The Insulin Express

by Oren Liebermann

  The things that make up a “normal” life—job, home, car, daily routine—will work themselves out. We will find jobs as we once did, and then we’ll find a place to live, and we’ll go from there. Everything else will work itself out eventually. There is no doubt it will be frustrating, but in no way does that make traveling a bad idea.

  And it’s certainly not something I will ever regret. I have not yet wrapped my head around diabetes, and I have plenty of highs and lows throughout the course of a week, but I am slowly learning each day. Yet none of that—none of the injections and blood sugar checks—keeps me from enjoying every moment of every day. It will take a bit more time, but I am coming to terms with my disease.

  Chapter 18

  May 8, 2014

  22°20’01.9”N 114°09’47.9”E

  Hong Kong

  There are few things more enjoyable in a foreign city than finding a local market, purchasing a few morsels of local food, and eating outside on a public bench while absorbing the city’s ambience and atmosphere via cultural and culinary osmosis. In Marseille, we bought a baguette, a wedge of cheese, and a few apples for four euros, and enjoyed a perfect meal by the harbor. We attempt the same sort of bare-bones, inexpensive meal on our first full day in Hong Kong, heading to the International Financial Centre mall, which is supposed to have a boutique supermarket and a beautiful rooftop view of Victoria Harbour.

  We grab the cheapest bottle of wine we can find—at twenty-two dollars, this is the most expensive cheapest bottle we’ve come across—and head for the roof garden with a small brick of blue cheese and brie, some French bread, and Italian salami. A meal that cost us seven dollars in France somehow costs us fifty-two dollars in Hong Kong.

  We gorge on our “budget” meal. We have no utensils, so in this most cosmopolitan of cities, I tear into the salami with my teeth, biting off hunks and chewing loudly. I imagine the people sitting around us feel like they are the first generation of homo sapiens, curiously looking at the end of homo erectus, hoping that I die off so they can rule the world in relative civility. I suspect they wonder where this savage came from. Philadelphia, bitches! And if you think I’m bad, wait ’til you see what the rest of the city has in store. Everything we lack in major sports trophies we make up for in attitude.

  I am afraid to speak, knowing Cassie is angry at me for misfiring so badly on lunch. Much as I hate to admit it, she has every reason to be peeved. I was in charge of procuring a cheap lunch, and the money I spent on one meal could’ve fed us for two days.

  I need to digress for a moment. I wish I remembered the following conversation better, because it has two of the most important quotes from our trip, both from Cassie. When she said these two sentences—and they were not said consecutively—I immediately pulled out my pen and pad and wrote them down. The problem is that I forget what came before or after these sentences, so they only exist in my memory as completely disjointed phrases. Apparently, nothing I said mattered because I didn’t write it down; and any and all meaningful thoughts in this conversation—and most others for that matter—came from Cassie.

  Here are the two things Cassie said:

  “You light a fire and you can’t put it out—the idea of traveling.”

  “It changes who you are. You can try to change that, but you can’t.”

  The people who set out from Philadelphia nearly a year ago were us in name only. We have seen more of the world than we ever thought we would see. We have made friends from countries I barely knew existed. We may not see them again for years—we may not ever see them again—but we have travel in common, which means we will always be able to pick up where we left off. When we go home, we will have changed in ways we never could have predicted, and we will be eternally thankful for that. And for all we have seen, we know there is so much more that we have not seen. Only when you try to explore the world do you begin to understand how truly large it is and how many different stories each little bit of it holds.

  As we finish our meal, the first few drops of rain pelt us from above, sending us inside to find cover. It doesn’t stop raining for the next four days, gathering in intensity throughout the evening hours until it qualifies as an all-out storm.

  We haven’t seen rain like this since we started traveling—only the spastic bursts of storms in Kenya and Chiang Mai and the on-again-off-again rain of Ireland that is as much a part of the country as Guinness and whiskey. But, even there, the rain let up eventually.

