The city & the restaurant

The City

People were walking down the busy streets, cradling their cell phones, and J-walking across traffic. Cell phones were ringing from all directions and horns were blaring. The faces of the people in business suits become ghostly blurs of long shadows, rushing past like a continuous canal of light. The train, screeching through the reverberating strip of Central, Hong Kong, left a vapory trail of immaculate rhythm.

When the stars came, for a moment, the night was still. I watched the stars as the cars rushed swiftly and rapidly under them. The city, with its ongoing traffic, crowdedness, noise pollution, made the stars that were quiet and dim suddenly appealing.


Daddy's restaurant

It’s funny. When I’m at home, I hate dinner clean-up, but at my father's restaurant I don’t mind it at all. At the beginning, I thought it was because I was getting paid for the time, but then I realized that wasn’t it at all. ^-^ Some people believe you leave your energy on everything you touch. I wonder if that’s true. When I wash off the plates, I think about the people who were there earlier in the evening. I try to remember what they ate and snippets of their conversations that I overheard. I get ideas for my stories that way. Most of the time people who come here are in a relaxed mood so their conversations are fun.

One night when I was here by myself a few months ago, a young couple came in and they were fighting. She was angry because he had flirted with someone else. He denied it, but he did look guilty. She stormed out of my dad's restaurant and for a few minutes he didn’t know what to do with himself. He sat there bent over his drink and looked out the window for a long time. I think he was hoping she would come back, but she didn’t. I was thinking about them later that night when I washed off the plates they’d been using. I put each plate into a different dishwasher. I know it’s silly, but right before I ran the dishwashers I found the girl’s plate and put it next to the guy’s plate in the same dishwasher. I wonder if they ever got back together.