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I've been "politely hassling" Wendy for a few months to write about her long visit to Lamma over Chinese New year, after leaving Lamma 17 years ago. She's finally emailed me these notes below. She calls them a "short piece", but "was finding it hard to stop" after starting to write!
This looks like the first major chunk of a major Lamma biography and I might continue to "politely hassle" to continue her simply wonderful and delightful writing! Even though I know almost all the people she mentions below I've learned so much about them and Lamma's past, less than two decades ago....
Wendy writes that these notes are "not really ready for publication" yet, but I "politely disagree" and have put them up here for initial feedback, before I'll publish the revised and edited version in the Lamma-zine very soon.
Feedback, please!
You can leave, but you never do
Lamma 2010 -- by Wendy Teasdill
As the plane plunged earthwards my consciousness arose in inverse proportion from its deep hypnosis and I found myself staring with suspended hysteria at the view: three tall chimneys loomed at us and as we skimmed past my wakening brain wondered: where in Hong Kong has three towers? As deserted beaches bit with delicate new moon sand at the jade green sea and the plane flipped, circled for its slot, it dawned upon me: where else but Lamma Power Station?
Fourteen years ago my daughter Iona had pointed an accusing finger out of the plane window, demanding to be there, Hong Kong. She was two, and we were just leaving, following a three-month visit. Iona generally got what she wanted and was now finally back in the land of her origins. We gibbered like wild animals as the plane finally hit the tarmac of the runway on Lantau. To those who never left Lamma, such primitive behaviour must seem slightly strange.
Sally was there to welcome us, beaming and dancing in the great glass hallway of glass and flowers, fruit and sunshine which is Hong Kong’s answer to Heathrow. Sally had accidentally put her train-ticket in the bin, but all the uniformed officials to whom she spoke just waved her through barriers which magically opened as she passed. In London one can expect to shot for such a transgression, and I wondered at the dirge-like magnetism of duty and expectation which allowed me to forfeit this paradise for the pedantic treadmill of life in the UK. Where did 17 years go?
Into the form of Iona is the answer - and of course her two sisters who we had left behind. The dubious belief that they’d be better off being brought up in the country of their ancestors was completely challenged as soon as Iona set foot on Lamma.
Roz lept out with a camera with the energy of a whole crowd of Paparazzi, and the pier was hung with Chinese new year flags and lanterns lilting gently in the warm breeze. The boats in the harbour bobbed smugly on the soft swell of the ferry, mosquitoes licked their lips at the prospect of juicy new blood and the hand-painted lettering on the harbour wall read: 'Welcome to Lamma.’ I felt again that deep satisfaction of being at peace which seems to just seep up through your feet as soon as you touch Lamma. It’s a funny thing, but of all the places in the world, this is the only one I never want to leave. And Iona got it too. Well, she was back in her place of origin. So buoyant were we in our jet-lagged realisation of paradise that we didn’t really notice that the trunk of the banyan tree which gives meaning to Yung Shue Wan had been parceled up in a square, bullet-proof vest of heavy metal.
We trod the blissful path to Sally and Hugh’s place, where Sally had set everything up like a dream. Our rooms were perfect, tastefully decorated in natural materials reflecting the environmental traditions of the east. Bamboo mats, unbleached cotton, handmade paper, sea-sculpted driftwood and dragon-chased pots full of happy flowers all bid us a joyful welcome. The white tiles of the yoga room floor gleamed enticingly and, just across the paddy-fields, the waves carefully polished the sand of Power Station Beach. We were introduced to Sally and Hugh’s new dog, Smudge, a bundle of amiable grey curls who will reliably run in the opposite direction the second he is summoned. Sally valiantly threw the rubber dog-Frisbee I’d brought him, but Smudge just couldn’t see the point.
The groove quickly grabbed us: we awoke daily to the sound of dogs, brooms sweeping adjacent terraces in preparation for the Chinese new year and the sound of the whirlpool bird; inhaling the heady scent of the water Narcissi growing in a thick yellow cluster from a bowl of water in the bamboo table on the tiled terrace; watching the high spirals of the black-eared kites, walking down to the sea, saying hello to the strange beast with lopsided fangs in a twisted jaw which could be a cat but is reputed to be a dog who goes under the name of Pu-Yi; swimming in the jade-green swell of the waves against the surreal back-drop of the convoluted efforts of the power station’s pipes to produce electricity for Hong Kong, splashing out till the three chimneys merge into one; sitting on Main Street with Nick the Book, meeting up with friends, old and new, trying out the new restaurants and comparing them with the Lamcombe - all the elements of the perfect life as envisioned beneath the dark Satanic mills of England were there.
