng before finally getting off at the Po Lam stop, at the far west end of the purple line. It was more than an hour ride each way, the doors swishing open and closed, a pre-recorded female voice coming over the loudspeakers in Cantonese and then English to announce each stop, to remind us of the rules. Whether the English – precisely annunciated, British-inflected – was a vestige of the colonial past or a move toward a global future, I was never sure.

Before I had left the States, everyone I spoke to had said that I would have no problem in Hong Kong, that everyone there spoke English. But when I would get off the metro at the end of the line, far away from the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown, and step out onto the street, I would be hard-pressed to find anyone to help me with directions to the housing project where the after school program was located. Everything in Hong Kong is shiny and new, people had told me. It’s like the future! All metal and glass, with a Louis Vuitton on every corner. But there were no Louis Vuittons here. Early on, my hosts set me up with a social worker, to tag along with her on her visits for an afternoon. We took an elevator up and up through a high-rise apartment, stopping every couple of floors to check in on a family from her list. We would buzz or knock and then we would enter to find four people, five people, six people sharing a single room or maybe two rooms, a rice cooker bubbling in the corner, a tea kettle on the burner, the smell of last night’s dinner still hanging in the humid air.

—

After the first few days, I was moved from the luxury guest apartment to the girls’ dormitories, which much more closely resembled a concrete bunker. Men were not allowed in the dormitories, which was not a problem for me, lost and alone as I was, but seemed draconian nonetheless. The dorm had no curfew, but it sat at the very top of a long, steep hill. The university ran a shuttle that stopped at the metro and then stopped at the tippy top of this hill, at the very end of the route, but the shuttle stopped running at midnight, effectively creating a tacit curfew for all but the most self-punishing, physically fit, or financially well-off, who could afford to take a cab. I was none of the above, and so every night, even on weekends, I would race back to the dorm like Cinderella at the ball, trying to beat the stroke of midnight. I was twenty-one and fresh off of the spring semester of my senior year, which had been full of parties and beach week and what had, at the time, seemed like the endless freedom that comes with being of truly legal drinking age in America. And now, here I was, back in a dorm already, lying in a stiff single bed and staring at a bare, grey wall when I would lie awake at night, unable to sleep with the oppressive hum of the air conditioner, keeping all well and cool and climatized inside my little prison, protecting me from the thick, fetid air on the other side of my window.

—

I knew a few other Americans there, other students who were part of my program. But while we all had cell phones in America, none of us had a phone in Hong Kong, nor did we have consistent access to the Internet. So, we would exchange a round of e-mails on a given night, making a plan to meet up the next evening, and then we would let luck determine whether we actually managed to find each other at the appointed place, at the appointed time. The first time we met, we gathered at a Starbucks on the third floor of a luxury mall, and shameful as it was to retreat into the familiar green-and-white symbol of all that is off-putting about globalization, I felt relieved as we sipped frappuccinos and laughed about our culture shock. Relieved to be in a place, even for half-an-hour, where I understood the menu, where I knew what to expect.

Another time, I was the one who missed the appointed place at the appointed time, and, after a frustrated hour of looping and turning and dashing about in yet another luxury mall, I had to accept that the others had probably stopped waiting for me. In my searching, I had passed a McDonald’s several times, and – hungry, exhausted, lonely – I returned to it. I ordered a Rice Fantastic – a kind of pulled pork sandwich, but with two seasoned rice patties instead of bread – and an aloe-plum tea. Neither were very good, and I sat alone picking at them as I watched uniformed workers bussing customers’ tables. I got up to bus my own, like we do in the States, and an employee dashed over to me and signaled to me to put my tray back on the table, to leave it alone.

—

Slowly, I began to explore more. The Cantonese girl I worked with, Sonia, took me to a restaurant next to the metro stop near our work, called Golden Shanghai Restaurant. It was a local chain, with a laminated menu printed in both Cantonese and English, and color photos to illustrate many of the dishes, the kind of place I might look down on now, might question. But at the time, it was heavenly, heavenly to understand what I was ordering, heavenly to be able to exert any measure of control in what was happening to me, what was about to happen to me.

We ordered chung king chicken, a dish made of small pieces of chicken, still clinging to tiny bits of bone, dry-fried with shredded chilies that covered the whole dish with a thin coating of rust-colored dust. My coworker would put a piece of chicken in her mouth, shuffle the whole thing around for a moment and then cleanly spit out the bone, utterly stripped of meat. I would put a piece of chicken in my mouth, shuffle the whole thing around for a moment, and then awkwardly spit the chunk of gristle and bone into my paper napkin, until the gristle and bone and paper piled up into a disgusting wet mass that I would wrap in another clean paper napkin, balanced on the edge of my plate. I was, of course, the one who was out of place here, with my napkin full of chicken detritus, but I could never bring myself to try spitting onto the plate.