  There are no signs of a respite here from the endless precipitation. The downpour may ease for a few minutes, but it returns with a meteorological vengeance, announcing its newfound energy with staccato explosions of thunder and vicious stilettos of lightning. We knew these days would come eventually; we knew that, statistically, we weren’t getting a year of good weather. In all our months of traveling, we had lucked out. Until now.

  The rain confines us to our room on the fifth floor of the Mei Ho House Youth Hostel—which, for all intents and purposes, is a hotel, especially in terms of price—and the dining room downstairs. Only a few hours into our climatic prison sentence, we are already going a bit stir-crazy. I can’t bear the thought of sitting behind a desk at whatever job I find back home, where we’ll be all too soon. That, too, seems like a prison sentence, only it’s one imposed by society, not weather.

  We venture out only to see the remains of a World War II fort called Stanley Fort on Hong Kong Island. The Japanese attacked Hong Kong the same day they attacked Pearl Harbor. Sort of. The attack happened within hours of the first wave hitting Pearl Harbor, but because of the different time zones and the location of the international date line somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, it was already December 8 when the Japanese attacked Hong Kong. Known as the Battle of Hong Kong, the city held out for more than two weeks before falling to the Japanese army. It would be one of the first battles of the Pacific war. Somehow, my high school textbooks failed to mention any of this.

  My Gore-Tex jacket and Adidas shoes, already pushed to the brink months ago in the Himalayas, give out in the ceaseless rain. To be fair, when Adidas and North Face designed our gear, I don’t think they intended for it to be dragged around the world, worn every day, and smushed into a backpack for extended periods of time.

  Despite the weather, we also venture out to find what I have been missing since Cambodia: a blood sugar monitor that works with all of the diabetes supplies I already have. I know that Watson’s, the pharmacy chain here, has exactly what I’m looking for. We find the nearest one on the map and walk in with a premature sense of relief. Watson’s has exactly what we need, except it doesn’t measure what we need it to measure in the units we want it to measure it in. Since my diagnosis, I have measured my diabetes in milligrams per deciliter, which is supposed to be between 80 and 120. As I find out very quickly, they use a different unit of measurement for blood sugar in this part of the world. Of course, it is one that I have never heard of.

  The millimolar.

  The millimolar is a measure of molar concentration, and it is generally used to measure the amount of solute in a solution. From high school, I remember that one mole is 6.02 x 1023, and that’s about all I ever intend to remember about moles. Even though the conversion from one unit to the other isn’t all that difficult, I make the determined decision to keep using my generic brand blood sugar monitor until I can find one that works exactly like my first monitor did, including the same unit of measurement. Millimolars be damned.

  During the brief moments when the rain abates, we can see Victoria Harbour from Mount Davis, a mountain at the western end of Hong Kong Island. We see a traffic jam of ships waiting to enter. And we see storms building all around us. Across the water, Lantau Island is visible, and then it isn’t, consumed by the wispy whiteness of a distant storm. From here, it looks peaceful, but in that storm, it’s raining like hell.

  We take the Star Ferry across the harbor to Kowloon and find a street stall selling curry fish balls, one of Hong Kong’
s indigenous foods. I order a small bowl using a few frantic pointing and eating gestures I make up on the spot. Cassie refuses to touch the curry fish balls. The balls have the texture of gefilte fish—which is, in some strange Jewish way, oddly comforting—and the seasoning and flavor of Indian curry, making it the strangest commingling of flavor and texture I have ever tried. Some foods are fantastic, others are disgusting, but they are uniformly fantastic or uniformly disgusting. Not Cantonese food. It’s great with a slight twist of strange, excellent with a hint of bizarre, or flavorful with a dab of I-can’t-believe-anyone-on-this-planet-would-even-consider-eating-this, which is a taste they’re quite adept at in Asia, at least to my delicate Western palate.