Over on Hunter’s beach the butterflies whispered Hunter’s secrets in the undergrowth. According to the Lamma blog Hunter is a legendary fruitarian who scavenged the bins to make art-work in the jungle. We had pantomimes and parties there, dancing under great tripods of driftwood and metallic eyes with saws for lashes, swinging on ropes of hemp and steel as John Hutton belted out the music and the night-time foliage was drenched in red and blue lights. Once upon a time in the early nineties, I rented a room from Solai and Udo. They wanted me to paint butterflies over the walls of their courtyard, and by way of preparation I went to Hunter’s beach and spent a morning watching the butterflies in the foliage there. It was a time untouched by the rest of the world - butterfly time had precise mathematical proportions written on the curves of their wings. The time was always now and it was always punctual. Upon my return I painted the butterflies on the walls of the courtyard and taught Udo how to make ear-rings from wire. It improbably turned out that he used to make false teeth and was handy with small creations; within five minutes he was making ear-rings faster than I. At the same time Richard Muller was tumbling stones and suddenly, before Solai had had time to make another pan of chrysanthemum tea, Udo was producing ear-rings and necklaces fashioned from wire and tumbled amber from the Baltic, and Solai was selling them faster than he could make them. Solai’s sales’ techniques were marvelous to behold and we used to go and watch her pulling in the Chinese tourists on a Sunday afternoon. An empire was born.
Tiptoeing down Main Street there was a shriek, and Solai was upon me, huge orbs of amber indenting themselves on my flesh. 'Look!’ I said, when I could. 'Look at my baby!’
'Waow! So beautiful!’ And she gave Iona a red envelope of Lai-si.
I had warned Iona that it might be boring for her, coming to Lamma. Everyone would be telling her they remembered her as a coodgy coodgy baby, and it would be embarrassing. When Iona was a baby, Solai gave me amber powder to rub onto her mosquito bites. As it was, Iona reveled in the attention, and the red envelopes were very graciously received. Udo and Solai’s shop glistened with resinous tears shed by pine trees forty million years ago, vibrant with insects trapped in their glutinous, prehistoric embrace. There was not a lot of business for Solai right now in the economic lull between the ox and the tiger, but she waited anyway. What is time?
According to Wikipedia, Lamma plays host to hedonists and lotus-eaters. Unfortunately the lotus pond which used to lurk shyly across the narrow path from the big blue barrels of shrimp paste has been filled in with concrete rubble. The whole lovely valley-floor has been fenced off and a drainage ditch built around it; while awaiting trial by democracy, Hong Kong-style, the wild grasses endure slow slaughter between the pincers of dehydration and rumour: is there a property developer pulling strings to topple the ruling that no buildings over three storeys high should grace the iron-red clay of Lamma? Can petitions and a vigorous burst of environmental activism save it? Can I find the photo of the lotuses which used to grow there?
The lotus-eaters have had to compromise a bit. Instead of lotuses the self-indulgent ex-pats must consume fresh locally grown vegetables, Chinese eggs, Swiss chocolate, French cheese, Italian olives, Colombian coffee and fresh Lamma tofu - all available on Main Street and some of them served up by Dan the Bastard and his son. To pay for these staples of the global village, the Hedonists have had to work long and hard. There is no social security in Hong Kong so the successful industrialists, business people, smugglers and drug-dealers live on the Peak while the unsuccessful ones live in other parts of the world, their lives chastened by the dark gutter that drags on the nadir of Karma’s wheel. That would be me then. And meanwhile those industrious middle-people, my friends the English teachers, artists, editors and writers, breathed the soft free spirit of Lamma, undisturbed by the erroneous assumptions and presumptions of unnamed and disembodied Wikipedian souls. They are in good company. Lamma is also home to wild pigs and turtles, a zillion snakes and immeasurable blasts of mosquitoes.
Very soon, Sally, Hugh, Iona and I were sitting at a round table opposite the metal-jacketed banyan tree where we could snag people as they drained off the ferries. It was warm and sultry in the land of the lotus eaters, and Iona and I scratched at our mosquito bites as we dipped into our bowls of tofu and greens. Annapurna appeared, as hypnotically beautiful as ever, and, upon being introduced to Iona, rattled out on her mobile a series of text-summonses to her tribe, who dutifully appeared. The very tall one with a pony tail was the baby she was pregnant with when I first met her ... and the self-possessed twelve-year-old was a baby when I last saw her. Annapurna introduced Iona to them all, and dismissed them all. And that was that - Iona’s social life was sorted.
'But of course!’ Annapurna was delighted. 'She don’t want to stay with us all night!’
The weather snapped cold, unusually cold, so cold that Sally had to put heaters in the yoga room. While the snakes slept on in the earth, the wild pigs rifled the imaginations of the readers of the Lamma-zine, and we borrowed fleeces from Sally and Hugh as the mosquitoes vanished.
All over the island seethed the sound of brushing and scrubbing and scraping as the Chinese swept away the grime of the old year in order to allow the tiger’s paws to scamper tenderly in. Bins filled and Sally found some exquisitely carved panels to grace the outside of the yoga studio. Apparently Hunter shipped back to San Francisco antiques discarded at the Chinese new year by the Chinese of Lamma and eventually made a profit. According to Pita, an ex-Lamma Hare Krishna who moved up the coast to Xiamen in China, Hunter sailed his junk up there in the mid-nineties in order to soak his sails in pig’s blood as is the tradition. As a vegetarian, Pita-Das naturally disapproved, but Hunter was nothing if not authentic. In the zone where all time is equal, I might yet walk out on the beach at dawn and find Hunter’s the only footprints there.