I went back to Golden Shanghai time and time again during my first few weeks in Hong Kong, both with Sonia and alone. I always ordered chung king chicken and then one other new dish. It was a place I felt comfortable, but it wasn’t a McDonald’s or a Starbucks, and I felt proud and happy, to be ordering in my faltering Cantonese, and to be using chopsticks like a pro, my fingers loose at the top instead of clasping them in a death grip toward the bottom. To be, even if only for the course of that meal, seemingly able to navigate my own life.

—

After only half my time in Hong Kong had passed, I already felt exhausted – exhausted by my constant struggle to communicate, exhausted by my long commute, exhausted by the pressure I had been putting on myself to see everything, to do everything. And, most of all, I felt exhausted by myself, by my sadness, my loneliness, my fear about the future, gaping in front of me, so terribly wide open. My initial excitement had worn off after the first week – it had not taken long – and I felt depleted, like a robot slowly running out of charge, shutting down with a long wheezing whimper.

But still, I had two more weeks until the date stamped on my return ticket, and I had countless hours to fill. Sitting alone at the after school center one afternoon, dreading the vast emptiness of the hours that lay before me that night, I decided that I wanted to eat dinner somewhere that was not in a shopping center, somewhere I wouldn’t order in English or point at a photo on a laminated menu. A memoir I was reading about 1930s Hong Kong mentioned one place over and over, the Mong Kok market, and so I looked it up in my guidebook. The entry was short, more of a disclaimer than a guide. “Mong Kok presents a coarser side to Hong Kong,” the guidebook said matter-of-factly. “The area is an impossibly crowded mix of tenements, people, noise, and traffic-clogged streets.” After ten days of shopping malls and wax museums and air conditioning and curfews, this sounded good. I felt like I was executing a prison break.

It was too late to get in touch with any of my few friends, and so I set off by myself, taking the purple line to the green line to the stop marked Mong Kok, guidebook tucked securely away in my bag. Clearly, it would not be useful to me here, now that I had stepped off the beaten path of tourism. When I exited the metro, it was not immediately obvious which way to go, and so I followed the crowd until, suddenly, a few blocks over, the street – closed to vehicular traffic – became a mecca of sensory overload: throngs of people filling the street and sidewalk, bodies pushing against bodies, neon lights flashing overhead, vendors yelling in crisp Cantonese to advertise their wares, each louder than the next. Set back from the sidewalk were brick and mortar stores with discount electronics, discount diamonds, discount Rolexes; in the middle of the street were tent structures housing displays of jade charms, DVDs and video games, counterfeit designer purses. And situated between the two, along the edge of the sidewalk, were the food vendors, lined up stall-by-stall on either side of the street, stretching all the way down the block.

At first, I meekly circled the stalls, clinging to the periphery of the crowds that gathered, silently watching the transactions, trying to note which foodstuffs were located where, gauging which looked the most delicious. I was trying, as always, to create a plan, in this case by making a food itinerary of sorts. But it was no use; there were so many stalls – blocks upon blocks of stalls – and so many people, and just so very much food, all of it calling out to me. There was nothing to do but plunge in.

And so I plunged, worming my way through the tight crowds that had formed around the most popular stalls and pointing at this and that and that and this, giving the cook however much money they flashed at me with their fingers and taking whatever foodstuff they handed back to me, which I shielded with my body as I moved back through the crowd and stepped into the traffic-free street, where I would perch on the curb while devouring my bounty. I ate it all: octopus legs that were battered and fried and served to me in a paper bag; scallion pancakes, redolent of onion and hot grease; mango sago drink, made from palm starch, with little cubes of tapioca, so much lighter and more delicate than Americanized bubble tea. And as I made my way through the stalls, I pointed at every dumpling I saw – pork dumplings, shrimp dumplings, veggie dumplings, dumplings whose fillings remain a mystery to this day.

After another drink – this one a taro bubble tea – and two different char siu baos from two different vendors, I checked the time and, as always, like Cinderella fleeing the ball, made a run for the metro. And I picked up the green line at Mong Kok and transferred to the blue line at Kowloon Tong and then I finally got off at University, where I managed to catch the last bus up the hill to the dorm and returned elated, so high on my independence that not even returning to the sterile dormitory with its bare walls and its empty, echoing hallways could bring me down. I had no idea that I had been so hungry.