  Hong Kong strikes me as very Dickensian. Not so much in a “best of times, worst of times” way; it is in the extremes here. The city is ultra-modern, yet it hangs on to its roots with its people and its vibrant street culture. A mile away from our hostel, I could find fifty people who spoke perfect English in a heartbeat. Here in Sham Shui Po, I can barely find a menu in English, and Cassie and I resort to pointing at pictures of food to order. That, to me, is the miracle of Hong Kong. It has not lost any of its own culture as it has become an international financial hub. It may have spots that are entirely Westernized, but for each of these spots, there is something that is entirely Cantonese—a place where you would absolutely struggle to understand where you are, why you’re there, how you got there, and where you’re going next without a firm grip on one of the world’s most difficult languages. We know because we found quite a few of these places in our exploration of Hong Kong.

  I can’t fully explain why I love this city so much. Maybe it’s the combination of modernity and tradition. Maybe it’s the bizarre street food. Or maybe it’s the awesome Bruce Lee statue by the harbor. Either way, I put Hong Kong high on my list of places to visit again. After four days, it is time to make our way north into mainland China.

  We had read about the vaunted punctuality of the Chinese train system. Every train leaves on time and arrives on time following its on-time journey that makes all of the intermediate stops on time. After the wild guesswork that goes into the trains in Southeast Asia, we are thrilled to be reading timetables and schedules that are in English and predictable. Cleanliness would be an added bonus.

  We arrive an hour early for our train—the T100 express to Shanghai—only to find out that it’s delayed. The term express is a bit of a misnomer. The train takes twenty-one hours to get from Hong Kong to Shanghai. The only “express” part is that it doesn’t make any stops. Twenty-one hours of perpetual motion through the vastness of the Chinese countryside. But here in the waiting area, there is no movement. The train before ours is delayed as well, so a seething mass of passengers destined for two different cities fills a waiting area designed for one train’s worth of people.

  All the seats in the waiting area are full, so I sit cross-legged on the ground near a pile of our stuff. Cassie stands next to me. There’s no point in moving—no point in anything but waiting patiently—but the locals push and jostle their way to the front of the line, itself just a large group with no discernible shape or order huddled near the boarding gate. Their efforts are pointless—both trains have assigned seats. Elevator music plays over the loudspeakers, which seems cruelly ironic because elevators move faster than us at this moment.

  The music, which seems like it was carefully picked following multiple focus group sessions, was probably designed to placate the masses. It makes me confident that, somewhere, there is a Chinese ticket agent delivering soma to the unsuspecting. But instead of calming us, the crowd grows restless. All of us are eager to get to our next destination. Every few minutes, the music cuts out and a voice starts speaking in Cantonese. I wait for the English translation, hoping it will carry some news about our train, but the message only repeats the same two warnings: watch out for pickpockets and don’t buy counterfeit goods. I find the latter warning to be very odd, since I’m pretty sure 85 percent of Asia’s street economy is built on the buying and selling of fake Rolexes and Breitlings. The industry term here is imitation. It’s not a rip-off Bulova, it’s an imitation Bulova. Either way, it looks damn good and will only set you back thirty dollars if you’re good at haggling.

  The train before ours is cancelled, and the dormant mass of passengers comes to life in a very animated and pissed-off way. The departure board announces the train has been cancelled because of inclement weather. Passengers can get a refund or reschedule at the ticket counter. That doesn’t bode at all well for our train, which I’m sure is about to be cancelled. Passengers screaming in both Mandarin and Cantonese rush to the ticket counter. Cassie and I wait for the announcement about our train, but it never comes.

  Two hours after our train was supposed to leave, the company hands out free water and crackers in an attempt to assuage our growing annoyance and impatience. After a few more hours of waiting, the train company provides us dinner in another attempt to keep us from storming the ticket counter. Rice and chicken. As simple as it gets. Only, instead of serving us chicken breast or chicken wings or chicken thighs, they serve us cross-sections of chicken. Although this is perfectly normal for the Chinese, it is quite stunning to us, especially in our frazzled, tired state. It is as if someone took a hacksaw across a complete chicken, cutting through skin and meat and bone, and plopped a one-inch section of chicken on a bed of rice. In fact, this is precisely what has happened.