We caught our breath in the quiet moment between the years of the ox and the tiger and took a ferry to the once-barren rock of Hong Kong island, where we retraced my steps from the old British Council in the Easey Commercial Building in Wanchai back to the ferry pier. 'Look, Iona!’ I said, pointing to the curb outside the British Council. 'That’s where I found my kitten, Buchi-san. She was black and white and had cat-flu, fleas and hardly any fur. There was an old woman who used to live on the pavement just there and I used to often buy her lunch from the vegetarian restaurant next door. She had grey dreadlocks and stunk like a sewer and there was a stream of her poo and pee that went from where she sat to the curb. When I picked up the kitten and took her home, the happy homeless woman chortled and grinned and nodded.’
She was removed before the British Council upped itself into the heights of Central, and the cat grew up on Lamma to be very healthy, eventually becoming a matriarch of a whole dynasty of felines back in Wanchai - but that’s another story. We slowly made our way back to Lamma. Tiger Balm Gardens has gone, the pawn shop’s a restaurant, but Wanchai market remains the same. We oozed through the all-Cantonese crowds as they purchased chickens, vegetables, incense, red gladioli and silver pussy willow, and fought over dozens of cut-price paper tigers. Playing ex-pats, we cooed over the quaint oriental traditions, dipped into god-shops gloomy with fine basket weave and hanging spirals of temple incense, gave money to a beautiful singer in a wheelchair, purchased a pink lotus candle and hand-painted good luck mottoes on red paper strips for the new year.
Out of the market we gasped and through the spacious concrete canyons of deserted car show-rooms, where huge pink paper-cut blossoms and tigers vied with whole trees of real bloom, to emerge eventually onto the steel walkways of Central where, in a huge shopping plaza, we came upon a huge family of tigers fashioned entirely from flowers. Exhausted by the extravagance, we collapsed finally on a sofa surrounded by wave-worn stones and luxuriously blooming flowers, and, looking down the stairs, saw an advertisement for Yoga.
Ah, Yoga. Once upon a time I was the only Yoga teacher in Hong Kong. Then the glamorous Shravaniya came over from Taipei, and took the health clubs by storm. When I left, Roberta started teaching with Robin, who then opened up Yoga Central - and suddenly it was Planet Yoga and Pure Yoga and Iyengar Yoga and Gu Yoga and Wu Yoga - and then just as suddenly, I hear - there is no more Planet Yoga. Or Yoga Yoga.
We took the ferry back to Lamma and stayed there. Iona revived with the company of Annapurna’s tribe and friends, and entered easily into the sleepless state of never-ending consciousness which was mine before I became pregnant with her. She was out all night, and annoyed with me when she came in at seven in the morning. Of course she was OK! Why wouldn’t she be? She’d been - you know - and she wiggled her thumbs. She’d been playing on an X-box, whatever that is.
Just before the stroke of midnight on the Ox’s last day, Sally emptied the bins, put up the red strips of paper painted with golden wishes for health, happiness, wealth and longevity, and we walked down to the Tin Hau temple in the village to the sound of drums. We’d missed the lion dance by the time we got there, but all the families of the local shops were there, taking it in turns to line up with their smoking bouquets of incense before going in to offer them to the dark wooden image of the sea-goddess there. The red incinerator outside flared with a thousand hopes and wishes for the year to come: we were now in the metal tiger, and an interesting year of sudden changes and reversals of fortunes was predicted.
There would also be false dawns. I had left messages for Lamma-Gung but he had not replied. The others told me he had lost even more weight, so, spotting a skinny Gweilo with a pony tail, I raced after him - but it was not him. I only caught up with him electronically after I returned home. Iona, on the other hand, was right on cue. From a dreamy, speculative mood of wonder and placid acceptance, she snapped to attention. 'Mum! I’ve seen Annapoona’s kids - I’m going off with them and I’ll see you later!’ And before I had time to say 'It’s AnnapURna,’ she was gone.
Meanwhile, the young Lamma locals were paying more attention to propitiating the unpredictable tiger ahead. Presently a group of young men carefully rolled out a huge car-tyre sized coil of proper, red bullet-style cracking crackers from China. They draped the head over a tree before igniting it, and as the fire hissed and spat and thundered its way through the spine in a wall of ear-splitting sound, Sally and I lept over the wall behind us, followed by a few children. But as soon as the beast was spent, and the red paper littered the floor, an international army of small children lept back over the wall and feverishly sorted through the still-glowing remains, looking for cartridges which the fire had missed.
I recalled the display of firecrackers outside the Museum of Asian Art in Bath last year: one man in a helmet and visor and fitted suit of fireproof material set light to a handful of such beasts with a luminous police force keeping the assembled adults and children at a safe distance while a fire-crew stood by, just in case. And I also recalled China, 1987, as we pussy-footed from the Tiger to the Rabbit. The Chinese family I was staying with gave me a firework to hold in my hand. Despite my misgivings I held it as directed - surely it would be rude to refuse, and they were all holding theirs! Naturally it was I, brought up to keep a safe distance from fireworks, who was the only one to be hurt. The fountain of fire and rain backfired into my palm and caused me some pain for weeks afterward.
Here on Lamma, under the watchful glass eyes of the granite lions who guard the temple gate, the only casualty to unpredictability so far was a Gweilo who had drunk too much and hit his head. He lay quietly on his Lilliputian ambulance and the children scampered off with their loot to the tennis courts behind us, where they presently performed their own scavenged junior version of the ritual cleansing of evil spirits.
