One morning I was in my home studio happily drawing an exploding hot dog while all around me Jimi Hendrix wailed about a red house over yonder. During a pause in the guitar solo, just as Jimi was about to confess lust for his girlfriend's sister, I noticed the doorbell ringing frantically. I put down my pen. Now what?
A construction worker stood at the door, jabbering excitedly in supersonic, heavily accented Cantonese. The only words I could pick out were "angry" and "gwaipo" (Causcasian woman). I threw on some flip flops and followed him to the other side of the village.
We had recently bought an old, dilapidated house near where we lived on Lantau Island. It was tipping over into the adjacent snake-infested ginger field, so we had no choice but to knock it down and build a new, and presumably more stable, structure.
Standing like a Valkyrie in front of The House was a tall European woman with jaw-length brown hair and eyes which strobed like emergency beacons. "Are you the owner?" she said in a vaguely Slavic accennt.
I told her I was.
"Well, you have to tell them to stop."
"Stop what?"
"What they're doing."
"What they're doing," I said, "is knocking down this house."
Mr. Cheung's workmen were busy with jackhammers, pulleys and buckets. At least they were supposed to be. All activity had stopped and every eye was fixed on me and the gwaipo, like spectators waiting for the opening bell at a boxing match.
"Don't treat me like I'm stupid," the woman said. "I can see that you're demolishing this house. And I'm telling you to stop." She pointed across the ginger field. "I live right over there," she said. "I'm a writer. And I can't work with this incessant noise." I was tempted to lean closer to smell her breath for vodka or fermented reindeer milk or whatever they drank in her native land. The workers leaned dangerously over the parapets, straining to catch any English words they might recognize.
"I'm sorry," I said, "but I'm not about to do that. When you knock down a concrete building with power equipment it tends to be loud."
"Well, I won't tolerate it! I moved here six weeks ago to get away from the noise of the city. The village is meant to be peaceful and quiet."
Yeah, in a fairy tale, I thought. Back in Hansel and Gretel Land where you obviously come from.
Of course I understood her point of view. Most of the time Mui Wo is blessedly silent, the only noises being the wind and the birds and, on particularly still days, the sound of little waves slapping the sand on the other side of the wetland which separates my village from the beach. But when the occasional house is built or renovated, power tools are an uncomfortable, though temporary, fact of life. "So what do you want me to do? Abandon building my house?"
She put hands on hips and leaned over me like a scolding schoolteacher.
"You can tell them to do it quietly."
Quiet jackhammers, of course! That's like demanding non-wet water, non-fat lard, a well-acted Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
"Couldn't they use hammers and chisels?" she suggested.
That did it. "Nobody's going to knock down a reinforced concrete structure with chisels! Anyway, hammers are noisy too. Maybe I should tell them to use spoons?"
I thought about the angry woman later, much later, while my wife and I were relaxing on the roof of the new house, long after it was completed, and even longer after our sensitive neighbour had moved to a quieter place, perhaps a padded cell somewhere. It was a clear autumn night with just a hint of a cool breeze. I leaned back and faced Sagittarius, who lay sideways in the sky.
"Wouldn't it be nice to put some outdoor speakers here?" I said.
"What for?" my wife asked.
"What do you think, what for? To enjoy some music while we're out on the roof."
"You have got to be kidding!" she said. "I'd rather enjoy the silence."
As usual, my wife had more sense than I did. It was a particularly quiet night. No barbecue parties, no dogs barking, no televisions blaring through open windows. Not even any frogs belching this time of year. The nearest road was a mile away on the other side of the hill. Even the wind wasn't quite strong enough to cause friction among the leaves. Who would want to disturb the silence, even with violins?
This sort of complete absence of sound was so rare in a place like Hong Kong that it needed to be caressed by your ears the way your tongue fondles an ice cream, savouring it and revelling in every droplet while it lasts.
The following day I rode the ferry into the city. Ferries are never silent, obviously, but after the endless series of juvenile announcements to "all strive together for a smoke-free environment" and not treat the seats as sleeping bunks, the ambient sounds of the motor and the waves blend into a kind of white noise which is itself a sort of silence.
Then the beep-beep-bong of an electronic game spat into life behind my head. The game player compensated for the extreme poor fidelity of the built-in speaker by turning the volume up to maximum-plus. It was the kind of electronic sizzle which acts like a microwave on your neurons and causes your muscles to jerk involuntarily. Surely everyone on the ferry was affected by the piercing squeal. After three minutes of twitching in my seat I turned around and asked the man behind me to turn down the volume. He ignored me at first, hunched over with thumbs wagging. I repeated my request in Cantonese and English, with an explanation that it was disturbing everyone on the ferry.
He ignored me for as long as he could, then finally responded: "I don't hear anyone else complain."
"Well, I am," I said.
"So put on some headphones," he said. Then he twisted in his seat to indicate he was through talking with me.
At that moment I realized that I was the angry "knock it down with hammer and chisel" woman and the game player was me. It also suddenly dawned on me why people here have such a peculiar notion of silence.
When Hong Kong city people come to Mui Wo for the weekend, you never hear them remarking how peaceful it is. Instead, once they've finished cramming 38 people into a 500-square-foot holiday flat, they move the television outside, turn it up full-blast, fire up the barbecue and shriek and bray like demented donkeys throughout the night. Rather than bask in the silence on offer, they smother it.
Silence is not an ideal for Hong Kongers, partly, I suppose, because in most places it's inconceivable. If there's any sonic disturbance--trucks in the street below, a neighbour's karaoke, or a boor playing an electronic game in the seat behind you--the remedy is to add your own layer of noise on top of that: put on headphones with blaring music, turn up the television, close the window and turn on the air conditioner even on a cool evening. There's no point in trying to make anyone shut up, because even if they do, it's only going to reveal the next layer of noise beneath theirs. So we pile noise upon noise to achieve serenity. That's simple pragmatism, something Hong Kongers are known for.
Total silence is alien, a vacuum, an empty void, something which needs filling like a restaurant teapot with its lid off. We're so used to claiming our space and filling the gaps in our lives with ceaseless chatter and electronic entertainment that it's out of the question to take advantage of silence when it's there. Nobody here cherishes peace and quiet when it's handed to them. Not even me, until my wife made me think about it. That's what drove my European neighbour crazy.
When I talk this way some people scoff and cite an alleged Chinese proverb:
Where there's no noise, there's no fun.
Instead of telling them to shut up I recite another Chinese proverb, one I wish they'd add to the ferry announcements, right after the "no smoking or gambling on board." I fact, it should appear on billboards throughout the city and announced on television in three languages:
Don't speak unless you can improve the silence.