2007 °   There is always a difference between Chinese and English guidebooks - in the former, you will never see a proper road map like in an English rough guide or LP. There's probably a schematic sketch, some simple lines that cognitively connects but hardly representative of real connections, in case one over-reads the abstract nuances of slight kinks and bends to mean actual street features to look out for, and place names that are so general, making a conceivably simple trip (as briefed in the guidebook) unnecessarily preluded with an elaborate rite of place list search at the various shuttle stands in the public bus terminal. Two points so closely dotted on the map can be seven kilometres away; and while one might peruse this to be a problem of scale, the reality is that most of the place-maps in Chinese-narrated travel guides are never consistently scaled, the authors clearly and matter-of-factly unworried about its absence, which perhaps illustrates a cultural distinction in the mindset of wayfinding and place-sensing (i.e. the difference between a map and a location plan). Perhaps the whole point is that if you can read Chinese, you are assumed to speak it just as well, so the guidebook prefers you open your mouth to get directions. The first day, 19 December, was spent being air-freighted into Guangzhou, via budget terminal at 0645. Close to four hours later, at Baiyun airport, we took express line 8 to Tianhe bus station, and transferred on another 2 hour bus to Kaiping, southwest of Jiangmen which is around the three-quarter point between Guangzhou and Macau. At Kaiping we checked into an inexpensive hotel along a side lane, the kind that doesn't have a lobby on the ground floor. We boarded the public bus heading north on Musha Lu, the trip which cost just ¥3 - it took us on a bumpy ride away from the insignificant city through rice fields and large tracts of vegetable farms, where isolated and largely dilapidated concrete structures held ground in the distant background. The bus passed by a grazing herd of four buffalos. This went on and on, and just when we were more or less deafened by the crescendoing rhythmatics of the shaky bus which sounded like it was all set to fall apart at the next road bend, the vast expanse of open fields narrowed into an awful looking town of pure reinforced concrete. It looked like a place so neglected and unloved, from afar, but yet at the same time replete with inspiring distaste and incredulity, like how can this be 2007? This is a whole town moulded in concrete, drab and stained from almost a century of weathering, like an entire Fibua village with plastering debonded, flaked and stripped, and the full walls plunged in a tanking test so that the hydrophilic concrete picks up a deeper grey with each force-fed damp, rising, capillarised or gravitating. You quietly ingest this thought: no, you wouldn't live here, but yet this is populated and alive, albeit slowly, silently, and expressly aged, and you try to imagine yourself staying here; then you begin living it. The bus meandered through the narrow streets, lined with extremely old shophouses with double-volume verandahways, styled in pre-war colonial aesthetics – a neo-Baroque façade here, a Romanesque arching there, some flowery ornaments bracing the beams, European balconies, many Mandarin roofs and concrete domes to top things off – this cannot be the work of architects, whose obsessions lie in banal consistency, but a bountiful imagination materialised in genuinely eclectic stature. Then the bus stopped. We alighted the seasoned carrier, took a while scrutinising the locality uncertain of where to begin, until a group of Chinese tourists spotted not too far off showed the way. This is Chikan old town, looking the way it is since the 1920s, minus the freshness and conviviality of long ago, add the punishment of time and the lack of embellishment thereafter. Occasionally we saw streaks of brown run along the edge of window sills, drawing vertical stains off the corners indicating years after years of downwashed oxides generously emigrating from the ironmongery. We found the usual suspects for visiting – the bridge over the stream running parallel to Dixi Lu, balanced with the linear streetscape frontage so photogenic in various journals and tourism posters in Kaiping that it is perhaps the only proof required of our being there done that. A Film City at the end of Dixi Lu asks for entry fees. We paid our dues only to see the built remains annotated with signboards here and there explaining a little of the life back then – a restaurant-teahouse (or call it a restobar-bistro); a few extended residences; spacious courtyards, some kitchens and back-of-house, and galleries for parking carriages. Apparently the aged urbanscape has been well sought after by film directors that a long list of movies and documentaries had been produced in this street alone. There are no lights in these empty spaces, and not many visitors as yet, despite its recent inscription as a Unesco Heritage Site – clearly, much more could be done. Needless to say, the lack of company meant we had the whole historiographic fantasy to ourselves.