Iona returned at seven in the morning, but I was now used to it. It was Chinese new year, there was no school, she was running with a gang of nice children, some of whom I’d known since they were in the womb, the place was safe - they weren’t going to get knifed. Nonetheless, Iona was a little distressed when she returned: they’d been playing play station (wiggle of thumbs) at the house of a boy whose mother was in Pune, India. In the middle of the night he had received a text from his mother saying she’d been in the German bakery when a bomb had gone off. She was fine but her friend was killed ...
I know the German bakery. Having been to Pune half a dozen times over the years to study at the Iyengar Yoga Institute, the German Bakery is in what used to be considered the enemy camp - Koragoan Park, opposite Osho’s infamous ashram. The rivalry once depicted by pictures of Osho and Mr Iyengar shaking their fists at one another over a centre fold of the Maharashtra Herald are long gone however, and Koragoan Park is a regular haunt for all foreigners - and indeed the burgeoning Indian middle-classes - coming to Pune. It is another nexus of lotus-eating ex-pats looking for a place to relax and feel at home in the world while retaining an illusion of freedom and the confirmation that they have escaped the entanglements of their upbringing. The German Bakery in Pune and Lamma Island are related, kissing cousins on a whispered network of spectral ley-lines.
Yet by morning the red litter had been swept away, and a precious hush enveloped Lamma as the Chinese visited one another and we wandered into the paradise of Herboland at Hung Shing Yeh. Glassy water swept the uncharacteristically quiet Sunday sand of the beach named after a deified official from the Tang dynasty, and within the verdant sanctuary of Hong Kong’s only organic herb garden, rabbits scampered in quiet coops awaiting their time. Only a year to go ...
Created by Hong Kong designers, Gavin and Gary, on May 1st seven years ago, Herboland is a triumph of order out of chaos. In place of the snakes who once lingered lasciviously in the frighteningly long grasses, there now flourish pert bundles of mint, tarragon, lemon balm, lemongrass, oregano, chamomile, basil, sage, bergamot, echinacea, lettuces, chillies - and every type of green medicinal plant imaginable. How is possible, what with typhoons and the heat?
'What about slugs?’ I asked.
'Every night in the summer we both collect slugs for three hours with chopsticks. Our hands ache with the chopsticks. Eleven o’clock we finish, and we have buckets and buckets of slugs ...’ All this information was delivered with the happy smile characteristic of the Chinese when delivering bad news. They are open Sunday to Monday, which is to say - every day. Visitors come and buy the goods, and they have had some media coverage. Neat signs painted on driftwood ask people not to smoke, to leash their dogs and to love the planet. Herboland is a miracle which depends not on propitiation to Tin Hau or even to Hung Shing Yeh, but on a vision realised through sheer human dedication. Now, back in the UK, I add Herboland organic bergamot to my tea and find courage in honour of the miracle.
We scampered up a path and found, above Hung Shing Yeh, the Keep family at home. Roz the Tiger was baking a chocolate cake for Roberta’s fiftieth birthday party that night. Phil, fresh from Dubai, nursed a painful tooth. Robin played some demon game on a large electronic screen, doubtless using both thumbs. A tiger rug sprawled on the floor. Walking along the coastline, up over the hill, we passed a rock, which Roz called Wendy’s moon-watching rock. Apparently I used to sit there and watch the moon. Oh, but I’ll watch the moon from anywhere. The rock had been painted yellow and black - in honour of the tiger.
The tiger crouched, the rabbits lurked, the air was very still and cold and Tin Hau and Hung Shing Yeh watched over the people with a benevolent eye. That night we all met up at the Waterfront - all the old faces and some new - to celebrate Roberta’s fiftieth birthday. There was a regular, structured feel to the event: food was ordered and consumed, the chocolate birthday cake was produced, the lotus candle from Wanchai was ignited, and we sang Happy Birthday. Born in the year of the boar, and not given to too much wildness, Roberta appreciates fine company, good friends and conviviality, and her Buddhist practice emanated from her like a fine aura. She and Gerry did do some time in California, but it didn’t really work, and here they are, back on Lamma, growing younger by the day and prospering. In fact I got sandwiched in a conversation between her and Eric about how very good their lives are right now. They are exactly where they want to be, have good and comfortable homes, a good income and satisfactory careers.
By contrast, I would be going home to the UK to face failure and defeat in almost everything. When I went home it would be to sell the house I’ve worked so hard to hold onto for so many years. Every ideal of non-greed and non-violence would be tested: did I have the courage to take the stability I’d so painstakingly constructed and throw it piece by piece into the crunching jaws of the discredited tiger? Could I take the humiliation of unrequited sacrifice and the pain of admitting that, though I’d inadvertently climbed near the top of my tree - it was the wrong tree and, moreover, a very small tree? I did not know. Nonetheless, though the begetting of children and their maintenance were the reason I was banished from this Paradise in the first place - Bradley insisted that we lived in the UK - I of course would have it no other way.