—

The days began to feel longer, but in the best possible way. Now that I saw Hong Kong through the lens of food, my remaining two weeks felt like very little time at all, and I became determined to pack as much into each day as I could. I began to explore, no longer attempting to meet up with my few American friends at this or that luxury mall, but heading out on my own, free to go wherever I wanted, to do whatever I wanted.

And free to eat whatever I wanted, as well: noodles Shanghai style, served in a light curry sauce; Chinese eggplant with minced pork; bitter melon salad with sesame; rose tea, made by pouring boiling water over whole dried rosebuds, the resulting cup giving off a taste and aroma so delicate and pristine; roast goose, which the proprietor removed from its place hanging in the storefront window, its skin a deep lacquered brown; durian, a spiky tropical fruit that, when cracked open, reveals lobes of custardy yellow flesh; a thousand-year-old egg, a Cantonese delicacy, made by preserving a whole egg in a mix of clay and ash and salt, so that the yolk turns an inky black, the white a gelatinous brown.

This last was a dish I had read about in my guidebook and had said that I would never try, the very thought of the jiggling yolk making my stomach turn. But one night I found myself with a preserved egg in front of me, unordered, as a kind of amuse bouche before a dinner of the house specialty tea-smoked duck. And so, before I could give it much thought, I shoved half of it in my mouth and forced myself to chew and swallow. It slipped down my throat in a relatively painless fashion, not nearly as terrible as I’d expected. Still, I left the other half on the table, untouched. The important thing was that I’d done it; I’d tried it. I had made a dare with myself, and I had won.

—

Still, other than my regimented commute from University to Po Lam and back again, I spent most of my time in central Hong Kong, either in the downtown or in the Kowloon shopping district or back in Mong Kok, returning to the market over and over and over again, always more stalls, always more food, and always, always more kinds of dumplings. But one day, I found myself on a city bus headed out of central Hong Kong, chugging along the winding roads to the fishing village of Sai Kung, the claustrophobia of the city falling away. When we arrived, I walked from seafront restaurant to seafront restaurant, settling on one of the many for no other reason than it was the one that drew me. After I was seated, a waiter came by my table and guided me to a large tank by the side of the building, filled with fish of all sizes and shapes, lobsters, crabs, eels. I pointed at a fish, one that was fleshy and slow-moving. A grouper, the waiter said.

“Good?” I asked in English. The waiter nodded. “How much?” I asked, the one phrase I had mastered in Cantonese. He wrote down a figure I deemed reasonable. I nodded. Then we walked back to my table, together, and I pointed to a photo on the laminated menu of how I wanted my fish prepared: steamed with spring onions and ginger. He nodded.

The fish came maybe fifteen minutes later. It was completely unadorned but for a few delicate shavings of green and gold sprinkled here and there, so utterly simple, utterly naked, I was prepared to be disappointed; as my heart sank, I was already irritated with myself for making a poor choice. But my first bite was the freshest, cleanest mouthful I have ever eaten; it tasted purely of that place, of that moment. I ate it slowly, savoring each bite, picking each piece of flesh off the bones, saving the cheeks for last and then digging them out, too, each little ball of perfectly tender meat. And I sat, alone in the sun, a plate of the silver white cartilage in front of me, and for that moment, I was content.

—

But the scene that I will always remember is me, standing on the street at the Mong Kok market, on one of any number of nights when I found myself with nothing to do but explore and eat. And I am overwhelmed by the people and the noise, the jostling and the spitting and the hawking, the frying and the sizzling. And I am looking out at all of it – at the octopus legs curled around skewers, their purple tentacles seemingly still flush with life; at the once-globular coconuts, now hacked into precise hexagonal angles, a straw sticking out the top; at the enormous black cast-iron woks, full of boiling oil, the bubbles popping this way and that – and I am pointing at something. And I don’t know what it is or what it contains. And I don’t know if it is going to be mindblowingly delicious or if I am going to want to spit it out. And I don’t know what it is I’m going to be doing next, when this night is over, when Hong Kong is over. And I don’t even know who I am, really, and maybe that, when it comes down to it, is really the problem, is really the question. But I am learning. I am learning that I am a person who can find sustenance in being alone. And I know that I am going to taste whatever it is that I’m pointing at, and then I’m going to taste something else, and then something else, and then something else after that.