We left for Kaiping by the same way back. Along the way, the grazing herd of four buffalos was still there, in the same position as before. In fact, on the next day, while trekking down to Zili village, we saw another buffalo in the fields, noosed by a rope to the ground, showing no signs of offence, patiently waiting for whatever there is to wonder.

We made our way to Li Yuan at Genghua village the next morning, setting off from Yici bus station. The trip costs ¥5 each. Li Yuan is a garden residence of the Xie family, but the buildings were typically tall (about three to four storeys) and detailed with defence devices like slit openings in the walls and floors, and most of the walls and handrails are terrazzo finished, pleasantly cool to the touch. We lunched at a restaurant in the gated area, before moving on to Zili village, which is only two stops away on the same bus route, but practically kilometres apart. The bus dropped us at a road intersection; there’s nothing around except for a direction signboard and a sculpture of a boy sitting on a buffalo, his left index finger showing the way. Unsurprisingly, the sculpture is formed in reinforced concrete, as can be seen by the rebars exposed at the chipped bullhorn. On one side, a watch tower (the Fang Clan Search-light Tower) stood atop a knoll full of grassy overgrown. We followed the cemented trail heading towards Zili; at Ma’s pace, it was a half hour walk just to get to the entry. We passed through the fields, saw buffalos, cyclists, graveyards, picnickers at the graves with a loud radio, as well as passing villagers with huge baggage. It is all richness of cadmium yellow and sap green in the plains, bottle green for the trees, slabs of grey in the background, and faint azure for the misty heavens.

Then we heard the geese. By the hundreds, doing their afternoon pace up and down the confines of their slavery. Some others get to roam in freedom around the village, usually in groups of three or more. They swagger about with their webbed feet, crossing tracks in oblivion of human visitors, dip into lakes without ever getting wet in their waterproofed outfits, and quack a lot. Passing a small plaza surrounded by brick houses, we soon found ourselves standing before a lotus pond fronted by three reinforced concrete towers. Towers indeed, unbecomingly unexpected to see in the middle of a village, where life is all geese-quacking and listening to the rice grow; but precisely the expectation of our whole point of being there.

These are the diaolous of Kaiping, which are often very easy structures to visualise since they are square and symmetrical in plan up to four storeys, before the plan changes at the uppermost floor and roof deck. They are tall because these villages are often pillaged by armed bandits, thus fenestrations are kept high off the ground, and the buildings designed with defence integrity such as corner forts with loopholes, iron windows (which have all rusted to a brilliant crimson, like corten) and fire-fighting water rifles situated on the upper terrace, much like fire extinguishers. Styled with arches and Corinthian columns and mismatched green-tiled roof, diaolous are the cultural products seeded by the visual memories of overseas Chinese returning from their labour stint in the States, the earliest of these Chinese “castles” being erected in 1919. Like the Hakka tulous, the Cantonese diaolous emerge in form largely because of security concerns, but they also signified a different form of rural aspiration where a single grand family may occupy a whole tower with enough setbacks for agriculture, while a similar square footage in the city may well be real estate reserved for the top-notch filthily rich. Undoubtedly the diaolou dwellers were wealthy people in their own rights – most of those who made it back with accumulated wealth own restaurants or medicinal halls in the States. Today we see these diaolous as the constructed visions of little utopias brewed in the minds of those who ventured across the Pacific, survived the interrogations of Angel Island, lasted through the Chinese Exclusion Act, rose through the menial opportunities and succeeded, only to conjure an imagination for their future generations with an architectural typology dished up in atypical Canton savoury.