  I take a few bites, trying to figure out how the locals around me make it look so easy, but Cassie demurs. This is simply not the dinner we had in mind. Not insignificantly, my diabetes food guide offers little advice on how much insulin to take for one crosswise inch of chicken.

  I want to explain to the ticket salesman that I would very much prefer not to be on the first train out of this station, especially given the reports of mudslides and heavy rains across our route. I would much rather be on the second train out, once I know the first train has arrived safely, but I feel like such subtlety would not be fully appreciated. Instead, I get ready to spend the first night of my life in a train station.

  It almost comes to that. It is 10:15 p.m. before we finally board, a seven-hour delay for a train system that’s supposed to always be on time. More than a few passengers are pissed off when security refuses to let them leave the station. The ticket agents are more determined to get us to Shanghai than we are determined to get to Shanghai. Finally, after forty-five more minutes of waiting on the tracks, the train pulls out.

  The train can best be described as completely unremarkable—twenty-one hours from Hong Kong to Shanghai (plus that seven-hour delay, but who’s counting?), and there is barely anything worth writing about the journey. We share our six-person compartment with two other people—both Chinese. One speaks no English. The other speaks great English and gives us pointers about what to see in Shanghai and Beijing. As miserable as the wait was, the ride isn’t too bad or too good. It just is.

  The only thing noteworthy about the train—and about the rest of China for that matter—is the prevalence of smoking. No one smokes in our compartment (although I’m pretty sure it’s allowed). Everyone smokes at one end of the train car or the other. Whatever end of our speeding locomotive they choose, the stench of smoke fills the cabin. The Chinese have taken to smoking like Michael Phelps took to swimming. They’re very good at it, and they do it a lot. I can’t imagine what sort of competition they’re trying to win with their nonstop inhale-pause-exhale routine, but I conclude there must be one, because only that would reasonably explain how often they smoke and how many cigarettes they avail themselves of. A lot is made about the smog problem in Beijing and some of the other cities in China. I think the reason the Chinese don’t care about it is because they’ve already subjected their lungs to the medical equivalent of drinking tar.

  We pull into Shanghai late in the evening, and the first two items on our agenda are finding our hostel and a place to eat. I am glad to be off the
train, even if we only have thirty-six hours until we get back on a train for a bullet run to Beijing.

  Conveniently, our hostel is on top of a dumpling house, so we order chicken and vegetable dumplings before the restaurant closes. When it becomes obvious they want us to leave, I ask the receptionist at our hostel how to say to-go box so we can take the rest to our room.

  “Tow po,” she tells me.

  “All I have to do is say tow po and they will understand?”

  “Yes.” Well, this seems simple enough.

  I walk the few feet back into the restaurant.

  “Tow po,” I declare confidently in my newly acquired Mandarin.

  The hostess shakes her head at me.

  “Tow po.” This time, I try to indicate that all I want is a small box in which to put my food.

  Another head shake.

  “Tow po,” I try one more time, with the exact same result.

  I conclude there is only one option left. We steal the plate, the dumpling sauce, and the silverware from the restaurant, and head to our room for the evening. The dumplings are quite tasty, with that extra bit of flavor that only petty thievery can impart. We leave the plate in our room for the hostel cleaning staff.

  Our explorations begin the next day. We walk along the Riverside Promenade, visit the Old City of Nanshi, and stroll through Fuxing Park. After a few hours of wandering around, I come to one depressing conclusion.

  Shanghai is sterile. The Chinese have modernized any semblance of culture out of the city, placing all of the history into one museum, which we don’t visit. If they can’t be bothered to care about their past, neither can we. Shanghai is one shopping mall after another. There is nothing uniquely “Chinese” to see here. Even the buildings that look historic are only mock-ups to lure in tourists for another round of kitschy souvenir purchases. The only vaguely traditional thing the city is known for is the food.