'HONG KONG? Isn't that the capital of Tokyo?' Yes, I'm back in my home town of Los Angeles and this is a question I've heard more than once during my two-week return. Of course, it's my own fault. It's the company I've been keeping. I've been hanging out at the local coffee house, inappropriately named The Novel.
I say 'inappropriately' because the teetering tables at this beachfront cafe are crammed with clog- and Birkenstock-shod slackers hunched over Macintosh Powerbooks, tap, tap, tapping away at the final scene of the script that is sure to inspire a multimillion dollar bidding war between Tri-Star and Hollywood Pictures. So I doubt anyone around here is working on a novel. But somehow a beat-inspired coffee house called The Screenplay just doesn't quite make it.
Anyway, I've forgotten just how friendly and curious and, well, misguided about Asia the people around here can be. More than a few believe that Hong Kong is a Third World communist country where dogs are afraid to roam the streets alone.
Of course, it's not just Hong Kong that baffles America-centric locals. It's all of Asia.
The Malaysian man at the next table, making casual conversation the way coffee house patrons will, tells me: 'When I first came here as a teenager to study at UCLA, my room-mate, a football player from the Valley, asked me, 'Do you live in a tree?' ' But the people of Los Angeles are always eager to learn about the ways of the East. Take the latest interest in the legislative measures of Singapore.
News of the fate of Michael Fay, the 18-year-old American expatriate brat formerly on the loose on the car-lined streets of Singapore, has reached LA. Six strokes of a moistened rattan cane 'administered' by a jailer trained in martial arts, four months in prison, and a hefty monetary fine - all this for spray-painting a couple of cars? Not only are those Singaporeans some mean mothers, they must be major philistines as well. Convicted graffiti taggers in LA are usually given a quick slap on the wrist, elevated to the status of Misunderstood Artists, and given a show at a trendy Westsidegallery with Madonna, Richard Gere and k.d. lang all sipping Spanish wine at the opening. (Such was the case of the notorious 1980s California tagger, Chaka, who left hundreds of thousands of tags on freeway overpasses, houses and police cars up and down the state.) So you would think that Los Angelenos would be up in arms over the Fay ordeal, sending faxes of protest flying to the Singaporean Government. In real life, however, such is not the case. According to an article on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, the general population believes the cane should be taken to some of the imbeciles running loose around the city.
Following last week's murder of two Japanese students in the parking lot of a Southland grocery store, locals have been crying out that California's criminal justice statutes are literally allowing people to get away with murder.