Exiting Zili, we decided to walk up the little knoll upon which the Watch Tower stood, but Ma refused, suspecting that hillock is an ancestral burial site. True enough, the dirt trail up to the Tower is lined on both sides with rows upon rows of tombs, all hidden under the tall unkempt grassy fringes and carrying the same Fang surname upon closer inspection; Pa and I spent little time at the unopened tower before heading down. We tried a third site for the day – Majianglong – the largest in extent of all the sites publicly opened, but it was slightly too late in the day and far too much walking to consider after we crossed the fairly lengthy Baihe Bridge, and not even near the entry yet. We were disappointed to have to give it a miss so as to catch up for Macau and Hong Kong; but it will be Christmas soon, and that is where the world is heading. We left Kaiping the next morning after a dim sum breakfast, bussed to Zhuhai, crossed the Gongbei checkpoint (pretty much an underground mall) and walked into Macau. It was 21 December. The common locals are not so well-acquainted with Portuguese names like Ruinas de Sao Paulo or Avenida Almeida Ribeiro; it's easier just saying Dai Sam Ba or San Man Lo (literally "New Road"). We took public bus line 3 to San Man Lo, trooped down Rua da Felicidade, wasted quite a bit of time and money in a desserts shop hardly worth rating, but recouped our losses by sampling the "shouxin" or gift biscuits and tarts along this street with a gradient. Navigating is easy from here – just follow the signs, the scent of street snacks, and the crowd. After jostling through the textured walks that reminded me of Sol in Madrid, add to that the egg tarts and fashionably pretty people eating egg tarts, we got to the facade of Dai Sam Ba. Pa saw the iconic Grand Lisboa and said let's go there. So we walked there, and ended up getting choked by the nicotinic ventilation. There's a huge screen at one table where you can play digitised blackjack; we had a feel of the casinogenic atmosphere and left. Many of the dealers were like students or fresh grads; their pays must be good. We went to Sands and it's all the same. There's MGM down the coast, and Venetian across at Taipa... can't be bothered. Macau's waterfront is nice. The bridges leading to the reclaimed south arched beautifully. We walked back to San Man Lo, the streets were all crowded, traffic was jamming and Christmas lights up and twinkling all over. Next morning, we had dim sum and left for Kowloon, by ferry.

And Hong Kong is so familiar it needs no elaboration. Well, maybe a bit – we had initially planned our nights at YMCA, Tsim Sha Tsui, but at the recep we were informed that the luxurious lodging was full. Unwilling to explore beyond the convenience of this area, we roamed the adjacent Lock Road and Haiphong Road, only to find all the remaining available range being extremely claustrophobic. We walked up one dirty staircase between two eateries. Two girls were ahead of us in the guesthouse office, standing around because there weren't much space, but no one attended to them because the housekeeping assistant on duty could only speak English; so we were in luck. The assistant took us to view the rooms – imagine going through a long corridor no more than 900mm wide, and with ceiling so low it is within reach; the Pac-Man path turns left and right uncountable times, sometimes passing by escape stairs; we went through two doors, another long corridor, before entering into a corner room, with the included bath maximising the tight L-corner, and the beds butting against walls, with only one side free. "One double here, and then one single over there. We have no triple room. HKD600." No way. The two girls who spoke Cantonese, most likely students, were still at the crammed reception (which is more accurately the laundry-sorting room). They were also shown some rooms; they followed us out soon after – i bet they freaked out as well. In the end we ventured into Chungking Mansion on Nathan Road – an old apartment block with shopping arcades on ground level, but more haphazard than Golden Mile, and full of Africans, Arabs, Indians and Pakistanis, as well as the ang mohs, several Mainlanders, and many security guards. The moment you step in you will be followed, because they all hope you'd stay in their rooms. There are many lifts, but they go to different sub-blocks and are incredibly slow, small and serve alternate floors, so if you are going to an even storey keep to the left car. The place we stayed was small, but surprisingly clean and secure, since the main entrance is passcode-locked. There are windows, but they look into the air wells. Actually all the windows look into the air wells, except for those looking out into Nathan Road. After two nights at Chungking, you get used to the buzz on ground floor; it's just little India, and a crowd of activities, haggling, quibbling, and baggages moving in and out everyday almost like rehearsed chaos; probably a sense of the Walled City in its heydays. 24 December, we exited Hong Kong for Guangzhou, after crossing into Shenzhen via Lo Wu (train ticket price is halved if journey begins in Shenzhen instead of Hung Hom, Kowloon, which brings you to GZ East). The Eve evening was spent in Shang Xia Jiu. Two girls again, probably from North China, asked me for directions to the Metro instead of checking with the locals, in perfect Mandarin, "or the quickest way to GZ Station". Maybe because I had a map with me; but the Metro was just fifty steps away. We shopped little that night, overwhelmed with the abundance of retail options. Checking out of Baiyun Hotel, we had one more dim sum the next morning, before Tiger-airing back to base camp. The office hardly functioned on the 26th. Neither the 27th nor 28th.

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