Unpredictability played its part when we went to dance at Diesel’s. The biggest thrill was prancing up the steps without feeling fear. This tiled fisherman’s building is accessed by a flight of steps set into a high wall which rears up from the street; in-built incense holders in the shape of two fish guard the magnificent granite doorway. When I first came to Lamma in the eighties, this was where all the local lads hung out, sitting on the wall and watching the Gweilos through their dark glasses as we ran the gauntlet of the narrowest bit of Main Street. We called it the Shooting Gallery. There was always a feeling, which, to be sure, only lasted a second or two, or walking through a canyon where bandits lurked behind rocks. The problem was psychological and all ours, but the place holds the legacy of stand-off nonetheless.
Then, in the nineties, Clive turned the building into an art gallery, and was officially entitled The Shooting Gallery. All our friends exhibited paintings there, and Asia 2000 even sprung my book launch there: with one baby on my back and Iona toddling, innocent and curly-haired, about my ankles, I gave a talk about walking to Mount Kailash as my husband Bradley, emboldened by alcohol, brandished a book and pontificated about the decline of the tiger in Asia.
And now it’s a bar called Diesel’s. We channeled the lawless past as we burst in through the doorway, and, to Iona’s acute delight at having the opportunity to be embarrassed, we - that is myself, Sally, Roberta, Roz, Annie Knibb and a random Filipina girl in a short tight black dress, a big grin, very high heels and long long hair - danced in an age-defying frenzy as Rodney, Phil, Jerry and Iona lurked edgily about the four directions as protectors of the mandala. Though Buddhas and lotuses guarded the front end of the white-washed walls, the escape hatch at the back was visible; and though the stories of the hatch are lost to us through the impregnable screen of cultural differences, there was a certain glee in dancing on in the mysterious ectoplasm of the darker seams of Lamma’s history to which our access is closed.
Nearly a week after our arrival, Yoga classes finally started. Lamma is where I first taught Yoga. The place on Lamma Station beach where I used to hold sessions on a Sunday afternoon is now covered in stones, but the Hong Kong Yoga industry is booming - and busting - and Sally’s modest studio a gloriously stable stepping-stone to a mid-line between those old days of free yoga sessions by the sea and the multi-million aspirations of Planet Yoga in Tsim Tsa Tsui, Causeway Bay and the Silver Fortune Plaza, Central.
The classes were, as always, a pleasure and a privilege to teach. The people of Lamma come to their yoga practice with sincerity and honesty; many of them are Buddhist practitioners, and problems such as competitiveness and superficial understanding are simply absent. The classes were small and wonderful, every session a delight to teach. And in between Yoga sessions, we visited a few houses.
On Ash Wednesday, Sally, Smudge, Iona and I walked over to Pak Kok. We had been invited to visit Eric, as he now lives in Sibylle’s old place. He apparently has an organic vegetable garden in the place where I remember a snake’s paradise of rioting grasses and a wilderness of magnificent morning glory. On the pilgrimage to this triumph of order over chaos we did get a little sidetracked.
Cresting the hill, Sally remarked: 'This is Annapurna’s old place.’ This place had come up in conversation, this old children’s sanatorium on the hillside above the sea on the way to Pak Kok. During some of the lost years, while I had been racing around trying to support my family with yoga-teaching, she had lived there with her children. As they grew up, they expressed a preference for a 'proper house’ nearer the town. She uses the old place as a studio now, she said. We couldn’t resist climbing through the barrier and following the overgrown path down, across unkept terraces, to the grey concrete archway with its red paint which marked the entrance to where, once upon a time, sick children would be sent to recover in the healthy breeze. Expecting paints and canvases, we walked in wonder into something
completely different.
The place is officially a ruin. Red paint on the walls says so. Some government official has left their red mark on each piece of deconstruction. And yet it is also a home and one which is not quite deserted. Room after room, half-open to the elements via glassless windows, open doors or absent walls, was meticulously arranged as if the inhabitants had just popped out to the shops for some soy milk. An iron sat on the edge of an ironing board, the cord neatly coiled, despite the obvious absence of electricity. Every room, every shelf was meticulously arranged and decorated. Sea-shells, semi-precious jewels and flowers were offered to Krishna in every room, and whole racks of clothes hung, ready to wear. As we walked through building after deconstructed building, the marriage of civilisation with the surrounding jungle was viscerally celebrated. Trees and armchairs, clothes and creepers united and whispered as we passed. Most powerful of all was the sound of the wind as it passed through the leaves and the grasses and lifted the cloths from the door-frames and curtains from the windows. The wind had no beginning and no end, and Annapurna’s artistry was manifest in the vibrant sensation of life which defied the absence of life-forms and the memorandums of sickness.
Down through the trees the sea rolled onto the bouldered beach and in the earth the snakes still slept. Though the place was abandoned, it was inhabited not by ghosts but by feeling; feeling like trespassers and privileged guests, we trod in diffident wonder until overpowered by the realisation that we were still on the way to Eric’s. Feeling a bit like a character in the Indian epics, in which the god-heroes can accidentally incarnate in other lives and have whole families, build up whole dynasties before they awaken to the memory of their divine nature, we ducked back onto the concrete path and got back on schedule.
Over the hill, overlooking the Lamma Channel, Eric had indeed triumphed over chaos. In the organic vegetable garden, yellow Japanese aubergines, peppers, chillies, salads and nasturtiums were all contained by red flowering ground-cover; in the place flagged in my memory as impenetrable and inhabited only by snakes, he had cleared grassy terraces, accessed by perfectly-cut steps. Lime bushes and banana trees flourished in well-kept simplicity. Apparently he has no problem with slugs. They just don’t seem to have colonised over here.
The house itself was even more of a revelation.The house used to belong to the delightful Apple, a street-sweeper, but Eric eventually bought the whole thing from her. Eric rents out the two downstairs flats and lives on the top floor, where Sibylle used to live. I spent quite a lot of time there in the eighties and nineties; in between houses, I house-sat for Sibylle when she was away, and spent some time there when I was first pregnant with Iona. It was here that I realised the exhaustion of the first trimester. One full moon night in October I lay on the floor, listening to the wind whipping round the house, wondering why I had no energy to get up and walk around the hills as I was wont to do. A song came on the radio and I recognised the voice: it was Neil Young, singing Harvest Moon. The world was changing and I gave up, fell asleep, and plunged into a life with a new set of values.
When Sibylle first got this place I helped her wash down all the tiles and cleansed it with an enormous puja comprising luxurious clouds of Tibetan incense. This was a Kailash abode: Sibylle cycled to Kailash in 1987; I walked there in 1988; and Bradley claims (quite rightly) to have been the first westerner there since Lama Govinda in the forties. After Sibylle left for San Francisco in the nineties, it was taken over by Peter Lloyd and Kate - who had also been to Kailash - and, of course, their son named, inevitably, Kailash. I remember them saying when they moved in that they didn’t have to do a puja - they felt it had been done already. It certainly had, and yet, in a way, the feng shui of the place is so excellent that perhaps all our labours were by the way.
The windows of the living room encompass the wildness of the islands and the skyscrapers of Aberdeen. There is a lot of sea. At night, when the fog-horns sounded in the Hong Kong shipping channel, Sibylle and I would imagine the mind-set of the sailors, sated by the pleasure-haunts of Wanchai, setting out once again across the lonely freedom of the waves. Sibylle would imagine the loneliness and I the freedom... How can we ever know what another human being feels? They probably had entirely different, and probably more carnal, emotions.
Eric has brought sophistication to a place which was already, to our traveling, eighties, survival-mode brains, untold tiled luxury. Sibylle’s platform and magnificent bamboo shelves (she built them all herself) are now replaced by an immaculate white calico sofa and a Buddhist shrine adorned by stargazer lilies. The tiny kitchen where Sibylle used to cook up the local vegetables, bargained for in Cantonese from the feisty women of the market in Kennedy town, now boasts Ikea cabinets and a bread-making machine. The understated simplicity and impeccable good taste took our breath away; speechless, we looked vainly for the flaws which Eric insisted marred the perfection of the plastered ceiling. We ate the home-made bread, drank tea from fine white cups. Coming from a house cluttered with the detritus of five ongoing lives as I do, and feeling the daily failure to engage with and control the mess as a personal affront, this was paradise. The fact that it was, moreover, reconstituted from my past, and the fact that the last time I had been here, Iona was a baby, just added to the sensation of suspended belief.
On the subject of the windows, however, I had an opinion. They had obviously been re-done since Sibylle’s day, and one particularly outrageously vast vista of sea-scape was broken into three sections.
'What do you think?’ asked Eric. 'Make it into one huge window?’
No question about it. 'Yes!’
We got into the groove: suddenly I was teaching yoga workshops every day and Iona was hanging out with her mates all night. It was the exact same gang she would have hung out with had we remained on Lamma. Had I rejected all Bradley’s suggestions of getting married and moving to the UK and simply stayed - this is how we might have been living now. I was teaching what I loved to a responsive group of people, and Iona was having the time of her life. I drew the line at the prospect of her staying out all night in Central, but they seemed to have plenty to do on Lamma, twiddling their thumbs on the digital recreational inventions, hopping over rocks, cycling about the concrete paths.
Though we had to have two heaters in the yoga room to keep things warm enough, and though Iona never really seemed to sleep, it was quite something to get a stab of trying on the might-have-been for size. It fitted very well, but of course with the other two daughters back in the UK there was no question about where we belong for now.
One day while Sally was teaching her regular yoga class in the studio, Iona and I went to the Concerto Inn on Hung Shing Yeh beach. Laminated posters along the path pointed to the wedding reception there, which was coincidentally just starting as we arrived. Her family was from Beijing, his from Guangzhou; they both spoke Mandarin and English with ease. Being a little behind in my understanding of how the Chinese have embraced Hong Kong as an outlet and outpost for capitalism and its delights, I was amazed and startled that they had chosen Hung Shing Yeh for their wedding reception. Yet why should I be? What better place? What taste and discernment! We played with the toddling niece, chatted to the bride and groom and their parents, and retired to a quiet table. We had our day and now it is China’s turn.
Suddenly it was Friday and time for Iona’s departure. She had to be at college on Monday so she was leaving five days before me. Off we trotted, and to a great fanfare of farewell photos she was off .... I took her to the airport and, two hours before her flight was due to depart, saw her silhouette disappear behind the glass screen with great sadness. She had been in her element on Lamma, her natural habitat.
At seven o’clock the following morning I was awoken by a sharp rapping on the window. To my surprise, Iona was there. She had knocked sharply, she said, to make sure I didn’t think I was still dreaming. She had gone to the wrong departure gate and by the time the mistake was discovered, and she’d run and taken a train to the correct departure gate - her plane had left - leaving her suitcase. She was freezing cold, having spent the night in Central in the company of drunks, her phone had run out of credit and charge and the only time she stopped crying was when she stepped onto the Lamma Island ferry. Most of all she was distressed that she had cost me extra money, but for my part I was just relieved that she was OK, that she had survived a night in Hong Kong on her own and made it back safe and sound.
Hugh and Sally rose magnificently to the occasion, and by two o’clock I had paid for and collected a whole new ticket from the high tech spaces of Ocean Harbour Golden City Plaza or whatever it’s called in Tsim Sha Tsui. If we hadn’t had this episode, I would have avoided this magnificent place like a dose of the gonorrhea that the British allegedly introduced to China, but personal preferences were now a casualty of necessity. Iona was now due to depart on the following day, on the Sunday afternoon. I taught the afternoon’s workshop as if nothing had happened, though people going to put their bags and clothes in the bedroom were surprised to see Iona there, and that night we went for a bonfire at Annie and Clive’s above the beach. Everyone there mollified Iona with stories of planes they’d missed, and the combination of kind people, friendly dogs, beautiful orchids, vigorous flames, the waves of Hung Shing Yeh and the disturbingly danceable seventies music that Clive beat out of his i-pod succeeded in making Iona feel so OK about herself that at some point after midnight she disappeared to run one last night with the gang.
I did have one drink - a modest amount of red wine in a very large glass - but recall no symptoms of being drunk. Nonetheless I awoke that Sunday with what felt like a gargantuan hangover. The symptoms were: a deafening headache, vomiting organ secretions that came out in the colours of the Italian flag and a complete inability to reach the sea. Sally and Iona kindly looked after me as - dressed only in my swimming costume - I feebly reiterated that if only I could get into the sea, I’d be OK. Actually, I did not get to the sea, and now entertain a sorry vision of what I’ll be like in senility. 'If only I can get to the sea ...’ Hmmm. Sally was even going to take Iona to the airport for me, but after lying down for half an hour with an eye-bag on my eyes and a hot-water bottle on my feet, I lunged out of bed and we three were trotting down the path - once again - to see Iona off. Half-way to the village we met the Kirin dancers, tailed by a joyous mob of Sunday afternoon day-trippers, and the throb of the drum echoed on the Lamma earth as we once more took photos of Iona leaving Lamma.
This time Iona’s boarding pass did not disappear into her handbag; this time we wrote her flight number and gate on her hand; this time she caught the plane and did indeed arrive home in time for college the Monday morning.
Back on Lamma, the houses of the island continued their dance. Sally had to meet prospective lodgers and I peeled off up the hill to visit Ahmed and Isabella. Their son, dressed in red, came down to the path to greet me - but somehow I don’t think I could have missed the luminous canary yellow of the house as the brilliance of its aura cut down the bamboo and beamed up to the sky, out-shining the sun. I always knew Ahmed had potential but could never have imagined this simple splendour.
The first time I glimpsed Ahmed was at a party of John Dillon’s sometime in the late eighties. He and his fellow Afghans were performing a mime-show, surrounded by transfixed Gweilos. Saskia and I crawled through peoples’ legs to see what the fuss was about - and though I can’t actually remember what these newcomers to the Lamma scene did, what I do remember is that they were outrageously funny. Saskia was from that moment hooked onto a magic carpet ride of hardcore surrealism and Ahmed’s energetic intelligence never failed to illuminate whatever company he found himself in. Then history did its thing and we divided and flung ourselves over the world.
I met Isabelle when she was pregnant with Alex - she and Ahmed came by, casually, out of the years, and ate my home-made flapjack in our Glastonbury kitchen before making their way down to Cornwall. John Clamp was with them - I never did hear from him again but am sure he is doing well in some parallel world which may well one day collide with mine again.
After a delicious lunch we sat in Ahmed’s carpeted and open-fronted office on the roof and watched the slide show of how he and his gang transformed his house from a dingy hovel to an airy palace. Once upon a time it was a regular Lamma dwelling, stuffed with mattresses, newspapers, pieces of wood and interesting metal - the usual detritus of thirty years’ inhabitation, in which every scrap had been carefully husbanded in anticipation of the nuclear holocaust or the plague of locusts or whatever interesting and catastrophic event will render such vital materials unobtainable. Some extraordinarily staggering statistics were involved - forty men took forty days to load forty skips a day in order to empty the place, or some such - but the result was a flamboyantly optimistic triumph of space over matter, of primary colour over complex deviance, of exile come home. One of the black-eared kites which I had watched for ten days circling overhead came and landed on an adjacent roof, where it paced up and down on a railing with only sea and sky behind it. Apparently it comes to earth in this way every day at the same time.
Walking with the family down Snake Path afterward, Ahmed commented that when he was living in Shanghai, he would return from time to time to Lamma; upon reappearing in Shanghai, everyone would comment on how youthful he looked: where had he been, what had he done? 'I come here,’ he said. 'On Lamma, everyone remains young.’
Why? Is it the chemical preservatives blown down the wind from the Pearl river industries? Is it a secret rare earth captured by the unique geological alchemy of Lamma’s iron-rich clay and silver-grey granite? The sheer absence of traffic while having ferry-access to a decent income? Why do those who choose to stay on Lamma stay eternally young? Will they still be here in a hundred years from now? Why did I ever leave?
Before I departed Lamma there was one last house to visit: the old fisherman’s house on the edge of the Feng Shui wood in Pak Kok where time goes backwards. When I and my cats first moved in, the house was shabby and overstuffed with the usual spare parts awaiting apocalyptic shortages. It had no running water - except when the typhoons sent water gushing their way right through the ground floor - but no shortage of mosquitoes, snakes or ghosts. In fact my friends called it the ghost house, and many refused to visit me. I was too busy for visitors anyway - I spent most of my time clearing and cleaning, painting and dancing, skateboarding, doing yoga, writing and maintaining the ancestral shrine. The mosquitoes ignored me and the ghosts negotiated me but I never quite got used to the snakes.
I was living in the ghost house when I met Bradley, and we wasted little time turning our lives around by creating Iona, getting married and racing off to the UK. I still claim I was whisked off on false pretenses while under the influence of hormones, which is why I still regard Lamma as my home. Nonetheless, when I visited the ghost house on subsequent trips to Lamma, while the children were still small creatures, it was obvious that, even with the water pipes I had put in, the ghost-house was home for a single person with no commitments. Once I was surprised to find the person living there after me had a television: who would find time to watch television with all that subconscious activity going on?
The place has now been returned to the ghosts. Braving the watchful glare of an old Chinese lady, I peered through the broken glass at the ghost of who I was. Like it or not, I have undergone a severe character arc since I skateboarded around those rust-painted floors to the sound of 'The times they are a-changin’. Though I left them in good hands, the cats were poisoned soon after I left by the toxins put out by the locals for the rats. In the process of re-learning how to live in Britain, I had lost both my immunity to the mosquitoes and the ability to negotiate with ghosts, leaving my snake phobia intact. Nonetheless, I peered through the veils of foliage before the front door, above which Andre Alexander, the previous occupant to me, had painted the plaster moulding a gorgeous golden Tibetan yellow. Nothing had changed. This is of course on the edge of a wood where time still wheels backwards, and in the rewind the pivotal scenes unwound at a blinding rate. As a mother, I cannot live like that; and yet every scene was a cipher to an untold thriller, schizophrenic windows on wilder worlds than I now dare inhabit.
Many people have come to Lamma sane and departed in madness; on the other hand, many have arrived on the brink of insanity and discovered sanctuary. Between those extremes are the lotus-eaters who have learnt to carry a torch on dark paths. They have earned the right to live long and prosper, for the energy on Lamma wreaks a different Karmic change on each person who steps off the ferry and onto the hallowed earth.
Hung Shing Yeh held out a supportive and heavily-draped arm from the Tang dynasty, silently reminding us that the British may have tricked a few concessions out of the Chinese, but this island still enjoys special protection. Originally inhabited by Che people, the migrant farmers who retreated from central Guangdong into the hills at the approach of the Han, Lamma has from time immemorial offered sanctuary to the drifters and the loners, mavericks and migrants. Now, like so many erstwhile alternative activities - such as Yoga and Glastonbury, recycling, organic vegetables and dragon tattoos - Lamma is hitting the mainstream. Families from Guangzhou and Beijing unite and forget that their ancestors, the Han and the Che, were enemies; they talk cordially with the British tourists, whose shameful history should have them eating opium and humble pie, with a sense of entitlement. Lamma has always been a melting pot. As Iona and I danced in a small circle with the exquisitely beautiful bride, her mother and her small niece with the pink blossoms in her hair, the waves of Hung Shing Yeh washed on the sand and polished in every a facet the organic kaleidoscope patterns of family life. Race and creed, past and future - they, in this moment of suspended animation, did not matter. We lived in the present unburdened by the past and in hope of a bright future. There is no other way to begin.
Just before leaving Lamma to return to my family nest in the UK, I went for a swim on Hung Shing Yeh - the old ritual. The sea was glassily quiet and warm, and the beach’s only inhabitant was Roz, who sat sketching, dressed in her favourite purples. How many times have I taken that last swim? And how many times was Roz there? However many, it’s an uncountable noun.
Then it was down to the village for a final meal at a big round table at the restaurant on the pier. In my mind they are all there - Sally, Hugh, Roberta, Jerry, Annie, Clive, John, Roz and all the others ... like Saskia and John Hutton and Nick the Book, Rodney and Lamma-Gung - etcetera etcetera - even though I know for a fact that Sally and Hugh are now in Greece and Roz is about to move to Paris. It’s not that I have particularly arrested development or merely a selective memory - it’s just that the physical plane is just one side of the story. Lamma island is not merely a dormitory plot situated conveniently near to a prosperous metropolis: it is a powerful geomantic jewel, one which cuts through time and space. On Hunter’s beach the butterflies still dance for all of us held hostage by the generosity of Lamma - the lotus-eaters, the kirins, the Che, the ghosts and the spiders caught in the baltic amber.
You can leave, but you never do.
_________________ Click here for Lamma-zine stories and recent Lamma Spotlights of the Week:
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Last edited by Lamma-Gung on Wed Jun 30, 2010 6:36 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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